by Michael Cox
The action, the necessity of self-defence, restored me to some measure of dignity and sanity.
'Let me go, you ruffian!' I cried, struggling to free myself from his grasp.
It was useless. He held me madly. There was no beating him off: and, so holding me, he managed to produce a single key from one of his pockets, and to slip it with a rusty clang into the lock of the door.
'You dirty, prying civilian!' he panted at me, as he swayed this way and that with the pull of my body. 'You shall have your wish, by G-! You want to see inside, do you? Look, then!'
He dashed open the door as he spoke, and pulled me violently into the opening. A great waft of the cold, dank air came at us, and with it—what?
The warder had jerked his dark lantern from his belt, and now—an arm of his still clasped about one of mine—snapped the slide open.
'Where is it?' he muttered, directing the disc of light round and about the floor of the cell. I ceased struggling. Some counter influence was raising an odd curiosity in me.
'Ah!' he cried, in a stifled voice, 'there you are, my friend!'
He was setting the light slowly travelling along the stone flags close by the wall over against us, and now, so guiding it, looked askance at me with a small, greedy smile.
'Follow the light, sir,' he whispered jeeringly.
I looked, and saw twirling on the floor, in the patch of radiance cast by the lamp, a little eddy of dust, it seemed. This eddy was never still, but went circling in that stagnant place without apparent cause or influence; and, as it circled, it moved slowly on by wall and corner, so that presently in its progress it must reach us where we stood.
Now, draughts will play queer freaks in quiet places, and of this trifling phenomenon I should have taken little note ordinarily. But, I must say at once, that as I gazed upon the odd moving thing my heart seemed to fall in upon itself like a drained artery.
'Johnson!' I cried, 'I must get out of this. I don't know what's the matter, or—Why do you hold me? D—it! man, let me go; let me go, I say!'
As I grappled with him he dropped the lantern with a crash and flung his arms violently about me.
'You don't!' he panted, the muscles of his bent and rigid neck seeming actually to cut into my shoulder-blade. 'You don't, by G-!
You came of your own accord, and now you shall take your belly full!'
It was a struggle for life or death, or, worse, for life and reason. But I was young and wiry, and held my own, if I could do little more. Yet there was something to combat beyond the mere brute strength of the man I struggled with, for I fought in an atmosphere of horror unexplainable, and I knew that inch by inch the thing on the floor was circling round in our direction.
Suddenly in the breathing darkness I felt it close upon us, gave one mortal yell of fear, and, with a last despairing fury, tore myself from the encircling arms, and sprang into the corridor without. As I plunged and leapt, the warder clutched at me, missed, caught a foot on the edge of the door, and, as the latter whirled to with a clap, fell heavily at my feet in a fit. Then, as I stood staring down upon him, steps sounded along the corridor and the voices of scared men hurrying up.
Ill and shaken, and, for the time, little in love with life, yet fearing death as I had never dreaded it before, I spent the rest of that horrible night huddled between my crumpled sheets, fearing to look forth, fearing to think, wild only to be far away, to be housed in some green and innocent hamlet, where I might forget the madness and the terror in learning to walk the unvext paths of placid souls. That unction I could lay to my heart, at least. I had done the manly part by the stricken warder, whom I had attended to his own home, in a row of little tenements that stood south of the prison walls. I had replied to all enquiries with some dignity and spirit, attributing my ruffled condition to an assault on the part of Johnson, when he was already under the shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal, and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to bestow. But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason would give under the strain.
Yet I had more to endure and to triumph over.
Near morning I fell into a troubled sleep, throughout which the drawn twitch of muscle seemed an accent on every word of ill-omen I had ever spelt out of the alphabet of fear. If my body rested, my brain was an open chamber for any toad of ugliness that listed to 'sit at squat' in.
Suddenly I woke to the fact that there was a knocking at my door—that there had been for some little time.
I cried, 'Come in!' finding a weak restorative in the mere sound of my own human voice; then, remembering the key was turned, bade the visitor wait until I could come to him.
Scrambling, feeling dazed and white-livered, out of bed, I opened the door, and met one of the warders on the threshold. The man looked scared, and his lips, I noticed, were set in a somewhat boding fashion.
'Can you come at once, sir?' he said. 'There's summat wrong with the Governor.'
'Wrong?' What's the matter with him?'
