by Howard Mason
I swam on my back, holding Stony under the arms; he trailed after me like a tug-drawn barge. The trouble with this method was that it was hard to steer. Sophia, keeping close to the wall, guided me, so that I shouldn’t crack my head against the wall. The sound of the fall was growing fainter now, and we swam side by side through the dark passage, silent but for the splash of our strokes, and the gentle trickle of the wake at Stony’s trailing feet. We fell into a rhythm, and after a time the motion began to seem almost soothing; I felt warmer and steady. Now and then the girl lifted an arm from the water and stretched upward, feeling for the roof that was creeping down to us.
“Two foot.”
We swam on.
It was Sophia who felt the steps first; we had come right up them, several yards, before we realized that we could stand.
We got Stony out of the water, and rested then. Sophia was shuddering with cold, and I held her close to me for a little, sitting on the steps with our feet still dangling in water, till we both felt warmer. We couldn’t stop long; we had to keep moving, I thought, or we’d both die of pneumonia, let alone Stony. We got him on to my back once more. It was icy cold now, climbing upwards, with the cool air cutting against our clammy wet clothes. The weight on my back seemed heavier; dead weight, I thought. I paused, shifting the weight a little; then we climbed on till we reached the circular cellar.
I laid the old man to the ground, thankfully; I couldn’t have carried him another yard, and as far as I was concerned, someone else could come and bring him up the last stretch; I’d had enough.
I left Sophia with him and climbed the circular stair, going easily now, thinking of the drink I was going to pour myself, a whopper, and I’d take it neat. After that I’d get into a bath, a hot one. And after that—
I stood on the stair, holding my arms out in front of me. The opening should have been there, but it wasn’t. Also it was dark, and there should have been a square of light from the chess-room. I felt over the stone that blocked my passage; it was the trap-door all right, and it was shut.
I felt all over the surface, but there was nothing like a handle. Only the rough keyhole, and when I stooped to peer through it, I could see no light. The red bishop, I thought, might or might not have been removed; in any case, the door was locked.
I put my shoulder to the door and heaved, but for all the effect my weight had, I might have been pushing against a stone wall.
CHAPTER V
There was only one person who could have done it, I thought, and that was Constantine.
He must have got out of the bedroom, somehow. There was a window, I remembered; it had a balcony. Or maybe he’d picked the lock. It must be he; even the best-trained servant would hardly have come upon that hole and closed the trap neatly up and put the picture back in its place and gone quietly on with his rounds. But if it was Constantine, what had he hoped to gain by shutting us in?
Presumably he had gone to rejoin his former partners at the Tower Hill.
I began to shout and kick at the stone door like a madman, but all I did was stub my toes. Sophia, hearing, came up the stairs; I told her the news. She took it well enough; I suppose she was too exhausted to sink into tears, which is what I would have done myself, if I hadn’t been beside myself with rage.
We both shouted and hammered at the wall, until, weak and empty, we gave up and sank down on to the step. Nobody came to let us out.
I said at last:
“I suppose there must be servants.”
“Yes.”
“Where would they be?”
After a moment, Sophia said: “They don’t come into the Tower very often. Only Hans is allowed in the chess-room, to dust. Because of the chessmen. Being so valuable.”
I said: “That’s fine, fine,” and my own voice sounded pretty sour to me, but I think it had the effect of bracing the girl up. She said: “They’ll come in time. They’ll be looking for us.”
In time. Well, yes, someone would come, in time; but would they be able to let us out? Suppose Constantine had taken the key?
He would have done just that. He’d probably hung the picture back on the wall and all. And taken the red bishop.
But once we were heard, they’d be able to break in to us somehow? They could take an axe to the wall, as far as I was concerned, as long as they got us out. Once we were heard. And if we were heard. And if someone thought of unhooking the portrait on the wall to look for a door behind it.
Meanwhile, Stony was lying down there unconscious, and soaking wet. Meanwhile, Mott was up there in the Tower Hill, getting away with sixteen gold chessmen, life-size, fashioned in all points according to their master’s etcetera, with much skilled inlaying of etceteras, and other sundry decorations, etcetera.
And meanwhile, I thought with a shiver, Sophia and I were going to get pneumonia if we didn’t keep moving.
I took her down to the circular cellar and we had a look at the old man, but it didn’t tell us much, except that his pulse was a good deal feebler than it had been. We chafed at his hands and feet for a bit, to warm ourselves as much as him; I don’t suppose it did him much good. He was soaking wet all over.
I went up the stairs again, then, and shouted some more. I kept it up for about ten minutes, until my voice gave out. There was an awful dead thickness about that stone door. I felt as though I was shouting in a vacuum, as though nobody would ever hear us.
I went down again to Sophia, and we sat for a little while, until we got cold and had to move again. We paced round and round the chamber, arm in arm, but that became tiring, and we sat down again. We’d finished the matches now, except for some damp ones that wouldn’t spark. I’d have given a great deal for a cigarette, but they were damp, too, so it didn’t really matter about the matches, except that the blackness was beginning to get us down.
