The beds are simple, rustic, heavy-made affairs, cloddish and without canopies or even posts for the same, which makes them seem very rude and ugly to the eye. However, they please me well, for I have read in my time—and once I saw the like—of bedsteads that had the canopy very great and solid and made to let down, like a press, upon the sleeper, to smother him in his sleep; and a devilish contrivance is such in those of our inns that are on the by-roads; and many a lone traveller has met a dreadful death, as I have proved in my business of a secret agent for the king. But there are few such tricks that I cannot discover in a moment, because of my training in all matters that deal with the ways of law-breakers, of which I am a loyal and sworn enemy.
But for me, at the Inn of the Black Crow, I have no great fear of any odd contrivance of death; nor of poison or drugging if I should be discovered, for there is a skill needed in such matters, and, moreover, the wench prepares my food and is my good friend; for it is always my way to have the women folk upon my side, and a good half of the battles of life are won if a man does this always. But what I have good cause to fear is lest the landlord, or any of the brute oafs of this lonesome moor, should wish to come at me in my sleep, and, maybe, hide in one of the great presses or the great cupboards to this end; and there you have my reasons for my nightly search of the room.
On this last night I paid a greater attention to all my precautions, and searched the big room very carefully, even to testing the wall behind the pictures, but found it of good moorland stone, like the four walls of the room.
The door, however, I made more secure by pushing one of the three linen-presses up against it, and so I feel pretty safe for the night.
Now, I had certainly a strong feeling that something might be in the wind, as the sailor-men say, against me; and a vague uneasiness kept me from undressing for a time, so that, after I had finished making all secure for the night, I sat a good while in one of the chairs by the table and wrote up my report.
After a time I had a curious feeling that someone was looking in at me through the barred window to my left, and at last I got up and loosed the heavy curtains down over both it and the far one, for it was quite possible for anyone to have placed one of the short farm-ladders against the wall and come up to have a look in at me. Yet in my heart I did not really think this was so, and I tell of my action merely because it shows the way that I felt.
At last I said to myself that I had grown to fancying things because of the friendly warning that the wench had given me over my dinner; but even as I said it, and glanced about the heavy, shadowy room, I could not shake free from my feelings. I took my candle and slipped off my shoes, so that my steps should not be heard below; then I went again through my pilgrimage of the room. I opened the cupboards and presses, each in turn, and finally once more I looked under the beds and even under the table, but there was nothing, nor could there have been to my common-sense reasoning.
I determined to undress and go to bed, assuring myself that a good sleep would soon cure me, but at first I went to my trunk and unlocked it. I took from it my brace of pistols and my big knife, also my lantern, which had a cunning little cap over the face and a metal cowl above the chimney, so that, by means of the cap and the cowl, I can make the lantern dark and yet have a good light burning within ready for an instant use.
Then I drew out the wads from my pistols, and screwed out the bullets and the second wads, and poured out the powder. I tried the flints, and found them spark very bright and clean, and afterwards I reloaded the pistols with fresh powder, using a heavier charge, and putting into each twelve large buckshot as big as peas, and a wad on the top to hold them in.
When I had primed the two pistols, I reached down into my boot and drew out a small weapon that I am never without; and a finely made pistol it is, by Chamel, the gunsmith, near the Tower. I paid him six guineas for that one weapon, and well it has repaid me, for I have killed eleven men with it in four years that would otherwise have sent me early out of this life; and a better pistol no man ever had, nor, for the length of the barrel, a truer. I reloaded this likewise, but with a single bullet in the place of the buckshot slugs I had put into my heavier pistols.
I carried a chair close to the bedside, and on this chair I laid my three pistols and my knife. Then I lit my lantern, and shut the cap over the glass; after which I stood it with my weapons on the seat of the chair.
I took a good while to undress, what with the way I kept looking round me into the shadows, and wishing I had a dozen great candles, and again stopping to listen to the horrid moan of the moor wind blowing in through the crannies of the windows, and odd times the dismal sounding lap, lap of the big Erskine creek below.
When at last I climbed up into the great clumsy-made bed, I left the candle burning on the table, and lay a good while harking to the wind, that at one moment would cease, and leave the big, dark room silent and chill-seeming, and the next would whine and moan again in through the window crannies.
I fell asleep in the end, and had a pretty sound slumber. Then, suddenly, I was lying there awake in the bed, listening. The candle had burned itself out and the room was very, very dark, owing to my having drawn the curtains, which I never did before.
I lay quiet, trying to think why I had waked so sharply; and in the back of my brain I had a feeling that I had been wakened by some sound. Yet the room was most oppressive quiet, and not even was there the odd whine or moan of the wind through the window crannies, for now the wind had dropped away entirely.
Yet there were sounds below me in the big taproom, and I supposed that a company of the rough creek and moor men were drinking and jollying together beneath me, for as I lay and listened there came now and then the line of a rude song, or a shouted oath, or an indefinite babel of rough talk and argument, all as the mood served. And once, by the noise, there must have been something of a free fight, and a bench or two smashed, by the crash I heard of broken woodwork.
