Chapter 49
Deadliest Menace
Bryson’s dreams had been surreal, and of an incomprehensible nature. Shimmering lights and freakish sounds had whirled about him like an immense vortex.
And he calmly sat upright on the end of the bed!
He noted the air, and that it was cool and calm in the room. But he spotted that there was a blanket of snow falling outside. He remembered being in a huddled posture, with blankets tightly wrapped about him.
An array of silent knocks made the door vibrate. And he stopped breathing slowly.
Bryson sighed, and shifted across the floor, listening for sounds from the outer corridor.
He swiftly unlocked it, and pulled it slightly open.
Merton and Mortimer stood outside, suggesting something was along the corridor. Bryson nodded, and closed the door.
He quickly dressed, but when he opened the door, they were gone. So he shut the door, and went to the room, wondering what they were doing. It had to be significant, as they had been positive about it being a good idea to wake him, in the middle of the night.
Before he arrived at the room, he gasped, hearing the sounds blaring out. It then mildly amused him, as it were as if Merton and Mortimer had two creatures fighting each other in the room. He tried to compare it to his dream, but he could not notice any connection.
The disturbance seemed as if it had different states.
He imagined it as a warp through space and time, causing many different things to occur about the castle, and in his dream he had seen inside the warp itself (and the room lay somewhere beyond it, connected through it to many locations throughout space and time).
But what he could never understand was what the things were doing. Did the things, or whatever they were, become part of the disturbance, while near it, when it automatically opened, at night?
Bryson dragged himself to the doorway, wondering what would happen if the source of the disturbance were closer!
Three scientists rushed passed, and rushed in, carrying cables, leading from all the rooms next to it.
Merton and Mortimer were standing at the hole in the wall, where, to his astonishment, the sounds were mainly emerging, blaring out from the depths of the shaft.
If the sounds had been astonishing before, they now were mind-bending. They came screaming through the shaft with fury. The things now sounded as though they were under the castle, trapped in some form of field.
The scientists rushed about, setting up their new equipment, connecting the equipment from room to room.
“What do think is down there?” Merton carefully asked, giving him the impression that they might be going to do something. And Mortimer then gave him the impression that he had waited all his life to do it!
Bryson started to realize the implications of the find, and that they would have to check what was there.
Bryson quickly asked: “Investigate all these walls?”
“Yes!” Mortimer replied. “We’d all the best equipment that we could get hold of brought in – to examine inside the walls.”
“What did they find out?”
“There are small shafts running through them ...”
“Where did they lead? Did these shafts go under the building?”
“They stopped just below ground level!”
“All the shafts are connected together,” Merton continued. “They must run through most of the building. We’re positive that they were for an ancient form of ventilation ...”
Bryson did not like Mortimer’s behavior: he had something planned. And he soon saw that he had even underestimated them: as Merton removed a large roll of nylon rope, from an old large nylon bag.
“I’m going down ...!” Mortimer then spoke.
“What’s wrong with lowering some equipment?”
Bryson then noticed that the scientists were getting ready to do that later.
“I want to experience and evaluate what’s there first,” he said, putting on a harness.
Surely they had not brought that with them. What had they been going to do with an old rope and harness?
“Why not send down a camera, with a few lights attached? We could easily obtain a good picture, and sounds. And you’ll have evidence of what’s there!”
“After some consideration – over the last hour! – I’ve decided to go down and experience what’s there. It’s something I would very much like to do. And I shall take a camera with me.”
Once Merton had tested that the harness was correctly fitted, he fixed the end of the rope to metal pegs that they had attached to the wall at the window.
Mortimer slowly climbed through the gap, and squeezed into the shaft.
It was no use: Mortimer’s bewildered face disappeared into the blackness.
“Where did you find that ...?” Bryson moaned, expecting to hear Mortimer’s screams in the noises.
“It was in a cupboard, in the kitchen. I saw it there when we went through there.”
Bryson tried to recognize any change to the tones, which would indicate Mortimer was influencing anything.
“What was climbing gear doing there?” he moaned aloud, wondering whose it was. It was old!
Bryson then noticed that the rope had stopped moving, and he knew that Mortimer had reached the bottom.
“Perhaps one of the servants left it there.”
“What would one of the servants be doing with mountain climbing gear?”
Bryson felt his tiredness, and wished that he had stayed in bed.
“They could have used it to climb up something else.”
The rope started swaying and vibrating furiously, giving the impression that Mortimer was frantically climbing up it – to escape.
He clearly had not realized how hard it would be to climb out of it.
Bryson and Merton pulled the rope up, while Mortimer used it to move out of it.
Suddenly, Mortimer’s frantic face appeared at the edge, desperate to climb out, almost slipping.
“Get me out of here!” he hollered, making Bryson and Merton go as fast as they could to help him.
