The Midnight Expedition
October 8. 11 A.M.
Furtively, yet with a strange half-fearful pleasure, I made my way in
safety to the top of the stairs and down. I knew it was useless to
inspect the rooms which had been examined many times by day during the
past week. So I would have passed the library entrance without a
moment’s check in my rapid movement, had not a streak of light shot
forth from beneath the door just as I reached the bottom stair.
Someone had lit the chandelier.
I felt shock. I curdled. To investigate is one thing; to run
point-blank on revelations in the wrong place is another. I had a
panicky impulse to slip upstairs again and lock myself in. But instead
I loitered where I stood, staring at the yellow drugget spread from
the lintel.
The door was slightly ajar, and I saw a portion of the panelling of
the library wall; yet no sound came from within. A pale screen of
light, of which the edge drew a line on the opposite side of the
corridor, indicated that I might peep into the room through the slit
of the door. And though my curiosity had somehow turned sick within
me, presently I found myself with my eye at the crack.
My legs seemed to wilt. If it had been Cosgrove himself, burly as
life, I could not have had a worse turn. A trim young fellow, clad in
dinner clothes and wearing a black cap, was inside, and he was a
stranger!
He had been standing beyond the table, apparently in thought, his head
three-quarters from me, so that I caught only the remote profile of
his smooth face, and a narrow slice of his white shirt-front. But now
he moved across the room to a bookcase just within my triangle of
vision, drew open its glass doors, and commenced looking for some
volume. He stood in full view with his back toward me, turning his
head from side to side in a survey of the upper shelves. I could see
then that though slight of stature, he was, for his height, no mere
skeleton, but of fairly solid build, being even a bit broader across
the hips than at the shoulders.
A minute later he was beneath the light, his chosen volume lay open
before him. I recognized it instantly as the Book of Sylvan Armitage.
With his face cast into shadow by the peak of his cap, he leaned
across the table with one hand flat on the red velvet, while the other
ran through the pages. I could tell that the outspread hand was
delicate and tapering, an “artistic” hand; but what I wanted to see
plainly was that clean-shaved face.
Of a sudden he picked the book up from the table, pushed himself erect
from his leaning position, walked toward the armoury door and beyond
my range of vision. There was a click, and the chandelier faded out; a
moment later I heard a tiny jingling sound, as of curtain rings
disturbed. The young man was restoring the portières to their original
places. Then—nothing.
The debonair manner I discerned in this youth even during observation
so brief and cramped, the easy, natural way in which his dapper feet
carried him across the floor, as if the place belonged to him—all so
much at variance with the stealthy habits of a lawless intruder—rather
increased the numb, foreboding ill-ease I felt.
At last I ventured into the library, and found it, as I expected, in
moon-bathed vacancy. The armoury and the Hall of the Moth were also
empty save for their furnishings. I stood in the midst of the Hall,
wondering where the young chap had betaken himself, whether out of
doors, which seemed unlikely, whether into some crypt or cove in the
massive walls, which seemed unlikely, too, or into thin air, which, in
spite of the compulsion of ancient sorceries, seemed less likely than
either. Anyhow, he was gone, and it remained for me to consider what
course to take.
No need to retail my devious thoughts. In the end I saw no good in
rousing the house, particularly since I must reveal my secret
projects. I went on as before, with caution redoubled.
The corridor—no one there, apparently. The dinner-room—no one there
for certain. The kitchen—now I was in unknown territory. I waited,
listened, breathless. Only the whistle of a bat outside, the creak of
a timber within. I ran the shifting circle of my torch about the
walls, across the floor. A cockroach, devil’s coachman, fled across
the flags, and a great moth with eyes glimmering green fluttered
toward me from some corner. There on its pillar hung the gate-house
key; there, beside the chimney-place where a modern stove presided,
was the door I sought.
With prodigious care I passed through this portal, for besides leading
ultimately to the bowels of the earth, it ushered me at first into a
passage off which opened the precincts of the servants. These
half-subterranean chambers lay beneath the dinner-room and
conservatory. While I stole past the doors, I had audible evidence
a-plenty that the dwellers within were sleeping soundly enough.
