THE DEATH DUNGEON
EVEN as the lads had started from the river’s edge inland to where their
own lines stretched away to seemingly endless distances south and east,
the moon which had been such a handicap to them in their sortie against
the Germans hid its light behind gathering clouds, and that which had
developed into a steady drizzle before they reached their company’s
quarters was now a veritable downpour as they turned in for the night.
Truly, they were in France! As Ollie remarked between vigorous tugs at a
mud-caked and water-soaked shoe that was reluctant to leave an aching
foot, it was unbelievable that it could rain anywhere else with such
persistency and in such quantity.
“I don’t know what country is on the opposite side of the earth from
France,” he said, with a vehemence engendered by the weather, his shoes
and the experiences he had endured, “but I’ll wager it’s a mighty
fertile land whatever and wherever it is.”
“Hope it grows men who know how to keep quiet when others want to
sleep,” a deep bass voice grumbled out of the darkness of a corner which
the boys up to that moment had thought unoccupied.
“Buck Granger!” George Harper almost shouted. “Of all things unexpected!
When did you get back?”
“Caught up with you again about noon,” Buck answered drowsily. “They
thought they had me for keeps, I guess, but I’m limping along all right.
I’m back to hand Fritz something as good as he gave me.”
The meeting took on the characteristics of a family reunion, for really
the lads had not realized what a warm spot Buck occupied in their hearts
until he had fallen, as they thought, mortally wounded, the day before.
And so, despite his sleepy protests, they kept up a running fire of
questions and conversation for the next ten minutes.
“Well,” said Buck at last, as though in retaliation, “now that you’ve
about pumped me dry, suppose I turn the tables and ask what you fellows
have been doing out so late as this?”
“Fair enough,” answered Tom laughingly. But before they were half
through telling him of their experiences of that evening, and all they
had been through since he had last seen them, Buck was sitting up wide
awake and plying them with interested queries upon this and that phase
of their harrowing escapes and thrilling captures and adventures.
“Say!” that energetic youth finally ejaculated. “I’d have given a whole
lot to have been along.”
“Wish you had been,” said Ollie, with deep sincerity. “There were times
when we certainly needed you.”
“It means certain and early promotion for all of you, of course,” Buck
went on, “and promotion is certainly worth striving for; but it isn’t
that so much as just having been through such things.”
The other three lads nodded in silent assent.
“Just imagine, Tom,” Buck Granger went on, with increasing enthusiasm,
and turning toward the newly-made sergeant, “just imagine the yarn that
will make for a little snoozer you’re joggin’ on your knee when you’re a
grandfather, eh?”
“Say, look here,” Tom interjected, in a startled tone.
“Oh, that’s all right,” Buck went on. “You expect to be a grandfather
some day, don’t you, if you get through this all right?”
“Your mind certainly can cover great distances in a short stretch of
time,” Tom objected again.
“Yes, but that story will make any kid proud of his grandpap,” Buck
continued, while George and Ollie chuckled at Tom’s evident discomfort.
“Why, that would make any youngster wish he had been living in the days
of the taming of the Boche, just to have knocked off a few of them
himself. Yes-sirree!”
And when Ollie knew by the sound and regular breathing on either side of
him that both Tom and George were sound asleep, and he himself was about
dozing off, he heard Buck mutter, in a self-accusing tone, “By gosh, I’m
an unlucky guy; nothing like that ever happens to me.”
Then Ollie slept. It could not have been long thereafter that Buck
Granger also drifted off into the land of sleep, to have this rest
interrupted with vivid dreams of personal participation in all the
incidents that his three friends had so modestly related to him.
What wakened Buck he could not tell, but he knew it was hours later and
that the rain was still falling and that it was yet dark, although
probably beyond the hour when, had it been clear, dawn would have been
breaking. But it was not the mystery of what had wakened him that
bothered Buck so much as it was that terrible feeling that possessed
him—that unexplainable, indefinable feeling that we all have at times,
when for some unknown reason we feel certain that something is wrong and
we know not what, or why we feel it so keenly.
The four youths were billeted in the small section that remained
standing of what once had been a cow-shed. Yes, here once had been a
fertile farm, the home and the support of a thrifty Frenchman and his
family. And now it was a vast shambles and ruin, with only a part of the
cow-shed remaining as tragic testimony to its earlier estate. Not very
luxurious quarters, you may think! But real luxury, after all, when
compared to water-logged trenches and rain-soaked, rat-ridden dug-outs.
As Buck first came out of his sound sleep he was conscious only of the
ceaseless, pitiless hammering of the rain upon the rusted tin roof of
the shed within which he lay—conscious only of that and of the
indefinable feeling, which he could not overcome, that something was
wrong.
And there is nothing that so unpleasantly grips the mind and the
imagination, and causes the heart occasionally to miss a beat, as that
tense waiting, waiting, waiting which accompanies a premonition of
impending evil or danger—born of no one knows what—which comes to one
with sudden awakening in pitch darkness and amid strange surroundings.
