Chapter VII: Part 7

Jackman’s nerves were wearing thin. To assume the new role of a member of Jackman’s conspiratorial circle would be much the safest dodge for him just now, of course--if only Logan knew how to play it. But, lacking knowledge of the ring, all he could undertake was to cast out dark hints from time to time. “Why, I’ll tell you merely this, Dr. Jackman: I am not authorized to make any regular communication to you until certain events have taken place, and until a certain time has elapsed. Until then, consider me simply as your casual guest.” He took a rook of Jackman’s.

“You _are_ a cool chap, Logan. I needn’t tell you I have ways of extracting a statement from you. I know all the ways, Logan.”

“Of course you know them. But suppose I am the sort of person I may be: if you did me any hurt, it might be awkward for you afterward, eh? I have a long memory, Jackman.”

Jackman bit his lip, and lost another pawn. “There are other ways of getting round you, Logan. Have you ever heard a lady scream? A full-throated scream, from exquisite agony, I mean. It’s rather distressing for a gentleman who happens to like the lady in question. And it is the ladies, the gently-bred, soft-skinned ladies, who scream loudest, Logan, and talk soonest and most. Imagine a young lady accustomed all her life to deference, who hadn’t had a hand laid upon her in anger since she was a naughty small child; and then think of her, to her surprise and chagrin, abruptly treated to the worst that the human body can stand. How she would scream, Logan, and babble all she knew, and beg to be let off; and you would have the interesting experience of watching the process, though unable to intervene. Suppose Miss Mary MacAskival were the young lady? I’m sure she could tell us a great deal about you.” Jackman’s marvellous eyes glinted. “Torment is the great leveller, Logan: in torment, the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin. There are no class distinctions in agony; our Miss MacAskival would behave like the lowest trull from Piccadilly, except that she would scream louder and talk sooner.”

It required a considerable effort, but Logan kept a smiling countenance. If he protested, or showed any sign of weakness, Jackman would take precisely this course; he was being sounded. Indifference on his part, just now, was the chief hope for Mary.

“Ah, well, Dr. Jackman, you and I are playing for higher stakes than a slip of a girl, aren’t we? If you must, you must; but I may as well tell you that you’d be wasting the time of both of us. Miss MacAskival knows only just what I found necessary to tell her, which is precious little. As for my being racked vicariously by her discomforts--why, you and I got past that a good time ago, didn’t we, Jackman? ‘O had ye been where I ha’ been, and seen wha’ I ha’ seen....’ When fellows like us have supped long on horrors, another squeal or two doesn’t much matter. Besides, I doubt whether you have much taste for twisting ladies’ arms, Jackman. I know you did your share of the disagreeable business, that very sort of business, in Barcelona and Bucharest--oh, I know all about you, Jackman”--here Jackman grimaced, taken aback--“but really, though you make such operations sound jolly, they aren’t very good fun, are they, now? One never quite grows accustomed to them; they stick in the craw; and what’s worse, they stick at the back of the brain, don’t they? Even our friend Royall, I suspect, doesn’t relish that business as he should.”

“Even so, Logan, I wouldn’t have to turn my own hands to the work, you know. Those strapping fellows downstairs would jump at the chance. They’ve been somewhat inhibited from their accustomed earthy pleasures here in Carnglass, poor chaps, and some haven’t had their way with a woman for months. Your recent little _contretemps_ with Anderson, for instance--I’m certain Anderson would perform the task with enthusiasm. They’re a trifle coarse-fibred, my men, and to apply the _peine fort et dure_ to a young lady would be quite their cup of tea.”

“No doubt, no doubt, old chap.” Here Logan took a knight from Jackman. “I have limitless confidence in their aptitude for such work, if for no other. But the powers that be still would tend to hold you personally responsible, wouldn’t they, now? And suppose the interrogation should all be in vain--why, however could you explain? Nothing does a diligent man’s reputation more serious damage than an unauthorized and unnecessary atrocity. _You_ ought to know that by this time, Jackman.”

“The things I did, others told me to do, Logan.” Jackman’s lips worked. He lost another pawn.

“Quite. But you went rather beyond specific instructions, didn’t you? I don’t advise you to exceed instructions here in Carnglass.”

