CHAPTER SIX
Wade stood blocking the closed door. He made no effort to move away. His gaze flicked over Yeslin’s shoulder. Hearing steps behind him, Yeslin turned to see that the stokers had all gathered close to him. They were frowning.
Yeslin cleared his throat. “Is something wrong?”
Leo gestured with his hand. “Just hand it over, lad.”
“Hand what over?” Yeslin felt sweat begin to trickle down his back.
“You know what we want,” said Jerry, who had taken out his penknife and was playing with the blades. “The ballad. Give it here.”
Yeslin’s expression must have been amusing to watch, for Curt’s frown broke into a grin. “What, you think we’re all fools?”
“Evidently not,” said Yeslin, trying to estimate his chances for survival.
“‘Evidently not,’” mimicked Wade from behind him. “You still got that elite way of saying things.”
“And you still got that elite way of thinking.” Leo shook his head, looking more sad than angry. “Lad, let me give you a hint that will do you good in your life: We commoners, all of us, think things through together. We make our decisions together. Now, it doesn’t take much thought to figure that, if you took all the trouble you did to come down to this dungeon, it was because you wanted to find out what was going on here and tell the lighted world. You wanted to sing the lighted world a ballad. That right? You going to break your oath of silence?”
Yeslin cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”
Curt shrugged. “He probably thinks the oath is less important than the ballad.”
“Aye, well.” Jerry scratched the back of his neck. “We all thought that once. And maybe you could sing a ballad that wouldn’t be bad, that wouldn’t hurt the prisoners. But you didn’t ask for our help!”
“You didn’t ask for our help,” Leo agreed. “You just made that decision on your own, the way elite men do. That’s your trouble, lad. You’re not thinking yet like commoners do.”
The truth was a good deal more complicated than the stokers realized, Yeslin knew. Yeslin’s distrust – his deep distrust of allowing other folk control over his decisions – came not from his time with the elite, but from his years of being misused at the hands of his birth-parents. Yet perhaps there was a seed of truth to what the stokers thought. Perhaps Yeslin had begun to think of “leadership” the way that the elite did: he had thought that leadership consisted of a man imposing his will on men and women below him.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged. “I haven’t been much of a leader to you. But I’ll be better after this, since I was smart enough to pick the best place in the Queendom of Yclau to start my guild: a place where commoners really look out for one another.” He let his gaze fall on all of the stokers present, whose expressions had turned embarrassed.
Still standing behind him, Wade said, “That’s all talk. You give us the ballad, boy.”
He laughed lightly, pulling the written ballad from his trousers pocket. Like any good balladeer, he already had the ballad memorized and could recite it from heart if the stokers chose to tear it up. But if they chose to tear it up, then it wasn’t the correct ballad to sing in any case.
“All right,” he said, turning to hand the ballad to the guild’s chapter leader. “Let me know whether I’ve sung this wrong. But in the meantime, I want to tell you about another ballad I have in mind. It’s about a group of stokers who were willing to suffer for the sake of the prisoners. . . .”
o—o—o
o—o—o
. . . We may never know what caused the young Seeker to depart from the shadow of his mentor, but if we examine closely the wording of Elsdon Taylor’s initial protests in the year 360, we can see that he must have had some sort of contact with the Commoners’ Guild.
The mystery is how such contact was made. In 360, the now-world-famous guild had barely begun. Textbooks proclaim its earliest activities to have taken place late in the sixth month of 360, when a series of protests and strikes by commoners threatened to tear apart the heart of Yclau’s capital. Even the guild’s young founder, Yeslin Bainbridge, expressed surprise at how his ideas spread like wildfire among the queendom’s commoners. (See Appendix F, “The Ballad of the Dying Prisoner – Bainbridge 360:1,” and Appendix G, “The Ballad of the Stokers – Bainbridge 360:2.”)
But how could those revolutionary notions have taken hold of Elsdon Taylor, at almost the exact same moment? How could a torturer, who had spent all his life as a member of the aristocracy, embrace within a handful of days a message that was aimed at the working class?
Various attempts by historians to link the names of Yeslin Bainbridge and Elsdon Taylor have failed; Elsdon Taylor entered the Eternal Dungeon when Yeslin Bainbridge was a mere fourteen years old, and we know almost nothing about the childhood and youth of either of these important historical figures. If the men ever had contact with each other in later years, they were both exceedingly discreet about that contact. The idea that Yeslin Bainbridge should have started his guild by visiting Elsdon Taylor, while a dramatic notion, has no grounding in historical evidence.
