by Otto Penzler
“But you wouldn’t,” Hugh said.
“I have no reason to think so.”
“You mean,” and the eagerness was creeping back into Hugh’s voice, stronger than ever, “that under the very same conditions as someone chained in there two hundred years ago you could get this door open?”
The challenging note was too strong to be brushed aside lightly. Raymond stood silent for a long minute, face strained with concentration, before he answered.
“Yes,” he said. “It would not be easy—the problem is made formidable by its very simplicity—but it could be solved.”
“How long do you think it would take you?”
“An hour at the most.”
Hugh had come a long way around to get to this point. He asked the question slowly, savoring it. “Would you want to bet on that?”
“Now, wait a minute,” the doctor said. “I don’t like any part of this.”
“And I vote we adjourn for a drink,” I put in. “Fun’s fun, but we’ll all wind up with pneumonia, playing games down here.” Neither Hugh nor Raymond appeared to hear a word of this. They stood staring at each other—Hugh waiting on pins and needles, Raymond deliberating—until Raymond said, “What is this bet you offer?”
“This. If you lose, you get out of the Dane house inside of a month, and sell it to me.”
“And if I win?”
It was not easy for Hugh to say it, but he finally got it out. “Then I’ll be the one to get out. And if you don’t want to buy Hilltop I’ll arrange to sell it to the first comer.”
For anyone who knew Hugh it was so fantastic, so staggering a statement to hear from him, that none of us could find words at first. It was the doctor who recovered most quickly.
“You’re not speaking for yourself, Hugh,” he warned. “You’re a married man. Elizabeth’s feelings have to be considered.”
“Is it a bet?” Hugh demanded of Raymond. “Do you want to go through with it?”
“I think before I answer that, there is something to be explained.” Raymond paused, then went on slowly, “I am afraid I gave the impression—out of pride, perhaps—that when I retired from my work it was because of a boredom, a lack of interest in it. That was not altogether the truth. In reality, I was required to go to a doctor some years ago, the doctor listened to the heart, and suddenly my heart became the most important thing in the world. I tell you this because, while your challenge strikes me as being a most unusual and interesting way of settling differences between neighbors, I must reject it for reasons of health.”
“You were healthy enough a minute ago,” Hugh said in a hard voice.
“Perhaps not as much as you would want to think, my friend.”
“In other words,” Hugh said bitterly, “there’s no accomplice handy, no keys in your pocket to help out, and no way of tricking anyone into seeing what isn’t there! So you have to admit you’re beaten.”
Raymond stiffened. “I admit no such thing. All the tools I would need even for such a test as this I have with me. Believe me, they would be enough.”
Hugh laughed aloud, and the sound of it broke into small echoes all down the corridors behind us. It was that sound, I am sure—the living contempt in it rebounding from wall to wall around us—which sent Raymond into the cell.
Hugh wielded the hammer, a short-handled but heavy sledge, which tightened the collar into a circlet around Raymond’s neck, hitting with hard even strokes at the iron which was braced against the wall. When he had finished I saw the pale glow of the radium-painted numbers on a watch as Raymond studied it in his pitch darkness.
“It is now eleven,” he said calmly. “The wager is that by midnight this door must be opened, and it does not matter what means are used. Those are the conditions, and you gentlemen are the witnesses to them.”
Then the door was closed, and the walking began.
Back and forth we walked—the three of us—as if we were being compelled to trace every possible geometric figure on that stony floor, the doctor with his quick, impatient step, and I matching Hugh’s long, nervous strides. A foolish, meaningless march, back and forth across our own shadows, each of us marking the time by counting off the passing seconds, and each ashamed to be the first to look at his watch.
For a while there was a counterpoint to this scraping of feet from inside the cell. It was a barely perceptible clinking of chain coming at brief, regular intervals. Then there would be a long silence, followed by a renewal of the sound. When it stopped again I could not restrain myself any longer. I held up my watch toward the dim yellowish light of the bulb overhead and saw with dismay that barely twenty minutes had passed.
After that there was no hesitancy in the others about looking at the time and, if anything, this made it harder to bear than just wondering. I caught the doctor winding his watch with small, brisk turns, and then a few minutes later he would try to wind it again, and suddenly drop his hand with disgust as he realized he had already done it. Hugh walked with his watch held up near his eyes, as if by concentration on it he could drag that crawling minute hand faster around the dial.
Thirty minutes had passed.
Forty.
Forty-five.
I remember that when I looked at my watch and saw there were less than fifteen minutes to go I wondered if I could last out even that short time. The chill had sunk so deep into me that I ached with it. I was shocked when I saw that Hugh’s face was dripping with sweat, and that beads of it gathered and ran off while I watched.
It was while I was looking at him in fascination that it happened. The sound broke through the walls of the cell like a wail of agony heard from far away, and shivered over us as if it were spelling out the words.
“Doctor!” it cried. “The air”
It was Raymond’s voice, but the thickness of the wail blocking it off turned it into a high, thin sound. What was clearest in it was the note of pure terror, the plea growing out of that terror.
“Air!” it screamed, the word bubbling and dissolving into a long-drawn sound which made no sense at all.
And then it was silent.
We leaped for the door together, but Hugh was there first, his back against it, barring the way. In his upraised hand was the hammer which had clinched Raymond’s collar.
“Keep back!” he cried. “Don’t come any nearer, I warn you!”
The fury in him, brought home by the menace of the weapon, stopped us in our tracks.
“Hugh,” the doctor pleaded, “I know what you’re thinking, but you can forget that now. The bet’s off, and I’m opening the door on my own responsibility. You have my word for that.”
“Do I? But do you remember the terms of the bet, doctor? This door must be opened within an hour—and it doesn’t matter what means are used! Do you understand now? He’s fooling both of you. He’s faking a death scene, so that you’ll push open the door and win his bet for him. But it’s my bet, not yours, and I have the last word on it!”
I saw from the way he talked, despite the shaking tension in his voice, that he was in perfect command of himself, and it made everything seem that much worse.
“How do you know he’s faking?” I demanded. “The man said he had a heart condition. He said there was always a time in a spot like this when he had to fight panic and could feel the strain of it. What right do you have to gamble with his life?”
“Damn it, don’t you see he never mentioned any heart condition until he smelled a bet in the wind? Don’t you see he set his trap that way, just as he locked the door behind him when he came into dinner! But this time nobody will spring it for him—nobody!”
“Listen to me,” the doctor said, and his voice cracked like a whip. “Do you concede that there’s one slim possibility of that man being dead in there, or dying?”
“Yes, it is possible—anything is possible.”
“I’m not trying to split hairs with you! I’m telling you that if that man is in trouble every second counts, and you’re stealing
that time from him. And if that’s the case, by God, I’ll sit in the witness chair at your trial and swear you murdered him! Is that what you want?”
Hugh’s head sank forward on his chest, but his hand still tightly gripped the hammer. I could hear the breath drawing heavily in his throat, and when he raised his head, his face was gray and haggard. The torment of indecision was written in every pale sweating line of it.
And then I suddenly understood what Raymond had meant that day when he told Hugh about the revelation he might find in the face of a perfect dilemma. It was the revelation of what a man may learn about himself when he is forced to look into his own depths, and Hugh had found it at last.
In that shadowy cellar, while the relentless seconds thundered louder and louder in our ears, we waited to see what he would do.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Collection copyright © 2006 by Otto Penzler
Originally published as Uncertain Endings
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