“Well, what do you want me to do, master mind?” growled Hefty.
“Hand it over and I’ll show you better than I can tell you. Watch me. See? I turn it on after I put my fingers over the business end. The light filters through them.” “It shines mighty dim and pink,” complained Hefty. “But there’s enough light to show us the room without being bright enough to shine out through any chinks to give us away to a possible sneak outside, unless he’s pretty close to the house. You can make out anything in this room, at least anything big enough to be trouble. Look when I turn it over toward the stairs. You can see them, can’t you? Or that old fireplace, or the chair you were sitting on. Okay, take over with the light. Keep your hand on it to filter it, and see if you can pick out whatever it was that bothered you.”
Hefty’s feet sounded on the floor, slowly and ponderous. “It came from over yonder somewhere,” he said, and his voice came closer and closer to the door beyond which Sherlock stood. “A kind of iron sound, clinking. Like a chain, maybe, or a frying pan. Wait!” Hefty raised his voice sharply. “Get your gun out, Corey.”
“You’ve got yours out already,” said Corey Jarnes. “All set to play wild West again, are you ?”
“I’m going to look in here.” A heart-stopping thump sounded on the panel of Sherlock’s door. Hefty must be striking it with the muzzle of his pistol. “Stand ready to cover me, I say. I want to put my gun away, and open—” A hand fumbled at the latch. Sherlock, frozen with terror, wished he could dwindle to the size of a mouse.
“Now grow up, Hefty!” commanded Corey James’s disgusted voice. “How could anybody get in here that way. The door below’s fastened from this side, and the double doors are padlocked so nobody could get in without a sledge hammer and enough noise to wake the whole county. You remind me of a little boy who’s been scared by wild stories, and hears some danger every time his ears flap. You probably think this house is really haunted.” To Sherlock’s intense relief, Hefty let go of the door and plodded away in the direction of Corey James’s scornful voice.
“That’s better,” said Corey Jarnes. “Turn off that light and give it to me. We’re going to sit still now, for the next hour at least, and wait for any more fresh guys who may want to come and see how ghosts act when strangers drop in without being invited.”
“I’m keeping my gun handy,” said Hefty.
“So am I,” rejoined Corey Jarnes, “but this time don’t shoot at anything until I give the word, or I’ll shoot myself, and my first shot will knock a piece right out of the rim of your ear.”
“You couldn’t shoot that good in this dark,” said Hefty. “Probably not, but don’t let it comfort you,” said his companion. “I might try to clip your ear, and put a bullet right where some people keep their brains.”
“Cut out that kind of talk!” begged Hefty.
“We’d better cut out every kind of talk, and spend our time listening,” agreed Corey Jarnes.
Silence in the front room. Sherlock turned over in his mind what he had heard them say about other doors, apparently leading to the place where he had taken refuge, and being locked “from this side.” He would search for those doors, unfasten them, and make his escape.
More cautious even than before, he lifted one rubber- soled foot and reached it back to set on the floor beyond.
But there was no floor beyond.
UNDERGROUND
Only the deliberate care that Sherlock had been practicing, until indeed it had become almost a set habit during the eternity-long hour of fear and stealth just passed, kept him now from losing balance and toppling backward into whatever awful abyss was waiting there in the dark for him.
He shot out a frantic hand to grab the latch and hang on, and in the same instant remembered that he must not touch that bit of iron, lest it rattle again and bring his enemies searching a second time, with their guns and lights. And so he tottered there on one foot, the other reaching into emptiness behind him, his arms flung outward to keep him poised.
He must look like a dancer posing in a tableau, thought Sherlock. It was a good thing that Max was not present, to see him and to laugh; but Max would not be able to see in this darkness, and Max would never have the courage to emit even a chuckle, with danger so near. Carefully Sherlock drew his dangling foot forward again, encountered the floor with his toe and once more stood solid and safe.
“Like I was just saying,” Hefty remarked outside the door, in a heavily doleful voice, “or maybe it was you said it, Corey, one of us, anyway, I hate to leave here so quick and sudden.”
