by Talbot Mundy
Then darkness became full of dread. Blair struck a match. Excitement glared in Taron Ling’s eyes. The match burned Blair’s fingers. He struck another, trying to see upward.
“Can you open that from below?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Is there another way out?”
“No.”
“Any water?”
“No.”
The fear of thirst strikes panic. Blair started to climb upward, but Taron Ling’s hand clutched his ankle. He kicked hard. The man clung; he had the strength of a gorilla.
“You obey,” said his voice in the dark, “or you die.”
Blair sat on a step and struck another match. It showed him Taron Ling’s face, sweat-wet, grinning with intention. Murder? What for? Money? He had none.
“What do you want?” he demanded. Then the match went out. He struck another; there were eight or nine remaining.
“I will have obedience.” said Taron Ling.
He let go of Blair’s ankle and descended backwards on hands and knees into total darkness. When the match burned out he spoke:
“Obey me and live. Disobey me and die. You think” — his voice throbbed and boomed— “that you were followed here, because you saw a signal. You believe those men will come for you. eh? They are Wu Tu’s men and Zaman Ali’s. I taught them the police signals. Is it likely I should take such pains to trap you. and neglect that? The commissioner’s men and Howland’s men — oh yes, yes, I know Howland — have been misled. That was a little silly easy matter. You are at my mercy.”
“What do you want?” Blair repeated. It was no use wishing he had not come. It was no use waiting until thirst should begin to torture him. He must use his wits while he had any left, and that necessity began to restore his self-control.
“You obey me, not Wu Tu,” said Taron Ling’s voice.
Thoughts raced through Blair’s brain. Why had Taron Ling deliberately quarreled with the Bat-Brahmin? Had there been no other way of inducing the man to haul the image back over the hole and shut them in? As for thirst — his mouth was already dry from fear and the heat and the stench of bat-filth — Taron Ling, too, would feel that presently. Judgment, he knew, and logic are among the first of the human faculties that wilt and vanish under the strain of trespass amid psychic arts that deceive no one more than the practitioner. All competent policemen know that. But even a professed occultist, persuaded by his own hypnotic skill that he was almost superhuman, would be unlikely to defy thirst. Not even a madman would do that. Taron Ling did not seem to be quite mad — yet; the road where madness lies in wait is sometimes long and devious.
He struck another match. Out of the darkness something fell into his lap. It was a human skull.
“Dozens have died in here,” said Taron Ling’s voice. “This is the secret way to Gaglajung that Ranjeet betrayed to the three kings.”
He tossed up another skull, then another. Blair hurled one skull back into the darkness.
“Damn your eyes,” he answered, “get going. What’s your game? You know a way out, that’s obvious.” He realized quite suddenly, and wondered why he had not realized before, that the quarrel had been deliberately timed to make the Bat close up the hole as an act of revenge. Possibly the Bat. did not know of another way out. Probably he resented the discovery of a secret that he and his antecedent impostors in office had kept for centuries. Whatever the secret might be, probably the Bat had welcomed an excuse to conceal it again, and let the intruders die parched in the dark. Conceivably the Bat had been induced to reveal the secret in the first instance? or perhaps the mad hermit had been induced to reveal it — by means of one of Taron Ling’s, hypnotic tricks. Such tricks bring reaction in their wake. Anger sometimes breaks hypnotic spells; it might have stirred the Bat’s evident madness to revolt and revenge. Taron Ling would surely not have run that risk unless he knew, or thought he knew, a way of escape.
Blair’s own competently governed anger began to come to his rescue. Why should he have been picked for this job — he of all people — he who hated all things that can not be stated in plain speech? The commissioner had chosen him, knowing his prejudice. Why? Wu Tu had dared to try to hypnotise him. Why him? Why had Henrietta treated him as if he were a disappointing fool without wit or understanding? What the devil did this beast Taron Ling mean by taking such pains to pursue and trap him? Why him? What did it all mean? He would find out. Forward, into the trap. Obey orders!
