by Russell Kirk
How many hours later it was that a noise woke him, he could not say. What could make a noise in the Bottle? Nothing living. It was a faint dragging noise. Then high overhead, he could perceive the faintest halfmoon of light. Someone was dragging back the stone lid of the Bottle, slowly.
Would Jackman and Royall pull him out and put him to more direct torture? If they had tormented the truth about him out of Mary MacAskival, the odds were that they would put him into the sea, as a man who knew too much of them, and whose death might be explained with tolerable ease. It might be easier for him to refuse to come up, and hope that aid might come from the mainland in time. They could descend, of course, and tie him, and haul him to the top; but that would mean a fight. If they shot him, that would be evidence of foul play, supposing his body were washed up.
Now something scraped and rustled, and barely brushed the top of his head: it must be the rope ladder. Reaching up, he grasped the thin strip of wood that was the bottom rung. Still Jackman, if he were above, said nothing. But light probed downward toward Logan; someone up there held an electric torch. He had might as well take this dubious chance. Although it had been long since Logan had gone in for gymnastics, he had strong arms, and so contrived to pull his chin up to the level of the bottom rung, get a fresh grip, and bring up his legs. And then he commenced the swaying climb toward the Bottle’s mouth.
As he neared the top, the torch dazzled him. Then a hand caught his, helping him over the edge to the floor of the crypt. No sooner had Logan got to his feet than a pair of arms was flung around his neck, and a small body hung for a moment upon his, in fright and delight. “They’ve broken no bone of you, Hugh?” said Mary MacAskival. Before he could reply, she kissed him, and then flashed the electric torch the length of his body, as if to be sure he were all there. “Don’t speak above a wee whisper,” she murmured in his ear, “and come over here, for we must be off.” Taking his hand, she led him through the dark toward a corner of the crypt.
“One glimpse of you, anyway,” said Hugh. Taking the torch, he sent the beam over and behind her. She was barefoot but with a pair of little walking-shoes slung round her neck. On her back she had Logan’s own rucksack, looking as if it were crammed with things. Her back was to what seemed to be the low circular coping of a well, with a derelict windlass above it.
“We daren’t talk now,” the girl said, “for we’ll have but a quarter of an hour, at best, before Niven gives the alarm. He’s sentry at the garden door on the floor above. I told him I was taking you food and water, which you’re not supposed to have, and he let me pass, for he knows I am a red-haired witch. Jackman will thrash the poor fellow within an inch of his life when he finds we’re gone. Niven never thought I could get out with you, of course. If he’d known that, even I couldn’t have seduced him.”
“Seduced him?”
She chuckled. “Oh, don’t be silly. Has Dr. Jackman been telling you more lies about me? I mean, subverted his loyalty to Jackman. I gave Niven five pounds and nearly a full bottle of rum. All right now, Hugh: take off your trousers.”
He was bemused. “Whatever for?”
“Why, silly, we’re going down the cistern, and there’s water in it, and you might catch your death of cold outside, with wet trousers. I think you may keep your shirt on; we sha’n’t go so deep, I hope. Here, take the pack, and carry it, and stuff your trousers in it. I can kilt up my skirt once we’re at the level of the water, but you could hardly slip off your trousers in the middle of the shaft. You’d best take off your shoes and stockings, and sling them round your neck, the way I have, too. You needn’t be shy: I’ll go down first, and I’ll point the torch the other way.”
Logan stared into the cistern. In the beam of the torch, he could see rusted iron rungs set into the masonry, leading downward; but they ended in still water. “If we’re to drown, Mary,” he said, “it had might as well be in the sea.”
“What with the gutters of the tower being half clogged,” she went on, “the water level down there is very low nowadays – twelve or fifteen feet, at best – and I feared they might find the arch, but they haven’t. It’s perfectly feasible: Malcolm Mor and I did it four years ago, like a bomb. Why, it’s a lark, Hugh; come along. The last one down is an old maid.” Hiking her skirt halfway up her white thighs, Mary Mac-Askival stepped over the well-coping, swung round, and began to descend the slimy iron rungs. “I locked the crypt door on the inside, for I have keys, you know,” she whispered up, “but Niven may be pounding on it any second, so be quick with you.”