This passage I was traversing had a distinct downward tendency and
stretched underneath the corridor of the ground floor. It terminated
in a door which, when I passed my light over it, appeared very black
and cumbrous. The key was in the lock.
To my surprise, when by a series of graded pressures I commenced to
turn this key, it moved easy and soundless, as if very recently oiled.
Beyond was a winding stone stair.
By way of sensible precaution I removed the key and brought it with
me, having no wish to be immured in the depths for any cause
whatsoever. The stairs, a dozen or so in number, brought me to the
entrance of another passage beneath the first, leading me in exactly
the opposite direction. While it proceeded it widened into a goodly
cellar, and I made out the yawning mouths of bins on either side, a
comforting sight. There were dark archways leading to other caverns.
And when I stamped, an unmistakable hollow sound came from below,
proof that some buried chamber existed there.
The trap-doors by which one gained these sub-cellars, Crofts had said,
were long disused, inch-deep in dust. And a few seconds later I came
upon one of them, a heavy iron plate in the floor, clamped down with a
clumsy padlock—but the dust was cleared away, and the padlock was not
fastened at all! I picked the thing up from where it was lying by the
flange, and stared at it stupidly. It would never lock anything again;
it had been forced.
Now, surely, this was none of Salt’s work; he had promised to do no
more than inspect the dust-covered entrances. It became increasingly
evident that someone had preceded me in this search, someone careful
not to be detected while he came, but careless whether it was known
that he had been. God forbid that he was still below!
With one fierce tug I lifted the door by a ring in the centre; it fell
backward with a heavy clang, and an atmosphere of choking damp came up
from the hole it left.
A stair descended therein, very steep and narrow, with a thinnish
fuzzy coating which must have been dust, though where it came from
would have been difficult to tell. In the dust there were footprints,
big footprints.
I didn’t like it, but I went on down. The rough stone walls were
crumbling with water-rot and the sheer decay of age. While the air
grew more smothering, I ran my head into stalactitic cobwebs and
rubbed elbows with evil fungi sprouting in every crevice.
It seemed as if there must be a hundred of those steps, though
actually they were about the same number as had been in the winding
stair. At length I saw that I had come to the last of them, for the
big footsteps tramped across a lumpy floor, athwart the glistening
path of a snail. The door was earth, soggy and covered with that same
thin dust-layer.
Midnight was midnight there indeed. Without my torch, I should never
have returned a sane man. Nor did my light, dancing about from wall to
wall, make it endurable. Fungi grew riotously everywhere, and the
cobwebs, black as a funeral, hung down thick from the vaulted ceiling,
like infamous hair. One or two spiders darted out and scurried
immediately back into their loathsome jungle. Whenever I shifted my
light, I had a feeling that from the place left in darkness the vile
growth was reaching out tentacles to grasp and cling to me.
I intended to make my business here as brief as possible, but first I
must find what the other visitor had been doing before me. I followed
the big footprints across the marshy floor, and noted a thick mark
drawn beside them. Something had been dragged.
Then the traces ceased, and I drew back suddenly with a cry at my
lips. I had had a narrow escape.
There was little to tell that the floor stopped here, for like it the
water was covered with an unclean growth. I stood on the brink of the
water-pit, where Aidenn’s lord had once drowned thirty wretches in a
single day! If ever a place was accurst for the cruelties performed
there, this is it.
Over the stagnant pit the ghastly festoons hung so thick that the
torchlight could scarcely pierce the darkness to the farther wall.
From that wall a queer shape protruded, round like an enormous barrel,
but too vague to be identified.
I suddenly caught sight of an object beside me on the verge of the
water. A stake had been driven into the earth through the gathered-up
mouth of a large cloth bag. The bottom of the bag hung over the edge
and down into the water, and the weight of its contents drew the whole
bag taut.
