Diabolic Candelabra

by E. R. Punshon

  “Not,” he rebuked himself, “not at all in the best lynx eye and twig the meaning at a glance tradition.”

  He had made up his mind by now. At the quick run growing daylight now permitted, he returned to the spot where he had left his car, took from it a coil of one-inch Manila rope he had brought with him, and dashed back again at top speed. Very bad luck indeed, he felt, if anything had happened during so brief an absence, but one had to take a chance at times.

  CHAPTER XLIII

  THE CAVE

  A MOMENT OR two he took to recover his breath and for a cautious look around. Then he looped his rope about the tree that had already so often, he was sure, served the same purpose. Doubled thus, it was still long enough to reach the ledge beneath, but only just. To be more precise, its loose ends dangled about a yard and a half or so above the ledge. But that should enable him, he thought, to secure a footing. Whether he would be able to edge his way along without toppling over backwards was, he also thought, much more doubtful. But the attempt had to be made. The feat had been accomplished pretty regularly, he supposed, and so should not be beyond his powers. Once safely, if insecurely, on the ledge, then, by loosening his hold on one end of the doubled rope and pulling on the other, he would be able to recover possession. He had no intention of leaving it in position for Loo to play tricks with. He felt fairly sure that these activities of his had not escaped her watchful and attentive eyes.

  Cautiously he swung himself over the edge, collecting more than one bruise against the rough surface of the rock as he began and continued his descent. It was a relief when at last he got his feet firmly on the ledge below, even though that ledge seemed now still more narrow and unsafe than it had appeared from above. For the moment he almost despaired of being able to accomplish such a tight-rope performance as an attempt to edge along it must be, and then to his considerable relief he saw that handholds had been cut in the stone. By the aid of these it was comparatively easy to keep a balance as first he loosened his grip on one end of the rope, hauled it down, coiled it over one shoulder and then began to make his way along the shelf. With the handholds, like narrow cups, to help him, he found the task not difficult, and safely he shuffled along for three or four yards till the shelf broadened out at the end where stood the stunted tree and the bushes visible from above. They formed, as he had guessed they would, a natural screen to the cave entrance and beyond them the shelf ended abruptly. It all had an entirely natural air, but now that he was closer, he was inclined to guess that the work of nature had been much improved on, and he remembered that old half forgotten story of how, during the storms of the Reformation period, the monks of Barsley Abbey had fled to a secret refuge in the forest but had been followed, their hiding place discovered, and all of them massacred.

  The cave entrance was so narrow and low that Bobby, a big man with big bones and broad shoulders, had some trouble in getting through. Within, however, the passage widened and he could stand upright. So little daylight penetrated through that narrow opening, screened, too, as it was by tree and bush, that he had to get out his electric torch before he could distinguish his surroundings. He saw then that the passage made almost at once a sharp turn to the left and that at this left turn a strong door had been fitted, though one that now stood open and carefully held back by a wooden wedge.

  Had this door been locked or fastened until now, he wondered. If so, was that why any inmate of the cave had been unable to escape or to make his presence known by displaying a signal of distress? Any such prisoner, too, would have remained unaware of the search that had examined so carefully the floor of the quarry, but had failed to pay attention to the bare, open face of the cliff, offering in appearance no possible concealment.

  Cautiously Bobby moved forward. He felt broken glass beneath his feet. Throwing downward the ray of his torch he discovered that the passage on this side of the door was covered with fragments of broken bottles. Someone had apparently been engaged in an orgy of bottle smashing. One of the larger pieces Bobby picked up. A very curious pungent penetrating smell clung to it, not exactly disagreeable and yet not pleasant either. It made Bobby think of the flavour of the chocolate Olive had once given him to taste. Not that there was any resemblance between that taste and this smell, except in that both were novel, and, so to say, characteristic, unlike anything he had ever come across before.

