by Sapper
“Four bolsters, sir,” said Denny at the door.
“Good,” said Hugh. “Now some ropes. I want about four yards.”
“Very good, sir,” said Denny. “I will get it at once.”
“We may not have a rope ladder,” remarked Hugh, “but we’ll get a damned good makeshift. Don’t get fidgety, young fellah,” he added to Freckles. “I know what you’re thinking, but believe me these preparations are necessary. There ain’t much good arriving at the wall and having to stand outside the whole night looking at it.”
“I’m blaming myself over that aeroplane,” said the youngster miserably. “It’s I who ought to have spotted it much more than Darrell. Two or three times when I was standing by the tree I actually noticed the thing coming straight towards the house in a line with the tower. By God! if anything happens to Pat…”
“Nothing is going to happen to Miss Verney,” said Hugh quietly. “And here is Denny with the rope. Now then, a loop at one end, and we’re ready. Except for one thing. Here are three whistles. Each of you take one of them, and keep them handy. And those whistles are only to be used for one purpose. If, in the darkness, le Bossu gets one of you, put it to your mouth and blow like hell.”
“Are you going to take the car?” I asked, and he nodded.
“It will be wanted before the night is out,” he said enigmatically. “And this time we will take precautions over sparking plugs. Now then – up and over.”
And with a feeling strongly reminiscent of zero hour in France, in my chest at any rate, we followed him to the gate, carrying bolsters and the rope. But this trip there was no question of seventy miles an hour: we crept along at the car’s most silent speed, with only our sidelights on. As I worked it out, le Bossu had about half an hour’s start of us at the most, but half an hour was a terribly long time for that cold-blooded murderer to be given a free hand. And though I quite saw the necessity for silence, I chafed at the slow rate we were going.
A hundred yards from the beginning of the wall Hugh stopped. A grass track ran off the road, and he backed down it for about thirty yards till a jink in the hedge completely hid her from anyone passing. Then he padlocked both sides of the bonnet; took out the safety key, and we left her.
To make absolutely certain, we first of all searched under the bushes where the rope ladder had been left, but there was no sign of it: Hugh’s forethought over the bolsters was justified. Le Bossu, guessing it would be somewhere near the spot at which we had previously entered, had found it and used it, and we wasted no further time. We passed up the bolsters one by one to Freckles, who was standing on Hugh’s shoulders, and he wedged them in between the spikes. Then he fixed the rope, and in turn we swarmed up and down the other side. The final act had started.
The first thing to do was to locate the tree, and we crept silently forward. To keep in touch had been Hugh’s order as we started, and he led us quickly through the undergrowth. Away to our right lay the house, sombre and forbidding. Two lights shone from it – one from a window at the very top, and the other from one about halfway up. At last we came to the old chapel wall, and he paused.
“Now then, Scott,” he whispered, “you take the lead. And not a sound.”
The tree stood, as Freckles had said, in a little clearing, and we found it without difficulty. But it was some little time before Hugh made the next move. He stood underneath it listening intently, though everything was silent, save for the faint creaking of the branches in the breeze. Once I thought I heard the crack of a twig not far off, but it was not repeated, and I dismissed it as imagination. And once I could have sworn I saw a dark shadow move between two bushes a few yards away.
“For God’s sake let’s get on with it,” muttered Freckles. “This is giving me the jumps.”
“Shut up,” said Hugh curtly. “Use your ears and not your mouth.”
At last he seemed satisfied, and stepped out into the open. The Great Bear was easy to spot, and from it the Pole Star. Thirty long paces north – our next task – was simple, and there the answer lay.
The excitement of the thing was getting me now – what was the answer going to be? Should we find some hole open in the ground – some ancient rusted door, perhaps, through which le Bossu had already passed? Or should we find le Bossu himself still trying to force an entrance, and unable to do so single-handed?
