Death Beneath Jerusalem

by Roger Bax

  He set off quickly over the rough ground, so quickly that Garve had difficulty in keeping up with him. He was just about to call to him to slow down when the second torch suddenly went out.

  “What the hell are you doing?” cried Garve sharply. “Don’t play the fool, Hayson.”

  “Something’s gone wrong with it,” came Hayson’s voice, muffled and thick. In the pitch darkness not the trace of an object was visible anywhere.

  “Well, keep still until I get to you. Don’t mess about with it. Where are you, damn you?” Garve moved forward a pace or two, groping, but found nothing.

  “Hayson!” he called again. He tried hard to keep the note of alarm out of his voice.

  “I’m here,” came Hayson’s voice again, almost under his nose—so near that the sound of it made him jump. “Shouting doesn’t help. It must be the bulb.”

  Garve stretched out a violent hand. “Let me look, you fool.” His arm struck something and Hayson cursed.

  “Careful,” he cried. “Careful. My God, now you’ve done it. You’ve knocked the bulb out of my hand.”

  “Hell!” ejaculated Garve, and there was a moment’s silence. Then he added more coolly, “Keep still and don’t tread on it. If we feel around long enough we’re bound to find it. Don’t move, though. If we once lose the spot we’re finished. I’ve got some matches.”

  He fumbled for the box and struck a light, while Hayson produced matches of his own and followed suit. The flickering flames were woefully inadequate. Garve had only time to catch a glimpse of Hayson’s burning eyes and pass his light cautiously over a square foot or so of ground before the darkness closed over them again like a cloak.

  “The floor slopes a bit here,” said Hayson. “The bulb may have rolled away. Stay where you are to mark the spot and I’ll look.”

  An outside observer might have laughed at the two crawling figures striking match after futile match. Garve stared at the spot where the bulb had been dropped, scanning the circle of rock round him while the feeble flames lasted. Hayson went crawling away down the slope, his progress marked by the pathetic scrape of matches and the little bursts of puny light which were getting farther and farther away.

  “It couldn’t have rolled as far as that,” called out Garve in exasperation. “The floor’s too rough—it’s probably right at my feet. Come back and help me.”

  Hayson had stopped striking matches. He was ten yards away, swallowed up in the blackness. He made no reply.

  “Hayson,” Garve called again. Out of the darkness came a sound suspiciously like a laugh —an hysterical laugh perhaps, or perhaps a vindictive, jubilant laugh.

  “Where are you, Garve?” came Hayson’s voice, and it seemed now very far away. “I can’t find you. Strike a light.”

  Garve obeyed, and the match spluttered and died. “Another,” came the voice, not perceptibly nearer. It was like a command.

  Garve felt in the box. He had six matches left. Suddenly he knew—knew with absolute certainty and conviction—that Hayson was playing with him. He did not intend to come back—he simply wanted Garve to waste all his slender store of matches and then he would leave him. Acute danger always made Garve cool. He struck a match.

  “This is my last,” he called in a loud voice. “Can you see it?”

  “Yes,” replied Hayson; “but it’s a long way away. Are you sure you haven’t another? My God, if you haven’t we’re lost.”

  “The box is empty. Can’t you come towards my voice.”

  “I’ll try. Start counting aloud. I don’t know how I got so far away.”

  Garve began slowly to count. “One, two, three, four …” He counted up to ten. “Are you still there, Hayson?”

  “There’s an echo,” came Hayson’s voice, distant and despairing. “I can hear you in two places. But go on counting.”

  Garve counted again. “One, two three, four … Are you there, Hayson?” There was no reply. Straining his ears in the darkness he seemed to hear, far off, a faint movement.

  “Hayson, are you there?” he shouted. Was it his imagination, or could he just discern far away through the velvet darkness a pale glow of light? In any case, it vanished almost at once.

  “For the last time, Hayson, can you hear me?”

  There was no reply. Hayson had gone, and Garve was alone in the cavern.

