The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  He examined the dispensary and checked the medical supplies, which were excellent. Behind the room was another door with a red hand symbol on it.

  “Storage for explosives and ammunition, and the petrol tank is behind it,” Kiti said.

  “Petrol?”

  “We are beneath the garage, here. The tank was put in there when the castle was being rebuilt. They have a pump to raise fuel to the garage when they need to fill the cars.”

  “So there’s a shaft between there and the garage?”

  He took a torch from a rack on the wall and approached the doors. They were locked and made of steel.

  Unemotionally, Kiti told him, “Only the Master and the duty officer has keys to those.”

  “Duty officer?”

  “Tonight, it is Gehn. Ducher is his deputy.”

  And Ducher had brought the keys for the cells, in order to let Amy out for her “disciplining”. He had used the same bunch of keys to try and let the slaves out. He dug in his pocket and dredged them out.

  “Will the key be on here?”

  She took the bunch and examined it carefully. Then shook her head.

  “I cannot see them. There is one Chubb key and a Yale. These are all Ingersoll.”

  Amy said “Sometimes people keep spare keys around in drawers.”

  Kiti and Carver exchanged exasperated looks over Amy’s eager head as she pulled open the top drawer in the instrument cabinet and began to rummage optimistically inside.

  Carver started to tell her she was wasting her time, then shrugged and let her rummage. Let her find out for herself, he thought.

  The keys were in the bottom drawer with a prescription pad and some used ball point pens. Carver tried them in the lock and the massive door swung open into the room. A smell of petrol and gun oil came from the room beyond.

  Inside, he found the petrol tank behind a wall of building blocks and asbestos.

  At the far side of the room was a rack of automatic rifles, and a smaller one with several pump action shotguns. There were grey metal cabinets which held boxed ammunition for both, and a third cabinet which held handguns.

  On the floor against the far wall was a case of grenades, and a further case containing industrial explosive. Some had been used, possibly in the construction of the road up to the Château Bram. There was no sign of any detonators.

  “They’ll be in another cabinet, in the castle,” said Carver. In any case he dared not risk using explosives in proximity to this arsenal. He was surprised that Sigmund Dark kept his explosives close to the petrol tank, but he supposed that this was the most secure part of the castle.

  He climbed onto the ammunition cupboard and put his hand into the gap between the top of the tank and the ceiling. More asbestos sheeting. The wall itself rose to within a foot or so of the ceiling. One of the girls might wriggle into the gap, but Carver certainly could not.

  He dropped to the floor and explained the situation to Kiti and Amy. Two owl-serious faces received the news without comment.

  “One of you is going to have to climb into the gap and see if you can find the shaft where the pipes to the petrol pump in the garage go up,” he said.

  Kiti volunteered and he boosted her onto the cupboard and passed up the torch. There was only a faint smell of petrol, but it did mean that the tank was not quite hermetically sealed. A spark might easily ignite a pocket of vapour and blow the lot. He hoped very fervently that Kiti would not drop the torch.

  For a long time, they could hear Kiti scrabbling around on the top of the tank. Then her face, smeared with dirt, reappeared in the gap above the building blocks. She shook her head wanly.

  “There must be a hole,” insisted Carver, exasperated.

  “There is a hole,” agreed Kiti, as he helped her through the gap and onto the top of the cabinet. “But it is full of pipe. And anyway, it is only so.” She held her hands less than a foot apart.

  Carver groaned. “It was to be expected, I suppose,” he said. “Anyway, if it had been any larger, he would have some kind of security trap on it.”

  The girls nodded, and after he had taken a box of ammunition for the sawn off shotgun, and equipped them with handguns from the cabinet, they returned to the light of the exercise room.

  “What time is it?” asked Amy, sitting on some rolled practice mats.

  Carver looked at his wrist watch and told her it was after nine.

  “The sale will be at eleven hours, and they will be leaving by thirteen,” she said. “And after that he will come down and kill us.”

  Carver turned back to Kiti.

  “Tell me about the top of the tank,” he said, more in the hope of keeping her busy than of learning anything useful.

  “It is a low space,” she said, eyes remote as she explored his. “The tank itself is covered with asbestos sheeting, and very dusty. The pipes go up in the far corner, through a small hole. They fill the hole except for the cables.”

  “Cables?”

  “Yes. There are cables coming down.”

  Carver supposed they ran to some kind of petrol gauge.

  “Are there a lot of cables?” he asked curiously.

  “Yes. One lot goes into the tank. Another comes out to a box on top of the tank.”

  Carver’s bowels froze.

  “How big a box?” he said in a strained voice.

  “About so.” She made gestures with her hands. “It is next to a package, covered in tape. Like ... like a bundle of wood. You know?”

  Carver knew, all right. No wonder Sigmund Dark stored his explosive next to the petrol tank, and his small arms with them. That package sounded like sticks of gelignite. There was an opened case of gelignite in the store room, and some sticks were missing.

  Somewhere in the castle, presumably in Dark’s living quarters, was a switch which would blow the petrol tank and the explosives with it. There must be a delayed action fuse in Kiti’s “box”.

