Phantom Wires: A Novel

by Arthur Stringer

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE WAKING CIRCUIT

  It was a thick and heavy night, with a drizzle of fine rain blanketingthe city. Every now and then a lonely carriage spluttered along theoily and pool-strewn pavement of the cross-street. Every now and then,too, the rush and clang of the Broadway cars echoed down the canyon ofrain-swept silence.

  Durkin waited until the lights of the cigar-store went out. Then heonce more circled the block, keeping to the shadows. As he passed thedarkened cigar-store for the second time his foot, as though byaccident, came sharply in contact with the refracting-prismed manholecover which had sounded so hopefully hollow to his previous tread. Ashe had half-suspected, it was loose.

  He stooped quickly, to turn up his trousers. As he did so threeexploring fingers worked their way under the ledge of the unsecuredcircle of iron and glass.

  It came away without resistance. He looked about him cautiously,without straightening up; then by its shoulder-strap he carefullylowered his leather tool-bag into the passage below, and as guardedlylet himself down after it.

  He waited and listened for a minute or two, before replacing the coverabove him. From the river, in the distance, he could hear the boomingand tooting of the steam craft through the fog. A hurrying car rumbledand echoed past on the Broadway tracks. Two drunken wanderers wentsinging westward in the drizzling rain. Then everything was silenceagain.

  Durkin replaced the covering, noiselessly, and feeling to right andleft with his outstretched hands, crept inward through the narrowtunnel in which he found himself. His fingers came in touch with thechilly surface of a steel-faced door. It sounded heavy and unyieldingto his tentative tap, and his left hand was already reaching back forthe tool-bag which hung by its strap over his shoulder when hisquestioning right hand, pushing forward, discovered that the door wasunlocked, and swung easily outward without resistance.

  He felt and fondled the heavy bolts, thoughtfully, puzzled why itshould be so, until he remembered seeing the half-dozen pieces ofanthracite lying about the manhole on the sidewalk above. That, hetold himself, possibly explained it. Some careless wagon-driver,delivering his load, had left the place unlocked.

  But before he crept into the wider and higher passage before him hepaused to take out the revolver which he carried in his hip pocket, tounlimber it, and carefully feel over the chambered cylinder, to makesure every cartridge-head stood there, in place. This done, hereplaced it, not at his hip, but loose and free, in the righthandpocket of his coat. Then he once more began feeling his way along thesmooth cement floor. He was enveloped in a darkness as absolute asthough he had been shrouded in black velvet--even the glimmer of therefracted street lamps did not penetrate further than the doorway ofthe first tunnel. There was a smell of dampness in the air, as ofmouldy plaster. It was the smell of underground places. Durkin hatedit.

  He had to feel his way about the entire circle of that second narrowchamber before he came to where the inner doorway stood. It, too, wasunlocked, and for the first time some sense of betrayal, someintimidation of being trapped, some latent suspicion of artfullyconcealed duplicity, flashed through his questioning mind.

  He listened, and was greeted by nothing but silence.

  Then he swung the door softly and slowly open. As he did so he leapedback, and to one side, with his right hand in his coat pocket. Forthere suddenly smote on his ears the sharp clang and tinkle of metal.

  He stood there, crouched, for a waiting minute, and then he laughedaloud, for he knew it was only the sound of some piece of falling iron,striking on the cement. To make sure of it, he groped about the floor,and stumbled on the little bar of steel that had fallen. Yet why ithad been there, leaning against the door, he could not comprehend. Wasit there by accident? Or had it been meant as a signal? It showed himone thing, however; its echoing fall had demonstrated to him that theroom he had entered was both higher and larger than the one he hadleft. It might be nothing more than a furnace-room, yet he toldhimself that he must be on his guard, that from now on his perils began.

  Then he wondered why he should feel this premonitory sense, and in whatlay the dividing line, and where lay the difference.

  Yet as he stood there, with his back against the wall, he feltsomething dormant and deep-seated stirring within him. It was not asense of danger; it arose from no outward and tangible manifestations.But somewhere, and persistently, at the root of his being, he heardthat subliminal and submerged voice which could be neither silenced norunderstood.

  He took three groping paces forward, as if to put distance betweenhimself and this foundationless emotion which some part of him seemedstruggling to defy. But for the second time he stood stockstill,weighed down by the feeling of some presence, oppressed by the sense ofsomething vaguely hanging over him. He felt, as Frank had once said,how like a half-articulate key, at the end of an impoverished circuit,consciousness really was; how the spirit so often, in this onlyhalf-intelligible life of theirs, flutters feebly with hints andsuggestions to which it could never give open and unequivocalutterance. Even language, and language the most artful and finished,was, after all, merely a sort of clumsy Morse--its unwieldy dots anddashes left many a mood of the soul unknown and inarticulate.

  As he stood there, in doubt, questioning himself and that vague butdisturbing something which stood before him, he decided to put asummary end to the matter. Fumbling in his pocket, and disregardingany risk which the movement might entail, he caught up a match andstruck it.

  As he shaded the flame and threw it before him, his straining eyescaught only the glimmer of burnished metal--a guard-rail of somedescription--and the dark and ponderous mass of what seemed a depositvault.

  The match burned down, and dropped from his upthrust fingers. Hedecided to grope to the rail, and feel along the metal until he reachedsome point of greater safety. He extended his fingers before him, as ablind man might, and took one shuffling step forward.

  Then a thought came to him, with the suddenness and the shock of anelectric current, as a radiating tingle of nerves, followed by astrangely sickening sense of hollowness about the chest, swept throughhis body. _Could it be Frank herself in danger, and wanting him_?

  More than once, in the past, he had felt that mysterious medium, morefluid and unfathomable than electricity itself, carry its vague butvital message in to him. He had felt that call of Soul to Soul, acrossspace, along channels less tangible than Hertzian waves themselves, yetbearing its broken message, which later events had authenticated andstill later cross-questioning had doubly verified.

  He had felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmalwires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires oneanxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; thatthe Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried andgave out and received its countless messages--if only the fellow-Soulhad learned to await the signal and disentangle the dark and runicCode. Yes, he told himself, as he stood there, thoughtfully, as thoughbound to the spot by some Power not himself,--yes, consciousness waslike that little glass tube which electricians called a coherer, andall his vague impressions and mental-gropings were those disorderly,minute fragments of nickel and silver which only leaped into continuityand order under the shock and impact of those fleet and foreignelectric waves, which floated from some sister consciousness achingwith its undelivered messages. And the woman who had so often calledto him across space and silence, in the past, was now sounding themystic key across those ghostly wires. But what the messages was, orfrom what quarter it came, he could not tell.

  He stood there tortured and puzzled, torn by fear, thrilled and stirredthrough every fiber of his anxious body. This was followed by a senseof terror, sub-conscious and wordless and irrational, the kind ofterror that comes to a child in unknown places, in the dead of someunknown night.

  "_For the love of God, what is it_?" his dry lips demanded, speakingaloud into the emptiness about him.


  He waited, almost as if expecting some answering voice, as distinct andtangible as his own. But nothing broke the black silence thatblanketed him in from the rest of all the world and all its livingthings. The sweat of agony came out on his face; his body hungforward, relaxed and expectant.

  "_What is it you want to say_?" he repeated, in a hoarse and muffledscream, no longer able to endure that silent and nameless Somethingwhich surrounded him. "_What is it you want to say_?"