Twenty-five: twenty-six long steps, and Hugh paused, again peering into the darkness ahead. I could hear my heart beating in the deathly stillness: even the night breeze had died away. But nothing stirred – nothing moved in front.
Twenty-eight: twenty-nine: thirty. We were there but where was the answer? We were standing on an ordinary piece of roughish turf, exactly the same as the ground we had walked over from the tree. But of any secret entrance to a passage there was no trace. In front of us were more bushes, but the actual spot where we were standing was in a little open space. And round that space we felt our way, exploring every inch of it. The result was nil: something had gone wrong. Wherever the answer lay, it wasn’t there.
That the tree was the correct one Freckles was prepared to swear. That the directions had been thirty long paces north we were all prepared to swear. So it boiled down to the fact that the directions were wrong. But if they were wrong for us, they were also wrong for le Bossu. He was in the same boat as ourselves, and in that lay the only consolation.
The thing was so completely unexpected. All sorts of other difficulties we had been prepared for, but none of us had ever thought of the possibility of not finding the entrance at all. And the problem that immediately confronted us was what to do next. Somewhere within the grounds was the man we wanted; but how were we to get at him? Wait till dawn and hope for the best, or what? One thing seemed obvious: it was useless to try and look for him in the darkness. And that course being eliminated, it really seemed that there was nothing else to do but to sit tight and wait with what patience we could.
It was Hugh who was the most worried. Freckles, now that any danger to Miss Verney had gone, was quite happy: John and I were inclined to view the matter philosophically. But Hugh had worked himself into a condition of positive irritability, which was an unheard of thing with him.
“I want that swab, Peter,” he fumed, “as a cat wants milk. And what is he doing now? That is what I can’t make up my mind about. Is he still here in the grounds, or has he done a bunk? Why should he stop on when he has once found out that the verse is wrong?”
“Well, my dear man,” I said, “one thing is pretty obvious. If we can’t find him inside the wall there is even less chance of our doing so outside. So it seems to me that we have either got to sit here and hope, or toddle back to bed.”
And even as I spoke there came a most peculiar noise from the house. It sounded like the clanging of a gong, and we all sprang up and stared through the bushes. The noise went on for perhaps a quarter of a minute: then it ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
“A burglar alarm for a fiver,” said Hugh. “Now, who has caused that to go off?” He was rubbing his hands together in his satisfaction. “He’s inside, you fellows, he hasn’t done a guy. And he is trying to get into the house. He has hit a trip wire or something of that sort. But where – damn it – where?”
Still we peered in front of us, trying impotently to see. Somewhere in that inky blackness was le Bossu, but he might as well have been in Timbuctoo for our chances of catching him.
“He can’t get in through a window, anyway,” said Hugh, “short of using dynamite. If only that damned fool inside would realise that he is far safer if he lit every room in the house instead of cowering there practically in darkness. Keep your eyes skinned for the flash of a torch, or the faintest suspicion of a light.”
But there was nothing: the darkness remained impenetrable, and the minutes dragged slowly on. Had le Bossu, alarmed by the sudden noise, given up, or w
as he still in front of us trying to break in? It was the uncertainty of it and the impossibility of doing anything to make sure that was so maddening. And yet we were better where we were than blundering round blindly. Suddenly Hugh gripped my arm.
“Peter,” he said tensely, “look at the top room. There were three shadows there a moment ago.”
I stared up at it: the light shone out undimmed. And then, there appeared for an instant the shadows of three people. Distorted into fantastic shapes, they showed up clear in the light – then they vanished again. Miss Verney and Granger – but whose was the third? Even as I asked myself the question it appeared again – grotesque and monstrous, with outstretched arms. Le Bossu was in the room.
“We must get in,” cried Freckles in an agony. “We must. If necessary by the front door.”
The boy was almost beside himself, and small blame to him. Until that moment the situation from his point of view had seemed all right: now everything was changed. If the third shadow was le Bossu the danger was enough to appal anyone, let alone the fiancé of the girl who was now facing him.