I gave a prolonged look through the shaggy gloom, where the black
streamers faintly shivered in the air my body had stirred. Was some
obscene presence spying on me from the murk?
Banishing fear, I wrenched up the stake, lifted the bag from the pool,
and let its burden fall upon the floor. Stark and stiff, with its eyes
staring, its tongue thrust out, its fur tousled into knarls and lumps,
its claws extended, the enormous cat of the sisters Delambre lay
outstretched at my feet. I stooped over the body; my fingers touched a
cord drawn tight about the neck.
So Maryvale had made this abysmal journey before me, and there had
been substance in his madness when he announced that Parson Lolly is
no more. Since bullets would not kill, with cord and water he made
assurance double. The long despairing cry will never shudder down the
Vale again.
I must have stood there a long while almost oblivious, gazing into the
invisible, until the darkness seemed to enter my brain. The most
infinitesimal sounds crept into my consciousness: the muffled murmur
of water in motion somewhere, the charnel breath of the things that
drooped from the vault, the very voice of silence! Then disgust at my
surroundings mounted in an instant almost to nausea, and I wheeled
about in flight to the cellar above.
I took the stairs in a leap and a scramble, the trap-cover closed with
a shout behind me while I darted among the bins and arches to the
winding steps. At the top of these I paused to replace the key but not
to turn it, then made tiptoes past the doors until I gained the
kitchen. With the key of the gate-house in my hand I passed into the
dinner-room, thence through the corridor into the conservatory, one of
whose smaller windows I proposed to use as a means of egress.
The valley seemed pale and quiet in the moonlight. In a trice I had
the casement open and had stepped through to the ground, concealed
beneath those outside stairs leading to the door at the end of the
first floor corridor. I pushed the window shut, and on the instant the
long screech of some predatory night-bird shrilled from the
summer-house park. If it was an omen, it was not for good—and my path
lay among those shadows!
This was for secrecy. If I passed directly across the lawn, some
wakeful eye in one of the long range of windows might find me out; so
I had no choice but a long three parts of a circle screened by trees.
First I stole behind the birches where I concealed myself at dawn the
other day on catching sight of the red-bearded runner, next through
the cypresses, then the sycamores of the park, and finally the
strawberry trees. These last extended far enough south to enable me to
reach the towers from the side opposite the House. The door was on the
other side, unconcealed, but I had to risk being seen while I unlocked
it.
I stood still beneath the twin, mute towers for a minute or two before
gathering determination for my effort. Salt, of course, visited this
place the day after his arrival, but has kept his discoveries secret.
My hope, of course, was that someone came here _after_ Salt, in
particular the black-robed object of our pursuit to-night.
I noticed that the moon was near setting, since it had but a short
progress to make from eastern to western hill. When it was down, the
Vale would be dark indeed. Was it worth waiting until that happened?
Impatience decided not. I sped around the tower that contained the
door, turned the monumental key, got safely inside the entrance, and
stood with bated breath. Seen or unseen, I was in for it now. Heaven
help me if I found a presence inside these walls.
My light showed the beginning of the spiral stair; there was
absolutely no sound. I commenced to climb.
It was a long way up. My stockinged feet were all but noiseless on the
overlapping stony steps, and more than once I checked myself, thinking
that I heard footfalls following mine. The torch, directed downward,
revealed the empty stair winding into nether darkness. This delusion
persisted; indeed, when I was at the point of entering the little room
atop the tower, I thought that I heard even the breath of some
stealthy climber. The light showed only the bare winding beneath me,
and I spoke a murrain on the narrow tower which had no well to enable
me to see clear to the bottom.
My imagination cooled down, and I set about examining the circular
chamber. Owing to the thickness of the walls, it was only some five
feet in diameter. It was low, and save in the centre, where the
pointed roof gave space, I could not stand upright. For windows it had
three slots, through one of which the moon cast a slanting beam. The
floor was thickly daubed with mud, but this in itself was not
surprising when one considered that Salt had sloshed through here on
the morning of the downpour.
