by Cave, Hugh
He seized my arm abruptly.
"We've got to get some!"
"But—it will take hours."
"Damn it, man, don't you know the truth of this thing yet! Some infernal supernatural force is at work in this house. Pell is in there, under its influence. We've got to get him out!"
"There's a train at noon, from the village," I said weakly, realizing that we could not possibly obtain an explosive nearer than London. "I could leave at once and make it back here by midnight, on the late train."
"Not you. I need you here. Macon!"
"I'll go," Rojer said curtly. "By God, that's more in my line—action. I'm nothing but a damned parasite if I stay here."
"It's dangerous," Lamoran frowned. "There's the moor to cross. It'll be pitch black, full of pitfalls."
"I'll make it," Macon said grimly.
"Good! Get enough of the stuff to blow this infernal door to hell!"
Rojer nodded silently. Without a word, he turned his back on us. We stood there, Lamoran and I, beside the door that barred its dread secret, and watched our companion hurry down the passage. When he had vanished, Lamoran said dully:
"We can't do anything here, Reed, until he returns. Suppose we give the house a thorough once over, top to bottom, and pray to God we find something to work on."
We made a systematic job of it, as we had been trained to do in the army. Starting at the tower, we searched every nook and crevice of the upper floors, every abandoned tunnel, every blind room. We found nothing in those upper recesses, except the marks of our own footprints of the last evening. It was far into the afternoon when we reached the ground floor again.
There, in the reception chamber, we found Tai-tse-Kiang, the stolid Oriental, methodically arranging the table for our delayed luncheon. The sight of food, I think, took some of the grotesquery out of our souls and made us remember that we were, after all, human beings in human surroundings. We sat at the table and devoured the stuff in silence. More than once our glances met in strained silence. More often we found ourselves staring at the empty chairs which had so recently held the jovial grinning faces of Pell and Macon.
The repast over, we scoured the lower floor and the horrible, inky-black pits of the sunken cellars. Here again we found nothing; nothing but the inevitable silence and darkness which brooded over the entire manse. When we finally groped up the stone steps from the pits, night had fallen and the servant had dinner ready for us.
We began it in silence. From the dead, resigned glare of Lamoran's eyes, I did not in the least expect any such outburst as developed. But develop it did, when the Oriental servant was bending over Lamoran's shoulder.
Lamoran reached up suddenly to grip the man's arm.
"You know what happened here last night?" he snapped.
"I have guessed, sir," the Oriental shrugged.
"Do you know the reason?"
"Yes."
Lamoran swung a livid face upwards. The entire affair had whipped all sense of reserve and all desire of caution out of his system. He was completely, thoroughly angry at that moment.
"What is it, then!" he growled.
"The other white man, sir, dared to disobey the warning which was given you. This is the house of the Master. The Iron Room is the room of the Master. He who enters—also dies."
"Damned rot!" Lamoran snarled.
"You are speaking sacrilege, sir. Confucius—"
"To hell with Confucius! And with you! Of all the blasted, infernal—"
Tai-tse-Kiang listened impassively to the most furious, livid outbursts of vehemence that I had ever heard pour from Lamoran's lips. I knew, well enough, that Lamoran possessed a temper and a goodly store of invective, but never had I heard him release it with such crimson hate. In the end the Oriental said, very softly:
"That is worse than penetrating the Iron Door. The Master has ears—and hears."
Then he straightened up and backed away, releasing his arm from Lamoran's grip. As he came erect, the light from the hanging candelabrum illuminated his entire face; and I shuddered at the glittering, half subdued cruelty in his slanted eyes.
"That," murmured Lamoran, when he had gone, "will probably bring results, Reed. I'm going to turn in. Macon won't return before midnight, even with the best of fortune, and when he comes, we'll need steady nerves for the task ahead of us."
He rose from the table.
"You have a revolver?" he said suddenly.
"Yes," I said. "In my room."
"Better join it—and keep it warm," he smiled dryly.