Until now the mystery of Elsdon Taylor’s shift in balance has remained unresolved. But a new document, discovered by this author in the royal archives, sheds light on the matter. It is a request from the Eternal Dungeon’s day supervisor, Weldon Chapman, for the retraining of all the dungeon’s stokers, in order to permit them to run the electrically powered furnaces that were about to be installed. Such a request for laborers’ retraining had never been made in the Eternal Dungeon . . . until the date of the document, the sixth month of 360.
Did Yeslin Bainbridge somehow manage to make contact with the dungeon’s stokers? Or did those stokers witness the earliest outbreaks of commoner fervor and decide on their own initiative to take action to better their lives? Whatever the cause may have been, the stirrings among the stokers, who worked just outside the Seekers’ living cells, must have been witnessed by Elsdon Taylor. Perhaps the stokers’ desire to improve their work conditions helped to bring to the surface some doubts that Elsdon Taylor had long held concerning his own work.
All this is speculation, perhaps no more fruitful than the speculation about Elsdon Taylor’s bedroom activities. What is not speculation – what is firm historical fact – is that the stokers, as well as many other commoners, would play a quiet but highly significant role in the upcoming conflict within the Eternal Dungeon.
I must turn now – reluctantly, because of the painful nature of that conflict – to the internal war that erupted in the Eternal Dungeon in the year 360. But before doing so, I would like us to pause and look back at the peaceful period which preceded that war. Layle Smith had healed, as much as he ever would, from the effects of his madness. He was at peace with himself and with his friends in the Eternal Dungeon: Elsdon Taylor and Weldon Chapman. He had received renewed indication of his senior night guard’s faithfulness. He had persuaded his old friend, the High Master of the Hidden Dungeon, to make reforms in that dungeon. He had returned to his satisfying work of assisting prisoners to recognize the gravity of their crimes.
We can only imagine the shock he must have experienced from the events that followed. What we do know – for all the evidence before us demonstrates this – is that the peace and love which Layle Smith stored within himself during the year before the conflict broke out would remain deep within him, until the appropriate moment would come for him to share it with others.
—Psychologists with Whips: A History of the Eternal Dungeon.
The Balance
HISTORICAL NOTE
Truth and Lies
I can safely say that this story was more difficult for me to research than any other I have written. Not only for emotional reasons but because, at the time I researched the novella (from 2003 to 2004), fewer historical texts existed online, so it wasn’t easy for me to locate information about the exact details of what took place when prisoners were racked.
I was
therefore working from only a handful of primary sources: William Lithgow’s account of his racking in 1620 (reprinted in J. Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man), John Gerard’s account of being hung from manacles around his wrists in 1597 (reprinted in Eyewitness to History, edited by John Carey), and one or two other accounts I no longer recall.
The most striking aspect of Father Gerard’s account is his repeated assertion that his torturers felt pity for him. The account is filled with passages like this:
My [warder] brought me back to my room. His eyes seemed swollen with tears. . . . Personally, I believe [the Governor of the Tower of London ordered my release because] he was moved by compassion, for some time after my escape a gentleman of position told me that he had heard Sir Richard Berkeley, this same Lieutenant, say that he had freely resigned his office because he no longer wished to be an instrument in such torture of innocent men.
Similar tales are told of other torturers during that time. Even allowing for dramatic exaggeration, it does appear that the literary trope of the Kind-hearted Torturer has some basis in fact. I think it’s unlikely, though, that any torturers went as far as Layle Smith did in an attempt to assist his prisoner.
Barbarians & Hidden
“Barbarians” and “Hidden” owe their existence to Anne Blue, who asked that I write an Eternal Dungeon story for her CD-zine, MAS-Zine. I gave her two. Their publication was accompanied by the following author’s note:
The editor of MAS-Zine has asked me to mention how I got the idea for “Hidden.” As a teenager I saw a zoo exhibit that told how a specialist had been bitten by a snake that he thought to be nonvenomous but turned out not to be. Under such circumstances, I would have been screaming and sobbing. However, the exhibit stated that the snake specialist spent his dying moments recording his symptoms.