After a while there was a sudden quietness, in which the silence of the big chamber grew on me with a vague discomfort. Abruptly I heard a woman’s voice raised in a clatter of words, and then there was a great shouting of hoarse voices, and a beating of mugs upon the benches, by the sounds.
I leaned up on my elbow in the bed and listened, for there was such a to-do, as we say, that I could not tell what to think.
As I leaned there and hearkened I heard the woman begin to scream, and she screamed, maybe, a dozen times, but whether in fear or anger or both I could not at once decide, only now I drew myself to the edge of the bed, meaning to open my lantern and have some light in the room. As I rolled on to the edge of the bed, and reached out my hand, the screaming died away, and there came instead, as I stiffened and harked, the sound of a woman crying somewhere in the house. And suddenly I comprehended, in some strange fashion of the spirit, that it was because of me—that some harm was to be done me, perhaps was even then coming.
I stretched out my hand swiftly and groped for the lantern; but my hand touched nothing, and I had a quick sickening and dreadful feeling that something was in the room with me, and had taken the chair away from the side of my bed, with all my weapons.
In the same moment that thus thought flashed a dreadful and particular horror across my brain, I realised, with a sweet revulsion towards security, that I was reaching out upon the wrong side of the bed, for the room was so utter dark with the heavy curtains being across the windows.
I jumped to my feet upon the bed, and as I did so there sounded two sharp blows somewhere beneath me. I turned to stride quickly across, and as I did so the whole bed seemed to drop from under me, as I was in the very act of my stride. Something hugely great caught me savagely and brutally by my feet and ankles, and in the same instant there was a monstrous crash upon the floor of the bedroom that seemed to shake the inn. I pitched backwards, and struck my shoulder against the heavy timbers, but the dreadful grip upon my feet never ceased: I rose upright, using the muscles of my thighs and stoma
ch to lift me; and when I was stood upright in the utter darkness I squatted quickly and felt at the thing which had me so horribly by the feet.
My feet seemed to be held between two edges that were padded, yet pressed so tight together that I could not force even my fist between them.
I stood up again and wrenched, very fierce and mad, to free my feet, but I could not manage it, and only seemed to twist and strain my ankles with the fight I made and the way I troubled to keep my balance.
I stopped a moment where I stood in the darkness on my trapped feet, and listened very intently. Yet there seemed everywhere a dreadful silence, and no sound in all the house, and I could not be sure whether I was still in the bedroom or fallen into some secret trap along with the bed when it fell from under me.
I reached up my hands over my head to see if I could touch anything above me, but I found nothing. Then I spread my arms out sideways to see whether I could touch any wall, but there was nothing within my reach.
All this time, while I was doing this, I said to myself that I must be still in the bedroom, for the taproom lay just below me; also, though the bed had fallen from under me, and I also had seemed to go down, yet I had not felt to have dropped far.
And then, in the midst of my fears and doubts and horrid bewilderment, I saw a faint little ray of light, no greater than the edge of a small knife, below me.
I squatted again upon my trapped feet, and reached out towards where I had seen the faint light; but now I could no longer see it. I moved my hands up and down, and from side to side, and suddenly I touched a beam of wood, seeming on a level with the thing which held my feet.
I gripped the beam and pulled and pushed at it, but it never moved; and therewith I put my weight on it and leaned more forward still; and so in an instant I touched a second beam.
I tried whether this second beam would hold me, and found it as firm and solid as the first. I put my weight on to it, using my left hand, and reached out my right hand, carrying myself forward, until suddenly I saw the light again, and had a slight feeling of heat not far below my face.
I put my hand towards the faint light and touched something. It was my own dark lantern. I could have cried out aloud with the joy of my discovery. I fumbled open the hinged cap that was shut over the glass, and instantly there was light upon everything near me.
A new amazement came to me as I discovered that I was yet in the bedroom, and the lamp was still upon the chair with my pistols, and that my feet had been trapped by the bed itself; for the two beams that I had felt were the supporting skeleton of one side of the heavy-made bedstead, and the mattress had shut up like a monstrous book; and what had been its middle part was now rested upon the floor of the bedroom, between the beams of its upholding framework, whilst the top edges had closed firmly upon my feet and ankles, so that I was held like a trapped rat. And a cunning and brutal machine of death the great bedstead was, and would have crushed the breath and the life out of my body in a moment had I been lying flat upon the mattress as a man does in sleep.
Now, as I regarded all this, with a fiercer and ever fiercer growing anger, I heard again the low sound of a woman weeping somewhere in the house, as if a door had been suddenly opened and let the sound come plain. Then it ceased, as if the door had been closed again.
Now, I saw that I must do two things. The one was to make no noise to show that I still lived, and the second was to free myself us speedily as I could. But first I snatched up my lamp and flashed it all round the big bedroom, and upon the door; but it was plain to me that there was no one gotten into the room, yet there might be a secret way in I now conceived, for how else should they come in to remove the dead if the door of the room were locked, just as I, indeed, had locked it before I made to sleep?