Jackman ran a hand lightly across his forehead, distractedly touching the little round soft patch in the middle with a forefinger. He ventured out a rook too far, and lost it to Logan. Then he looked, silent, into Logan’s eyes. The gaze of those great glowing pupils of Jackman’s was hard to bear. Into Logan’s mind came the sentence, “And if thy light be darkness, how great shall be that darkness.” It was just possible that he might prove a match of Edmund Jackman now, though the odds were against him. The man’s brain must be damaged, and under Jackman’s outward imperiousness, Logan suspected, vacillation was gnawing away. Logan thought also that had he encountered Jackman at the height of the man’s powers, Mary would have had a sorry knight-errant. But now the merciless energy and talent which had been Jackman’s were flickering in the socket, like enough, and Logan had to deal only with the remnant of a bad man. In Jackman’s ears sounded the wings of the Furies, and his mind sank further into doubt and dread. Or so Logan surmised, looking into those splendid, troubling eyes. It was just barely conceivable that Logan might defeat this failing master of deceit.

Logan started, and shook his head to rouse his consciousness. Had Jackman been attempting to mesmerize him? If so, the attempted paralysis of will had not succeeded, what with Logan’s own mind being full of plots and stratagems. Yet Jackman might have come near successful hypnosis; Logan had a feeling that the man had been asking him questions, in a low, almost friendly voice, to which Logan had given no answers as yet.

Just now Jackman was saying, ever so softly, “Who _are_ your friends outside the Old House, out there in the wet and the dark?”

“Friends?” Logan spoke shrilly, alarmed at his own near-slip into reverie or trance. “Friends? Whose friends? If anyone’s outside, they’re no people of mine.” Logan regretted this admission as soon as he had made it; it would have done no harm to keep Jackman wondering whether he had an accomplice or two hidden in the bracken. Indeed, perhaps Jackman had begun to extract the truth from him by hypnosis, and Logan had escaped from the domination of those black eyes only in the nick of time.

But Jackman shook his head slowly, in disbelief; and his eyes went to the window of that room high in the tower, almost as if he feared to see some face pressed against the pane, far above the living rock of the Old House’s foundation. It was borne in upon Logan that Jackman’s unease was greater than his own fears.

Jackman licked his thin lips. “Why, Logan, who do you expect me to believe they are?” If the mystery back there behind the bracken had shaken Jackman this much, the panic must be worse among the men below stairs, with Rab’s hysteria to work upon them. “If they were police or intelligence people,” Jackman said, almost as if he expected to be overheard by some presence in that dusky painted chamber, “they would have swooped upon us long ago; they wouldn’t skulk about, picking off first one man and then another.”

“Rab told you that it was Tam Lagg: old Lagg, Dr. Jackman, that you sent over the cliffs a thousand feet down to the rocks and the sea, while he screamed of his wife and his bairns.”

Jackman looked at Logan astonished. “You, Logan--were you watching then? But no, you’ll have had that from Donley, before you finished with him. Lagg? What are you talking of? I saw him strike a crag half way down, and bounce off like a ball, and then fall to the sea. Such a thing doesn’t walk again.”

“Not alive,” Logan replied. “No, not alive.” Jackman’s eyes dilated. Yes, he could sound this note, Logan decided: the black beast was upon Jackman’s shoulders, and the conjuror was bewitched. If ever a man was haunted, it was Jackman, stalked by Spanish victims and Roumanian spectres, and now with the wraith of Lagg at his heels. “See here, Jackman: you raise sham bogles to frighten old women, and you laugh up your sleeve. But when you play with things from the abyss, you run risks. In this dead island of Carnglass, all round us things are ready to stir, if they’re called. I felt them in Dalcruach clachan. In Carnglass the dead are more than the living. And why shouldn’t Tam Lagg rise? You gave him the death that he feared most to die. If ever you set a spirit to walk the night, it was when you tossed that screaming man from the headland at the back of St. Merin’s Chapel.”