Alas, while checking on this story to write this note, I’ve discovered that the actual story is not quite so colorful as I recalled it: the herpetologist in question (Karl P. Schmidt, who died in Chicago in 1957) did not realize he was dying. However, there are many other cases in history of people carefully recording the circumstances of their death for the sake of posterity - for example, the diary of Robert Falcon Scott on his failed expedition to Antarctica (https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/6721). It was while I was thinking about what sort of person it would take to be able to keep his mind on his duties while dying that the idea for “Hidden” popped into my head.
Death Watch
To any scholar wishing to spend a few years researching the primary sources of an obscure topic, I suggest that they tackle the history of fisting (placing a hand or arm inside an anus or vagina). From the scant sources I’ve been able to track down, it appears to me that fisting was a rare sexual activity before the twentieth century, but not entirely unknown.
The 1880s (when this story is set) is the decade when some physicians began to wash their hands before surgery, a practice that remained controversial for a number of years.
Balladeer
There is a passing reference in this story to a strike at Miller’s Rubber Stamp Manufactory. This story is set in the alternate-universe equivalent of 1881, in the alternate-universe equivalent of Luray, Virginia (site of a certain famous set of limestone caves). According to Chataigne’s Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory, 1884-1885, J. F. Miller & Co. ran a rubber stamp manufactory in Luray at that time. I know nothing about the business beyond that fact.
With much publicity, electric lights were introduced to Luray Caverns in 1881. This is sheer, happy coincidence; the date of the Eternal Dungeon’s electrification was determined by events in prior stories.
In Britain, the 1880s was the decade when unions of unskilled laborers began to be popular. (In the United States, these unions started slightly earlier.) Before then, the uniting of workers had occurred mainly in guilds and craft unions, whose membership was confined to a select number of skilled workers.
o—o—o
o—o—o
o—o—o
=== On Guard ===
Hell hath a co-operation with Heaven.
—St. John Chrysostom, as loosely translated by John Donne.
On Guard
PROLOGUE
The junior Seeker stood in the entrance, awaiting death.
He did not turn his head to look at the guard moving behind him. Instead, his eyes and thoughts remained focussed on the chamber around him. Unlike most other parts of the Eternal Dungeon, this chamber had no artificial walls. Instead, the chamber was a vast, semi-circular cavern, with niches carved into the walls to serve as shelves for glass-enclosed candles. Many of the candles were lit; their smoke created a haze in the upper part of the chamber, drifting slowly up to a smoke-hole at the very top of the ceiling.
The ground below was littered with ladders and extra candles and matches; otherwise it was stark. The floor consisted of nothing but the rough, uneven stone of the cavern, gleaming faintly in the light. In the middle of the chamber, a low railing guarded a circular area larger than a prisoner’s cell. This area was made of stone as well, but the stone was manmade, as could be seen from the fact that it rose up in the middle to form a hook. From this hook rose a chain as vast in width as the chain that holds a steamer’s anchor.
In the brightly lit chamber, only one other person stood: a woman from the outer dungeon, lighting a candle in honor of some Seeker or former prisoner she had known. The guard, stepping past the junior Seeker without a word, went over to the woman and said something to her in a whisper. She jerked and looked over her shoulder, staring with wide eyes at the hooded Seeker by the doors, as if she had seen a ghost. Then she nodded and hurried toward the only other exit from the chamber, a small door to the right of the junior Seeker.
Once she was through this, the guard closed and bolted the smaller exit before returning to the Seeker. Still silent, he stepped past. In a minute, the junior Seeker heard the great, booming sound of the crematorium’s doors shutting behind him.
Only then did he move. He went over to one side of the chamber, used a key to open a metal panel set within the wall, and contemplated the switch there. With a wrench, he pulled up the switch.
A screech filled the chamber, like the grieving howl of a soul trapped in afterdeath. He covered his ears as the slack chain above the circular stone tightened, and then began rising. The screech of the metal was accompanied by a low, harsh rumble as stone scraped against stone.
He looked up at where the chain travelled over a pulley hanging from the ceiling, as it had for a century. The chain, though frequently replaced, was old in design; the machinery pulling the chain onto a vast wheel nearby had stood there for only twenty years. It was said to be the most powerful mechanical crane in the world, far more powerful than the cranes that had been used to build the mighty train-bridges that awed foreign visitors to the queendom of Yclau. Watching the rise of the stone lid, as heavy as any train, the junior Seeker did not doubt the boast about the crane. He only wondered how, by all that was sacred, the Seekers had managed to raise the lid before the existence of mechanical engines.
