THE TOMB-BOUND MAN
Mr. Guest had visited his victim and had gone.
Supper was over. Beef-tea and phosphorous! and Mr. Guest had said his
mocking words of good-night.
"Sleep well, Mr. Rathbone! I shall not be compelled to ask you to wear
that pretty metal cap until to-morrow, so I won't turn out the light.
You have a book to read, you've had your supper, and I wish you a
pleasant time alone. No doubt you will occupy your leisure in thinking
of Miss Marjorie Poole. You'll recall that occasion in a certain room
hung with pink, when you kissed her by the side of the piano in the
white and gold case! I know you often recall that happy incident."
He had closed the heavy steel door with a last chuckle of malice and
power, leaving the prisoner white and shaking with fear. How did this
sinister and devilish gaoler know his intimate thoughts?
He groaned deeply, and then, as he had done a thousand times before,
gazed round the place in which he was in terror-struck amazement. Where
was he? _What_ was this horrible prison with all its strange
contrivances, its inexplicable mysteries?
He was in a large stone cell, brilliantly lit at this moment by two
incandescent electric bulbs in the vaulted ceiling far above his head. A
long time ago now, how long he could not have said, he was Gerald
Rathbone, a man living in the world, seeing the sunlight and breathing
the air of day. He had been Gerald Rathbone, moving honourably among his
fellow men, seeing human faces, hearing the music of human voices, an
accepted lover, and a happy man.
That was long ago, a dream, a vision which was fading away. It seemed
years since he had heard any voice but that of the pink, hairless man
who fed him and whose slave he had become.
Once more the prisoned thing that had been Gerald Rathbone gazed round
the cell, striving with terrible intensity of thought to understand it
and penetrate its mysteries. Here he had been put and here he had
remained ever since that sickening moment when he had been talking to
Sir William Gouldesbrough. He had been standing in front of the baronet,
when his arms had been gripped from behind and unseen fingers held a
damp cloth, with a faint sickly and aromatic smell, over his face. A
noise like the rushing of great waters sounded in his ears, there was a
sense of falling into a gulf of enveloping blackness.
He had awakened in the place which he was now surveying again, with
frightful and fascinated curiosity.
In the brilliant light of the electric bulbs every object in the cell
was clearly seen. The place was not small. It was oblong in shape, some
sixteen feet by twelve. The walls were built of heavy slabs of Portland
stone cemented together with extreme nicety and care. The door of the
cell was obviously new. It was a heavy steel door with a complicated
system of locks--very much like the door of a safe. The whole place,
indeed, suggested that it had been used as a strong-room at some time or
other. There was no window of any kind in the cell. In the centre of the
arched roof there was a barred ventilator, and close by an electric fan
whirled and whispered unceasingly. The sound made by the purring thing
as it revolved two thousand times a minute was almost the only sound
Gerald Rathbone heard now.
The floor of the cell was covered with cork carpet of an ordinary
pattern. The victim cast his glance on all this without interest. Then,
as if he did so unwillingly, but by the force of an attraction he could
not resist, he stared, with lively doubt and horror rippling over his
face, at something which stood against the opposite wall. He saw a long
narrow couch of some black wood, slanting upwards towards the head. The
couch stood upon four thick pedestals of red rubber, which in their turn
rested upon four squares of thick porcelain. The whole thing had the
appearance of a shallow box upon trestles, and at the head was a curious
pillow of india-rubber. At the side of this thick pad was a
collar-shaped circlet of vulcanite clamped between two arms of
aluminium, which moved in any direction upon ball-pivots.
He stared at this mysterious couch, trying to understand it, to realize
it.
He rose from the narrow bed on which he sat, and advanced to the centre
of the cell--to the centre, but no further than that.
Around his waist a circlet of light steel was welded, and from it thin
steel chains ran through light handcuffs upon his wrists, and were
joined to steel bands which were locked upon his ankles. And all these
chains, hardly thicker than stout watch-chains, but terribly strong,
were caught up to a pulley that hung far above his head and, in its
turn, gave its central chain to another pulley and swivel fixed in the
roof.
In the half of his cell where his little bed was fixed, the prisoner had
fair liberty of movement, despite his shackles. He could sit or lie,
use his hands with some freedom. But whenever he attempted to cross the
invisible line which divided one part of the cell from the other, the
chains tightened and forbade him.
He stood now, straining to the limit of his bonds, gazing at the long
couch of black wood, with its rubber feet, its clamps and collar at the
head.
Above the mysterious couch, upon a triangular shelf by the door, was
something that gleamed and shone brightly. It was a cap of metal, shaped
like a huge acorn cup, or a bishop's mitre. From an ivory stud in the
centre of the peak, coils of silk-covered wire ran to a china plug in
the wall.
Rathbone stood upright for several minutes gazing at these things. Then
with a long, hopeless sigh, to the accompanying jingle of his fetters,
he turned and sat down once more upon his bed.
As prisoners do, he had contracted the habit of talking aloud to
himself. It was a poor comfort--this mournful echo of one's own
voice!--but it seemed to make the profound solitude more bearable for a
moment. He began a miserable monologue now.
"I _must_ understand it!" he said. "That is the first step of all, if I
am to keep my brain, if there is ever to be the slightest chance of
escape, I must understand this terrible and secret business.
"What are these fiends doing to me?