“Can’t you fire through the window?” he muttered. “Drummond, you must do something.”
“Steady, old boy,” said Hugh, and though to the others his voice was quite normal, I caught the note of almost feverish anxiety in it. In fact, he told me afterwards that in the whole course of his life he had never felt so desperately afraid.
“I visualised the scene, Peter,” he said to me a few days later, “as if I had been in the room myself. I could see Granger and the girl sitting there, believing themselves to be perfectly safe. And then the door slowly opening, and that great masked figure standing in silence watching them. Granger crazy mad with fear: the girl wondering desperately what to do, and where we were. She would play for time, of course, and provided Granger handed over the stuff, it was possible that le Bossu would spare her. That was all I cared about, naturally. Nothing else mattered. Even allowing le Bossu to escape altogether was infinitely better than that the slightest damage should come to her. But what to do? Peter, I damned nearly went bughouse. There was that poor devil jibbering beside us, and I knew that the most fatal thing we could do was to give away the fact that we were in the grounds.
“You see,” he went on, “our only hope was to let le Bossu think he had the whole stage to himself. And the devil of it was that to all intents and purposes he had. He had got into the house, and we hadn’t. And it was possible, I thought, that if he remained in ignorance of our presence he might not hurt the girl. Whereas, if we went and pealed on the front door bell, we gave the whole show away without doing any good. Up till then we had all of us thought that he, like ourselves, was outside. Now we knew he’d got in. How? Not by the door: not by a window. So how? It must have been by the passage.
“Gosh! old boy, my brain was moving as the poor old thing had never creaked before. Passage, passage, passage – the word positively hammered at it. Le Bossu had found the entrance: we hadn’t. Why? We had followed out the instructions to the letter: the same instructions that he had followed out before us. But we couldn’t have done, or we should have found the entrance ourselves. What followed irresistibly? Why, that the instructions we had followed were not the same that had guided le Bossu. It was just about that stage of my brain storm,” he added with a laugh, “that I bit young Freckles’ head off, if you remember, for interrupting. Poor devil! He couldn’t help it, I know, but I was absolutely keyed up. I felt I was on the right track, but what was the next step?
“If the instructions were not the same, le Bossu had deliberately altered them before passing the plan on to you. He had read them aright himself first: then he had cooked them for our benefit. And at that point I almost despaired. He might have written anything – the most complete rot and gibberish. Bad thing – despair, and the ray of hope came quick. Would he have dared to write rot? His object was to keep us in some safe place out of the way, while he walked in. If the verse he had invented was meaningless, it would not have produced that result. Besides, he knew that at any rate part of the verse was far from meaningless: it had led us straight to the tree. Therefore the alteration he had made was a small one – yet it was sufficient. And it was then that I made the remark that so astounded you: the solution had hit me like a kick in the stomach from a mule.”
So, four days later, did Hugh fill in for my benefit the two minutes that followed the appearance of le Bossu’s shadow in the upper room. To us who were with him, they had seemed an eternity. He had stood there absolutely motionless, without speaking, save for one remark, when, as he said, he bit the youngster’s head off. John was muttering to me that we must do something: Freckles was almost sobbing in his despair. And then, like a bolt from the blue, came Hugh’s sudden remark.
“Sixty yards. Ample at night. That’s it. Wait by the tree.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” I cried, but he had vanished, and, a little dazedly, we walked towards the tree. I could hear him near at hand: with le Bossu inside the house the necessity for silence had gone. And suddenly he loomed up out of the darkness.
“I’ve found the entrance,” he said quietly. “Our friend altered two letters in the verse before passing it on to us. S to N and U to R. Thirty long paces north took us exactly sixty long paces from the spot we wanted to find, which happens to be thirty long paces south of the tree. Come on.”
