THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
In the ensuing silence, as the unbroken seconds dragged themselves on,
Durkin called himself a fool, and, struggling bitterly with that
indeterminate uneasiness which possessed him, pulled himself together
for some immediate and decisive action.
He could waste no more time, he told himself, in foolish spiritualistic
seances with his own shadow. He had too much before him, and too short
a time in which to do it. His troubles, when he came to face them,
would be realities, and not a train of vapid and morbid self-vaporings.
He advanced further into the darkness of the room, slowly, with his
hands outstretched before him. He would feel for the friendly support
and guidance of the metal railing, and then grope his way onward. For
as yet he had only carried the enemy's outposts. Then, for a second
time, and for no outward reason, he came to a dead halt. He felt as if
some elusive influence, some unnamable force, was holding and barring
him back. Again he struck a match, recklessly, and again he saw
nothing but the burnished metal railing and the dark mass of the vault.
It was with almost a touch of exasperation that he stood there in his
tracks, and slowly, methodically, thoroughly, surveyed the four
quarters of the lightless room in which he found himself. He
scrutinized the heavy, enmuffling gloom with straining eyes, first in
one direction and then in another.
There was nothing to be seen, and not a sound reached his ears. He had
been in the room perhaps not three minutes, yet it seemed to him as
many hours. Then he peered about him still again, wondering, for the
first time, by what psychological accident his eyes turned in one
particular direction, slightly above and before him, to the right of
the direction in which he was advancing.
To rid himself of this new idea, and to decentralize the illusion, he
shifted his position. But still his gaze, almost against his will,
turned back toward the former point, as though the blanketing blackness
held some core, some discernible central point, toward which he was
compelled to look, as the magnetic needle is compelled to swing toward
the North. Surrendering to this impulse, he gaped through the darkness
at it, with a little oath of impatience.
As he did so he began to feel stir at the base of his spine a tiny
tremor of apprehension. This tremor seemed suddenly to explode into a
mounting shudder of fear, flashing and leaping through his body until
the very hair of his head was stirred and moved with it.
The next moment the startled body responded to clamoring volition, and
he turned and fled blindly back into the outer passageway, with a
ludicrous and half-articulate little howl of terror.
For growing out of the utter blackness he had seen two vague points of
light, two luminous spots, side by side, taking on, as he faced them,
all the mysteries of all the primeval night which man ever faced. He
felt like a hunter, in some jungled midnight, a midnight breathless and
soundless, who looks before him, and slowly discerns two glowing and
motionless balls of fire--who can see nothing else, in all his
world--but from those two phosphorescent points of light knows that he
is being watched and stalked and hunted by some padded Hunger lurking
behind them.
In the unbroken and absolute silence which seemed to mock at his
foolish and stampeding fears, an immediate reaction of spirit set it.
He felt almost glad for this material target against which to fling his
terrors, for this precipitation of apprehension into something tangible.
He groped through his bag, hurriedly yet cautiously, for his little
sperm-oil lantern. Then he took up the revolver that lay loosely in
his coat pocket. A moment later a thin little shaft of light danced
and fingered about the inner room.
He could, at first, see nothing but the line of burnished copper
stretching across his path and flashing the light back in his eyes.
Behind this, a moment later, he made out the dark and gloomy mass of
the black safe. Then he looked deeper, with what was still again a
flutter of enigmatical fear about his heart, for that twin and
ghostlike glow which had filled him with such precipitate terror.
But there was no longer anything to be seen. He played his
interrogative finger of light up and down, and it was a full minute
before his slowly-adjusting sight penetrated to the remoter and higher
area of the surrounding walls.
It was then, and not till then, that he discovered the fact that the
wall on his right opened and receded, some five feet above the
floor-level, into a dimly-outlined alcove. As he looked closer he made
out that this alcove had, obviously, been filled by the upper portion
of a heavy iron staircase, leading to the floor above. The entire
lower half of this stairway, where once it must have obtruded into the
vault chamber, had been cut away. It was on the remaining upper
portion of this dismantled stairway that his pencil of light played
nervously and his gaze was closely riveted.
For there, above his natural line of vision, half-hidden back in the
heavy shadows, his startled eyes made out a huddled and shadowy figure.