As Logan spoke, a nasty change came over Jackman. His face went a sick white, and his eyes closed, and he slumped in his chair. The horror must be on him. His breath came hard. Logan began to think of closing with him as he sat motionless across the table. But after a moment, Jackman gasped, blinked, and fumbled for the pistol in his pocket; he drew the gun and laid it before him, beside the chessboard.

“Then you feel it, too,” Jackman muttered, very low. “All about us, eh? Oh, this is a damned house, a place of dreams, horrid dreams. Listen: last night I walked the passages, for I didn’t dare to sleep, until I was worn out. In the end, I lay on my bed, not closing my eyes. And then it was not a bed, but a long, close tunnel or cave, and I was stumbling along it. Away at the end, I could see something standing. And it came to me that I myself was standing there, even though I walked toward the thing. The Edmund Jackman at the end of the cave was the Edmund Jackman that I might have been, if--if I had taken another turn at the beginning. And as I came up to myself, wanting to see the face, and the beauty of what I might have been, the thing turned, and looked at me. Its face was the face of a goat. Ah, the slit eyes! And I became one with it, and woke, and the horror still was on me.”

Infected by the man’s loathing of himself, and his fright, Logan also lowered his voice to a whisper. “Would you rather have died in the cave than have become one with the goat?”

“Yes,” said Jackman, “yes. It would be better to lie dead, dead like Lagg. I thought then of the gelignite, and I think of it every day and every night.” At this, Jackman shuddered, seemed to collect his wits, scowled at Logan, and glanced dully at the Table-Men of Askival on the board before him.

“Your move,” Logan reminded him. Edmund Jackman moved almost at random. “So!” Logan shifted his queen. “Checkmate, Dr. Jackman.”

“Hell!” cried Jackman, reaching out his hand as if to sweep the pieces to the floor.

“Easy!” Logan said, intercepting Jackman’s hand with his own. “There’s but this one set in the world, you know.”

Once more their eyes met in a long, strange stare; then Jackman, to Logan’s surprise, glanced down at the table. “Logan, or whatever you are,” he said, almost pleadingly, “I don’t know whether you can understand me. You’re a Party intellectual, I think, and the Party believes it knows all things. Yet in some matters the Party is blind. Just now I said ‘Hell.’ In Carnglass, I have learned that Hell is real. That’s heresy in the Party; but I have looked on Hell. There is no Heaven, but there is Hell.”

Jackman’s eyes were vacant now; he seemed to have forgotten to whom he spoke. “Hell endures,” he went on. “I have been in Hell always. This Carnglass is Hell. Don’t you know you were here in Carnglass before, infinitely long ago? We fought here then--and I lost. In Carnglass there is no time. Eternity is real here, and change is the delusion. I know this in the nights, when I walk the corridors. It is only in the day I can pretend that I am alive, or that what things I do can possibly save me from the torment. In the nights it is Hell that is real, and the Party is a sham. Do you understand that? And I know that you came here to send me to the torment, as you did before.”

Many times, Logan had heard the phrase “possessed of a devil.” But not until this moment, as he sat opposite Jackman with the chessmen between them, had he perceived the full and dreadful meaning of the words. The dark powers had claimed Edmund Jackman long since, and what sat opposite him was only the husk of a human being. Even the husk was crumbling now. Yet out of that desiccated scrap of mortality, dry and empty as the armor of last summer’s locust, there echoed now and again cries of anguish, the vain contrition of the damned. Whatever traditionary spectres might throng round the Old House of Fear, here right before Logan sat the ghost of what once might have been a vessel for honor.

Again Jackman’s eyes had closed, and the man or devil did not stir in the chair. What visions came and went behind those fallen eyelids, Logan preferred not to think. Jackman had drifted somewhere beyond this world of sense, for the moment. In the middle of that pallid forehead, the nasty round spot, the Third Eye, seemed to pulsate faintly, as if keeping night watch upon Logan.

Hugh Logan fought clear of the contagion of madness. Minutes, precious minutes, were slipping away. By a heap of chessmen lay the little pistol. Should he make a try for it? Or was this some sort of trap that Jackman had set? No, the damned man’s trance was genuine. If he chose, Logan could leap up, snatch the pistol, and make for the stairs. But that gang of murderers was below. And where might Mary and he run to? Well, let him get his hands on a rifle, and he might hold the old tower against them for a time. It might be possible to keep Jackman a hostage. The scheme was fantastic, but the only probable alternative was torture and death for Mary MacAskival and himself. Rising silent from his chair, Logan stretched out a hand toward the gun.