  10. Lost!

  So Hayson had intended to murder him. Garve felt a chilly spasm run through his body. Perhaps had murdered him. He had had a plan all the time, and had carried it through with consummate cleverness.

  At last Garve realized how incautious he had been. Knowing that Hayson hated him, distrusting his intentions, he had deliberately made the path to murder smooth. And Hayson had taken the absolutely safe way. He had been acting all the time, of course. He had simply let Garve knot his own noose. He had watched while Garve ran his own head into it and pulled it tight.

  Garve looked back over the events of the evening and could find no satisfaction in them anywhere. With mortification he saw how Hayson had played with him. It was Garve who had suggested going to the quarries. Hayson had tried to prevent him, knowing that the attempt at dissuasion would fail. His quick mind had seen all the possibilities. He knew how keen Garve was to find the ammunition dump. He knew that he would go on whatever the difficulties. His reason for coming had not, after all, been fear of discovery in some secret nefarious practice in the cave, but merely that he wished to make absolutely sure of Garve’s death, and no better opportunity was likely to present itself. Of course, Garve could see it all now—now that it was too late. Hayson had stumbled deliberately in order that he might have an excuse to lose his torch. He had counted on Garve’s enthusiasm to go on outweighing his caution. He had made Garve insist on going on, waited until Garve handed over his own torch willingly, almost eagerly. He had kept it until they had reached the most inaccessible and dangerous part of the workings. Then—oh yes, it had been so simple—he had probably just unscrewed the bulb. In the impenetrable darkness that followed, he had counted on Garve’s giving him reason to drop it. If he had dropped it—but why should he have done? It had been such a scramble—it had all happened so quickly—Garve had not even had an opportunity to examine the torch. No doubt Hayson had kept the bulb all the time. By now he had probably put it back in the torch. That pale glow that Garve had seen—that might easily have been the reflection of the torch back in one of the tunnels. Hayson would be out of the quarries in half an hour. No doubt he would throw the bulb away.

  Yes; he had certainly been clever. Not by word or action had he made it conclusively clear that he had intended to leave Garve in the cave. Garve would have had no case to take to a jury. Hayson had shown every concern for his safety. Right up to the end he had pretended that he was getting lost himself. He would blame the tragedy on the darkness. Why had he taken such care not to show his hand? The answer gave Garve a tiny ray of hope. He had not been a hundred per cent sure that Garve would die. The odds were incredibly against his getting out, but there was always the odd chance. As it was, if he did get out, Hayson would have nothing to fear. If Garve accused him to his face of attempted murder, he would ridicule the charge and demand proof. And there was no proof. It was a cold, deliberate, damnable plot to get rid of a rival, but it had been carried through with every show of courtesy and consideration.

  Garve thought of Esther and squirmed. Hayson would go back to her, would try to get her in his toils again—probably he would succeed. He had realized that Garve’s influence was counteracting his own—that he could sway Esther by herself, but not Esther with Garve behind her. Garve had been the stumbling-block—Garve had to be got rid of. Esther would soon forget him—probably she would consent half willingly, half against her will, to marry Hayson, while his own flesh rotted in a cave that no-one ever visited. Nobody would look for him, nobody knew he was there. He had made that clear to Hayson—God, what a fool he had been!

  Anyway, there was only one thing to be done now. Someho
w he had to get out of the quarries. Life was very precious to him. It had always seemed worth while, but never more so than now, when his love for Esther was growing day by day. His confidence was undiminished, and he told himself with conviction that to escape was not beyond his powers.

  He tried to consider his chance impartially. At least he would not die of thirst, for he had seen water dripping from the roof and running down the walls in a dozen places. There was no immediate danger of starvation, thanks to his foresight in bringing a packet of sandwiches. He remembered now that Hayson had advised not bothering about food. That alone should have given him pause.

  He had five matches, and to those he might well owe his life. In this one matter Hayson had left something to chance, and Garve’s normally alert faculties had functioned just in time. But what were five matches against such Stygian blackness as this? However, they were better than nothing. In addition he had a flask of whisky and a gun. The latter might still be useful, he thought grimly—just as Hayson had suggested. A bullet was certainly better than slow starvation, but the precipices would have to be risked.