  Sweating, he wondered if the fuse was even now running. No wonder Dark had been content to trap them down here. All he had to do was run his sale, see off his customers and their slaves, turn the switch and make his own dignified exit. Some time later the castle would cease to exist.

  The blast itself, confined down here in the rock chamber, would be tremendous. What was not actually destroyed in the blast would fall down the mountain face, its foundations blown away.

  It made sense to put the charge down here, too, where it would be certain to demolish not only the deep chambers of the castle but also the slaves’ quarters.

  “Does Dark have a special switchboard in his quarters?” he asked Kiti.

  “Yes. There is one next to his bed and another in the work room, by the desk,” she said. “They control all the gates and the alarms.”

  “And the bombs,” said Carver, savagely. He considered getting Kiti to cut the wires to the charge, but dismissed the idea instantly. He had no way of knowing if the very act of disconnecting one or more of the wires might not set off the charge.

  To disarm it would require the services of a bomb disposal expert, and he was not one. In any case, he could not fit into the crawl space on top of the tank, even if he had been.

  “There has to be some way of getting that door open,” he said, and went to examine it once more.

  The door itself opened outwards, and was jammed almost at once by the gate outside. He could get his hand through the gap, and touch the gate, which he thoughtlessly did, then cringed at the idea that it might have been electrified.

  Once again, he thought, he was locked into the room with two beautiful women – and all he could think about was getting the hell out of there as soon as possible.

  He returned to Kiti and started to question her once again, this time turning his attention to other parts of the cellar, including the torture chamber. To his amazement, she almost instantly burst into tears.

  He stopped, held and comforted her, but as soon as h
e started to ask questions again, she cried again.

  “What the hell is it?” he asked, bewildered. There was no reply save reiterated sobbing, and any attempt to restart only led to almost hysterical protests.

  “You try,” he said to Amy in disgust, but she shook her head, staring at Kiti.

  “Can’t you see she can’t help it?” she said bitterly. “She can’t talk to you. He won’t let her.”

  Carver stared at her.

  “Who won’t?”

  “The Master.”

  “But he’s up in the castle, far away from here.”

  “Physically, he may be, but his conditioning is not.”

  Carver had a nasty feeling the whole situation was slipping away from him.

  “What conditioning?” he said dangerously. “And make it quick. I got a nasty feeling our time here is very limited.”

  “I told you it takes more than shackles to make a slave,” Amy said awkwardly. “I have been away from the castle for several weeks, but it is almost impossible for me even to talk about it. During the period of training there is another phase. When it was in its infancy in Korea in the 1940s and 1950s, it was called brain-washing.”

  A great light began to dawn in Carver’s mind.

  “You mean you’ve all been hypnotised?”

  She shook her head fiercely. There were tears in her eyes, too, and he had a nightmare feeling that any moment now, he would be in danger of drowning in salt water.

  “Don’t you dare go cry on me too,” he shouted. “Give, girl! Give!”

  “It is conditioning!” she shouted at him. “Look at her! She knows something, but she is too deeply conditioned to tell us! Look!”

  He stared at Kiti. Certainly her distress was uncontrollable. She was staring at him out of streaming eyes, her hands twisting and turning together, bent forward as though she was under some terrible threat.

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. Her wet face was twisted into a caricature of a mask of tragedy, mouth pulled open and turned downwards at the corners, nose running, eyes red.

  She was unrecognisable from the beautiful girl he had been looking at before.

  “Kiti!” he shouted. “Kiti, listen to me!”

  She shook her head desperately and tried to pull away, but Carver held her with hands like steel jaws.

  “We are going to die!” he said to her. “There is a bomb on top of the petrol tank and it is wired up to that special switchboard in The Master’s quarters. The fuse may be running even now! We have to get out of here!”

  Kiti was trying hard. Deep down in her eyes he could see the need to communicate struggling to assert itself. For a moment her mouth opened, and then her eyes slid upwards until only the whites showed. Her body relaxed, and she fell forward into his arms like a hank of yarn.

  “Jesus!” He lowered her on top of the exercise mats and turned to Amy. “What was she trying to tell us?”

  Amy shrugged elaborately.

  “How do I know?”

  “You’ve been brainwashed too. What was it he didn’t want you to tell?”

  Once again the shrug.

  “Anything about this place.”

  “But you did tell me all about this place. How did you overcome the conditioning?”

  She looked baffled.

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine. Perhaps it was not as firm as Kiti’s.”

  “Or perhaps it can be undone, released, like a hand brake. Or perhaps he didn’t tell me...”

  Carver stared at her. “That’s it!” He grabbed Kiti and shook her.

  The girl showed no sign of returning consciousness. At the back of his mind, Carver discovered the term: “Waxy immobility” and recalled that victims of intolerable mental pressures sometimes retreated into themselves so far that it was impossible by external stimulus to reach them.

  If Kiti had become catatonic, then she was useless to them. In any case, he had no idea when the charge on the petrol tank would go off. If Dark decided to dump his cargo and cut his losses, they had no time at all to sit around and wait.