“As you were!” It was Royall’s harsh voice, at Logan’s back. A revolver-muzzle pressed into his spine. Royall’s long, almost skeletal arm reached past him and snatched up the little pistol by the chessmen. “Over to the wall,” Royall said, “and stand there till I tell you to turn round. I’ve been behind the screen these ten minutes past, Logan.”

11

It would have been a lunatic try anyhow, Logan thought as he faced the wall. Behind him, Royall was ministering to Dr. Jackman, but Logan felt sure that if he swung round, Royall would not miss.

“Here, a little brandy,” Royall was saying, rather in the tone of a nurse. “Come round now, Dr. Jackman. It’s no time for fancies.” There was a sound as if Royall were gently slapping Jackman’s cheeks. “That’s it, sir: are you quite awake now, Dr. Jackman?”

Jackman’s voice came choked and faint, but grew in power after the first few words. “Askival,” Jackman was saying. “Askival--where is he? And Lagg?”

“Take hold of yourself, Dr. Jackman. We’ve this fellow Logan to deal with. Very well, Logan: come over here and sit down.”

For the present, Royall had assumed command. With his revolver he gestured toward the chair in which Logan had sat during the chess-match, and Logan took it without protest. Royall continued to stand. On the other side of the table, Jackman seemed in possession of his faculties again.

“We’d best search this man,” Royall said. He slipped a hand inside Logan’s jacket, still standing at Logan’s back, and found his wallet. Logan did not move: Jackman was watching him keenly, his hand on the pistol. They would find no identification in the wallet, for Logan had put his passport and anything else with his name on it into the knapsack.

“No, sir, there’s nothing with a name, worse luck,” Royall murmured. “Stand up and take off your jacket, Logan.” Logan did as he was told. In a moment Royall thrust the jacket back to him. “And no labels, Dr. Jackman. The man must be an old hand at his game.”

“Tompkins searched his room this morning?” Jackman asked.

“Yes; and he found nothing but a razor and the like. No papers--and not even the canvas sack this man brought with him. I suppose he burnt it in the fireplace, or else flung it out of the window and down the cliff to the sea.”

“Have a man look along the rocks at low tide,” Jackman said. “Yes, our friend Logan undoubtedly has had experience as an agent of some sort.”

“You needn’t bother to have a man risk his bones on those weedy ledges,” Logan told them. “I burnt the sack on the coals, last night.” He trusted that Mary had tucked away the pack in some really secure hidie-hole.

“For your circumstances, Logan,” Royall muttered, “you seem unreasonably cheerful. I shouldn’t care to find myself in your present situation.” Royall ran his hands carefully along Logan’s trousers and into his pockets. “No, Dr. Jackman--no knife, and no papers stitched into the linings.”

“Why,” said Logan, “I suppose a man might as well laugh as cry. And then, don’t you know, it’s not I who need to fash--as we true-born Scots say. It’s you gentlemen who will have to make your peace, if you can, with the men that will be here all too soon for your comfort.”

“Sit down again, Logan,” Royall ordered. “You needn’t sing that tune for us. If you had any people at your back, we’d have seen them before this.”

“Oh?” Logan answered, amicably. “And who do you suppose took Carruthers? Donley was dead hours before you missed Carruthers, remember.”

Jackman and Royall stared at each other, silent. In that moment, Logan almost felt a touch of pity for them. Both must have been reared and educated well enough--very well, indeed. What flaws of character or intellectual false turnings had brought them into this ruthless business, he could not tell. They might have commenced, like others, full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology, with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors. Ideological fanaticism had made of Jackman the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not the lust for women’s bodies. Jackman’s was the _libido dominandi_, the tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death. And in the flame of that lust for power, Jackman and Royall would be burnt up, today or next week or next month: they were at the end of their devil’s bargain, and the fiend would claim his own.