“Go on!” he commanded. “Lead the way!” There was a sort of vertigo, as he resisted a mesmeric effort to make him see things in the dark. He threw that off. He went forward, downward, with a hand on either wall and his riding-whip ready for action.
“Careful!” warned Taron Ling’s voice. “Here is danger!”
“Face it then!” he retorted, fighting-angry. He meant to hit the man if he could reach him.
A fight in the dark would be better than views of invisible things that crowded the — darkness, as they do in dreams, memories — spaceless, void, intangible — the tiger, the shrine, the Bat’s face, the hermit’s, Wu Tu’s eyes, the old Rangar and the god Ganesha, the commissioner’s iron-gray smile — and then Henrietta.
“Go on!” he commanded. He would not ask questions. He would make the man show him.
He trod on a rolling bone and almost fell, striking his spur upon the last step. He sat down and removed his spurs, began to thrust them in his pocket but threw them away savagely. They fell a prodigious distance; it seemed a minute before he heard them strike on rock beneath him. Then he heard Taron Ling up above him in front, scrambling over loose stones, some of which fell and remeasured the depth of the darkness on his left hand.
He thrust outward to the right with the riding-whip and touched nothing. Groping with his foot, he found the bone that had, tripped him. He picked it up. It felt like a human thigh-bone. He threw it away to the right. It fell what seemed an endless distance before he heard it strike bottom. Evidently he was on a ledge between two precipices, and he hated precipices. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled forward. The ledge was irregular. In one place it was less than a foot wide; but it was only about twenty feet long and he soon found a rough, sloping ramp at the end that led sharply upward.
Remembering there were loose stones, he crawled up that carefully, pausing, whenever he was sure of his hold, to listen for Taron Ling. But he reached smooth, level rock without overtaking the man. Then he stood up and reached out his arms in all directions, touching nothing.
There was no sound. He went forward,, feeling his way with the riding-whip. Within a minute he had lost sense of direction. Forward, backward, it was all the same fathomless, dark silence. Then he saw the monster coming toward him — the same green-eyed head and belly on eight writhing arms that had approached him in front of the tent. If it had been real — if he had thought it was real, he could have faced it with less horror. He groped for his matches, and struck one. The thing vanished. Taron Ling stood grinning at him, ten feet away.
The match gave him a glimpse of cavern walls before it burned out and’ Taron Ling spoke.
“You are helpless!”
“Am I?” He charged, striking out with his whip. He struck air twice, and with the third blow struck home, following that with his left fist. Then he felt himself clutched in frenzied fingers, so he kicked Taron Ling’s heel out from under him. They fell together, and he heard Taron Ling’s head strike the rock floor; then the clutch of his fingers relaxed and he lay still.
Another match. There was blood on the rock. Taron Ling lay dead, with a broken skull, with one eye open. Six matches left. Silence. Dreadful darkness. Then a fluttering blow in the face. It stank. A bat had struck him.
How do the bats get out of here? he wondered. He wiped the smell of the bat off his face and then stepped out with both hands stretched in front of him until he found the cavern wall. He felt he had slain a monster, not a human being. But what next, alone in all that darkness —
&n
bsp; Then he had found the cavern wall by groping. Blair counted his remaining matches. Six. He struck one. He could not afford enough light to search Taron Ling’s clothing. The match revealed two dark openings, almost opposite each other. He had completely lost sense of direction; in the struggle Taron Ling had fallen sideways, not backwards, so that the position of his body afforded no clue. He chose the wrong direction and nearly fell down the ramp up which he had scrambled five minutes before. That increased his state, of panic, but he found the wall again and felt his way along it to the other opening, reserving his remaining matches for emergency. It was absolutely pitch-dark. He could see nothing — not even his hand before his eyes; There was not even an audible echo until he groped his way out of the cavern and into the tunnel. Then the echo, of his footfall began to rumble along ahead of him, as if the tunnel were crowded with hurrying men.