  Hayson had the rope, and as Garve’s mind dwelt on the journey back, his spirits sank. Even supposing he could find the passage from which they had emerged into the central chamber, even supposing he did not follow by mistake some minor passage from it, he felt dubious about being able to negotiate safely in the darkness that eight-foot drop that they had descended with the help of the torch. There was probably some projection at the top that Hayson could sling the rope over on his return journey, but to scale it in the dark and unaided would be perilous. Garve shuddered to think what would follow a broken leg, or even a sprained ankle. It would be a bullet or nothing, then.

  However, thinking about the consequences of failure did nothing to make success more likely, and Garve decided to eat a sandwich as the better way to encourage himself. He discovered a healthy appetite after the physical exertion of the descent, but resolutely restored the rest of the packet to his pocket against a greater hunger. He washed down the frugal repast with a mouthful of whisky—neat but heartening—and considered his first move.

  He had completely lost his bearings, as was inevitable. What was it that Hayson had said about this central chamber? On one side it ended in a wall, with a great hole above reaching up to the top level, and probably quite unscalable. On the other side, it ended in a precipice dropping down to the bottom level. And somewhere to the right of that precipice was an opening leading to a smaller chamber—so Hayson had said—and ultimately to Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Thank heaven he had listened to Hayson’s words!

  The question was, should he seek an exit upwards or downwards? It was important that he should have clearly in his mind what he was trying to do—whether to return the way he had come or to find Hezekiah’s Tunnel. At the moment, if Hayson had spoken the truth, which was by no means certain, he had a rough idea of the layout of the quarries in relation to his position. Once he began to move he might easily become hopelessly fogged unless he kept a definite objective very clearly in mind.

  He gave the matter some thought, and eventually decided that the evils that he did not know could not possibly be greater than those he had already experienced. He recalled that the way back involved not merely scaling a height in the darkness and negotiating a narrow ledge above a precipice, but also choosing between six or seven passages running out of a single chamber at the top. By the time he had tried half a dozen of them, he might well be too exhausted to go farther. It was a risk either way—the descent to the lowest level might easily be impassable without a rope and in the dark, but it was an unknown risk, and Garve was an incorrigible optimist.

  Above all, it was essential to go slowly and not panic. This appalling darkness, weighing down on him like the lid of a coffin, made him feel already that he was buried alive, and could only escape by lifting that mountain of rock and hurling it away. He must keep his thoughts strictly to the immediate task.

  Even then he hesitated. What was the immediate task? He was sitting in an unknown spot somewhere in the vastness of a cavern of unknown size and shape. He did not know in which direction lay the wall and in which the precipice. Whichever way he moved, he would clearly have to work on the assumption that he was heading for the precipice. If he could have built a fire he would have done so—then, if the worst came to the worst, he would have returned to it and started again; but the cavern floor was naked of anything combustible, and it seemed unwise at this stage to start burning his clothes. If only he had had a ball of twine, like Theseus after the Minotaur! He considered unravelling a portion of his clothing, but discarded the idea at once as brilliant but impracticable.

  “Well, God help me,” he murmured finally, and crawled slowly away. He knew the danger of moving in a circle, particularly if the chamber were vast enough, but there was nothing he could do about it. Inevitably he would travel at best along a zigzag path.

  Garve had never moved more slowly, unless on those occasions in his early reporting days when he had been ordered from the scene of a crime by the police. Each time before he drew his body forward he swept his hand all round in front of him, covering an area of a square yard or more with each sweep. Then he crawled forward on his knees, taking care not to advance beyond the safe area, and repeated the operation. At each move he advanced perhaps two feet, and each advance occupied a full minute. After his arm had performed its encircling movement for the thirtieth time, he stopped to rest and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He had covered sixty feet, and the luminous hands of his watch stood at half-past eight.