There was nothing for it but to obey this madcap. Down Logan went into the cistern; he hoped the old rungs would hold. Once his foot caught the girl’s fingers, and she suppressed a cry. He heard a faint splash of water below, and turned the torch downward, looking between his bare legs. Mary MacAskival, her skirt held up almost to her shoulders, was more than waist-high in the black water. “There is nothing in the world,” she volunteered, “quite like a cold tub. Now do as I do, and mind your head, for from floor to ceiling is scarcely more than four feet.” She vanished.
Dismayed, Hugh Logan descended to his waist in the cold water. Then, on his left, he saw the arch of which Mary had spoken: a roundheaded masonry arch, very old. The cistern water came to within two feet of the crown of it. Gingerly, Logan stretched out a leg, found the floor of a passage under the arch, gripped Mary’s outstretched hand thrust back from the passage, and swung himself from the iron rungs to a low tunnel nearly filled with water; he had to stoop so that his face cleared the surface by only a few inches, and his little pack, strapped to his back, scraped against the roof.
Squeezing his hand, Mary MacAskival pulled him along the black passage, the torch-beam gleaming on the water. She had her skirt twisted round her neck. “One thing’s certain,” she panted, “they’ll not hear us here. In the old days this place was flooded altogether, except when The MacAskival let water out of the cistern so that men could enter the passage. Malcolm Mor – he was the old gardener, remember? – told me that his father’s father’s father’s uncle knew of this place, though no living man had seen it for a hundred years and more. Malcolm and I found it out together. We had grand larks.”
After six yards or so, the floor began to slope upward, fairly sharply; and after a dozen yards, they were free of the water. “No trousers for you yet, modest Hugh,” Mary said, though she had let her skirt fall into place. “There is water still to come.” A moment later, they entered a small square rock chamber, beyond which loomed another narrow passage. “The Picts made this, as they made the Whiskey Bottle, Hugh. Look there.” She pointed the torch toward one wall, and by it Hugh made out a faint band of carving on the wall: little hooded and caped figures, faceless, some riding on queer little ponies. “This was a chapel, think, or a tomb; but we haven’t a moment to spare just now.” She led the way into the further passage, the floor of which sloped downward again. “We’re far beyond the Old House now, Hugh.”
The passage shot abruptly downward, and then ended in a solid barrier of living rock. Did the girl mean them to crouch here indefinitely, on the chance that help might come from the mainlandbefore they starved? “I think the Picts dug all this for a temple,” she was saying, “or a king’s tomb; but the MacAskivals used it as a sortie-port in time of siege, or a way of escape if worst came to worst. Oh, I’m not strong enough. Tug at it, Hugh!” She was kneeling on the rough floor. Handing the torch back to her, Hugh Logan felt under his hands a thick stone slab, roughly rectangular. He tugged. It could be slid to one side, far enough to allow them to squeeze through to whatever lay beneath. And beneath was more water. But this water splashed and sucked, and the strong stench of seaweed came up from it; and from beyond came the roar of the wild Carnglass tide.
“We’re to go into that, Mary?” But Mary MacAskival already had swung her handsome bare legs through the gap. The water just below snarled and surged in the cave, as if full of murderous desire.
“It’s past midnight, Hugh, an
d the tide has ebbed.” She jumped down.
After all, Logan found when he followed her, the water came only to their knees. At high tide, the passage would be impossible. He scratched a foot on some sharp submerged stone. Roof and floor of the cave now angled downward, and the water deepened; but by the time they reached the entrance, it was no higher than their waists. “In the old days,” Mary said, “little coracles came into this at low tide. There is another cave like this on the northern shore, but larger, and far harder to reach from the land.” She plucked a bit of seaweed from a rock. “This is the carrageen. In a better time, I will make you a pudding of it.” Then she ducked through the low mouth of the cave, Hugh Logan behind her, and they were in the night, by the ocean, a cliff at their backs, a splendid moon overhead.