The lid stopped and hung, swaying, barely high enough for a man to crouch under it. This the junior Seeker did, feeling, as he always did, the breathless fear of an ant who has deliberately walked under a man’s boot. He grabbed a nearby safety lamp as he ducked down, swinging it forward so that he could locate the top landing of the stairs spiralling round the pit below the lid. The light also landed on the circular wall of the ash-pit that the spiral staircase curved around. The ashes themselves were hidden from view.
He felt a little better once he was on the iron stairs, climbing his way down. The stairs, though of open ironwork, were steady under the feet and had strong handrails on both sides. There was little chance he would slip and fall, provided that he kept the lamplight spilling upon the steps to come. The stairs wound their way gradually round the pit, with manmade stones on both sides, so it was easy to pretend that he was going down a circular stai
rway in the palace above the Eternal Dungeon, rather than circling in a spiral around a pit of death-ashes.
He could no longer hear the crackle of candle-flames above him, but he could hear the hiss of air, and occasionally the air would brush him when he passed a vent. The sound was reassuring. He had heard tales that, when the mechanical Lungs that kept the Eternal Dungeon alive had broken down, back in ’42, the only person who failed to escape alive had been a Seeker who was in this pit at the time, mourning the death of a parent. Forgotten in the mad rush to evacuate the dungeon, he was found later at the top of the iron stairs, his hands pressed futilely against the stone lid that would open from below for no man, no matter how strong.
The junior Seeker looked back up the stairway. He could see dim light above, a sure sign that the lid remained raised. He told himself that the doors to the crematorium were now locked and guarded; he told himself that, even if by some chance a Seeker entered the crematorium and closed the lid, not knowing he was there, he could still survive here for weeks, and his absence would be noticed long before that. It made no difference. This place felt to him as it had on his previous visits, as though it were his grave.
As of course it was, he reminded himself. He looked at the convex wall next to him, wondering whether he had yet reached the level of the pit where, one day, his own ashes would rest.
He took a deep breath and continued down.
The only sound was his boots tapping the steps, and the thump of his rapid heartbeat. It was difficult, at times like this, not to think of the ashes that lay in the pit because of him. He could tell himself that his former prisoners’ souls had been reborn into new life, but the only certainty he held was that the ashes of their bodies lay in the cold earth. Despite the autumnal coolness of the air, he paused a minute to raise the face-cloth of his hood, knowing that no one could see him here. Sweat lay thick on his face.
He walked more carefully after that, his palms now slick upon the railing. He felt sure that he must be nearing the end of his journey, and he knew that certainty to be an illusion. The pit was wide and deep, made to hold ashes for many centuries in the future. Travelling down to its bottom took as much time as walking across the whole of the capital’s Parkside district.
He could feel himself shaking by the end. He was strong, for a man of his class; he did not spend his days idling in a parlor chair but instead stood for anywhere up to twelve hours a day, searching prisoners. But walking down an endless staircase, holding a lamp in the dark and trying not to stumble to one’s death, was an exercise that would exhaust even the strongest man. He tried not to think of what the journey upward would be like.
The door came so suddenly that he nearly walked into it. He stood a moment, trying to catch his labored breath, and feeling his heart drum inside him. He did not bother to look up; he knew he was too far down to see any light now. After a minute, he hung his lamp on the hook designed for it, next to another lamp that was dark. He closed the shutter of his own lamp, more out of respect for where he went than out of fear that some unknown gas would set the stairwell ablaze. He could still hear the ventilated air sighing, like a mother soothing her frightened child. He groped a moment in the dark, found the latch, and opened the door as quietly as he could.
He was just as quiet closing it. The small cubicle he stood in was nearly pitch-black; he paused a moment before soundlessly pushing back the curtain in front of him. Then, as he heard the unmistakable hiss of another ventilation shaft, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the light in the chamber of death.
“The vigil chamber” was its official title, but the junior Seeker had never heard this room called that except in documents. It was as stark in design as the crematorium: nothing more than a circular floor that was the width of the pit, with a stone wall curving round the sides. Its ceiling had begun, in the past two years, to bow under the accumulated weight of a century’s worth of death-ashes. The junior Seeker did not like to think of what the scene in this room would be like if the ceiling gave way while he was there. He knew that the palace engineers were still battling each other over the best way to preserve this place. In the meantime, the High Seeker had broken with decades’ worth of tradition and ordered that a small electric light be installed above the only exit, in case there should be enough warning of an impending cave-in to give the vigil-keeper time to dash for the stairwell. No longer would vigil-keepers be plunged into the dark once the oil in their lamps gave out, permitting them to share in the lonely darkness experienced by the newly dead. For now, the vigil-keepers’ prayers would take place in dim light.