“Yes, it was a good setup,” agreed Corey Jarnes rather sadly.
“Though I was starting to find it lonesome,” continued Hefty. “Night after night in this spook hole, and I was getting to feel spooky myself.”
“The local yokels expect spooks,” reminded Corey Jarnes. “That’s why we were here. The racket has its drawbacks, but it’s better than working, don’t you think?”
Sherlock, with the utmost care, smoothness and silence, did a full-knee bend, as he had often done in physical education class. Squatting on his heels, he could grope with both hands along the floor boards.
“Yep,” Hefty was saying, his good humor restored. “And you can’t beat the hours. We didn’t do so bad hereabouts for a starter. We picked up one three nights ago, another night before last, and you say you spotted another we could have got tonight if it wasn’t for those kids messing up our plans. Three, and every one a hunk of ready money. What we can’t fix so nobody will recognize it, we can take a wrench and pull to pieces. And garages all over the country are so far behind on the parts they need, they’ll push and .scramble and battle each other for a chance to pay whatever fancy price we ask.”
All this was along the line of the earlier strange talk about the pair’s profession. Sherlock felt that it was beginning to make sense, but only beginning. Just now, however, he had other things on his mind than eavesdropping. His hands had found the edge of the floor over which he had almost fallen, and that edge extended no more than two feet beyond the closed door. He swivelled around on his toes, still painfully cautious, and put his hand down below that edge. His fingers stirred to and fro, at first encountering nothing but emptiness. Then, as he lowered them more and more, they came upon a lower surface a few inches down, flat and hard as stone.
At once Sherlock knew what that apparent jumping- off place was. The door through which he had crept led, not to a room, but to a stairway that led down to a basement.
Corey Jarnes and Hefty were still talking, loudly enough to give Sherlock a feeling of comparative safety. He slid along until he could sit on the shelf of flooring, with his feet on the step below. After a moment he slid again, lowering himself to sit on the top step, with his feet on the next. Those steps were of solid concrete, and he knew they would make no echoing sound if he walked upon them. He summoned his courage, therefore, to rise and walk down them, his hand on the side wall for support.
Like another Sherlock, the immortal Holmes for whom he was nicknamed, he remembered to count the steps. There were five that went down to a broad landing, which itself would reckon as a sixth step, and ten more below that. Sixteen in all, and the distance down from the floor level would make the total seventeen. The exact number, Sherlock remembered as he .paused in a close narrow hall at the bottom, that the other Sherlock had counted the first time he went up to his rooms at 221-B Baker Street. Was it an omen of good luck? In any case, he estimated that each step was seven inches high. Seven ' times seventeen made a hundred and nineteen inches, just one inch short of ten feet. The basement of the haunted house was a deep one.
Still keeping one hand on the wall, he extended the other in front of him and inched cautiously ahead on the cement floor. At no more than two paces’ distance he came to another door, undoubtedly the “door below” that Corey Jarnes had mentioned. What else had Corey Jarnes said about the door? That it was fastened “from this side,” and, sure enough, the boy’s explor
ing hands rested on the knob, and moved below it to find a key ready in the lock.
Once again Sherlock waited, one hand on the knob, the other on the key, listening. Finally Hefty said something that set both men laughing, not loudly, but loudly enough to deafen them for the moment to lesser sounds.
At once Sherlock turned the key and heard the lock grate softly as it drew back. With his other hand he opened the door, stole through, and quickly shut the door again behind him.
Now at last he felt far enough away from the men in the upper room, with two doors closed between himself and their menace, to allow a hearty sigh to rise from his lungs. It was not a sigh of complete relief, but at least it betokened his thankfulness that he had come so far undiscovered.
And he decided, too, that he could and would dare another thing. From his hip pocket he drew the flashlight he had almost forgotten. Remembering the advice Corey Jarnes had given Hefty, he put his hand across the glass lens of it before he pressed the switch. Through the flesh of his fingers the light filtered, a dim rosiness that no more than tinted the dark. Sherlock spread his fingers a trifle, letting more light through. That was better, and he could see, though dimly, where he was.