  “One of the old man’s new flavours or medicines or lotions,” Bobby said to himself; and, throwing the ray of his torch here and there, saw near the door, still on this side, a heap of burnt material. He turned it over with his toe, detaching a large piece that was only scorched. It was canvas, it showed a fragment of a painting, a portion of a sky in which clouds gathered terribly and yet with a glowing light behind, as though they were clouds that hid both the glory and the wrath of God.

  Bobby stood and stared. He could hardly believe the conclusion his eyes and mind suggested. He went down on his knees and began to scrabble with his hands in that heap of ash and cinder. He found one long strip on which showed a stretched forth arm, suggesting somehow rather immeasurable length than merely human arm. More and more certain he became that here lay all that remained of the two El Greco pictures, that here someone for some reason or for none had made a bonfire of them.

  He got to his feet, mechanically brushed from his hands the ashes of two of what he felt might well have been world masterpieces. He looked again at the large fragment he had found first. Charred and torn and burnt as it was, it still seemed to convey its thundrous message of eternal things behind the poor mask of time.

  Bobby laid it down with reverence, wondering who had destroyed it thus and why. He turned his attention to the door and soon saw that it was provided with a strong spring lock and hung in such a way that unless controlled it would swing to instantly. He tried the experiment, removing the wedge, but putting his handkerchief in the lock to make sure it should not fasten. Easy to see that anyone opening the door from without and passing through without taking the necessary precautions would almost certainly find it closed and fastened behind him, cutting off all retreat. Bobby noticed, too, that the inside of the door was covered with iron plating, making the door heavier and more difficult to break through—impossible indeed to break through without tools. He saw also that there was a small space, due apparently to irregularity in the stone above, between the roof and the door. He guessed that the broken bottles he had found had been pushed through this opening to smash on the stone outside in the hope the noise they made might attract attention. Probably, too, the El Greco paintings had been set on fire and pushed through in the same way and with the same object.

  A strange end, Bobby reflected, for paintings whereof the recovery would have been a world-wide sensation, even in war time. How great delight and more than delight, had not humanity thus lost. For that matter, how much mere money value had not gone up here in smoke and flame, burning away in this obscure rocky passage in so futile, so useless a bonfire.

  So absorbed had he been by these discoveries and thoughts that he had almost forgotten what errand had brought him here. But now, after once again taking precautions to make sure that the door should not be closed upon him, either by accident or design—he broke the blade of his penknife inside the lock in such a way that only by a good deal of trouble could the lock be put in working order again—he made his way on along the passage that the door had guarded. The air grew fresher, the light stronger, as he advanced, and then a new sharp turn taken by the passage gave him a clear view of a great chamber hewn, for it was too regular to be wholly the work of nature, in the very heart of the rock. Air, and some degree of light, penetrated from narrow shafts sloping upwards through three or four yards of solid rock to the quarry face, where, when they issued, they had only the appearance of cracks or crevices in the stone. Though the light thus provided was not strong it was abundantly sufficient for Bobby, emerging from the obscurity of the passages along which he had groped his way, to distinguish the details
of the scene.

  A first glance showed him two men facing each other in the centre of the cave and showed him, too, that it had been roughly furnished. There was a heavily made table, across which these two men faced each other. There were two or three chairs. In the wall opposite was a kind of alcove in which was piled a heap of rugs and blankets to form a bed. In one corner stood an oil stove for cooking and there was an oil heating stove as well. Near the cooking stove was a rough wooden bench running nearly the whole length of the wall and covered with utensils that Bobby thought at first were simply pots and pans for cooking, but that later investigation proved to be flasks, retorts, and so on that had evidently been used for experimenting with various herbal products. It was here no doubt that the different lotions and medicines the old man had produced, including the new flavouring, had been concocted.

  In addition to the light that entered, though scantily, by the ventilating shafts, further light was provided by two great silver candelabra that hung upon the inner wall, the wall on Bobby’s left as he stood in the mouth of this passage that led into the main portion of the cave. There was no difficulty in recognizing the Diabolic Candelabra. Each branch was carved in the likeness of a human face twisted into every variety of hate and malice and all ill will. In each branch a lighted candle stood, and in the flickering light they gave, for there was a breath of air that ran about the cave from the ventilating shafts, one could well have imagined that each of those carven heads was alive and each animated by the same delight in wickedness. The evil in the hand that wrought had well translated itself into those carven images.