Now, in this oppressive silent moment, the conviction came to Logan that these two artists of disintegration were more frightened than he. He felt surprised to find himself thinking clearly enough, almost ruminating, in this tension that made electric the ancient room with the painted ceiling. Because frightened, Jackman and Royall were the more dangerous; but also their brains were stagnant with dread.

Fear, it crossed Logan’s mind, is the normal condition of man, after all. Quiet ages and safe lands are the rare exceptions in history. Nowadays the tides of disorder were gnawing at whatever security and justice still stood in the world, quite as the swell round Carnglass sought to bring down that heap of gray stones to the mindless anonymity of the ocean. With growing speed, the brooding spectre of terror, almost palpable in Carnglass, was enveloping the world. This island was the microcosm of modern existence.

And here in the haunted stronghold of the Old House of Fear, Jackman and Royall and their gang found themselves caught in their own snare. Even the dull criminals below stairs, huddled tipsily by the kitchen fire, were unmanned by a dim sense of catastrophe, caught up in a horror of the empty island, where mist and silence seemed to have made away with time, so that Glasgow and Liverpool and London were fancies out of an illusory past.

Jackman himself, with his distraught imagination, his ruined talents once near to genius, fancied himself snared here by destiny, condemned to give reality to a myth. And was he wrong? In the Old House, Logan doubted where the realm of spirit ended and the realm of flesh began.

In this dead island, all Jackman’s cleverness lay frustrated, and the strange chance or power that had brought Logan to Carnglass on this day seemed to fill the close air in that forgotten tower-room. For Edmund Jackman, Logan might be something not quite canny, at once a man and an occult agent. Even for Royall, Hugh Logan must seem a retributive figure, from Party or police, mercilessly calm with the knowledge that others were not far behind him.

For all their effort to behave as if they still were masters of the island, a tautness almost hysterical had crept into Jackman and Royall, and their voices were strained. What for years they had dealt out to others, now waited for them; and they had forgotten the meaning of mercy. There was no justice to which they could appeal. By fear they had lived; and now the fear which they and their sort had carried throughout the world was claiming them also. Having murdered order, these two at last were cast into the outer darkness.

Jackman was speaking. Had something like a quaver crept into that urbane and sardonic voice? “Well, Royall,” he was saying, “what will we do with this Logan?”

Royall shifted uncertainly behind Logan’s chair. This man, it occurred to Logan, saw the growing madness in his leader, and yet was loyal--his last link with old-fangled human affections.

“Dr. Jackman,” Royall said, “I have a theory concerning our friend Logan. I believe he’s one of Vlanarov’s people.”

Jackman now spoke with his old decisiveness, as if another spirit had entered into that sinister body, and as if what had happened during the preceding half hour had quite washed away from his memory. “Possibly,” Jackman commented. “Quite possibly. The thought had crossed my mind, too. If he should be, perhaps we can arrive at satisfactory terms. Well, Logan?”

Logan devoutly wished, at this juncture, that he had studied more attentively the recent history of Eastern Europe. If he had fought in Europe, rather than in the Pacific, that might have been of some help; or had he been in intelligence, rather than the infantry. As it was, the name Vlanarov told him a little, but not enough. If memory served him aright, Vlanarov was such a one as Jackman, but a much bigger fish. Logan rather thought that Vlanarov had been at Bela Kun’s side in Hungary, a generation ago, and in Madrid during the Civil War, and after 1945 a terror in Poland. Through all the vicissitudes of Party feuds and all the eddies of ideology in the buffer states, the shadowy but formidable figure of Vlanarov had glided scatheless. No one ever saw a photograph of the man. It had been his peculiar talent to anticipate the triumph of particular factions within the Soviet states, and to shift masterfully in precisely the proper moment from one interpretation of Marxist doctrine to the corrected version. Whenever a vanquished clique fell to its ruin, Vlanarov sorted through the wreck for such survivors as might still do mischief to the new Party orthodoxy, and clipped their claws and their wings for them--or something worse. Certain Trotskyites called Vlanarov “The Vulture.”

This much, Logan recalled. And he could see that conceivably the pose of being one of Vlanarov’s people, at watch upon Jackman’s schemes, might save his neck. But the great difficulty was that he knew far too little of Party intrigues to play this role to the full. For that matter, he was not precisely sure that Vlanarov still was alive: Royall might be setting a trap for him.