It was a woman's figure, in black, and motionless. It was bound hand
and foot to the iron stair-stanchions.
He did not notice, in that first frenzied glance, the white band that
cut across the lower part of her face, so colorless was her skin. But
as he looked for the second time, he emitted a sudden cry, half-pity,
half-anger, for slowly and thinly it filtered into his consciousness
just what and who that watching figure was.
And then, and then only, did he speak. And when he did so he repeated
his earlier cry.
"My God, Frank, what is it?"
There was no response, no answering movement or gesture. He called to
her again, but still absolute silence confronted him.
As he crept closer to her, step by step, he saw and understood.
The two luminous eyes, burning through the dark, had been his wife's.
She had been imprisoned and tied there; but bound and muffled as she
was, the strength of her desire, the supremacy of will, had created its
new and mysterious wire of communication. Some passion of want, some
sheer intensity of feeling, had found and used its warning semaphore.
She had spoken to him, without sound or movement. Yet for what?
Yet for what? That was the thought that seemed to dance back and forth
across the foreground of his busy brain. That was what he wondered and
demanded of himself as he clambered and struggled and panted up the
wall into the narrow and dusty alcove, and cut away the sodden gag
between her aching jaws. The tender flesh was indented and livid,
where the tightened band had pressed in under the cheek-bones. The
salivated throat was swollen, and speechless. The tongue protruded
pitifully, helpless in its momentary paralysis.
"Oh, he'll smart for this! By heaven, he'll smart for this!" declared
Durkin, as he stooped and cut away the straps that bound her ankles to
the obdurate iron, and severed the bands that bruised and held her
white wrists. Even then she could not speak, though she smiled a
little, faintly and forlornly and gratefully. She struggled to say one
word, but it resolved itself into a cacophonous and inarticulate
mumble, half-infantile, half-imbecile.
"Oh, he'll pay for this!" repeated the raging man, as he lowered her,
limp and inert, to the floor below and leaped down beside her. She
sank back with a happy but husky gasp of weakness, for the benumbed
muscles refused to obey, and the cramped and stiffened limbs were
unable to support her.
All she could do was to hold her husband's hand in her own, in a
grateful yet passionate grip. She must have been imprisoned there, he
surmised, at least an hour, perhaps two hours, perhaps even longer.
He started up, in search for water. It might be, he felt, that a lead
water-pipe ran somewhere about them. He would cut it without
compunction.
He took two steps across the room, when an audible and terrified note
of warning broke from her swollen lips. He darted back to her, in
wonder, searching her straining face with his little shaft of lantern
light.
She did not speak; but he followed her eyes. They were on the
burnished copper railing refracting the thin light that danced back and
forth across that dungeon-like chamber. He questioned her fixed gaze,
but still he did not understand her. She caught his hand, and retained
it fiercely. He thought, from her pallor, that she was on the point of
fainting, and he would have placed her full length on the hard cement,
but she struggled against it, and still kept her hold on his hand.
Then she took the tiny lantern from his fingers, and bending low,
tapped with it on the cement. Durkin, listening closely, knew she was
sounding the telegrapher's double "I"--the call for attention, implying
a message over the wire.
Slowly he spelt out the words as she gave them to him in Morse,
irregular and wavering, but still decipherable.
"The--railing--is--charged!"
"Charged?" he repeated, as the last word shaped itself in his
questioning brain.
He took the lantern from her hand, and swung the shaft of light on the
glimmering copper. From there he looked back at her face once more.
Then, in one illuminating flash of comprehension, it was all clear to
him. With a stare of blank wonder he saw and understood, and fell back
appalled at the demoniacal ingenuity of it all.
"I see! I see!" he repeated, vacuously, almost.
Then, to make sure of what he had been told, he crossed the room and
picked up the bar of steel that had fallen at his feet as he first
entered the door. This bar he let fall so that one end would rest on
the metal vault-covering and the other on the rail of copper.
There was a report, a sudden leap of flame, and the continued hissing
fury of the short-circuited current, until the bar, heated to
incandescence, twisted and writhed where it lay like a thing of life.
He drew a deep breath, and watched it.
That was the danger he had so closely skirted? That was the fate which
he had escaped!