  Yet of all this Bobby was at the moment hardly more than dimly aware, so much was his attention and amazement held by yet another spectacle that same wall of the cave presented, framed between the two candelabra. It happened that through one of the air shafts, one a trifle larger than the others and less steeply sloped, a ray of sunlight fell clear upon this portion of the wall. The clear and golden ray, like an angelic spear of light, passed over the heads of the two men by the table, and struck the very centre of a pattern that now he could distinguish there, a pattern in gleaming white outline, a pattern formed of many human bones, of skulls and ribs, thigh bones and bones of arms, all arranged with careful and as it seemed almost with loving care to fit into some strange and hidden harmony of line and form.

  Bobby had always been sensitive to form. From form, from pattern, from design and proportion of curve and line, he had at times received that hint of other things that other people can receive from the harmonies of sound in great music or the harmonies of colour in nature or in painting. In past days he had been stirred in ways he did not understand by his first glimpse of the harmonies still perceptible in the noble ruins of Tintern Abbey, or again by the pattern in a picture he afterwards knew to be the work of one of the great artists of the world. So now there was something in this pattern traced by dead men’s bones upon the wall of a hidden cave that seemed to convey to him a message, though a message of which he knew not the meaning.

  Oblivious utterly for the moment of his surroundings, he stood and stared, trying to trace there the significance that somehow he was certain it had been intended to convey. Fascinated, he stood before that arabesque of dead men’s bones, trying to grasp it as a whole, trying to follow each line and curve so subtly and so strangely traced, and feeling himself utterly baffled and defeated. A rhythm of movement was in it, a suggestion of upward urge that yet returned continually upon itself, as if ever defeated and yet ever striving, persuading him still that if only he could distinguish the prevailing motive, then he would understand. He remembered the enigmatic smile Leonardo da Vinci lent to his ‘Mona Lisa’. Yet that he felt had a meaning both small and shallow compared to the intention hidden here. He felt an impulse to go forward and trace with careful finger each curve, each line, each circling loop or sudden start. A queer excitement seemed to tell him that if he did so with care and reverence he would come at last to understand the hidden secret.

  Yet of the nature of that secret there came to him no hint.

  Then he saw another thing. Apart from this great central pattern, low down, on the right as one faced it, four sentences had been formed, and these were made of the smaller human bones, the bones of the hand and the foot, that had apparently been unsuitable for incorporation in the main design. They had the air of having been added recently. They even spoiled to some extent the majestic symmetry of the central pattern. In modern English capital letters they formed the words of four phrases, one below the other, in this order:

  ‘The blood is the life.

  The blood is ill and cancer comes.

  Cure the blood and cure the cancer.’

  The lowest fourth and final sentence consisted of but the one word:

  ‘Eureka’.

  Fascinated, wondering, asking himself how many hours of patient work was here represented, asking himself again and again what meaning lay hidden here, what was the relationship between those four sentences and the pattern above, asking himself if significance and relationship were there in fact, or but the product of his own excited, startled imagination, Bobby still stood and stared. Again the memory came back to him of the old story of how the abbot and monks of Barsley Abbey had sought refuge in the forest, in a secret hiding-place, and never more been heard of. He supposed that here perhaps were relics of their fate and proof of an ancient massacre of long ago, and in his absorption he forgot entirely the presence of those two others by the table, who, for their part, absorbed in their own emotions, remained equally ignorant of his presence and arrival there. But now one of them spoke, his voice slow and hollow in that heavy air, and as he heard Bobby could have sworn that each one of those carven, devilish faces under the flickering light of the candles above, grinned approval. For what Bobby heard to rouse him from his fancies was a startled, incredulous scream:

  “You mean you’ll murder me; you can’t.”