So it was that even as Buck Granger lay there, fully aware now of where
he was, and listening to the even breathing of his three friends who
were stretched out not more than ten feet away from him, something
happened which seemed almost to make the blood freeze in his veins.
It was a moan! Weak, subdued, but distinctly audible, it came from
directly beneath him, as though out of the very ground upon which he
lay.
Buck Granger was no coward, but there are some things which, calmly
accepted if not easily accounted for in the assurance and
self-possession which one feels in daylight, seem to verge upon the
supernatural in the darkness and mystery of night.
The hand which Buck Granger passed swiftly across his now wide staring
eyes was as cold as ice. For a moment he lay there as though hypnotized.
And then the moan was repeated, this time so subdued as to be scarcely
audible, but all the more uncanny for that very fact. With a quick
movement that brought him to his hands and knees, Buck literally dived
across the black space to where the other three men lay, landing
directly beside Tom Walton.
“Tom!” he whispered shrilly into the latter’s ear. “Tom! Wake up! It’s
Buck Granger! There’s something queer going on around this shack!”
Tom, who had been partially aroused by the first mention of his name,
came upright into a sitting posture as Granger spoke jerkily of the
mystery at hand; and he sat up with such suddenness and force that his
head, striking Buck directly under the chin, nearly dislocated the
latter’s neck and as narrowly escaped cracking Tom’s skull.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” the young sergeant demanded, also in a
hoarse whisper, as they both rubbed their respective injuries.
“Listen!” Buck responded; but there was no necessity, for just at that
instant the moan was repeated for the third time, now as clear and
distinct as the first time Buck had heard it.
“Great Scott, that’s wierd,” Tom exclaimed, almost involuntarily. “What
is it? Who is it? Where does it come from?”
“I don’t know who or what it is,” Buck whispered back, “but it seemed to
come right up out of the ground where I was asleep, and you’re right,
it’s wierd enough.”
“When did you hear it first?” Tom asked in a low tone, at the same time
cocking his ear in the darkness for a repetition of the strange sound.
“Just a moment ago—heard it twice,” answered Buck. “Let’s waken the
others and make a light and see what we can find.”
Tom reached into his pocket and drew, forth an electric searchlight
which he immediately switched on. Their first act was to squint around
in the glare of the light into every crook and cranny of the little
cow-shed, but there was nothing unusual to be found, nor was there any
further sound.
“I’ve always heard that ghosts fade into thin air and cease all sound
when a light appears,” said Tom, trying to speak lightly.
“There’s no such thing as a ghost, as you and I both know,” Buck
responded, resenting anything that might tend to make him look foolish.
“That groan came from a man, and whoever he is or wherever he is the
fellow isn’t far away from where we are right now.”
“What’s the matter with you two, anyway,” demanded Ollie Ogden, suddenly
sitting up and rubbing his eyes, and at the same time so disturbing
Harper that he too, awakened.
“Wait a minute or two and you’ll know as much as we do,” Tom replied.
But they did not have to wait that long. The words had hardly died on
Tom’s lips when something most resembling the sighing of wind through
the bare branches of trees, but which all four knew to be a human sound,
reached their ears. And just as Buck Granger had said, it seemed to come
from directly out the ground, at the spot where he had been sleeping.
Tom took the pocket searchlight over to that part of the shed and began
an examination. He laid his ear to the damp earth, but could hear
nothing. Then playing the light over the ground, he got down upon his
hands and knees for a closer examination. Standing around him and gazing
over his shoulder, the other three carefully followed his every move.
He was moving around almost in a circle, when accidentally, in a quick
turn, he kicked a section of the shed wall heavily with the heel of his
boot. He drew up suddenly, and the other lads crowded closer to him.
“Didn’t that seem to you to have a peculiar sound?” he asked.
“It certainly did to me,” George Harper replied.
“Like tapping a rotten watermelon,” said Buck Granger, in language more
descriptive than elegant.
“Sounded hollow, anyway,” put in Ollie Ogden.
“That’s just what I thought,” said Tom, and to verify their verdict he
tapped the partition again. It gave off the same empty sort of sound.
“Ah, ha!” exclaimed George Harper, leaning over Tom’s shoulder, and
examining the woodwork above the sergeant’s head. “I guess this explains
it. Looks like some sort of a secret door.”
He had been tracing the outline of a scarcely perceptible crack which
ran from the floor to a height of about three feet, then across for two
more feet, where it joined another vertical one which paralleled the
first. Also he had found what anyone might have taken for a knot-hole at
first glance, but which closer examination showed to have been made,
apparently for the purpose of pulling the thing open.
“Try it again,” Tom suggested, as George, with one finger crooked into
the aperture, gave it a tug without any seeming result. “Try it again; I
thought it moved a little.”
With considerable effort Harper managed to twist two fingers of his
right hand into the hole, and again gave a sudden jerk; but the only
result was a slight vibration, while George vigorously rubbed his two
pained digits.
“Wait a minute,” Ollie suggested, and going across the shed he picked up
a piece of iron shaped at the end like a stove poker. “Try this,” he
suggested.
“Let somebody else do it,” said Harper. “My hand feels as though it was
broken.”
