Comparatively few of us go through the experience of being bound and, gagged. Outside the region of definite physical agony, this is probably the most uncomfortable condition one can endure, and the definite physical agony will certainly accompany the condition if it is endured too long, if the binding is so tight that it impedes circulation, or if the gagging covers nose as well as mouth.
Fortunately Ben’s gag was limited to the lower feature, through accident rather than kindness, and he was able to breathe. How he thanked God for having designed man with an alternative breathing device! Two ears, two eyes, and a couple of breathers. Never before had he felt so grateful to his nose! There was nothing else he could feel grateful to, however. He had not even the blessing of solitude in the darkness. Sharing the room with him, and leaning unseen against a wall, was a dead man.
‘Yer know, somethink’s wrong with me,’ he reflected. ‘I ain’t goin’ mad!’
It really wasn’t reasonable. It made him a little anxious about himself. He ought to have been going mad. Any sane man would. He ought to have been laughing like one of them yiheenas and raving like what he’d heard. But, instead, his senses were almost glaringly alert and his mind was painfully clear. Panic was somewhere in the middle of him, but it was sitting perfectly still, waiting to spring—sitting still in the darkness of Ben, as Ben was sitting still in the darkness of the room.
‘I know why I ain’t bein’ mad,’ thought Ben suddenly. ‘I gorn beyond, like.’
In this uncomfortable beyondness, he listened for sounds. For sounds above him. For sounds outside the hut. For sounds—least desired of all—from the wall against which the dead man was propped.
‘’Allo, Charlie!’ he tried to say. When dead, all people became Charlie to Ben. ‘Wot’s it like?’
But the attempt at friendliness was abortive. Neither Charlie’s ears nor Ben’s mouth were functioning. This made conversation difficult.
The footsteps of Greene and Faggis had died away, but sounds continued to come from the ceiling. Faint, stealthy sounds. Those would be Sims. Quick, definite sounds. Those would be Molly. Vague murmurings. Couldn’t say anything about those. Too indistinct. Too like the murmuring of wind. Perhaps it was the wind? The wind had begun to rise a little. It was moaning round the hut like a lost soul … Yes, but was it the wind? Gawd! ’Ow did one know?… Now, silence again. Ben prayed for sound. The sound restarted. He prayed for silence. Nasty sound, this time. Louder, like. Lummy, that moaning wasn’t the wind! Someone had cried out …
Things grew rather unbearable in the little parlour. That cry had been particularly unpleasant. He tried to blot it out by recalling happy memories. A pound of cheddar. A gold-tipped cigarette end. A bath he’d got out of taking. A kindly bobby who had given him fourpence. And, once, the Prince of Wales had hit him with his smile. The Prince of Wales did him a lot of good. You can hang on to the Prince of Wales! That smile of his—it tacks princes and paupers together, and could even join Edward and Ben in a kind of a love knot. You just thought of the Prince’s smile, and hung on to it …
Thud!
The Prince of Wales vanished.
The silence that followed the thud seemed ten minutes long. Actually, it was one minute. At the end of it a key clicked in a door above, and footsteps resounded on the stairs. Not quick, definite ones. Faint, stealthy ones.
The steps reached the ground level. They halted. Ben felt, rather than saw, the parlour door being pushed open. He also felt, rather than saw, somebody standing in the dim aperture.
‘Feeling comfortable?’ inquired the soft voice of Sims.
For the first time in their association, Ben made no retort. Sims remarked upon it.
‘I miss your humour,’ he said; ‘but sometimes the lesser good has to be sacrificed to the greater. You, on this occasion, are the lesser good.’
‘This ain’t fair,’ thought Ben.
‘I suppose there’s nothing I can do for you before I go?’ came the ironic request.
‘Yer could scratch a tickle,’ thought Ben.
‘Because, Ben, as you’ve probably realised by now,’ concluded the voice of Mr Sims, ‘you have reached the end of your journey.’
The door closed. Sim’s footsteps sounded again outside, then vanished into the void.
The end of the journey?…
Now there was utter stillness in the hut. No sounds overhead. No sounds on the stairs. No sound in the parlour. But, oddly enough, it was not the silence that dominated Ben’s thoughts just now, nor was it Sims’s parting threat. It was the growing sensation on his nose that he had voicelessly invited his tormentor to scratch.
At first it had been the merest baby of a tickle. The sort of tickle that, if caught young, could be dislodged with a rapid wrinkling of the nose itself. But it was a baby no longer. It had grown up before Ben had seriously noticed it, and like an ignored disease now demanded drastic treatment. Becoming more and more intense, it expanded and spread. It spread through his entire body till he became one vast tickle. It spread beyond him. It filled the room, till the room seemed to prick and hum with it. Surely, if this went on, the whole of Spain would soon be up scratching! The thought was so arresting that, for an instant, the agony was suspended. ‘Lummy, I’m sort of ticklin’-in!’ thought Ben. He pictured Spain scratching itself. ‘I know that’s silly, but it’s jest ter git me mind orf!’ he told himself, while his eyes streamed. But he couldn’t scratch. He hung limply on his cords, in Chinese agony. Even the Prince of Wales could not assist him now.