  And the answer came:

  “Why not? Looks like I’ve got to, don’t it?”

  CHAPTER XLIV

  FORGED CONFESSION

  STARTLED FROM HIS absorption in this bizarre and grisly decorative effect, with its strange, haunting hint of a secret underlying significance, Bobby turned quickly. The two men by the table were still unaware of his presence, so utterly was the regard of each concentrated on the other. He might have made ten times the noise he had done without breaking in upon their desperate, fixed attention. One of the men had his back to Bobby. It was impossible to recognize him in the dim light prevailing, that entering through the ventilating shafts, that given by the candles in the Diabolic Candelabra, both together only serving feebly to illumine this huge grim rock cavity. The second man on the farther side of the table, of whom therefore Bobby had a clearer view, was a small, elderly man, with a grey wisp of a moustache. Crayfoot, the missing baker, Bobby guessed. Dirty, unshaven, afraid, he leaned across the table, both trembling, shaking hands upon it as though for needed support, and even from where he stood Bobby could see how those hands, the man’s whole body indeed, quivered, trembled, shook, till the very table itself, solid as it was, seemed to shake in sympathy. High pitched and shrill his voice came again:

  “You couldn’t . . . wouldn’t . . . you can’t . . . why, it would be murder.”

  “Well, it’s what you done your own self,” the other retorted, “what you done to the old hermit bloke, so why not the same for you also?”

  “I’ll give you anything you like, I’ll give you my cheque, I’ll—” Crayfoot began, and the other cut him short with a threatening gesture that made Crayfoot shrink tremblingly away.

  “Aw, shut it,” he said, and in the hand he lifted Bobby made out now that he held a revolver of heavy calibre, probably an old service weapon. “What’s the good of cheques and promises and such-like?” he demanded. “Like as not off you would go to the cops soon as ever you was out of here, and then where would I be?”

  Crayfoot began to splutter eager
, quick protests that never would he do such a thing, never, never. He could be trusted absolutely, he shrilled, and again he was silenced by a threatening lifted movement of the revolver.

  “You can’t murder me,” he wailed, huddling down as he spoke into a curious, crouching attitude, as though in an effort to protect himself from the bullet he was dreading. “You wouldn’t do murder?” he cried again. “Not murder. You can’t.”

  “Why can’t I?” retorted the other. “It’s what you did, ain’t it? And don’t you go for to deny it, either, seeing as I know what I know. A good thing for you, too, or else you would have starved and rotted here and no one ever known a thing about it, not till kingdom come. And serve you right.”

  “I never, never . . . I never even knew old Peter had been killed—” Crayfoot protested, and again was cut short by a wave of that menacing pistol.

  “Aw, shut it,” its holder said. “Shut it and let me think or I’ll put a bullet through you as’ll make you hold that tongue of yours for keeps.”

  Crayfoot fell silent, mopping his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief that was black with dirt. Bobby moved softly back, farther into the shadows where the passage entered the cave. He had once or twice been on the point of interfering, but now he decided that danger was not imminent. Killing might come, but not yet. There was quite clearly something Crayfoot was required to do or say, and until then his life at least was safe. Those who mean to kill, kill without talk. Crayfoot, waiting his fate, had collapsed now into one of the chairs near by. Very plainly he had neither the will, the courage, nor indeed the strength to do anything but await passively the other’s decision.

  “It’s not as if I wanted to do you in, only I’ve got to look after myself, ain’t I?” this other man now continued. “Why, I wouldn’t hurt you nor no one no more than a babe unborn except for having to. You did in the old hermit bloke and don’t you go for to deny it, either, because I know, see? Not that I care what you done, but I got to think of myself, and there’s a blasted cop knocking around, Mr Blooming Inspector Bobby Owen, what if I had him where I’ve got you I wouldn’t be just talking like I am, not by a hell of a way I wouldn’t. Only seeing it’s you, I’m trying to think of a way out, which is more than most would, it being safe and simple and easy like to pop you off and done with it—aw, shut it.”