Even as he landed on the floor, he was still rushing to remove the harness, shocking them even further – and that they might now be in danger.
But, as he removed it, he rushed away through the door, running towards the other rooms, leaving them waiting for something terrible to appear. But he had not suggested what.
At the edge of the doorway, they watched him running along the corridor.
“Where is he going?” Merton muttered, just staring, bewildered. “This castle is one hell of a crazy place!”
Bryson watched the drifting currents of snowflakes blow by the window.
He really felt like some rest, in bed. It had been a long day, and the next day might be even longer.
What was Mortimer doing? Even though he had done what he himself felt like doing – rushing away, without saying anything (but to go to bed instead).
Why were they not tired like him? What had they been doing at the room anyway?
In the darkness, at the end of the corridor, he saw two figures rushing towards them – resembling a sort of dream view, in his sleepy mental state.
He then saw Mortimer, and that he had dragged Inspector Bailey out of his bed.
Bryson turned to observe the hole in the wall, wondering what he had found. It had to be something real, as he would not have awakened Inspector Bailey. Had Mortimer found another body down there? He gasped, and looked along the corridor.
“Not again!” he moaned.
He could not stand it. And they might have to stay up for a long time, to obtain the conclusion.
Bryson felt so sleepy that when they rushed past, he was hardly aware that they were there.
Then, as they raced away, in the opposite direction, he realized he had better follow.
He was sure that they had not wanted to tell them what it was. But it might have just looked that way.
Bryson shrugged, and t
hen followed Merton, who started chasing after them.
In the sounds, from the room, he heard a rhythmical tapping, increasing in volume, making him slow to listen. Then he realized that it was footsteps rushing towards him.
From the end of the corridor, behind him, two policemen came running along, still fixing gun holsters on their waists.
Bryson then saw that Inspector Bailey now had his gun in his hand, as he arrived at the stairs. He also had a torch, but it was switched off, keeping them in dark.
The situation was worse than he had anticipated. If someone did not die, it would be surprising.
Bryson and Merton rushed towards them, and crept down the stairs, which creaked loudly when they made rapid movements.
At the bottom of the stairs, he watched their figures creep from room to room, looking for something. But there definitely was not anything there.
He finally was able to approach Mortimer.
“Let’s look in the kitchen!” Inspector Bailey warned, and crept through to it.
The policemen went next to him. And one of them switched on the light, and Inspector Bailey rushed into the storeroom, holding out his gun, ready to shoot at anyone who appeared.
Bryson felt awake again, but tired, and avoided staggering.
“I heard someone down here,” Mortimer muttered to Merton, moving away from him.
How had he heard anyone down here? It had been so noisy at the shaft that he would have thought that by the time he had climbed to the surface that he would have needed a hearing aid just to speak.
“There’s a footprint!” one of the policemen announced, standing at the hidden entrance.
Bryson mechanically recognized it, and that it was the killer’s!
Chapter 50
Into Oblivion
Clouds of gray dust mingled through beams of light, edging into Bryson’s face and lungs.
He groaned to himself, and dangled about on the rope, glimpsing parts of the shaft above, mentally exhausted, wondering if he could wangle his way out of it. But it was not a matter of persuading them, it was really himself.
It might be his final confrontation with the room, which had shrouded his life.
If he had only known all those years ago, as a youth, what he would end up doing, he would have forced himself to forget about the haunted castle. Its sounds were now screaming out at him, out of the darkness, in an abyss below, as if a gateway into hell were there, with him suspended over it on a thin rope, waiting to descend into its hideous reaches.
How had they managed to talk him into this? One minute they had been chasing a murderer, who mysteriously had appeared in the middle of the night, from the tunnel (somewhere close to where Mortimer had descended), and next they had been checking what he had been up to. Then they had listened to Mortimer’s theories about the shaft. He had claimed as he had descended into it, that he had heard the sounds coming loudly from the small vents, and that the louder sounds had gone behind him as he had fallen downwards into it. At the bottom it had been empty, and had resembled the bottom of a well. But as he had been going to climb back up, he had heard the person going through the tunnel, which had been near him.
They were sure that they had scared him away, by going down the stairs, with its loud creaks. The person was either lucky or good. Any other night they would have had the police search the area. The roads had been blocked with thick snow, and the heavy blizzard would have quickly covered any trace of him anyway.
Then, afterward, as they had been resting in the room, discussing it, Mortimer had found another shaft, in the wall at the other side of the room, at precisely the same spot as the other.
It was part of a complex ventilation system.
A few small shafts below went outside. It was all that it needed.
He wondered where the killer had gone. How could he have traveled there with the snow blocking the roads? Could it be that he did not use a car, and was at some distant location, at the fringes of the estate? Could there be another tunnel going there? It would be a good way to sneak about without them catching him.
He surely had not known that they had found the tunnel into the castle.