  “Amy,” he said savagely. “Listen to me. There is a charge on top of the petrol tank. Beside it is a load of gelignite. Stored down here with us there is more gelignite, and Sweet Jesus knows how much petrol, and ammunition. If friend Sigmund sets the fuse and goes, we fry. Kiti went bolo as soon as I said there was no other way out of here. Therefore, there is another way out of here and she knows where it is. You seem to have had at least some of the blocks removed from your mind, and whatever you think, it’s all of Detroit to a pile of a bearshit that somewhere in your mind there’s the same information as there is in Kiti’s. Now, think, kid!”

  She stared at him round-eyed. Carver seemed to change his character as often as his ancestors changed their paint. Now, staring at her was the same naked savagery she had seen in his face in the Paris flat, the same awful sadism which had made her stomach turn over.

  Carver reached into his pocket and pulled out a surgical scalpel he had found in the dispensary. He slid the blade out of the protective plastic coating and let the metal catch the light.

  “You don’t need to talk, kid. Just let your mind react,” he said softly. “I’ll talk; you listen and just let it come. Okay?”

  Eyes riveted to the blade, she nodded slowly.

  “We’ll go on a tour. Is it here, in this room? In the cells? At the doorway? Is there a secret release for the door in here? Is there a release out there? In the passageway? Can we reach it?”

  His voice went on, low and mesmeric, as he took them on a verbal tour of their prison. The exercise room, the dispensary, ammunition storage, torture chamber.

  Kiti’s eyes went blank.

  “Bingo,” said Carver. “It’s in the torture chamber.”

  He walked across the exercise room, and pushed open the massive door. From the chamber beyond, there was a startled movement and two pairs of eyes peered desperately at him.

  He checked on the men’s fetters first, noting that the setting might be antique but the fittings were not, and peered round the room.

  It was small, shadowed and unpleasant, and the smell of the two men’s sweating bodies was rank in the still air. But there was none of the charnel house stench from the oubliette that he might have expected. The trap door was, he knew, sunk in a heavy rubber insulation ring, but even so there should have been some hint of the place.

  Unless, of course, the oubliette had its own outside ventilation.

  “How’s Kiti?” he asked Amy, who was still outside the doorway peering uneasily through.

  “She’s conscious, but...”

  “But what?”

  “She doesn’t want to come in there.”

  He stepped back into the exercise room and peered at the girl. She looked dreadful, and her eyes were fastened with dread on the doorway to the torture chamber.

  “Not ... not in there,” she pleaded huskily. “Please not in there.”

  He picked up one of the torches and looked around for some means of fastening it to his head. He had an uneasy feeling he was going to have to climb and in that case he wanted to have his hands free.

  There was elastic bandage in the dispensary, and he devised a head harness with that. It was hot and sweaty and made him look like the Invisible Man, but it held the torch securely on top of his head.

  Where he looked, there the light would be.

  Taking the second torch in his, hand, he stepped though again into the torture chamber, and opened the trap door to the oubliette. There was a low moan from the figure in the iron chair, and he glanced sideway to see Lefeu fighting his fetters.

  “Don’t worry, little shithouse, I’m not dropping you down here,” he said, and saw the relief in the bulging eyes.

  “Yet,” he added, just to keep Lefeu on edge.

  The smell from the pit was making him gag, but he peered down, swinging the torch from side to sid
e. A long way below him he could see the upended corpse of Luther lying on an indescribable heap. Someone must throw quicklime down from time to time; otherwise the place would be intolerable. But none had been thrown over Luther. Carver turned the torch hastily away, and searched the sides of the pit.

  The place seemed a simple shaft, going straight down, but he remembered Dark saying that it widened at the bottom. He noticed, too, that the neck of the hole was obviously much larger than the trap itself.

  That evoked no reaction from him until he recalled that the alcove in which the trap lay was only a foot or so wider than the trap itself. Below the trap, the shaft was evidently much wider. He wondered what was concealed beneath the overhang, and tried to shine the torch there, but found out he could not do it without lying down and hanging his head over the edge of the pit itself.

  Even then, the torch beam simply showed him blackness. He stood up, and went back into the exercise room, where Amy was tending to Kiti. The girl looked better now, but her eyes were so dark rimmed she looked like a panda.

  “You see any rope round here?” he asked them. Both heads shook.

  He searched the arsenal and the dispensary, but could find nothing stronger than bandage and surgical tape. He was considering making use of a combination of these – though the thought of the consequences of a makeshift rope breaking while he was dangling within the shaft made his stomach heave – when he heard a chain rattle in the torture chamber.

  “Got it!”

  He went back into the torture chamber and examined the manacles and leg irons which hung from the wall. After a few minutes, he took one of the long metal branding irons, and hooked the end of it through the staple which held to the wall a pair of manacles with a particularly long connecting chain.

  At first, the staple refused to move. But Carver was not used to laying out his strength without something being forced to give.

  He took a heavy metal mallet from a pile of tools on a block, and attacked the staple, beating it from one side to the other until it began to move, then threw his weight on the bar again. This time the staple moved, just a little.