The junior Seeker could not see that the light made any difference to the atmosphere of the chamber. This place still looked like what it was: an ancient burial tomb.
As his pupils widened, his vision took in what lay in the chamber: Crates of tinned food and tinned milk, enough to supply this place for a month. Other supplies necessary for a long sojourn. An inconspicuous metal plate in the ground that the junior Seeker knew led to a waste pit that would be cleaned out later by dungeon workers. A bed that looked as though it had not been slept in. A chair that had clearly not been sat in, for it was holding one of the crates. And in the midst of this all, kneeling on the stone floor in the center of the chamber with his body upright but for his bowed head, was the High Seeker.
His head was bare of his hood; his back was to the junior Seeker. He said without turning, “I was told I could have a month.”
The junior Seeker stepped out of the darkness of the tiny antechamber. “Another message arrived from Vovim. The Codifier needs to speak with you.”
The High Seeker did not move for a moment. Then, with a sigh, he made a gesture that was foreign to the junior Seeker but elaborate enough that it appeared to convey meaning to something unseen. The High Seeker rose slowly to his feet but continued to look down, as though his thoughts were not on the ashes above, but on something that lay much further below.
After a minute, he moved over to one of the crates, picked up an incising instrument that lay atop it, and stared at the wall that surrounded him. The junior Seeker, sensing what he was searching for, went over to one curve of the wall and pointed to his own name, carefully incised into the stone. The carving was surrounded by hundreds of other names, some overlapping each other as the Seekers who had visited this place vied for elbow room in the remaining space on the wall.
The High Seeker nodded and began incising his initials next to the junior Seeker’s name. The junior Seeker watched him work without speaking. He had carved his name here three years before, when he had come here to honor the delayed interment of his sister’s ashes. He had been here twice since then, once to mourn the death of his father, and a second time when he learned of the death of the schoolmaster who had taught him his letters. The High Seeker, though, had apparently never entered this chamber in vigil before, not even after the death of the man who had first trained him to be a Seeker.
Behind him, the junior Seeker heard a faint, irregular beeping, like the peep of a newborn chick. He looked round the dim chamber until he found what he was searching for: a niche in the wall, holding a pair of headphones and a signalling instrument.
Leaving the High Seeker at his work, the junior Seeker went over and put on the headphones. The code, as he had suspected, was from the Codifier’s night secretary, signalling the vigil-keeper in the required daily pattern. The junior Seeker waited for a pause, and then acknowledged the signal with his own name and the High Seeker’s, tapping in the code with the painstaking care of someone who has learned his code in school rather than at work. He added the information that he and the High Seeker would be returning to the dungeon.
The acknowledgment from the Codifier’s office came immediately; the acknowledgment from the palace above the dungeon took longer. The junior Seeker was not surprised. The signalling office of the Yclau palace was the largest in the world, hooked by cable to dozens of governments and receiving hundreds of messages each hour. Most of th
ese messages required no more than a token acknowledgment, so the palace signalling office had developed machines to punch the code onto paper that could be read and transcribed at a later date.
Out of all the signalling instruments in that room, the junior Seeker had been told, only one had a bell attached to it to alert the code-men that a new message had arrived. Even so, three minutes passed before a code-man responded.
The junior Seeker used that time to marvel at the marriage of old and new that was represented by this signalling instrument in the ancient vigil chamber. He knew that the High Seeker had received strong opposition from the other senior Seekers when he had proposed this addition several years before. They had argued that a true vigil required that the vigil-keeper share the conditions of the dead.
The High Seeker had not tried to argue with his colleagues; that was not his way. Instead, he had placed before them a list of the names of the vigil-keepers who had died from illness of body or mind in the death chamber over the past century, because the chamber lacked any direct means of communication with the world above. Then, equally silently, he had laid before them the passage in the Code of Seeking which required that Seekers preserve life wherever possible.