When I left Lamoran and retired to my own room on the second landing that night, I did not remove my clothes. Perhaps it was the knowledge that I had, at the most, only two hours or so of available sleep. Perhaps it was the subtle premonition that something would happen even before those two hours had elapsed. At any rate, I threw myself on the bed without removing a single article of my garb. In fact, I added an extra burden: I removed the automatic revolver from my luggage and dropped it into my coat pocket.
I did not attempt to sleep. My thoughts mulled about in confusion. First the malignant face of Tai-tse-Kiang persisted in rioting through them; then the Iron Door in that half buried passage almost directly below me seemed to loom out of the darkness and mock me. Again I had visions of Rojer Macon groping across the blackened moor in the dead of night with his significant burden. And then, climaxing this series of nightmares, I heard something.
At first it was merely a whisper; then it increased in intensity until I recognized it as being a continuation of the soft, almost lovely Oriental chanting that had penetrated my dreams of the night before. This time, however, I knew it to be no dream, but reality. And rather than lie in my chamber, pondering futilely over the cause of it, I slipped from the bed, obtained a tiny pocket flash-light from my bag, and crept to the door.
The sound came from below. I tiptoed along the passage to the head of the great ramp, and there hesitated. I felt, then, something religious in the monotonous tone of it. It possessed the same quality of tone that I had heard more than once in far-away India, where the cowled priests of the Buddhist temples stand upon their flat housetops, with their followers kneeling in the streets below, and offer sunset prayers to their god.
I descended the ramp very quietly, making no sound that might interrupt. Following the intonations, I passed along the lower corridors, feeling my way in the dark without having recourse to the flash-light in my hand.
So I came at length to the corridor of the Iron Door. Even as I entered the mouth of that dismal tunnel, the chant ceased. I, too, stopped—and waited. A door opened in the pitch-like gloom far in advance of where I crouched. I heard footsteps, moving away from me. I followed them. They led me through a second series of short passageways to the head of the chill, black stone steps that twisted down into the pits. Undaunted, since I had traversed this same route during the afternoon, I continued.
My boots might click on those bare steps, I considered. Therefore I removed them; and as I went from step to step, deeper into the depths, I made less noise than a shadow. Far above me hung the doorway. Before me, as I reached the bottom level of the old house, extended that sinister labyrinth of subterranean pits and tunnels which Lamoran and I had so carefully inspected earlier in the day.
My unsuspecting guide was still ahead of me. I could hear him, and I guessed now his identity, for he shuffled along with an ominous scraping movement of sandal-shod feet. The man was obviously Tai-tse-Kiang.
Down here it was cold, with a penetrating chill that crept into my very bones. I hardly noticed it, so intent was I upon keeping track of my quarry as he paced through the network of interwoven ways. For perhaps three or four minutes I continued to creep after him, and then the sound of his progress ceased.
He was, I knew, in the most remote room of the cellars. This particular room had but one means of ingress, since it was the final chamber in a twisting chain of pits. I advanced silently to that opening and flattened against t
he stone. Then I saw him—or saw his indistinct form.
He crouched beside the opposite wall, twenty feet from me. His hands were uplifted. He had pushed aside a portion of the wall, revealing a secret niche which Lamoran and I had not previously discovered. Even as I watched, the Oriental slid forward with cat-like grace, and vanished within the opening.
Again I waited. I saw nothing. I heard nothing, except a half inaudible rasping sound, as of metal grating against metal. Then, with the same sinuous movement, the Chinaman reappeared and reached up to replace that section of the stone which hid his alcove from prying eyes.
I had barely time to secrete myself before he turned. Luckily, the wall beside me was irregular with protuberances, and I was able to pack myself into one of them. Almost before I had become motionless again, the Oriental shuffled past me, returning the way he had come. He looked neither to right nor left, and the light was so obscure that I could make out no detail of his features. This time, however, he walked with quicker step. Before many seconds had passed, he had vanished again.