'Why'—he looked down, rubbed an imaginary protuberance smooth with his foot, and glanced up at me again with a quick, furtive expression—'he's got his face set in the grating of 47, and danged if a man Jack of us can get him to move or speak.'
I turned away, feeling sick. I hurriedly pulled on coat and trousers, and hurriedly went off with my summoner. Reason was all absorbed in a wildest phantasy of apprehension.
'Who found him?' I muttered, as we sped on.
'Vokins see him go down the corridor about half after eight, sir, and see him give a start like when he noticed the trap open. It's never been so before in my time. Johnson must ha' done it last night, before he were took.'
'Yes, yes.'
'The man said the Governor went to shut it, it seemed, and to draw his face to'ards the bars in so doin'. Then he see him a-lookin' through, as he thought; but nat'rally it weren't no business of his'n, and he went off about his work. But when he come anigh agen, fifteen minutes later, there were the Governor in the same position; and he got scared over it, and called out to one or two of us.'
'Why didn't one of you ask the Major if anything was wrong?'
'Bless you! we did; and no answer. And we pulled him, compatible with discipline, but-'
'But what?'
'He's stuck.'
'Stuck!'
'See for yourself, sir. That's all I ask.'
I did, a moment later. A little group was collected about the door of cell 47, and the members of it spoke together in whispers, as if they were frightened men. One young fellow, with a face white in patches, as if it had been floured, slid from them as I approached, and accosted me tremulously.
'Don't go anigh, sir. There's something wrong about the place.'
I pulled myself together, forcibly beating down the excitement reawakened by the associations of the spot. In the discomfiture of others' nerves I found my own restoration.
'Don't be an ass!' I said, in a determined voice. 'There's nothing here that can't be explained. Make way for me, please!
They parted and let me through, and I saw him. He stood, spruce, frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against and into the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the interval between the rails precluded so extravagant an idea. He stood quite motionless—taut and on the strain, as it were—and nothing of his face was visible but the back ridges of his jawbones, showing white through a bush of red whiskers.
'Major Shrike!' I rapped out, and, allowing myself no hesitation, reached forth my hand and grasped his shoulder. The body vibrated under my touch, but he neither answered nor made sign of hearing me. Then I pulled at him forcibly, and ever with increasing strength. His fingers held like steel
braces. He seemed glued to the trap, like Theseus to the rock.
Hastily I peered round, to see if I could get a glimpse of his face. I noticed enough to send me back with a little stagger.
'Has none of you got a key to this door?' I asked, reviewing the scared faces about me, than which my own was no less troubled, I feel sure.
'Only the Governor, sir,' said the warder who had fetched me. 'There's not a man but him amongst us that ever seen this opened.'
He was wrong there, I could have told him; but held my tongue, for obvious reasons.
'I want it opened. Will one of you feel in his pockets?'
Not a soul stirred. Even had not sense of discipline precluded, that of a certain inhuman atmosphere made fearful creatures of them all.
'Then,' said I, 'I must do it myself.'
I turned once more to the stiff-strung figure, had actually put hand on it, when an exclamation from Vokins arrested me.
'There's a key—there, sir!' he said—'stickin' out yonder between his feet.'
Sure enough, there was—Johnson's, no doubt, that had been shot from its socket by the clapping to of the door, and afterwards kicked aside by the warder in his convulsive struggles.
I stooped, only too thankful for the respite, and drew it forth. I had seen it but once before, yet I recognized it at a glance.
Now, I confess, my heart felt ill as I slipped the key into the wards, and a sickness of resentment at the tyranny of Fate in making me its helpless minister surged up in my veins. Once, with my fingers on the iron loop, I paused, and ventured a fearful side glance at the figure whose crooked elbow almost touched my face; then, strung to the high pitch of inevitability, I shot the lock, pushed at the door, and in the act, made a back leap into the corridor.
Scarcely, in doing so, did I look for the totter and collapse outwards of the rigid form. I had expected to see it fall away, face down, into the cell, as its support swung from it. Yet it was, I swear, as if something from within had relaxed its grasp and given the fearful dead man a swingeing push outwards as the door opened.
It went on its back, with a dusty slap on the stone flags, and from all its spectators—me included—came a sudden drawn sound, like a wind in a keyhole.
What can I say, or how describe it? A dead thing it was—but the face!
Barred with livid scars where the grating rails had crossed it, the rest seemed to have been worked and kneaded into a mere featureless plate of yellow and expressionless flesh.