He stood in a great rectangular chamber, wide and long and high enough for a gymnasium, walled with cement that once had been whitewashed, an old, old basement, but still tight and solid, undoubtedly the best part left of that ruinous old house. Along the walls, set as high up as a man could reach, were narrow windows, tight shut and covered tightly with black tar paper nailed to the frames. At the far end of the rectangle, the end toward which Sherlock found himself facing, showed heavy double doors. These, Sherlock guessed, were the same doors he had seen from outside the day before during the hare-and-hounds race, and would open toward the lower ground at the back of the house.
The basement itself was furnished with a long bench of dark-stained wood that extended almost the entire length of one wall. Upon this bench were wooden boxes of various sizes, and underneath it showed a row of larger crates, also several kegs, such as Sherlock had seen in hardware stores for keeping various sizes of nails. Nearer the double doors showed a jumble of big, irregular shapes, apparently covered with fabric, that almost filled that half of the basement. Still keeping his light dimmed with his fingers, Sherlock tiptoed gingerly toward where the bench stood.
He reached it, and with his free hand groped into one of the boxes on top. From it he lifted a metallic something, bright and irregular, and saw that it was an ornamental cap for the radiator of an automobile. He put it back, and felt in the box again. It seemed to contain a number of other things, spark plugs, from the shape of them. He took a step along the bench and investigated another box. It held another collection of small parts for an automobile. No, that was not correct. More than enough of such parts for a single automobile.
Back into Sherlock’s mind came the conversation he had only half-heard and half-understood while he was managing his retreat downstairs. Hefty had spoken mysteriously of parts—he undoubtedly had meant automobile parts—and garages. Was this basement a garage? But if it were, why should the two men be running a garage in this out-of-the-way place that had such a grim legend of haunting? And why hide at all, if their business was honest ?
Their talk had plainly betokened stealth and crime. Here in the basement would be the answer to the question of exactly what kind of crime.
As Sherlock made his way along the bench, his sneaker- clad toe touched one of the large crates beneath, and he stooped to explore that, turning his finger-diluted flash beam into the crate’s interior. It held cylinder heads, several of them. Beyond the crate were axle rods, neatly stacked together, of several sizes and makes. Turning from the bench, he continued on to the double doors through which he now had hopes of making his escape. He remembered the trail that led away, and was sure that he could follow it to a point where by groping memory of the hare-and-hounds trail he could make his way once more to camp. By now Mr. Palmer would surely be there, Mr. Brimmer had said something like that; and Mr. Palmer, as a policeman, would return to speak with Corey Jarnes and the giant Hefty in language they would understand and respect, the stern language of law and order.
But as he reached the doors, he found they were fastened shut. A heavy chain had been threaded through their stout grips, and a big patent padlock snapped upon the chain. This time there was no key. Sherlock’s only way out would be back through the basement, up the stairs, and through the room where his enemies kept guard, with their ready guns and readier determination to be rough with strangers.
Sherlock snapped off his flashlight and pondered his plight. The dark that again enveloped him was no thicker and blacker than his mood. To escape now through the front room was an impossibility. As for staying here, Corey Jarnes had decreed that he and Hefty would leave at dawn, driving cars. Undoubtedly those cars were the shapes he had half made out beneath the draperies near the double doors. They would be coming through this basement, sooner or later. He would have to hide.
He moved toward the covered heaps, again turning on his flashlight. The nearest pile was smallish, and he turned back a corner of the old canvas that shrouded it.
He saw several detached fenders, and no dents or breaks showed in them. They were certainly not here for repair. That showed, once for all, that Corey Jarnes and Hefty were not operating a garage. Next he uncovered a stack of tires, still on their metal rims. He prodded the uppermost, remembering his fruitless tracking of the zigzag tread-pattern to Oatville. Perhaps, but though these tires were all new, or nearly so, none had that telltale tread design. Finally he looked at three larger shapes under tarpaulins, plainly automobiles parked in this spacious basement. He peeled back the fabric that hung over the radiator of the nearest
His first glance was at the front tires, and then he went to the rear of the car to look at their mates. He puckered his lips, and checked just in time a whistle of excitement. Those rear tires had the zigzag tread.