“Yes,” Royall was saying, “I fancy that he’s a Vlanarovite, sent over by Bruhl from Brussels, to report on our work. Only one of that sort could have made away with Donley so efficiently.”

Jackman, now tense and erect in his chair, nodded. “Logan,” he said, “if you come from Bruhl or Vlanarov, with instructions for us or perhaps for a survey--why, tell me now. After all, you can’t expect to remain anonymous much longer, because tomorrow or next day I should receive word from Glasgow, and perhaps from Paris.”

“No, Jackman, I don’t think you will.” Logan had resolved to sound as much like a Vlanarovite as possible, without being expected to furnish proof positive. “You’ve contrived to get your boats burnt for you by a stupid old Irishman. You’ve had part of your wireless stolen”--Jackman started at this--“and you’ve no way of sending word to shore. And you saddled yourself with the clumsiest set of agents that ever I set eyes upon. Gare, that drunken incompetent; Dowie, who’s fit only for filching sixpences from slum boys; Jock Anderson, all swagger and no nerve. We gobbled the lot of them.” Logan opened his right hand wide and closed it hard, as if crushing something within. “They’re awa’ doon the water, Jackman. An old hand like you! One would think you had turned to drink. But you’ve turned to old wives’ tales, instead.”

Jackman bit his lip. “Do you mean--do you mean they’ve been taken?”

“Liquidated is our word, Dr. Jackman. They were, after all, depreciated assets. And were I you, Jackman, I’d look sharp. What have you accomplished here in Carnglass? The rags and tags of information you’ve collected in foraging round the islands are next to worthless. We have better ways of mapping those missile sites. And playing with gelignite, like a boy with firecrackers! You’d never get the stuff past the guards at the installations, if you seriously tried: these hangdog fellows you’ve collected here in Carnglass haven’t the heart or the mind for it. You drove out your only experienced man, Donley, so that he had to be liquidated for fear he’d talk. Unauthorized enthusiasm! It will be your ruin, Jackman.”

“But after all,” Royall put in eagerly, “Bruhl himself gave his consent to this project.”

“Tentative consent is one thing,” Logan said; “approval of blunders in operation is another.”

Jackman ran his fingers across his forehead in his old gesture of incertitude. “Logan,” he said, “I believe you really are from Vlanarov’s people. You’re a Party intellectual: you’ve the look and tone of it. In short, you’re a man we can talk with. You must know as well as we do what has gone wrong with this scheme. The people in the Continent want action from me, but they’ll take no risks nor spend any money. For that matter, they’ll give me no men. I am expected to extort the funds from old women, conscript a set of criminals and hold them together by blackmail and intimidation, and pay the penalty by myself, with my own neck, if everything falls in pieces.

“For years those people have used Royall and me in this way. Edmund Jackman, who ought to be forming policy at the upper levels, set to leading a gang of banditti at the back of beyond! It’s enough to craze a man. As one intellectual to another, do you see any justice in that? Bureaucracy on the one hand, fanatic ideological rigidity on the other; and the best minds in the Party, like yours and mine, fallen between the stools. In my situation, what would you have done differently?” He was almost wheedling.

“I’m not authorized to offer any opinion on that subject, as yet,” Logan said, with what he hoped was an enigmatic smile.

“Perhaps I had better make it clear, Logan,” Royall put in, “that Dr. Jackman’s association with Beria arose solely from necessity, and from his obedience to Party discipline. We regret as much as anyone does what happened to Vlanarov’s father.”

“Do you have a cigarette?” said Logan. “I suppose lunch will be ready soon.”

“Logan,” Jackman demanded, intensely, “are you here to supplant me? If you are, why this shilly-shallying? Can’t you have the decency to present your instructions?”

“Why, I’m in no position as yet to give definite orders, Jackman. The decisions must be yours; I decline any responsibility. But this I will suggest: disarm your men, lock up the guns, and give me the keys to the gunroom and the cellars where you keep the gelignite. Send all the men down to the New House except Tompkins and Royall. Light a beacon, or send up flares, and put Carnglass in communication with the mainland through ordinary channels. Leave me in charge of the Old House. Then wait the turn of events. If you do this, I’ll put in my good word for you with my superiors.”