I remained in my hiding place until I could be certain that he would not hear me. Then I slipped out and drew the catch-latch on my flash-light. With the beam of yellow playing upon the floor at my feet, I advanced toward that mysterious section of wall which I had seen moved aside.
I found it. The stone slab was, to all appearances, a part of the solid whole; yet, when I discovered the correct inch upon which to exert pressure, it slid back under my fingers as easily as a square of wood. Evidently it was nicely balanced with counter-weights.
Before me lay the hidden niche. Perhaps five feet across it extended, and it could have been no more than two feet in depth. It contained nothing more, at first glance, than a long iron lever which extended down through the stone ceiling.
I inspected the thing cautiously, without touching it. I was in no mood, just then, to put my hands on anything I did not fully understand; and this peculiar stick of metal, protruding from the roof of the alcove, was seemingly inexplicable.
But was it? It was connected, evidently, with the room above it, on the main floor of the house. I strove to remember the plan of those upper corridors. I tried to organize, mentally, the many rooms and passages over my head. And then, like a sudden cold shock, I knew the meaning of this iron rod. It hung directly beneath the door of the Iron Room!
In its present position, more than three feet of it protruded below the ceiling of the cellar. Had it been pushed up to its full length, it would have extended into the very center of the Iron Barrier, forming a lock which no mortal could hope to shatter! This, then, was the thing which had baffled Lamoran's attack. This thing, crude and almost aboriginal in design, was the lock of the Iron Door!
Still I did not touch it. The Iron Door had been locked securely. Evidently the Oriental, with some fiendish plan in mind, had come here to release the lock. Now that the door above me was open, there was nothing left for me to do but go at once to Lamoran's chamber and tell him.
I turned about to step out of the niche. The light in my hand played its beam at my feet. My groping foot struck something soft, yielding. I stared down—at a human leg.
For a moment I stood rigid, frozen. Then, gulping down my fear, I dropped to my knees and peered into the narrow fissure which concealed the rest of the limp body. I stared into the dead, upturned face of Rojer Macon. I stared at the strangler's cord which still encircled Rojer Macon's dead throat.
After that, with the flash quivering like a cobweb in my groping hand, I ran back the way I had come. I wanted to look into Lamoran's face—to hear him talk—to plead with him to flee this madhouse of horror.
How long it took me to reach the stone stairs leading to the main floor, I am not sure. I know that I stumbled into blind passages and scraped the skin from my hands and tore my clothing and was altogether like a blind bird in a trap. I know that I fell while climbing the steps, and was on hands and knees when I reached the upper passage.
Then caution possessed me again. I began to realize that this was no time for blundering, blubbering fear. If I were to warn Lamoran in time to prevent further horror, I must be quiet as a ghost and as soft-footed as a cat. I dropped the flash-light into my pocket, drew my revolver, and crept noiselessly along the corridor in the overwhelming darkness.
I would have to pass the Iron Door. That thought alone terrified me. Yet it would have to be faced, if I were to reach Lamoran's room on the upper landing. Consequently I trod, eventually, into the fatal corridor.
The dread passage was no longer in abject darkness. One of the candle-brackets, set at wide intervals in the grim wall of the tunnel, had been recently ignited. It sputtered perhaps a dozen yards from me, filling a certain portion of the corridor with an unearthly globule of sickly yellow pigment. I noticed, too, that only one of the brackets had been lighted, and that one was the particular candle that cast its glow directly upon the surface of the Iron Door. Obviously the Oriental had traversed this passage before me, and had created the light for some uncanny reason of his own.
I crept toward it slowly, with the utmost caution. There was no telling when Tai-tse-Kiang might return and find me here; no telling the consequences if such a discovery were to occur. Thus I had proceeded no more than half the distance to the Iron Door when a sudden, unexpected footfall caused me to hurl my bent body against the wall and flatten out like a clinging bat. Far in advance of me, at the very mouth of the corridor, I saw the shadowy outline of an approaching figure—a figure which came forward with dead, mechanical steps toward me and toward the door.