"Let me go through the whole thing slowly and in order."
He began to reconstruct the scenes of his frequent torture, with the
logic and precision with which he would have worked out a proposition of
Euclid. It was the only way in which he could keep a grip upon a failing
mind; a logical process of thought alone could solve this horrid
mystery.
What happened every day, sometimes two or three times a day? Just this.
He would be lying on his bed, reading, perhaps, if the electric lights
were turned on. There would be a sudden creak and rattle of the big
pulleys high up in the roof, a rattle which came without any warning
whatever.
Then the central chain, to which all the other thinner chains were
fastened, would begin to tighten and move. Slowly, inch by inch, as if
some one were turning a winch-handle outside the cell, the chain wound
up into the roof. As it did so, the smaller chains, which were fixed to
the steel bands upon his limbs, tightened also.
Struggle as he might, the arrangements and balance of the weights were
so perfect that in less than a minute he would be swinging clear of the
bed, as helpless as a bale of goods at the end of a crane.
Then the upward movement of the chain would stop, the door open with a
clicking of its massive wards, and Guest would come in.
In a moment more Gerald always found himself swung on to the long black
couch. His neck was encircled by the collar of thick vulcanite, his head
was bent upwards by means of an india-rubber pillow beneath it, his
hands and feet were strapped to the framework of the couch.
And finally Guest would take the metal cap and fix it firmly upon his
head, pressed down to the very eyes so that he could in no way shake it
off. The man would leave the cell, sometimes with a chuckle or a
malicious sentence that seemed full of hidden meaning, sometimes in
silence.
And then the electric light invariably went out.
Rathbone never knew how long he was forced to remain thus in the dark,
the subject of some horrible experiment, at the nature of which he could
only guess. The period seemed to vary, but there was no possible test of
time. Long ago time had ceased to exist for him.
Release would come at last, release, food and light--and so the dreadful
silent days went on.
"What are these devils doing to me?"
The hollow voice of reverie and self-communing cut into the silence like
a knife.
"It must be that I am being made the victim of an awful revenge and
hatred. Charliewood was the decoy and tool of Gouldesbrough; it was all
planned from the first. Marjorie was never really relinquished by
Gouldesbrough. He meant all along to get me out of the way, to get
Marjorie back if he could. All this is clear enough. I thought I was
dealing with an honourable gentleman, and a great man, too great to
stoop even to anything petty or mean. I have been dealing with desperate
and secret criminals, people who live hideous double lives, who walk the
world and sit in high places and do unnameable evil in the dark. Yes!
That is clear enough. Even now, perhaps, my darling is once more in the
power of this monster Gouldesbrough!"
The thin voice failed and died away into a tortured whimper. The tall
form shook with agony and the rattle of the steel chains mingled with
the "purr," "purr" of the electric fan in the roof.
By a tremendous effort of will Rathbone clutched at his thoughts again.
He wrenched his mind back from the memory of his dreadful plight to the
solving of the mystery.
Till he had some glimmering of the _meaning_ of what was being done to
him, he was entirely hopeless and helpless.
He began to murmur to himself again.
"In the first place Gouldesbrough has got me out of the way
successfully. I have disappeared from the world of men, the field is
clear for him. But he has not killed me. For some reason or other,
dangerous though it must be for him, he is keeping me alive. It surely
would have been safer for him to have murdered me in this secret place,
and buried me beneath the stone flags here? I am forced to conclude that
he is keeping me for an even worse revenge than that of immediate
extinction. It is torture enough to imprison me like this, of course.
But, if the man is what I feel he is--not man, but devil--would he not
have tortured me in another way before now? There are dreadful pains
that fiends can make the body suffer. One has read of unbearable agonies
in old books, in the classics. Yet nothing of the sort has been done to
me yet, and I have been long in this prison. My food has been plentiful
and of good quality, even definitely stimulating I have thought at
times.
"It is obvious then that I am not to be subjected to any of the horrors
one has read of. What _is_ being done to me? when, each day, I am fixed
rigidly upon that couch, and the brass helmet is put upon my head, what
is going on? I cannot feel any sensation out of the ordinary when I am
tied down there. I am no weaker in body, my faculties are just as
unimpaired when I am released as they were before. At least it seems so
to me. I can discover no change in me either, mental or physical.
"Something is being done by means of electricity. The coils of wire that
lead from the helmet to the plug in the wall show that. The way in which
the couch is insulated, the vulcanite collar, the rubber pillow, all
lead to the same conclusion. At first I thought that a torturing current
of electricity was to be directed into the brain. That my faculties, my
very soul itself, were to be dissolved and destroyed by some subtle
means. But it is not so. There is no current coming to me through the
wire. Nowhere does my head touch metal, the cap is lined throughout with
rubber. But yesterday, as my gaoler held up the helmet to examine it
before putting it on my head, I had an opportunity of seeing the whole
interior for the first time.
"There was very little to see! At the top was a circular orifice which
seemed to be closed by a thin disc of some shining material. That was
all. It looked just like the part of a telephone into which one speaks.
My brain, my body, are not being acted upon. Nothing is being slowly
instilled into my being. _Can it be that anything is being taken away?_"
He bent his head upon his hands and groaned in agony. All was dark and
impenetrable, there was no solution, no help. He was in the grip of
merciless men, in the clutch of the unknown.
The electric light in the cell went out suddenly.