At the time it had seemed to me the wildest piece of guesswork that had come right: an unworthy suspicion for which I afterwards abased myself. But the fact that it had come right was all that mattered, and a few seconds later we were standing in front of the entrance. Some bushes screened us from the house, and Hugh switched on his torch.
It consisted of a hole in the ground, from which mouldering stone steps went downwards. It had evidently been covered with boards and rubbish, because these had been removed and now lay in an untidy heap beside the edge. Rotting green fungus was growing on the sides of the steps and walls, and the spot reeked with the putrid smell of decay.
Earth was lying thick on the steps, and in the light of the torch footprints were plainly visible – footprints which went towards the house and did not return, grim proof that we were not mistaken over the shadow. Not many minutes previously le Bossu had passed along that passage, and with a curt warning to walk warily, Hugh led the way down the steps.
The air was dark and foetid, though the passage itself proved to be of a comfortable height to walk in. The floor was rough and uneven, and the walls consisted of crude blocks of stone, moss covered and crumbling in places.
For about twenty yards it ran in a straight line: then it jinked sharply to the left, and Hugh paused.
“Presumably,” he said, “we are now under the chapel wall. And from this point the passage runs straight to the house. So we’ve got to carry on without a light.”
He switched off his torch: undoubtedly he would have been a sitting shot for anyone lying up for us at the other end. But feeble though the glimmer had been in front, it had served its purpose: now that it was out, the darkness seemed the most intense thing I had ever known. It pressed on one till one felt it was tangible. Not one glimmer of even faint greyness, but a solid black wall closing in on one from all sides.
From my recollection of the position of the chapel wall, I estimated the distance to the house from the jink in the passage to be about sixty yards. And I guessed that we had gone about thirty when suddenly the same noise began as we had heard in the grounds before. But this time it was much louder. It came from the house in front of us – the loud insistent clanging of a gong. I stopped instinctively: we must have run into the same alarm as le Bossu.
The others had halted also: I could hear John’s quick breathing just in front of me. And what happened then, happened so quickly that it is hard to recall the exact sequence of events.
First there came a loud creaking no
ise from close by us – so loud that it quite drowned the clamour of the gong. Then a sudden shout from Freckles – “My God! The walls are moving.” Then light – blessed light – from Hugh’s torch.
Only one momentary glimpse did I get of the amazing scene before Hugh’s roar of warning galvanised us all into activity.
“Back for your lives.”
And just in time did we all get back. Another half second and Hugh, who was the last out, would have been caught. As Freckles had said, the walls were moving: they were closing together for a length of about ten yards in front of us. Like two gigantic millstones they approached each other until they met with a dull thud in the centre. The meaning of the line about the turning wheels was clear.
“An unpleasant death,” said Hugh grimly, his torch fixed on the solid block of stone that now confronted us. “But the damned annoying thing is that we are on one side of the obstruction and le Bossu is on the other. He got through and we didn’t. Back to the entrance: there is nothing more to be done here.”
And there was nothing more to be done there either. Fifteen yards only did we go before we found that the walls had closed behind us also. We were shut in the space between them: caught like rats in a trap.
For a moment even Hugh gave way to despair and cursed wildly: then he pulled himself together.
“No good biting the bedclothes,” he remarked. “Let’s explore our quarters.”
The exploration did not take long, and certainly did nothing to raise our spirits. There was no possible way out, until the mechanism should operate in the other direction. We could go neither forwards nor backwards. And the roof presented no hope either. It looked perfectly solid, and judging by the number of steps we had come down at the entrance there were at least four feet of earth on top of it. In fact the only ray of comfort lay in the fact that though the moving walls had completely blocked us in, there was a space between the top of them and the roof. Not large enough for one of us to crawl through, but sufficient to allow of the passage of air. There was no danger of our being suffocated. Also for the same reason our prison was not soundproof: we could shout and in due course somebody would be certain to hear us. But who? What was the good of shouting when the whole house was in the hands of le Bossu? He wasn’t likely to let us out.