This was spreading it perilously thick, Logan thought, but one might as well be taken for a tiger as for an alley-cat.

Jackman sucked in his breath. “You ask too much, Logan, whoever or whatever you are. Is this some plan to make Royall and me the scapegoats? To hand us over to the police or intelligence, possibly, by way of covering some one else’s blunders? I’ve been treated that way before, Logan, and I’ll not endure it again. Sooner than that--sooner than the gaol or the gallows--I’d walk into the cellars and detonate the gelignite. I’d rather blow Carnglass into pebbles than be the dupe once more.”

“You asked for suggestions, Jackman. I told you I’d assume no responsibilities.” Logan had not dared to hope that Jackman actually would fall into his impromptu snare; but at least it served to bewilder Jackman and Royall.

“And if we did disarm the men,” Royall volunteered, “who would keep off your friends outside? The ones that made away with Carruthers, and sent Rab mad? What’s your scheme, Logan--to liquidate all of us in Carnglass? To send us to join Gare and Dowie and Jock Anderson and Donley? To make sure that no one here ever has an opportunity to furnish evidence to the government?”

Inadvertently, he might have carried the game too far, Logan saw: he might get himself drowned for a commissar instead of a police-agent.

“Damn it,” Jackman almost shouted, the patch in the middle of his forehead twitching, “are you really from Vlanarov? Do you have another name?”

“I’ll tell you when there’s need for it,” was all Logan answered him. For Jackman was losing control of himself, and it was conceivable that he might shoot Logan where he stood.

“Now, now, Dr. Jackman,” Royall murmured, “if he _is_ from Vlanarov, we’d best not....”

“No!” Jackman cried, his air of power returning to him. “No, you’ll tell me soon enough. If you’re sent by that mutual-admiration circle in the Continent, I’ll have that news out of you, and make you pay for it. And if you’re something worse, I’ll twist that truth from you. I know your medicine, Logan. You’re going into the Whiskey Bottle; there’s no man who can endure that place long. You’ll talk with me, and thank me for the chance.”

“Dr. Jackman, I really do think ...” Royall began, uneasily. But Jackman cut him off.

“Mr. Royall, get Anderson and Caggia. We’ll put our friend Logan away below stairs. The responsibility is mine. And while I’m at the Whiskey Bottle, you make the rounds of the house, Royall, and make sure all the men have ammunition enough.”

It never would do to let Jackman see any sign of weakness in him, for the man subsisted on others’ dread, and was most merciless, Logan guessed, when they were most piteous. Deliberately Logan gathered up the Table-Men and set them in their casket. “I thought you had a taste for sherry, Jackman,” he said, “but you seem to have whiskey in mind for me.” Jackman answered nothing. Then Anderson and Ferd entered. Anderson’s jaw was bound up in a bloody handkerchief, and the man looked murder at Logan.

In silence, Jackman and Anderson and Ferd Caggia took Logan down the worn stair in the thickness of the wall. They took him to the ground floor of the old tower, where first he had met Mary MacAskival only yesterday about this hour, though it seemed an age ago. And they shoved him toward one corner of that great vaulted empty room. In that corner, flush with the flagstones, a small stair twisted downward, below the level of the rock on which the Old House stood. Anderson thrust him forward with a curse, so that Logan staggered down the short flight, the three men behind him.

The place below was wholly dark. Caggia carried a petrol lantern, and he lit it and swung it round. This crypt, hollowed from the rock, apparently contained nothing but what looked like a broken windlass in a far corner, and what seemed to be a coil or heap of rope in a near corner. And in the middle of the floor was a circular lid or cover of stone, with an iron ring set into it. Caggia and Anderson commenced to drag back this lid.

This being, perhaps, his last appearance above ground, Logan thought he ought to improve the shining hour. “I do hope, Anderson,” he said, “that your jaw doesn’t pain you.” Anderson responded with an obscenity. “I am acquainted with your brother Jock in the Gallowgate,” Logan went on. “A lively man, Jock. He kicked me in the jaw not long ago.”