Higher he hoisted the tarpaulin. He had seen this car before. It was the dimmed black coupe which he and Max had trailed into Oatville, thinking it was Mr. Brimmer’s. Sherlock’s suspicions on that occasion, laughed away by his friends because of no evidence to support them, had had some soundness, after all. This car was part of the mystery activity of the two pistol carriers upstairs. And the tires, though to be sure they were not on Mr. Brimmer’s car after all—
“Wait!” Sherlock muttered to himself. True, they weren’t on Mr. Brimmer’s car. Not now, anyway. But before now?
He rearranged the covering of the coupe, moved quietly past it and lifted the cloaking tarpaulin of the next.
It was a gray sedan. A gray sedan that Sherlock knew.
To be sure, its tires were worn and smooth, just such tires as might leave the tracks seen and disregarded on the road below camp on the morning that Mr. Brimmer’s car had vanished. But the car itself was Mr. Brimmer’s stolen property.
Now it was all fitting together in Sherlock’s mind, the jigsaw puzzle of evidence in which such maddening gaps had existed before. For the moment he forgot his own perilous problem of safety, for a swelling sense of triumph quickened the beat of his heart as fear had never quickened it.
He must get out of here, and at once. He must tell Mr. Brimmer and Mr. Palmer and bring them back, before Hefty and Corey Jarnes could slip away in the dawn and leave a new and more difficult task of finding them. Sherlock took half a dozen paces across the floor.
He thought he was moving clear of that stack of tires, and he was. But the tarpaulin that covered it trailed across the floor. Sherlock’s toe caught in a fold, and twitched it ever so slightly. That slight twitch was enough, and more than enough.
Sherlock sprang away just in time to avoid the falling stack of tires on their rims, the tumbling tires that clattered and thumped on the cement floor, filling the whole cellar with an echoing sound almost as loud as exploding gunpowder.
THE SHOWDOWN
After
that clattering confusion of sound died away, there was silence, downstairs and upstairs, but not for long.
Corey Jarnes and his friend Hefty had stopped talking to listen. Sherlock, frozen in place on the cement floor below them, turned off his flashlight. After a moment he heard the men get to their feet. He heard the creaking of the floor boards. Two pairs of feet—the heavy feet of Hefty and the surer, lighter feet of Corey Jarnes—began to move, cautiously but purposefully, toward the door that led to the basement stairs.
Caught, Sherlock told himself wretchedly. In the very moment of solving the dark heart of the mystery, he was caught, by his own ill luck and carelessness. There were only two ways out of this box-trap of a basement, one of them chained and padlocked shut, the other cut off even now by the men who were after him. He heard Hefty fiddling with the latch, heard Corey Jarnes’ hissed command to hurry up and get the door open. Even if Sherlock hid, under a tarpaulin or behind a crate, they knew he was here. They would search and search, guns in hand, until they found him. He must think of something brilliant and decisive, and at once, something that would affirm his right to the nickname of Sherlock, or within brief seconds he would be—
Sherlock! Of course, it was all set out for him in Sherlock Holmes!
Not in the stories, but in the stage play. He himself had never seen William Gillette perform as the great detective, but his father, the police chief, had seen the revival of the play and had often told him about it. The climactic scene of the play was especially vivid in the boy’s imagination. It took place in the dark room, into which came murderous villains, just as was about to happen now, and Sherlock Holmes had misdirected their attack with no more complex an apparatus than the glow of a lighted cigar in the dark.
Sherlock snapped on his flashlight hurriedly, ran to the bench, and set it there so that its unobstructed beam made a halo of radiance at and around the doorway to the stairs. The light must have seeped through the cracks of the door, for the two men, halfway down, paused suddenly.
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1947 Page 10