Whistling is one of the ways by which a man can recover his self-control. He tried it, and his first effort was merely a Whisper, because his lips were dry. The whisper made a sound in the tunnel like a.soft wind. That suggested another thought. He wetted one finger as well as his lips, and held up the finger. There was a perceptible, although very slight current of air. There must be an opening somewhere. His second attempt to whistle was shrill and off-key; the sound went shrieking an immeasurable distance, that might be miles or might be an illusion due to the formation of the tunnel, the state of his own nerves, and the darkness.
As the hollow shriek faded and died, it resembled a murmur of human voices very far off. It occurred to him then for the first time that very likely there were other people in the caverns. If so, they must certainly have heard him. Taron Ling’s behavior was explainable on that supposition. It was incredible that he could have set his trap so well without some organized assistance. He had boasted that the watchers, whom Blair had mistaken for the commissioner’s or Howland’s undercover men. were Wu Tu’s agents; and that was conceivably true. If so, others of Wu Tu’s agents might be wafting at a rendezvous for Taron Ling and perhaps also for himself, for some reason not yet evident.
Assuming that to be true, Taron Ling’s motive could be guessed at. Both he and Wu Tu had used hypnotic methods. Taron Ling had used a kind of third degree, to create a mental condition quite familiar to psychologists, in which the victim does what he is told. He had then demanded obedience to himself, in place of Wu Tu. She. in Bombay, also had insisted on obedience.
That might even mean, although it was improbable almost to the point of impossibility, that Wu Tu herself was somewhere in the caverns, and that she and Taron Ling were false allies, at secret cross-purposes. Anyhow, more than probably there was a very definite reason why Taron Ling had behaved as he did. Presumably he, Blair Warrender, in some way was important in the schemes of a number of people, who might be expecting him. In the circumstances that was an encouraging thought, and he whistled again, then shouted, “Koi hai?”
The shout went thundering along the tunnel like the voice of a multitude, until the words lost shape and died away at last in a hollow murmur — oi-ai — oi-ai — oi-ai. There was no answer. He waited until the ensuing silence, became as” terrifying. as the darkness and he knew he must go forward or lose all command of himself. The echo of his first footstep made him jump nearly out of skin. He knew then exactly how third-degree witnesses feel. He craved even Taron Ling’s company.
He spread his arms on the invisible wall and pressed his whole body against it because he felt there was a precipice behind him, although he knew there was not. He drove his toes against the wall, as if he stood on a narrow ledge with his heels on nothing. Frantically he fought against thought, fearing he might begin to see. things in the dark and go mad.
But the thought of Henrietta intruded, insisted and won. Where was Henrietta? Had they brought her to these caverns? If so was she enduring this silent darkness? Could he find her? He must find her. There was no other picture than Henrietta in his mind after that — Henrietta on the rock in moonlight — Henrietta in Bombay amid the colored garden-party lanterns — Henrietta at Ganesha’s shrine, garlanded amid the shadows, watching a mad hermit bless a tiger-skin — Henrietta with hands over her eyes (but he could see the eyes through the hands) in the chair in front of his tent —
He did not think of himself any more. He thought only of her. Gradually the terror loosened its grip. It left him feeling weak-kneed but in command of his senses. He began to move forward very slowly, groping his way along the wall with his left hand, almost feeling he was not alone, because the picture of Henrietta in his thought was so clear and persistent. There was a weird, exciting, nervous but not too terrible sensation of following Henrietta into the heart of a mystery. The echoes of his own footsteps almost made him think he heard her. He remembered speculations such as all men make at one time or another. Death, and groping one’s way into life after death, might be like this. But he stopped after fifty or sixty careful paces and leaned on the wall again. That mental image of Henrietta was becoming too real. He was beginning to imagine himself dead and in the next world. He was losing his mind. So he stood perfectly still, hardly breathing, to let the echoes die away in silence. He tried to force himself to think. Here he was, a policeman, with a definite job, in a bad predicament. What was the sane thing to do? Go back? Climb those steps and try to move Ganesha’s image from, beneath? He could not imagine himself doing it; nor could he drive the picture of Henrietta from his mind. She was somewhere on ahead of him. She must be. Without knowledge or reason he knew that, and felt an irresistible impulse to go forward and find her.