And it was this I had seen in the glass!
There was an interval following the experience above narrated, during which a certain personality that had once been mine was effaced or suspended, and I seemed a passive creature, innocent of the least desire of independence. It was not that I was actually ill or actually insane. A merciful Providence set my finer wits slumbering, that was all, leaving me a sufficiency of the grosser faculties that were necessary to the right ordering of my behaviour.
I kept to my room, it is true, and even lay a good deal in bed; but this was more to satisfy the busy scruples of a locum tenens—a practitioner of the neighbourhood, who came daily to the prison to officiate in my absence—than to cosset a complaint that in its inactivity was purely negative. I could review what had happened with a calmness as profound as if I had read of it in a book. I could have wished to continue my duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me. But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia to flaming lunacy.
I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak. It was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that softened the ugly outlines.
Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer me according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an obvious evasion of it would have distressed me.
'Hammond,' I said one day, 'I have never yet asked you. How did I give my evidence at the inquest?'
'Like a doctor and a sane man.'
'That's good. But it was a difficult course to steer. You conducted the post-mortem. Did any peculiarity in the dead man's face strike you?'
'Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars as to cause bruising and actual abrasion. He must have been dead some little time when you found him.'
'And nothing else? You noticed nothing else in his face—a sort of obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?'
'Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any ordinary fatal attack of angina pectoris.—There's a rum breach of promise case in the paper today. You should read it; it'll make you laugh.'
I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.
One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide awake in me once more. It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but trembling. Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along the misty path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with an awful thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and escaped—of the demons my witlessness had baffled.
The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful by experience.
Hammond noticed the change in me directly he entered, and congratulated me upon it.
'Go slow at first, old man,' he said. 'You've fairly sloughed the old skin; but give the sun time to toughen the new one. Walk in it at present, and be content.'
I was, in great measure, and I followed his advice. I got leave of absence, and ran down for a month in the country to a certain house we wot of, where kindly ministration to my convalescence was only one of the many blisses to be put to an account of rosy days.
Then did my love awake,
Most like a lily-flower, And as the lovely queene of heaven,
So shone shee in her bower.
Ah, me! ah, me! when was it? A year ago, or two-thirds of a lifetime? Alas! 'Age with stealing steps hath clawde me with his crowch.' And will the yews root in my heart, I wonder?
I was well, sane, recovered, when one morning, towards the end of my visit, I received a letter from Hammond, enclosing a packet addressed to me, and jealously sealed and fastened. My friend's communication ran as follows:
There died here yesterday afternoon a warder, Johnson—he who had that apoplectic seizure, you will remember, the night before poor Shrike's exit. I attended him to the end, and, being alone with him an hour before the finish, he took the enclosed from under his pillow, and a solemn oath from me that I would forward it direct to you sealed as you will find it, and permit no other soul to examine or even touch it. I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the—not inexplainable, but not worth trying to explain. It was patent from what I have gathered that you were in an over strung and excitable condition at that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character. It seems there was some nonsense abroad in the prison about a certain cell, and that there were fools who thought fit to associate Johnson's attack and the other's death with the opening of that cell's door. I have given the new Governor a tip, and he has stopped all that. We have examined the cell in company, and found it, as one might suppose, a very ordinary chamber. The two men died perfectly natural deaths, and there is the last to be said on the subject. I mention it only from the fear that the enclosed may contain some allusion to the rubbish, a perusal of which might check the wholesome convalescence of your thoughts. If you take my advice, you will throw the packet into the fire unread. At least, if you do examine it, postpone the duty till you feel yourself absolutely impervious to any mental trickery, and—bear in mi
nd that you are a worthy member of a particularly matter-of-fact and unemotional profession.
I smiled at the last clause, for I was now in a condition to feel a rather warm shame over my erst weak-knee'd collapse before a sheet and an illuminated turnip. I took the packet to my bedroom, shut the door, and sat myself down by the open window. The garden lay below me, and the dewy meadows beyond. In the one, bees were busy ruffling the ruddy gillyflowers and April stocks; in the other, the hedge twigs were all frosted with Mary buds, as if Spring had brushed them with the fleece of her wings in passing.
I fetched a sigh of content as I broke the seal of the packet and brought out the enclosure. Somewhere in the garden a little sardonic laugh was dipt to silence. It came from groom or maid, no doubt; yet it thrilled me with an odd feeling of uncanniness, and I shivered slightly.