For the first time in many days, the mist and drizzle had lifted from Carnglass altogether; and for these islands, the sea was calm. But the clear beauty of the night was small comfort to these two fugitives: Jackman and his gang might hunt them down by that round moon. Mary splashed through a rock pool toward the relatively low cliff of gray stone that met the ocean at this point. “I think, Hugh, that by this time they will have searched the Old House for us, and Jackman will know we have got out. But they will not know the way that we have gone, and perhaps Jackman cannot make the men follow him out of the house this night, for they are afraid of every shadow now. Here we’re too close to the Old House for safety. We’ll pass between Cailleach and the sea-cliffs, and so up to St. Merin’s Chapel; that’s best.” When the two of them had got to the foot of a faint path that seemed to wind up the cliff, Mary put on shoes and stockings. “Now, Mr. Barrister Logan, you pillar of respectability, you may wear trousers again.”
They climbed; they scrambled; they trotted; when they could, they ran. From the cliffs they descended into the glen that twisted round the hill of Cailleach, and hurried through heaps of stones along a forgotten trail; here, once, had been a village, and Duncan MacAskival’s people had lived under the thatch of one of these ruins. The girl was agile as a deer; it was all Logan could do to keep up with her, for his rucksack was curiously heavy. The moonlight helped them to make speed, but also it would leave them naked unto their enemies, should Jackman and the rest come this way. For more than an hour they hurried, until they had crossed a valley and saw before them the steep way up to the highest point of Carnglass, the headland on which stood St. Merin’s Chapel, with the graveyard round it. Then Mary flung herself exhausted on the heather, and Logan sank down panting beside her. Two or three strange white shapes scurried away from them; Logan started. “Are those things deer or goats?”
The tired girl laughed at him. “Carnglass sheep, like no other sheep on earth. Long legs and long necks, and great leapers, and altogether wild.” Everything in this forgotten island, it seemed, defied the tooth of time.
But it was no hour for philosophical observations. So soon as they had got a little strength back, they must be away to the top of the island. And what they could hope for there, aside from a brief respite, was more than Logan could see. Unarmed, they would be much easier game than Donley had been. Jackman and the rest would have their blood up. This girl, it might be, had destroyed herself by trying to save him. “Here, Hugh,” Mary said, “you’ll want this.” She took from the rucksack a paper in which were wrapped some scraps of meat, two boiled potatoes, and a piece of bread, all this salvaged furtively from Lady MacAskival’s dinner-tray. Logan, indeed, was ravenous, and he ate the lot, Mary insisting that she had got down a late supper. As he ate, she told him what had passed since he went down the Whiskey Bottle.
When Jackman and Royall had taken Logan to the study at gunpoint, Mary MacAskival had run to her room and locked herself in. It was only much later in the day, when Jackman and most of the men were searching for Carruthers, that she had bullied out of Niven the fact that Logan was shut in the Whiskey Bottle. In her room, she had taken out of a chest the only weapon she had, the ancient dirk that was said to have been Askival’s, and had sat with it in her lap, expecting all the time to have Jackman and Royall turn upon her next. But Jackman had only tried her door; and, not being able to enter, had called out that he would deal with her later. And then he had gone out to comb the island for Carruthers, whom they did not find; nor did they find anyone else. The men returned after sunset, Jackman and Royall going back to the study, where they sat talking for hours. The girl had crept to the study door and had caught fragments of their argument.
No, they had not found Carruthers; but they had turned up something. When Donley’s body was searched in the cellar, one of the men discovered in a pocket a water-soaked note. It was nearly illegible; but they could make out Logan’s signature, and that it was addressed to the police. On this evidence, Jackman and Royall abandoned their notion that Logan was an agent of Vlanarov; they now took him for a detective. The question remained as to what they ought to do with the man in the Whiskey Bottle. Royall thought it best to hold him there until they could get some boat, and then to run for it, abandoning their whole project. But Jackman was for death: Logan knew too much, and must go over the cliff. The two exhausted fanatics still were debating when the girl slipped away, but she believed they would dispose of Logan in the morning, if not sooner.
So she took Logan’s pack, with what food she could get her hands upon, and a pint bottle of paraffin, and Askival’s dirk; and she bullied and wheedled Niven, on guard in the old tower; and to her immense satisfaction, she had got Logan clean away. Jackman and his people had no notion of the existence of that passage out of the cistern; Lady Mac-Askival herself had not known of it. When she ran, Mary knew that she left her aunt in danger, but Jackman’s fanatic voice behind the study door convinced her she dared not delay; Jackman would act before his time ran out altogether. And here she was, lying beside Hugh Logan on the heather.