But that mud would have dried long ago, and this showed signs of damp!
Eagerly, critically, I bent and studied the floor in the full glare of
my torch. There were dubious faintly moist impressions, of feet, I
believed; but I could make nothing of them. No entire footprint was
evident. Over the general surface of the dirt, however, something
sopping wet had recently been trailed, but not so heavily as to
disturb the topography of the mud. The little ridges and knolls left
by Salt’s rubber boots remained intact, but portions of that
microscopic countryside looked as if they were recovering from an
inundation; in one or two hollows there were positive pools,
one-sixteenth of an inch deep.
Something exceedingly wet, but not very heavy—what else but the gown
of the creature that had fled from Aire and me and plunged into the
stream? Only, how in the name of magic did that creature evade us to
get here, unless it skipped _up_ the stream, which both Aire and I are
prepared to attest on oath it did not do?
A flat-headed aperture led the way across the bridge between the
towers. In that direction the water-trail appeared to tend, although
at the edge of the dirt, where the gown had been drawn along the
stones themselves, almost complete evaporation had taken place.
Further along there was no sign of damp at all; I suppose the intruder
had observed the puddles he was making and had lifted the garment
clear from the floor, perhaps doffed it and rolled it under his arm.
I had to crouch nearly double in that low passageway to reach the
inner room, which now I believed to be the headquarters of Parson
Lolly. My light, cast ahead, showed that it was a chamber of identical
mould with the one I had just quitted, and, much to my relief, it was
empty. One difference there was, indeed: the corresponding stairway
which led down from this tower had for some reason been walled up. I
tested the mortared stones; I pounded them with my fist; I butted them
with my shoulder. They were sound and secure, leaving no doubt that
those stairs condemned to everlasting darkness held no secret
connected with the present mysteries.
When I had reached this comfortable certainty, I made a detailed
search of the turret. Someone, for sure, had been in the habit of
coming there; I found what appeared to me sufficient evidence of
occupation, and of hurried, perhaps permanent, departure.
There were pencil-whittlings on the floor, from an indelible pencil; I
know the nasty taste of the aniline preparation. Now, when I
re-examined the Parson’s placard inside the House this evening, I saw,
though I did not comment on the fact, that such a pencil had been used
in writing it.
There were two or three dark stains, splashes now quite dried, which
yet had a dim, offensive odour when my nose was close to them. To my
mind, no more proof is needed that a young pig was murdered here.
There were a few short lengths, an inch to four or five inches, of
some pliant fibrous wood, perhaps bamboo, which I cannot account for.
With these, perhaps, are associated the fragments of black crepe I
found cut in wedges, rhombs, and various irregular shapes.
I detected, while bending near one of the slender openings, a
sub-acrid, faded scent, which seemed specially localized on the sill,
so to speak, of the window, as if some pungent stuff had once been
spilt there and removed. In its proper context the source of the odour
would, I am sure, have been obvious in an instant; yet here it baffled
me.
Last I found a torn end of paper. The side uppermost was blank, but to
my joy the other proved to contain printed words. The piece was
obviously detached from the title-page of some old book, octavo size,
with which I am not acquainted, though “CATTI” looks obscurely
familiar. I shall hardly have any trouble in identifying it.¹
¹ Reproduced on following page. (V. Markham.)
I felt actual elation, for Salt would never have overlooked this, or
left it here, supposing he had found it in the course of his
inspection.
[Illustration: A torn piece of paper, missing much of the left side.
The printing on the paper is laid out like a handbill or a book’s
title page. What can be read says: “The ―es & Vagaries of ―on Catti,
―ones, Esq., ―d Wag of Wales; by ―yn Prichard”.]
Five minutes had revealed these things; an hour could not reveal more.
I tucked the slip of paper into my breast pocket and departed from the
turret. Half-way across the bridge I was again aware of the sound of
footsteps climbing to the first chamber, but dismissed the idea as a
renewal of the delusion which had troubled me before.