He stood gazing at the insidious yet implacable agent of death,
spluttering its tongue of flame at him like an angry snake; and, as he
looked, his face was beaded with sweat, and seemed ashen in color.
Then a sense of the dangers still surrounding them returned to his
mind. He shook himself together, and, making a circuit of the room,
found the switch and turned off the current. As he did so he gave a
little muffled cry of gratitude, for across the rear corner of the room
ran two leaden water-pipes. Into one of these he cut and drilled with
his pocket-knife, ruthlessly, without a moment's hesitation. He was
suddenly rewarded by a thin jet of water spraying him in the face. He
caught his hat full of it, and carried it to Frank, who drank from it,
feverishly and deeply. It not only brought her strength back to her;
but, after it, she could speak a little, though huskily, and with
considerable pain.
"Can you walk?"
She signalled, yes.
"We've got to get out of here, at once!"
He could see that she understood.
"Can you come now?" he asked.
She nodded her head, and he helped her to her feet. Together, the one
leaning heavily on the other's arm, they paced up and down the already
flooded floor, until power came back to her aching limbs, and
steadiness to her tired nerves.
"It would be better not to go together. I'll help you out and give you
fifty yards' start. If anything should happen, remember that I'm
behind you, and that, after this, I'm ready to shoot, and shoot without
a quaver."
Again she nodded her head.
"But listen. When you get up through the sidewalk grating, keep
steadily on for two blocks, toward the west. Then turn north for half
a block, and go into the family entrance at Kieffer's. If nothing
happens, I'll join you there. If anything does occur to keep me back,
give them to understand that you've missed the last train for your home
in East Orange; put this five-dollar bill down and ask for a front room
on the second floor. From there you must watch for me. If it's
anything dangerous I'll signal you in passing."
By this time he had led her down the narrow, tunnel-like passageway and
was helping her up into the rain-swept street.
"Whatever happens, remember that I'm behind you!" he repeated.
Their struggles, as he assisted her up through the narrow opening, were
ungainly and ludicrous; yet, incongruously enough, there came to him a
fleeting sense of joy in even that accidental and impersonal contact of
her hand with his.
Then he braced himself against the narrow brick walls where he stood,
appearing a strange and grotesque and bodiless head above the level of
the street.
Thus peering out, he watched her as she beat her way down the
wind-swept sidewalk. Already, through the drifting midnight rain, the
outline of her figure was losing its distinctness. He was reaching
down for his wet and sodden hat, to follow her, when something happened
that left him transfixed, a motionless and bodiless head on which
startled horror had suddenly fallen.
For out of the quiet and shadowy south side of the street, where it had
been silently patrolling under lowered speed, swerved and darted a
wine-colored, surrey-built touring car with a cape top. Durkin
recognized it at a glance; it was Penfield's huge machine. Its
movement, as it swung in toward the startled woman, seemed like the
swoop of a hawk. It appeared to stop only for a moment, but in that
moment two men leaped from the wide-swung tonneau door. When they
clambered into it once more Durkin saw that Frank was between them.
And one of the men was MacNutt, and the other Keenan.
He heard the one sharp scream that reverberated down the empty street,
followed by the fading pulsations of the departing car, when with an
oath of fury, he was already working his arms up through the narrow
manhole. As he did so he heard a second, hoarser cry, succeeded by the
heavy tramp of hurrying feet, and then a peremptory challenge.
Turning sharply, he caught sight of a patrolling roundsman, bearing
down on him from the corner of Broadway; and he saw that the officer
was drawing his revolver as he charged across the wet pavement.
It was already too late to free himself. With an instinctive movement
of the hands he caught up the manhole cover, shield-like. As he did so
he saw the glimmer of the polished steel and heard the repeated
challenge. But he neither paused nor hesitated. He let his knees
break under him, and as he fell he saw to it that the rim of the
manhole dropped into its waiting circular groove. Then he heard the
sound of a shot, of a second and a third, from the policeman's pistol.
But as he secured the cover with its chainlock, and dropped down into
the tunnel below, the reports seemed thin and muffled and far away to
Durkin.
A moment later, however, he heard the ominous and vibrant echo of the
officer's night-stick, on the asphalt, frenziedly rapping for
assistance.