What had he been trying to do? He had to have a good reason for risking doing what he had done. If he had been going to poison them, he would have tampered with the food. But they had followed his prints into the dining room.
The person had to have been doing something. And why had he been so desperate to do it?
Bryson went down the shaft in stages, edging himself in it.
Why had he not gone to bed when the police had?
Mortimer had believed that the main sounds had been emerging through the small vents from this direction, implying a possible source had been in this wall. And, of course, he had soon located it, and removed a block of stone, to reveal the shaft, hidden there all the time.
He jerked, startled, hearing a sort of scream, as though from a faraway place, on a distant world. He visualized it out in space, in the blackness.
There were traces of rotted vegetation in the air, floating in the light coming from overhead.
Some of the blocks of stone about him resembled the stones in the Egyptian pyramids. They were strange things to use to build, but they were hard to penetrate, and had been needed for a good castle.
He imagined a spectral figure in the thick darkness, which was now swallowing him.
Merton’s face appeared, through the hole above.
Bryson angrily waved his arm about to clear away thick webs, and cleaned green slime from his face.
“Here’s Inspector Bailey’s searchlight!” Mortimer voiced, from behind Merton, with the searchlight that he had finally fetched, as the other had gone dud, due to Mortimer leaving it alight.
Mortimer lowered the light to him on the end of a length of string.
Bryson imagined weird shapes of giant insects darting about him.
Once he had the torch, he illuminated a thin tunnel going down, as if probing something that he should not probe – lighting somewhere that perhaps centuries of people who had stayed in those rooms would have cringed in utter horror near.
It remarkably only resembled a well though, and his eyes strained to see what was at the bottom. But the light and his eyes were not good enough. And he looked until he could maintain it no more and he shut his eyes, and mentally rested.
As he dropped down, the entrance slowly disappeared out of sight.
He then realized that the main sounds emerging were not mainly coming from under him – they were coming from somewhere above – and when he listened more intensely, he heard them mainly coming from somewhere above the entrance. In the loud sound, and confusion, he had not heard it.
He was sure that it was coming from the top floor.
Incredibly, nobody had been near there at night.
Yet they were so muddled and strange, with so many echoes, from the thick stone, he could not properly make out what or exactly where they were coming from.
He released the rope, and landed on the ground.
It resembled a well, under the castle.
A thick layer of dry dirt occasionally gave off a cloud of dust, as he moved his feet.
Mortimer had been correct, about hearing sounds easily from below the castle. The sounds from about the lower castle, from the blizzard, were there, as though magnified.
A silent whistle came from the wind blowing against something.
It would be almost impossible to search the whole castle. There must be many of these shafts through the walls. How could they check them?
Strange objects about his sides, vaguely captured his attention, but they were only building rubbish, which had been discarded from somewhere above.
Yet an object, partly buried in dust, that he had seen, and had ignored, started to interest him, and he crouched at the side of it, to see it better.
And he carefully fitted the light onto an old chunk of wood, behind it, so that the light brightly went over
it. Then he cleaned away the dirt, and revealed an old chest.
He grabbed the lid, and unsuccessfully attempted to yank it up from it.
He then rested, while studying it, and prepared himself. And he just took off the harness, and firmly wrapped the object in it.
He energetically climbed up the rope, and he was soon climbing out of it.
He then rested on the bed, breathing heavily.
“It’s mainly coming from above somewhere,” Bryson stated, recalling what he had realized in the shaft.
“What do you mean?” Merton asked, screwing up his face, as though he could not fully believe what he had said, obviously seizing the opportunity to question him – probably detecting that he had found something else.
“Up at the top floor!” Mortimer declared.
“Nobody has been up there at night,” Bryson replied, leaping off the bed.
“What’s on the rope?” Merton asked, tugging at it.
“I found something. Pull it up!”
Merton hoisted the chest up, and he placed it on the floor.
“It’s locked!” he uttered, backing away from it.
“I’ll go and get a hammer and chisel!” Merton declared, and excitedly left.
Bryson felt how solid it really was.
What would a locked chest have in it? He suddenly imagined valuable items there!
If Sir Richard had left it there, there surely would be some signs of it.
Merton quickly arrived with the hammer and chisel.
Mortimer looked surprised, that they were now going to open an old chest.
The chest sat strangely upon the bed. It looked very expensive, and even a shame to ruin. And Bryson was sure that it was even exceedingly rare, and that it could be an expensive antique. However, he could not imagine them spending hours trying to pick its lock, when it might be worth virtually nothing, while its contents might be worth millions.
Merton banged the chisel gently against it, trying to separate the lid, waiting to see if they had any other ideas on how to achieve their goal. Bryson just nodded, in agreement, for him to continue. And he began firmly chipping away at the gap, next to the lock.
The Lost Treasure Map Deluxe Book Collection (2017 Edition) Page 118