It was after I had made my third expedition to shout on the stair, and had come down again, that I first began to think about the rate of the water rising in the passage.
And what I thought was, first, that the force of the water had seemed to me, on the return journey, slightly to have slackened; and second, that there had been still a foot and a half or so for the water to go when we reached the steps, and that the water couldn’t, therefore, have been rising nearly so fast as it had been when the fall first started.
I am hard put to it to explain the decision that I made then, and it seems to me, looking back, that I must have been mad. In fact, I probably was mad. It had been an exhausting evening, to say the least of it, and the discovery of that locked door had nearly sent me off my rocker. What was more, the thought of Mott and his activity in the Tower had suddenly begun to get my goat. I thought of those chessmen, and I thought of what they would be worth, and I was damned, all of a sudden, if I was going to let him get away with it while I sat here waiting for Christmas. He would have to be stopped, I decided; and I would have to do the stopping. In order to do so, I would have to get out of that passage fast.
Once I’d reached that point, my crazy logic led me on to the next. There was only one way out of that passage, as things stood; and that was at the place where the water came in.
If the water could get in, why shouldn’t I get out? It wasn’t a sane idea, of course, but at that moment I’d have done anything, anything at all, rather than sit in that cellar hollering; and time was short.
The whole thing depended on what the source of that water was.
It couldn’t be a rock spring, I thought, because there was too much of it and too strong a flow. Wherever it came from, it must have quite a wide channel at the place where it entered the roof. It couldn’t be from a hole in the riverbed, because if it was, the whole damned river would be flooding in, and the flow would have strengthened, not slackened. On the other hand, the source must be quite near the river, because we had heard it overhead, near the fall.
Then it m
ight be an underground stream; and if it was an underground stream, it would have formed a natural tunnel for itself through the rock; and there might be swallow-holes where the rains or the flooding river-waters found their way in to feed the stream.
It was worth trying. If the water hadn’t risen too high in the passage already. I began getting out of my clothes.
I didn’t wait to argue with Sophia. I told her to keep moving, to walk round and round the chamber if necessary, until she was dry and warm; and to go up and shout and bang on the door at intervals of ten to fifteen minutes. She didn’t like it much, and I didn’t blame her. I had stripped to my shorts and was gone before she’d recovered her breath to protest.
* * * *
The water still had a foot to go.
A little less than a foot, I thought, as I stood at the foot of the steps, and passed my hand over the wall to the roof. A little less than a foot, and a long, long way to the fall.
The rate of rising had definitely slackened. It had moved only about six inches since we left the foot of the steps. It was lapping gently at the step on which I stood, and I couldn’t tell whether it was making any progress. I didn’t wait to find out.
It was a nasty moment, going down those last flooded steps into the water; you felt the sloping roof creeping down on you, and the water coming up to meet it, till the roof straightened out and there you were in the tunnel with a nice steady ten inches of headroom. I got my head well down and began to thresh through the water as fast as I knew how.
The trouble was, there was no room to bring up my arms in a proper crawl-stroke. I had to keep the strokes low, and it slowed the pace a bit. My elbows kept grazing the roof, as they churned forward out of the water; they got pretty sore.
I hadn’t thought about the air. There seemed to be enough, though; I came up, gulping it, every ten strokes, and lowered my face to the water again. I kept a good straight course, and I was making a fair speed; this time there was no body to drag behind me. The water seemed almost warm, after the cold air of the upper corridor on my wet body. My elbows began to hit the roof more frequently. I paddled along then in something between a crawl and a frog stroke. I listened for the sound of the waterfall ahead, but I couldn’t hear it yet. It was the river I heard first, that slow steady murmur; and then I heard the water in the passage, and it was quite a gentle sound, no more, I thought, than trickle; certainly not that gush we’d heard the first time. The sound revived me a bit, and I put up a good spurt for the last two hundred yards. When I reached the fall, I swam right under it before I’d realized it was there. It had shrunk to a slow steady dribbling stream at one end of the gap.
When I stopped and began to tread water, my head was touching the roof, and the water was lapping at my chin. There was about eight inches of headroom.
It was a nasty feeling, once you stopped swimming; it hadn’t been so bad on the move, but now the roof seemed to be pressing down on me like a coffin-lid. The top of my head bumped gently at the beams as I trod water, paddling with my hands. I moved over to the opposite wall, where the entering water was no more than a light spray.
I put up a hand and felt for the gap where the beam had gone. It was only one beam that had fallen, and the space was about nine inches wide; not enough. My arm went up through the gap, feeling jagged rock on either side. The crack in the rock felt a good deal wider than the actual gap in the roof; not very wide, but wide enough for my shoulders, I thought, if I could get through the roof.
I felt for the next beam and got a grip on it. It was a cramped position, because of the water at my chin; my arms could go no higher than my head. I tried to work the beam loose, edging it away from its fellow. It must, I thought, be rotten, like the one that had fallen. I trod water fiercely, pulling and tugging at it; it had already come slightly apart from its neighbour. I gave it a good jerk then; I felt the wood give a little, and jerked again. This time it came down splitting and rotten, on to my head.