  The brief rest restored him physically, but not mentally, for he was scared of losing all sense of direction, and took care to face the way he was going as he rested. The slightest lack of concentration at this point, the smallest shifting of the body on its axis, might well mean curving back on his tracks. He sat motionless for five minutes by his watch and then started off again.

  The temptation to stand up and run was very great. If he ran he was less likely to take a circular course, and there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would reach the wall in safety. Otherwise—he wondered morbidly what it would feel like to be running and suddenly find no ground under one’s feet, and know that awful falling sensation. Did one think as one fell—did one say to oneself, “In a second my body is going to hit a mass of jagged rock and be smashed to pulp?” In any case, it would be all over quickly and there would be no more of this nightmare of darkness. He began to feel certain now that he was moving in a circle. Surely the cavern could not be so huge. Round and round and round, he thought —crawling like a silly insect till his knees wore out and his nerves and muscles failed him and he lost consciousness. What an awakening it would be from that unconscious sleep! To wake, dreaming of Esther’s arms around him, and find that no sun had risen, no day broken. To wake to this suffocating opacity of blackness, all sense of direction lost. Good God, yes, it would be fatal to sleep. But already he felt sleepy—the regular rhythm of his sweeping hand—the “One—two” as his knees moved forward, the strain of expecting at each move to touch nothing but space, had all helped to make him drowsy.

  “I must pull myself together,” he thought. “I’m getting apathetic—soon I shan’t care whether I live or die.” He took a long swig of whisky and considered how relative all values were. A man left alive and solitary in a world struck suddenly dead would hardly wish for life. His sanity would go pretty soon. Garve was like that—“alone, and yet alive.” Was he going to lose his reason? Would his brain crack—would he walk round this rocky tomb in the hours that lay ahead, muttering and mumbling insane nonsense? The whisky revived him a little, and warmed him. He tried to concentrate on something pleasant—something amusing—that ridiculous cable, for instance. Well, a bicycle would have been a lot of good in his present predicament! Pretty funny, that! He laughed, and his laugh terrified him. He took care not to laugh again.

  If only it had been light—if only he had had just a little lig
ht, what a difference it would have made. He must look a pretty rum spectacle, crawling so laboriously and feeling his way in fear along a perfectly flat rock floor with a precipice far behind him. If it was behind him! Oh, for a light! He found himself framing wheedling phrases about that light. Just a tiny one!—just a glimmer for a fraction of a second—just a faint pallor to relieve him from the frightful sense of oppression and claustrophobia which was wearing down his resistance. He wondered whether it would be forgivable to strike a match. It was a serious matter, and he considered it seriously. The longing was intense, but the value of a match incalculable. He remembered a fable by Robert Louis Stevenson about three men who were discussing the striking of a last match, and drawing lurid pictures of the fire that might be started by it, and the terrible damage done—and then, when they had struck it, it had gone out. But what was that to do with his case, anyway? He had five matches, not one. If he struck one he would have four—God in heaven, how tired he was.

  For the sixty-fourth time his hand swept the rock floor, and this time it struck something. With fumbling fingers, Garve searched the darkness and everywhere he encountered reassuring solidity. He had reached the wall of the chamber at last.

  With the gesture of a man welcoming a long-lost son, he stood up and stretched his arms out to it. His breath came in little sobs as his fingers curled in among the crevices. He could almost have wept in reaction. It was several minutes before he realized that, after all, it had been the precipice rather than the wall that he really needed to find. It was near the precipice that he hoped to discover the mouth of the tunnel leading down to the lower workings. But now that he had found the wall he clung to it as though he would never leave it. Nothing would persuade him to plunge again into the uncharted interior of the cavern. The wall was his hope.

  He was faced now with a new problem. If he followed it to his left, he would be bound to arrive sooner or later at the tunnel he was seeking, and before he reached the precipice. Unfortunately, there were probably other passages leading from the chamber as well as the one he wanted. He had only to follow one of them to become hopelessly lost. On the other hand, if he turned to his right and continued along the wall until he reached the precipice, he would have to work his way all along the edge of the abyss in order to find his tunnel.