Behind them bulked the northern heights where St. Merin’s Chapel stood. They could hear a little waterfall tumbling in that still night, from the cliff tops. The burn ran through the heather and bracken close by them, lower down joining a stream that entered the sea by Askival harbor. Now they must climb to their last forlorn refuge. First they drank from the peaty burn; then Logan shouldered the rucksack, and up they started. They hardly spoke in the course of that hard nocturnal climb.
From the summit, nearly an hour later, most of Carnglass was dimly visible to them in the moonlight. They could make out specks of light away to the southwest: lamps burning in the Old House. “Hugh,” Mary said, laying a hand on his arm, “Carnglass is the oldest place in the world, and the loveliest. Do you hate it? You’ve seen only fright and death here. But it was Dr. Jackman that brought the terror. If – if we live, Hugh, I’ll show you Carnglass as you ought to see it. Can you forgive me for having drawn you into this terror?”
“One crowded hour of glorious life,” Logan told her, “really is worth an age without a name. And if I’d not come, I’d never have met Miss Mary MacAskival, would I?”
“No,” she said, with a little sob, “no. But we can’t loiter here.” She took Askival’s dirk from the rucksack. “Hugh, take this, and cut some branches off the trees around the chapel, as quickly as you can; and I’ll scrape together some dead sticks and bits of dry heather; I made a little pile of them here weeks ago, on the chance that I might need to light them one day. We can burn the rucksack, too, and my jacket. They’ll make no grand beacon, but we can do no more. The paraffin I brought will start them blazing.”
Logan stared at her. “Who’d see the fire, except Jackman’s boys?”
“There’s a chance, Hugh. The night is clear. Besides, what other scheme is there? And my people will come. They may not come soon enough, but they will come.”
“Your people?” The girl must be sunk in a Carnglass fantasy.
“Hurry, Hugh,” was all she said. “It won’t be long before dawn.”
They built their poor futile beacon, with what fuel they had on that hilltop, and they poured the par
affin upon it, and they set it alight with one of Logan’s matches, and they added to it the rucksack and Mary’s tweed jacket and Hugh’s coat. It flared somewhat better than Hugh had expected. But what possibility existed of this being seen by any vessel passing in the night, or of being acted upon? And it was almost certain that it would guide Jackman.
“We’re only targets here,” Logan said. “At the chapel, we’d have some shelter.” They climbed still higher on that cliff-plateau, until they came to a low drystone dyke. Beyond it were tombstones, white in the moonlight. This was Carnglass graveyard; and in the middle of the graveyard stood a long, low medieval building, St. Merin’s Chapel, battered by five centuries. Away to their right, a tall ruin, infinitely older than the chapel, round, nearly forty feet high, windowless and roofless, loomed at the brink of the cliff.
On its rough stones flickered the light of their little impromptu beacon. “They call that the Pict’s House,” said Mary, “or sometimes the Firgower’s House.” The tower’s circular wall slanted slightly inward, all round, for some twenty feet of its height; then it shot perpendicularly to its summit. It was what was called a broch, a strong place, Pictish work beyond question. “I do not think that really the Pictish chief lived here,” Mary went on, “for that room and the passages under the Old House, have the look of his palace. The Picts lived underground, you know. This was a watchtower, and a place of refuge.”
She turned toward the chapel. The firelight was reflected, between them and the medieval building, upon a great Celtic cross, perhaps fifteen feet high, carved with grotesques and convoluted interlacing bands; and it leant heavily to one side. This was the Cross of Carnglass, set up by the missionaries of St. Columba in the dim Irish age, St. Merin’s Cross. Mary led Logan toward it; and, as they came close up, she pulled from one of the stunted rowan trees which brooded over that windswept graveyard a little twig, on which the first leaves of spring had opened. She thrust it into the topmost buttonhole of Logan’s shirt. “The rowan keeps off wraiths and evil spirits, Hugh,” she said, “and St. Merin’s kirkyard is famous for them. Niven thinks I am the chief of them. Look at me: am I a witch?”