The signal from the palace arrived, a terse acknowledgment followed by a reminder that the palace would require word from the Codifier’s office once the vigil-keeper and his companion were returned to the Eternal Dungeon. Both the junior Seeker and the Codifier’s secretary acknowledged the message; then the junior Seeker pulled off the headphones and turned to look at the High Seeker.
The High Seeker had by now stepped back to gaze at the initials and year he had incised, which were hidden in the shadow of his body. The junior Seeker wondered whether he was seeing instead the initials of the man for whom he had come here.
The junior Seeker said, “He is reborn. You can be sure of that.”
“Can I?” The High Seeker often pronounced questions like this in the presence of prisoners. When he did so, it was with a light voice, mildly inquisitive, no matter how deep his actual interest in the prisoner’s answer. Now his voice sounded as though it were dipped in dark liquid. “He was Vovimian, believing that he would spend eternity at hell. Perhaps that makes a difference.”
The junior Seeker stepped forward then, touching the High Seeker lightly on his sleeve. “Love, he abused prisoners,” he reminded the High Seeker solemnly. “If he is undergoing pain now, it is no worse than the pain he often gave others.”
The High Seeker did not look his way. “The last words he wrote were of his apprehension that I would despise him if I learned that he was afraid when he was brought to his final moments. Despise!” The High Seeker’s voice was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “He tried to reform his dungeon, knowing what fate awaited him if his efforts were discovered, and yet he believed I would think less of him because he feared that ending when it came!” He turned away abruptly, went over to the bed, and picked up the hood that lay on the pillow there.
He did not put it on immediately, though. He remained where he was, staring at the ground in the cool room, saying softly, “And it was all for nothing. All the work he did, all the pain he endured at the end – it was wasted. His dungeon is returned to what it was; his blood was spent for nothing.”
“Then see that his death was worth it.”
The High Seeker raised his head slowly to look at the junior Seeker. Though his face remained naked, his expression was unreadable. The junior Seeker gave an impatient shrug of his shoulders. “Love, you’ve told me often enough that, if a prisoner dies before he has accomplished what he should in his life, it is up to those who were close to him to bring to fruit the deeds that remain to be done. He wouldn’t want you to give way to despair like this. If he sent you his last thoughts, it was because he hoped that you could make something of his death.”
The High Seeker was very still. His eyes were opaque. Then, without any expression entering his face, he pulled his hood over his head.
“Yes,” he said softly as he walked forward. “I will make something of his death. I swear that, by the name of hell’s High Master.”
The junior Seeker felt uneasiness enter him then. He opened his mouth to speak, but the High Seeker walked past him without pause, flicking a switch in the wall as he did so. The chamber plunged into darkness.
On Guard 1
PROMOTION
Barrett Boyd
The year 360, the sixth month. (The year 1881 Fallow by the Old Calendar.)
In our day, the crime that the first High Seeker of the Eternal Dungeon has often been charged with is of having been a vicious, cruel abuser of prisoners, torturing men and women without reason and using his power to force others to horribly maltreat prisoners. In light of these charges, Layle Smith’s justifications for the actions he began taking in his fortieth year make no sense.
To understand those events, we must remember that, even in our own day, an opposing charge has been placed against Layle Smith. Citizens of victim rights organizations complain that Layle Smith was the first in a long line of prison workers who cared more about the welfare of their prisoners than about their prisoners’ victims and possible future victims. These critics argue that the first High Seeker’s policy of urging in court that his prisoners receive lower sentences established a terrible trend that has continued into our own crime-filled era.
In the Golden Age of the Eternal Dungeon, such voices must have been, not a minority, but an overwhelming chorus. Few people would have argued that Layle Smith was too hard on his prisoners. Instead, from the time that Layle Smith first began reforming the Eternal Dungeon’s overly punitive handling of prisoners, he must have been told again and again that he was being far too soft on criminals who deserved nothing less than prolonged torture and death.
Anyone who claims that Layle Smith should have remained on a pedestal, far above these criticisms, must ask themselves whether they would have had the ability to remain deaf to such a united chorus. What is surprising is not that Layle Smith began to listen to the charges. What is surprising is that he waited until the moment at which, for the first time, a second charge was placed against him. At that point, buffeted by blows in opposite directions, he chose to stand his ground firmly in the middle. Too firmly, as history would later judge . . .
—Psychologists with Whips: A History of the Eternal Dungeon.
The Eternal Dungeon: a Turn-of-the-Century Toughs omnibus Page 75