However, the first thing I shaped to do was to get free, and I caught up my knife from the chair and began to cut into the great box-mattress where the padding was nailed down solid with broad-headed clouts.
But all the time that I worked I harked very keen for any sound in the room that might show whether they were coming yet for my body. And I worked quick but quiet, so that I should make no noise, yet I smiled grim to myself to think how strange a corpse they should have to welcome them, and how lively a welcome!
And suddenly, as I worked, there came a faint creaking of wood from the far side of the big, dark room where stood one of the great clothes-cupboards. I stabbed my big knife into one of the edges of the closed mattress where it would be ready to my hand in the dark, and instantly closed the cover over my dark lantern and stood it by the knife. Then, in the darkness, I reached for my pistols from the chair seat, and the small one I stood by the knife, pushing the end of the barrel down between the mattress edges, so that its butt stood up handily for me to grip in the dark.
I caught up my two great pistols in my fists, and stared round me as I squatted, harking with a bitter eagerness, for it was sure enough that I must fight for my life, and, maybe, I should be found in the morning far out on the moor, like poor James Naynes was found. But of one thing I was determined, there should go two or three that night to heaven or to hell, and the choice I left with them, for it was no part of my business, but only to see that the earth was soundly rid of them.
Now there was a space of absolute silence, and then again I heard the creaking sound from the far end of the room. I stared hard that way, and then took a quick look round me, through the dark, to be sure that my ears had told me truly the direction of the sounds.
When I looked back again, there was a light inside the great cupboard, for I could see the glow of it around the edges of the door.
I knew now that there must be a hidden way into the bedroom, coming in through the back of the cupboard, which must be made to open; but I smiled a little to remember that I had locked the door, which had a very good and stout brass lock.
Yet I learned quickly enough that this was not likely to bother the men, for after I had heard them press upon the door, there was a low muttering of voices from within the cupboard, and then a sound of fumbling against the woodwork, and immediately there was a squeak of wood, and one end of the cupboard swung out like a door, and all that end of the bedroom was full of light from the lamp they had inside the cupboard.
In the moment when the end of the cupboard swung out there came to me the sudden knowledge that I must not be seen until the murderers were all come into the room, otherwise they would immediately give back into the cupboard before I could kill them. And I should indeed be in a poor case if they fetched up a fowling-piece to shoot at me; for they could riddle me with swan-shot, or the like, by no more than firing round the edge of the great oak cupboard; and I tethered there by the feet and helpless as a sheep the moment I had fired off my pistols!
Now, all this reasoning went through my brain like a blaze of lightning for speed, and in the same moment I had glanced round me, for the light from the cupboard was sufficient to show those things that were near me. I saw that there was half of a coverlid draped out from between the two edges of the great trap, and I snatched at it, and had it over me in a trice, and was immediately crouched there silent upon the edge of the mattress, as if I were simply a heap of the bed-clothing that had not been caught in the trap.
I had no more than covered myself and crouched still, when I heard the men stepping into the room.
“It’s sure got un proper!” I heard the voice of the knock-kneed Llan say.
And he crowed out one of his shrill, foolish laughs.
“There’ll be less of these king’s agents an’ the like after this!” I heard Jalbrok’s voice growl.
“Gglag the swine!” came a familiar voice. “I’ll put my knife into un, to make sure. Why, blow me if he don’t know enough to gaol us all.”
“There’ll be no need o’ knives,” said Jalbrok; “an if there is, it’s me that does it. He’s my lodger!”
“Share plunder alike! Share plunder alike!” said another voice from the cupboard, by the sound of
it.
And then there was the noise of heavy feet approaching, and the sound of scuffling in the big cupboard, as if a number of the brutish crew were fighting to get their clumsy bodies into the room, all in a great haste to see how the death trap had worked.
In that instant, and when the men were no farther from the bed than five or six paces, I hove the covering clean off me, and stood up on my trapped feet, but keeping my two great pistols behind my back, for I had them all now at my mercy.
I think they thought in that first moment that I was a ghost by the howl of terror that some of them sent up to heaven. Such a brutish crew no man need have paused to shoot down; yet I did, for I wished to see what they would do now that I had discovered myself to them.
They had, all of them, their belt-knives in their hands, as if they had meant to thrust them into my dead body rather than let no blood. The landlord carried a lantern in one hand and a pig-sticker’s knife, maybe two feet long from haft to point, in the other, and his eyes shone foully with the blood-lust such as you will see once in a lifetime in the red eyes of a mad swine.
So they had all of them stopped as I rose, and some had howled out, as I have told, in their sudden fear, thinking I was dead, and had risen in vengeance, as was seemly enough to their ignorant minds.
But now Jalbrok, the landlord, held his lantern higher, and drew the flat of his knife across his great thigh.
“Good-morning, mine host and kind friends all,” I said gently. “Wherefore this rollicking visit? Am I invited to join you in jollying the small hours, or does Master Gglag, you with the open mouth there, desire my help in the landing of good liquor from the sea?”
“Slit him!” suddenly roared Jalbrok, with something like a pig’s squeal in the note of his voice. “Slit him!”
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions Page 20