THE WAKING CIRCUIT
It was a thick and heavy night, with a drizzle of fine rain blanketing
the city. Every now and then a lonely carriage spluttered along the
oily and pool-strewn pavement of the cross-street. Every now and then,
too, the rush and clang of the Broadway cars echoed down the canyon of
rain-swept silence.
Durkin waited until the lights of the cigar-store went out. Then he
once more circled the block, keeping to the shadows. As he passed the
darkened cigar-store for the second time his foot, as though by
accident, came sharply in contact with the refracting-prismed manhole
cover which had sounded so hopefully hollow to his previous tread. As
he had half-suspected, it was loose.
He stooped quickly, to turn up his trousers. As he did so three
exploring fingers worked their way under the ledge of the unsecured
circle of iron and glass.
It came away without resistance. He looked about him cautiously,
without straightening up; then by its shoulder-strap he carefully
lowered his leather tool-bag into the passage below, and as guardedly
let himself down after it.
He waited and listened for a minute or two, before replacing the cover
above him. From the river, in the distance, he could hear the booming
and tooting of the steam craft through the fog. A hurrying car rumbled
and echoed past on the Broadway tracks. Two drunken wanderers went
singing westward in the drizzling rain. Then everything was silence
again.
Durkin replaced the covering, noiselessly, and feeling to right and
left with his outstretched hands, crept inward through the narrow
tunnel in which he found himself. His fingers came in touch with the
chilly surface of a steel-faced door. It sounded heavy and unyielding
to his tentative tap, and his left hand was already reaching back for
the tool-bag which hung by its strap over his shoulder when his
questioning right hand, pushing forward, discovered that the door was
unlocked, and swung easily outward without resistance.
He felt and fondled the heavy bolts, thoughtfully, puzzled why it
should be so, until he remembered seeing the half-dozen pieces of
anthracite lying about the manhole on the sidewalk above. That, he
told himself, possibly explained it. Some careless wagon-driver,
delivering his load, had left the place unlocked.
But before he crept into the wider and higher passage before him he
paused to take out the revolver which he carried in his hip pocket, to
unlimber it, and carefully feel over the chambered cylinder, to make
sure every cartridge-head stood there, in place. This done, he
replaced it, not at his hip, but loose and free, in the righthand
pocket of his coat. Then he once more began feeling his way along the
smooth cement floor. He was enveloped in a darkness as absolute as
though he had been shrouded in black velvet--even the glimmer of the
refracted street lamps did not penetrate further than the doorway of
the first tunnel. There was a smell of dampness in the air, as of
mouldy plaster. It was the smell of underground places. Durkin hated
it.
He had to feel his way about the entire circle of that second narrow
chamber before he came to where the inner doorway stood. It, too, was
unlocked, and for the first time some sense of betrayal, some
intimidation of being trapped, some latent suspicion of artfully
concealed duplicity, flashed through his questioning mind.
He listened, and was greeted by nothing but silence.
Then he swung the door softly and slowly open. As he did so he leaped
back, and to one side, with his right hand in his coat pocket. For
there suddenly smote on his ears the sharp clang and tinkle of metal.
He stood there, crouched, for a waiting minute, and then he laughed
aloud, for he knew it was only the sound of some piece of falling iron,
striking on the cement. To make sure of it, he groped about the floor,
and stumbled on the little bar of steel that had fallen. Yet why it
had been there, leaning against the door, he could not comprehend. Was
it there by accident? Or had it been meant as a signal? It showed him
one thing, however; its echoing fall had demonstrated to him that the
room he had entered was both higher and larger than the one he had
left. It might be nothing more than a furnace-room, yet he told
himself that he must be on his guard, that from now on his perils began.
Then he wondered why he should feel this premonitory sense, and in what
lay the dividing line, and where lay the difference.
Yet as he stood there, with his back against the wall, he felt
something dormant and deep-seated stirring within him. It was not a
sense of danger; it arose from no outward and tangible manifestations.
But somewhere, and persistently, at the root of his being, he heard
that subliminal and submerged voice which could be neither silenced nor
understood.
He took three groping paces forward, as if to put distance between
himself and this foundationless emotion which some part of him seemed
struggling to defy. But for the second time he stood stockstill,
weighed down by the feeling of some presence, oppressed by the sense of
something vaguely hanging over him. He felt, as Frank had once said,
how like a half-articulate key, at the end of an impoverished circuit,
consciousness really was; how the spirit so often, in this only
half-intelligible life of theirs, flutters feebly with hints and
suggestions to which it could never give open and unequivocal
utterance. Even language, and language the most artful and finished,
was, after all, merely a sort of clumsy Morse--its unwieldy dots and
dashes left many a mood of the soul unknown and inarticulate.
As he stood there, in doubt, questioning himself and that vague but
disturbing something which stood before him, he decided to put a
summary end to the matter. Fumbling in his pocket, and disregarding
any risk which the movement might entail, he caught up a match and
struck it.
As he shaded the flame and threw it before him, his straining eyes
caught only the glimmer of burnished metal--a guard-rail of some
description--and the dark and ponderous mass of what seemed a deposit
vault.
The match burned down, and dropped from his upthrust fingers. He
decided to grope to the rail, and feel along the metal until he reached
some point of greater safety. He extended his fingers before him, as a
blind man might, and took one shuffling step forward.
Then a thought came to him, with the suddenness and the shock of an
electric current, as a radiating tingle of nerves, followed by a
strangely sickening sense of hollowness about the chest, swept through
his body. _Could it be Frank herself in danger, and wanting him_?
More than once, in the past, he had felt that mysterious medium, more
fluid and unfathomable than electricity itself, carry its vague but
vital message in to him. He had felt that call of Soul to Soul, across
space, along channels less tangible than Hertzian waves themselves, yet
bearing its broken message, which later events had authenticated and
still later cross-questioning had doubly verified.
He had felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmal
wires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires one
anxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; that
the Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried and
gave out and received its countless messages--if only the fellow-Soul
had learned to await the signal and disentangle the dark and runic
Code. Yes, he told himself, as he stood there, thoughtfully, as though
bound to the spot by some Power not himself,--yes, consciousness was
like that little glass tube which electricians called a coherer, and
all his vague impressions and mental-gropings were those disorderly,
minute fragments of nickel and silver which only leaped into continuity
and order under the shock and impact of those fleet and foreign
electric waves, which floated from some sister consciousness aching
with its undelivered messages. And the woman who had so often called
to him across space and silence, in the past, was now sounding the
mystic key across those ghostly wires. But what the messages was, or
from what quarter it came, he could not tell.
He stood there tortured and puzzled, torn by fear, thrilled and stirred
through every fiber of his anxious body. This was followed by a sense
of terror, sub-conscious and wordless and irrational, the kind of
terror that comes to a child in unknown places, in the dead of some
unknown night.
"_For the love of God, what is it_?" his dry lips demanded, speaking
aloud into the emptiness about him.
He waited, almost as if expecting some answering voice, as distinct and
tangible as his own. But nothing broke the black silence that
blanketed him in from the rest of all the world and all its living
things. The sweat of agony came out on his face; his body hung
forward, relaxed and expectant.
"_What is it you want to say_?" he repeated, in a hoarse and muffled
scream, no longer able to endure that silent and nameless Something
which surrounded him. "_What is it you want to say_?"