But there was no mistake this time, as I realized very soon. The
pad-pad of the unknown feet was growing louder, coming nearer. At once
I was terrified, yet possessed of reason. I knew it might be fatal to
let this creature see me before I saw him—it—her. Particularly
disastrous it would be to be caught in this low passageway where I
must go with my head almost touching my knees. I snapped off my light,
staggered into the room beyond, and stood at the edge of the
stair-head, leaning perforce on account of the funnel-roof. It was a
position of vantage. There I was in darkness, whereas whatever was
coming must emerge into the moonlight that shot through the opposite
slit. I might even escape undetected down the stairs if the creature
hurried past me to the bridge and the farther tower.
But this hope was abortive. The creature knew I was there: that belief
stuck like a knife in my heart.
The steady steps were only ten feet below, one twist of the stair.
They were like the steps of any ordinary man.
The moon must have been nearly swallowed by the hills all this time,
for now it went down with appalling suddenness and left the room in
thick and absolute night. I could not see my foe in darkness; could it
see me?
Every nerve in me was ringing its own alarm. The subtle glue that
holds the body-cells in friendly ties dissolved; it was every cell for
itself. I was fleeing in all directions.
The creature actually passed me by; I felt the touch of some part of
it, cold as an Arctic stone, on my arm.
It was like awakening from an evil dream. My fear welled up in fury.
Silently I launched an attack; with the torch I held I let fly in
blind and murderous onslaught. I struck something a blow that glanced;
the torch slipped from my grasp, but the creature staggered and sank
to the floor. I had my hands on its body now, and a crazy exultation
took hold of me when I realized that my opponent was merely a man like
myself and at my mercy. The stroke I had given blindly seemed to have
stunned him, for he made no resistance, but lay crumpled up, as I
found by groping. His breath came harsh and irregular.
Who was he? For what seemed immeasurable time I searched, but I could
not find my torch.
Obviously I had made an important capture, and the best thing to do,
since my light was lost, would be to lock the fellow-prisoner in and
go for reinforcements.
I had a handkerchief; so had he. With their assistance I triced him in
a position from which he would not easily free himself. I placed him
face downward, with his head turned aside for breathing and his legs
doubled back, and I clipped each wrist to the opposite ankle.
Then I groped my way down the long turnings, found the darkened world
again, locked the tower door, and made for the House.
The rest was like the return of horrid dreams. With the moon gone,
still the stars gave a grey cast to the darkness. I saw some
fluttering-draped figure descend from the first storey by the outside
stairs; I heard distracted sobbing. I saw vague forms that followed
one another on the lawn, heard phantom calls and a queer hysteric
laughter. The place seemed more alive by night than at any hour of
day.
Maryvale, I discovered afterward, had come out again, clambered down
all the way by the ivy. Lib, in the room next his, had heard him this
time, caught sight of him, fled across the passage to Mrs.
Bartholomew, shared that lady’s dismay on finding me also flown,
summoned Pendleton, who had roused Aire and come helter-skelter in
pursuit of the errant man of business. Lib and Mrs. Bartholomew, in
different styles of negligée, now stood spectators of the course.
Millicent Mertoun, too, had come crying out of doors by those northern
stairs, in her sleep, as she had come that first night with the
American girl watchfully by her side.
But to-night she roved alone. Where was Paula Lebetwood, whose room is
next the stairs, and who, however soundly she may have slept, must
have heard her dear friend’s weeping?
Lights were awakening in various chambers. Maryvale, much surprised at
the solicitude of his captors, was explaining courteously that he had
merely descended to “pick herbs.” Alberta Pendleton had appeared and
was taking Miss Mertoun back to the House.
By the time I had called attention to myself and had caused my story
to penetrate Crofts’ brain, many minutes had gone by. Four of us,
followed by those audacious females, Lib and Mrs. Bartholomew,
approached the towers. The door stood open. The intruder, securely
trussed and locked in by me, had made off. He had taken my torch,
invaluable as both light and weapon.
_Satis._