Then, from an incredible source, help came. It came swishing along the wall, with a sound that froze. A limb flung out, swept Ben’s face, and completed its downward course on the floor. Salvation had come from the dead.
Several minutes later, Ben came out of a blackness deeper than the blackness of his wooden prison. He came out of it sweating, while a thousand cold hands relinquished him grudgingly to slip back into a vanishing nightmare.
‘Now I ’ave bin mad,’ he blubbered in his mind. ‘But, o’ corse, I’m orl right now.’
He tried to blink his tears away. He must be all right now! Lummy, wasn’t he forgetting? The girl upstairs … the girl upstairs …
He managed to raise his head, and to stare upwards. Still no sound! Surely Molly Smith would have given him the comfort of a signal, if she had been able to? And, if she was not able to, why wasn’t she? If only he could have shouted! He was lost without his ‘Oi!’ He tried to blow, but his mouth was blocked up, and you can’t aim at the ceiling with your nose.
Suddenly he became conscious of a new thing in the room. It was small and dazzlingly white, and it was on the floor. It gave him a start. How could new things appear in rooms unless somebody entered to put them there? Lummy! Had somebody entered? That thought gave him another start. Perhaps, while he had been mad, somebody had come into the room and placed the white thing there!
Then he found out what it was. It was a little spot of moonlight.
He concentrated on it. It was something to do. He watched it grow less intense and expand, then become a point again, then vanish, then reappear. Clouds in the night sky have no knowledge of the queer antics they play in rooms! Presently the spot of light expanded definitely, painting the whole floor silver with a rapid brush. The brush swept from the window to the back wall. It illuminated, crudely and callously, Ben’s silent companion. For the first time Ben saw the features in all their distinctness.
Face down, the dead man had borne some vague resemblance to the fellow-being who had killed him. Face up, he looked quite different. Not so old. Not so large boned. Not so expressive of rugged strength. Yet there was a certain similarity, even face up, that bothered Ben for a while. Something joined them together. Something linked them. And, all at once, Ben got it. It was criminality.
‘’E wasn’t no detective,’ he thought. ‘Wrong ’uns, the pair of ’em!’
As he stared at the moonlit form, a shadow suddenly passed over it. Not, this time, the vague shadow of a distant cloud, but the distinct shadow of something infinitely closer. Something immediately outside the window, in fact.
The shadow paused. A second shadow joined it, making two long black strips over the head and body of the corpse.
Ben did not turn his head. He knew well enough whose the shadows were. The owner of one of them laughed, confirming the knowledge.
‘Pretty picture, isn’t it?’ came Greene’s voice outside the window.
‘It’s got Madame Tussaud’s beaten to a frazzle!’ came Faggis’s response. ‘Talk about the Chamber of Horrors!’
‘Yer right,’ agreed Ben, in the silence of his thoughts. ‘If I was ter see meself lookin’ like I do, my ’eart wouldn’t stand it.’
‘Think he’s dead yet?’ queried Greene.
‘Fancy he must be,’ answered Faggis. ‘Let’s go in and poke him.’
‘What for?’
‘Just to see. If he’s not, we could raise his gag a bit to cover his nose.’
There was a pause. Ben kept his bulging eyes glued on the shadows. When they moved, which way would it be? Towards him or away from him?
They moved towards him. Ben’s heart leapt. Lummy, yer’ve gotter ’ave yer nose! But the footsteps died away instead of coming closer, and then he realised that shadows sometimes played dirty tricks on you like that. He’d hit one once that was a mile off.
‘They’ve gorn ter the boat,’ he thought. ‘When the moon come up they was goin’ ter, wasn’t they?’
And now there was only Sims. But Sims was worse than a dozen Greenes and Faggises. Sims was the one you really needed out of the way …
Another shadow fell upon the moonlit corpse. Ben was so used to the corpse by now that he hardly noticed it. He was using the corpse as a mirror, or as a cinema screen across which moving silhouettes flitted. The new silhouette was as unmistakable as the departed ones had been. It was Sims’s silhouette. And he was chuckling. As the others had. But Sims’s chuckle was softer and infinitely more unpleasant. It was the chuckle of a mind that moved in a much larger circle.
‘Git hon, git hon,’ thought Ben, as Sims’s shadow paused.
‘Still comfortable?’ inquired the shadow.
‘I’m dead,’ decided Ben.
‘Pretend, by all means, if it amuses you,’ said the shadow. ‘The real thing will come along in good time. It never spoils by anticipation.’
The shadow slipped along the corpse’s form, slid off the head, and disappeared. Ben put a question direct to God.
‘Why ain’t people nice ter me?’ he asked. ‘Did yer tell ’em not ter be?’
Sims’s footsteps did not vanish with his shadow. They entered the hut, paused at the parlour door, and then began ascending the creaking wooden stairs to the floor above. The soft chuckle accompanied them.
‘Yer know,’ Ben told himself suddenly, ‘I don’t think I can stick no more.’
As he came to this decision, a new head appeared at the window.