Tom took the iron, fixed the end into the hole and gave a mighty yank.
As the secret door gave way under his weight, Tom suddenly and
unceremoniously and without advance preparation took a seat on the floor
at the far side of the shed.
At any other time his fall might have caused some merriment, but no one
paid attention to it now. They were too busy examining a little
apparatus in the closet-like aperture in the wall of the shed, which now
stood exposed to full view. The mechanism resembled, in fact was almost
a replica, of the dial on the front of a combination safe. The only
difference was that this disc was marked only with an S at the top, an O
at the bottom, and with a line running part way around it, near the
outer edge, with an arrow at the bottom end, showing that the small
lever over the dial was always moved from the top downward to the right,
and then upward on the other side.
“S and O,” Tom read off, gazing at the queer thing as he joined the
others. “And it points to S now. Why, that seems to be clear. It means
‘shut’ and ‘open.’”
“If it’s connected up with any signalling apparatus a complete
revolution of that lever also might sound an S.O.S.,” suggested Buck
Granger.
“Or it might mean ‘slip out’ while the slippin’s good,” put in Ollie.
“Oh, it might mean any one of a thousand things, such as ‘stop orating’”
George Harper spoke up, impatiently, “but I’m inclined to believe Tom’s
right. Let’s try it, anyway.”
Tom was just reaching for the small lever when another suppressed moan,
unquestionably from directly beneath their feet, arrested his hand.
“There’s someone down there under the ground,” said Tom, in an awed
whisper. “I believe there’s some connection between that person and this
thing here. I’m going to try it anyway. Suppose you fellows stand back
there against the opposite wall, in case anything happens to me when I
turn this lever. And Ollie, you hold the light so that it will be
directly on the dial.”
Not knowing what to expect, the three youths stood with their backs
against the opposite wall, staring at Tom’s hand as the fingers closed
on the lever and he began turning it toward the mark O, in the direction
the arrow indicated.
Slowly he pushed it round until the point was directly over the O. Tom
stepped over to where the others were, and he was just in time. There
was a sucking sound, such as is made by drawing one’s boot out of oozy
mud, and then _the ground where Buck Granger had slept began to move
upward_!
The lads stood huddled together. The ground, which proved to be but a
very thin layer, gave way, and a trap door lifted itself slowly into the
air.
Tom was the first to move. He stepped over and peered down into the
hole.
“Great guns!” he gasped, in a quivering voice.
The others were at his side in an instant. The sight was a staggering
shock to all.
There, on the bottom of a black cavern that apparently extended under
the whole flooring of the cow-shed, lay two bodies. Both were in French
uniforms. Obviously one man was dead. The other moved slightly and gave
another low moan that showed he was alive, although not conscious. Three
huge rats scampered away in fright as the light was thrown upon them.
“Ollie,” said Tom, again taking the leadership, “you get a surgeon as
quickly as you can. We’ve got to get that fellow out, and save his life
if possible.”
Without a word Ollie was gone on the errand directed, while Tom, holding
to the hands of George Harper and Buck Granger, lowered himself into the
subterranean prison, the floor of which was not more than five feet
below that of the shed.
Tom turned the living man over so as to see his face. It was drawn in
lines of suffering and fixed in an expression of absolute terror. The
whole body was emaciated almost beyond belief.
“Poor fellow,” murmured Tom, as he placed one arm under the shoulders of
the soggy and mildewed uniform. “Left here to go stark mad and starve to
death. Probably heard death rattle of his companion here as the rats
were gnawing at him. Ugh!”
The man weighed no more than an average boy of fifteen or sixteen years.
Tom raised the body carefully, lifted it to the height of the shed
floor, and into the hands of the two youths waiting there. Tom himself
was just climbing out of the pit when Ollie and a surgeon entered.
“What have we got here?” the latter asked, as with businesslike
precision he strode to the still form on the floor, the boys making way
for him.
In a few brief words Tom explained—told how Buck Granger first had been
awakened, then how all of them had heard the moans, and of the discovery
of the secret switch, and then of the cavern and the bodies within.
As Tom spoke the surgeon cast a queer look at him, but an instant later
he was working over the unconscious Frenchman, a hand on his pulse, his
ear to his heart.
“Weak,” he announced at last, “mighty weak. If he survives it will be
because you men reached him not a moment too soon. But at that he may be
a hopeless lunatic. We can’t tell about that yet—especially when a man
has gone through what this one evidently has.”
The surgeon again looked down at his patient. “Why,” he ejaculated
suddenly, “he wears a major’s uniform—infantry, too.”
It was true. The ghastly ruin of a man that lay before them once had
been a battalion commander in the French army.
“Discovered at last,” the surgeon murmured, more to himself than the
others.
“What?” demanded Tom, quickly.
“The terrible torture prison that we all have heard about, but never
knew how to locate.”
The surgeon paused for an instant as the unconscious man made a feeble
movement.
“Unquestionably,” he continued, “this is the Hun chamber of horrors
known throughout the Allied armies—the Death Dungeon.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------