I watched it in fascination, until it entered the realm of light. Then, to my horror, I saw that it was James Lamoran!
I should have cried out to him, warning him, had not the expression of his tense face choked the words on my lips. His gaunt head was outthrust, his hands hung lifeless at his sides; his body was a stiff, rigid thing that moved as if some exterior force were propelling it. His eyes were wide open, unblinking, and ghastly livid in the glow of that infernal light. He was not conscious, not awake. Either he was walking in his sleep—a thing which I had never known him to be guilty of—or he was under the influence of a somnambulistic trance brought upon him by hypnotic powers.
Trembling, but fascinated beyond power to move, I crouched in my place of hiding and watched him. He went straight to the Iron Door, stopped before it, and raised his dangling hands to seize the latch. The iron rod lifted easily in his fingers. The great barrier swung slowly, ponderously inward with a rasping screech. Like a mindless automaton, Lamoran paced over the threshold into the forbidden chamber, and the massive portal rolled shut behind him.
I heard the latch click as the door closed. Perhaps it was that sinister thud which made me realize that I was entirely to blame for whatever might happen to my friend in that chamber of horrors. I lurched from my place of concealment. I stumbled blindly forward, with a half uttered, choking cry of delayed warning. My fingers twisted about the iron rod and strove to lift it.
The thing was fast again; immovable. Though I am no anemic weakling, I could not stir the latch from its grooves. In desperation I flung my entire body against the barrier, hoping to do what Lamoran had been unable to do on that other horrible occasion.
The result was the same. The door flung me back again, and again, and again. I pummeled it with my fists, kicked at it in my stockinged feet, madly, futilely, unreasonably. Then as I fell back with a sob, I was aware of the automatic clenched in my fist.
Savagely I jammed the muzzle against that mocking lock and jerked the trigger. Three bullets thudded into the metal, into the narrow, slot-like opening which held the iron rod. The roar deafened me. I heard a rasping clash of metal, heard a heavy, significant thud under my feet as my bullets released the counterbalance and let it fall into the death-pit in the cellars below.
The Iron Door creaked open under the weight of my body.
What happened from that moment on, as I staggered over the threshold, is a
maze of distilled horror. It occurred with such rapidity that I can but vaguely recall it.
I saw my companion ten feet before me, his back toward me, pacing lifelessly across the stone floor. Beyond him I saw a towering, inhuman form with two glittering, greenish eyes that had the power to drag me forward.
The thing was a monstrous idol—a squatting, deformed image of the heathen Confucius. Its huge, vividly colored arms were crossed derisively over its flat chest. Its head was outthrust on a sinewy neck. Its bare feet were curled fiendishly together, like talons. And there, prone upon the floor before it, lay the lifeless figure of the man who had been missing since the previous night. Pell!
All this I saw in the feeble light that penetrated from the outer corridor. It burned itself into my memory in the space of a broken second. Then I knew, instinctively, that Lamoran had been lured into this chamber by the formless specter of the House of the Undead. The idol, squatting before me, held some terrible power of death; and Lamoran was being forced toward it!
After that, I acted. Lunging to one side, I lifted the gun in my hand and jammed the trigger until the chamber was empty. I fired in madness, in positive hate. I aimed at the very center of that leering face.
The effect was instantaneous. The dead features, rotten with age, crumpled under the impact of four bullets. Lamoran, groping toward it, twitched suddenly as if with the ague, and became motionless. Then I was running forward, the smoking automatic still gripped in my hand.
He would have fallen had not my arm gone about his middle. As it was, he sagged down on my shoulder and could not speak for a full minute. I felt the cold sweat on his white face, felt his body quiver. Then he lifted his head limply and murmured:
"Thanks, Reed. You—were just in time."
I waited until he could stand erect. In another moment he got hold of himself and I was relieved of his dead weight. He turned slowly to examine the horror room.