Those last echoes were a long time dying; They appeared even to grow stronger. There was something added to them — something with a slap in it that, he knew afterward, should have instantly informed him. It was probably more than a minute — an eternity foreshortened — before he suspected the sound of feet in loose slippers approaching. He nearly froze then, into immobility.
When he forced himself to move, his hand trembled so that he could hardly get a match out of the box. However, he struck one at last. It gave him a glimpse of a tunnel that seemed partly natural and partly hewn through onyx or some similar formation. The sound of the approaching footsteps ceased before the match went out. He stood still, listening, with the picture of the weirdly colored tunnel gradually fading from his eyes.
He could hear nothing. But after a minute, or perhaps two minutes, dim light crept toward him along the left-hand wall of the tunnel, at a point some distance off, where it curved to the right and sloped upward. The light was not quite steady. He felt reasonably sure it came from an electric torch in someone’s hand. It grew no stronger, and moved no farther along the tunnel wall; and because of the curve of the wall it left a diagonal zone of total darkness. It might be possible to creep along that dark zone unseen, and to peer around the curve before showing himself. He decided to make the attempt.
But his nerves were in no shape for still hunting; it was very difficult to move without making a noise. He tried to move on tiptoe, but his sinews trembled. At the first sound he made, the light was switched off suddenly. He made a dash for it then, awakening a thousand booming echoes and reaching the opposite wall while the distance to the right-hand curve was still sharply impressed on his mind.
By groping his way along the wall he reached the bulge of the curve almost before the picture of it had faded from his eyes. There he waited, hardly breathing, flattened against the wall; and after a long wait the light came on again. There was a perceptible sound; he thought he recognized the faint click of the switch of an electric torch. But it might be a trigger.
He lay down then, as close to the wall as he could crowd himself, and very gradually crawled until he could see around the corner. Someone was holding a powerful light at the top of a long slope. He appeared to be sitting and holding the light on his knees to keep it steady. Not improbably he had a firearm in the other hand, but it was impossible to see beyond the light; it had a big lens and might be electr
ic, or, even an acetylene bicycle lamp. It revealed the floor and walls of the sharply rising tunnel in minute detail, including a huge zigzag shadow that crossed the floor from side to side and seemed to indicate a chasm. It looked like a split caused by an earthquake.
He memorized its position carefully, estimating the number of steps he should take to reach it. He judged there would be a jump of about for or five feet to be made, up-hill, at the narrowest part of the chasm near where it touched and split the right-hand wall. It would be a desperate jump to have to take if the man should switch the’ light off.
“Koi hai!” he shouted, and then hugged the floor, pressed flat, half expecting a bullet. He could not catch a word of the answer because it was all confused by echoes. He could not even tell what language it was spoken in, although it was certainly not English. It was a short answer — six or eight words; Then the light was switched off, and when it reappeared it had grown dim in the distance.
He got to his feet in a hurry; he coy Id no longer see the chasm in the middle of the upward slope of the tunnel floor; there was merely an unsteady pale light up above and beyond, to show that someone who carried the light was moving away rapidly. If he was expected to follow, there was no time to waste.
He started to climb up the slope on his hands and knees. It was quite dark when he reached the chasm; he had to feel for it. Groping for the far edge with his riding-whip he discovered that the gap was wider than he had estimated. He could just touch the edge with the end of the whip, and it was three or three-and-a-half feet higher than the place where he must jump off. Measuring again and feeling about in the dark for a narrower place, he dropped the riding-whip. It seemed like an eternity before the echo of its fall came cracking upward, and the very echo seemed to stink of death.
To hesitate then would be fatal, he knew that. Thirst was beginning to torture him, and he knew his nerve would give way if he gave it half an opportunity. He set both feet on the brink of the chasm and sprang so violently that his feet slipped backward, reducing the impetus. He fell waist-high on the upper ledge with his fingers scrambling madly at smooth rock and his legs dangling in the chasm. He could touch nothing with his feet; they seemed to weigh a ton apiece and to be dragging him downward, but his fingers found a crack in the rock and he held on.