It knocked me sideways into the water, and I swallowed a mouthful of the stuff. I got my head above water again, choking; if I coughed, my mouth went under. The roof pressed on my skull like a vice. Claustrophobia caught me for an instant, and I floundered, choking and coughing; then I pulled myself together, and paddled back to the gap.
There was a fair-sized gap now, and I put my head through it, thankfully escaping from the pressure on my skull. I was still treading water, with a hand on either edge of the gap. I let go with one hand and put up my arm to feel above me again. I could reach higher, now, and directly overhead it was clear, except for the water streaming down over my hand. I found a hand-hold in the rock and began to pull myself up. The water below buoyed me up, and that helped a bit. I swung one foot up through the gap and on to the edge of the beam, then the other; I was hanging doubled up, now, like a jackknife. I reached higher, pulling myself up, till at last I stood astride the gap, clear of the passage. I straightened upwards, cautiously, and reached for a further hold in the rock.
I was spread-eagled now in the rocky fissure through which the water was gently coursing. The cleft was wide and jagged, with room and to spare at my sides, but barely twenty inches in breadth; not much of a margin for climbing. I felt for a higher hold, and found that the cleft inclined slightly from the vertical, just above my head. I hoped it was going to go on inclining, because I wouldn’t get far if it went straight up. I found a higher foothold, then another, jarring my knee on the rock; my arms were reaching forward now, instead of straight upward. I got a good grasp on a jagging spur, and pulled upward; for a moment my feet were dangling, feeling wildly for a hold; then I got a heel into a niche, pushed off, and dragged myself over the bend and on to the slope.
I was lying on my stomach now, at an angle of forty-five degrees, and I could feel the water coursing under me and around me. The cleft was still wide, but there was no headroom. I wriggled forward over the rock, slowly, for it was hard and craggy under me, and the rock tore at my hands, my chest, my knees. This hideously uncomfortable progress continued for about five yards, on an upward slope, and must have taken as many minutes; then the fissure widened into a tunnel-like gully, going crookedly up through the rock at a gentler inclination, and I was able to get on to my hands and knees.
I crawled then, feeling my way blindly over the stones; there was pebble and loose rock here, and the gurgling stream ran in its own tidy channel; I found I could keep clear of it, moving over boulders at the water’s edge.
I must have gone, I think, about ten yards, when I encountered an obstacle to my path.
I felt my way cautiously across the gully’s width, proving the obstruction. It was, I discovered, a fall of loose rock and marl; and I saw then that this was the reason why the chute of water had slackened to a small stream. For the blockage had created a kind of natural weir, over which the water was finding a passage in two places, spouting down to meet and flow on with lessened force down the gully. From the strength of those two spouts, I judged that there was a good deal of water beyond, trying to break its way through.
I sat back on my heels in the water, raising my head warily, for fear of cracking it on the rocky roof.
I thought I could clear away the obstruction all right, given time and patience; but the trouble was that in clearing it away, I should be removing the dam, and the whole force of the water behind it would be upon me. I could hear it, I realized suddenly; the soft hum and gurgle had been with me for some time now, but it hadn’t registered on my mind until I listened consciously. It had the sound of steady motion, and I thought it seemed to be flowing across and past the obstruction, rather than directly at it, but I couldn’t be sure.
I didn’t hesitate for long, because there wasn’t much choice; I couldn’t turn back. The passage, by now, would be flooded to the roof.
I chose the bigger of the two ducts where the water was entering, and began to work at the hole. The loose stone and silt came aw
ay quite easily, once I had dislodged a big chunk of rock that was jammed. As the hole widened, so the water increased, gushing in now freely. I scrabbled away at the hole, working from the shelter formed by the dam’s solid centre. Soon I had cleared a channel big enough to take a man’s body, and the volume of the water was correspondingly heavy. I worked at it a little longer, because I was going to need a clear passage, unless I wanted to stick halfway through and drown.
I’d probably drown anyway, I thought, and clung for a long moment to my shelter behind the dam. Then I took a last deep breath of air into my lungs, held it tight, and swung round and headed through the gap, into the gushing water.
The water’s force held me pinned for a moment, and I thought my lungs were going to burst; and then I kicked myself clear and found myself swimming underwater, freely, with room to spare all round; and after that I shot to the surface like a bubble, and exploded thankfully into air.
* * * *
I floated on my back for a moment, feeling the water’s ease after the hard cramped climb; it was buoyant and there was plenty of space and the air was cool and fresh, and I didn’t bother to think about anything else for a minute or two.
After that I turned over and swam a stroke or two, taking it leisurely; and then I began to wonder where I was.
For one delicious half-minute, I thought that I was right out on the river, under the sky. But I realized now that the sky was too dark; it was pitch black, in fact; and it wasn’t the sky at all. I was still underground.
I swam a few strokes more, feeling a gentle current bearing me with it. I turned then, moving across the current, and I’d only taken one stroke when I came up against a wall of rock.
It seemed to go up quite high, curving inwards above me and out of my reach. The surface was uneven, but worn almost smooth.