“Gude for Jock,” growled Anderson. “I’ll soon gie ye anither.”

“But we caught him, Davie Anderson,” Logan continued, “and put him where he’ll kick no more. We caught Jim Dowie and his wife Jeanie, too, and the others. And now all the world knows of the criminals of Carnglass.”

“Enough of that, Logan,” Jackman put in. Anderson and Ferd were standing by the open mouth of a pit or cistern, staring attentively at Logan. Jackman pressed the muzzle of the little pistol into Logan’s back and urged him toward the gulf. This must be the pit, for dead herring or dead men, described in Balmullo’s account of the Old House.

“Dr. Jackman,” Logan said in some haste, “I do trust that when, tomorrow or the next day, you decide in despair to blow up the Old House, yourself, and everyone round about, you will allow these two fine fellows to join me in this well of yours. It will probably be the safest place for some miles round. I doubt whether Anderson and Caggia are so ready to die as you are.”

Ferd Caggia’s perpetual grin diminished. He glanced appraisingly at Dr. Jackman. “Ferd,” said Logan, “presumably you will be brought to trial for treason, at the least, even if you escape Dr. Jackman’s gelignite. They tell me that you are an excellent shot. If I were you, I should endeavor to persuade Dr. Jackman to remain a comfortable distance from the crypt where he keeps the explosives.”

“Logan,” Jackman muttered in his ear, “do you want a bullet in your spine?”

“By no means, Dr. Jackman. And try not to forget that there will be people asking after me, very soon.” Would they try to throw him into the pit that stood open right by his feet?

“Kneel down,” Jackman told him, “and you may have a glimpse of the Whiskey Bottle. Do you know the Mamertine prison in Rome? This is very like, Logan, but deeper.”

Caggia had tied a long cord to the lantern, which now he lowered into the hole and swung in a circle, slowly, so as to show the interior of the place. Kneeling reluctantly, Logan made out an immense dry depth. The pit was shaped roughly like a bottle, narrow at the mouth and gradually widening, and going down, down. It was irregular, however, with bulges and depressions here and there in its sides, as if more the work of nature than of man. From the mouth, one could not get a clear view of the whole interior. The lantern sank lower and lower into the abyss, and still Logan could not perceive the bottom; then Caggia hauled it up. In this place, according to Balmullo’s history of Carnglass, had been found the deformed skeleton that the crofters had called the Firgower. If ever the pit had been filled with salt herring, it must have enabled the Old House to withstand a siege of months, supposing there was fresh water enough to drink.

Logan stood firm upon the lip of the Whiskey Bottle. Nothing but audacity, he felt, would discourage Jackman from indulging in a new atrocity at this moment. “Look sharp that our friend Dr. Jackman doesn’t put you, too, down this well, Caggia,” he remarked. “It must tell on one’s nerves to have a lunatic bent upon self-destruction for an employer.”

“There you’ll stay, Logan, until you feel inclined to talk with us,” Jackman said, rolling the words thickly. “If I don’t forget you. You’ll not eat or drink until we let you out--if we do. I won’t say when we’ll come back to inquire after you: it may be hours, or it may be days. A man does not stay sane very long in the Whiskey Bottle. If you come out in time, there’s no harm done. Scream when you wish to come out, and perhaps we will hear you. Better men than you have gone down and not come up alive. Down with you, now.”

Anderson had dragged from the corner a long rope ladder. He made it fast to two iron rings sunk in the floor of the crypt, and let the rope fall into the pit. “There you go,” said Jackman. “Goodnight to you, Mr. Logan.”

“I think I’ll not go,” Logan told them. They scarcely could carry him down the swaying rope ladder.

“In that event,” Jackman remarked--and Anderson sniggered--“we would have to pitch you in, and it’s nearly fifty feet to the bottom, so you would be broken. Or we would have to lower you in at a rope’s end, head first, with risk to your skull. I advise you to choose the ladder.”

There was nothing else for it. Logan set his feet and hands on the swaying ladder, and began to descend. As he went down, the feet of the three men disappeared from view, and presently he was in blackness. After what seemed eternity, swinging and twisting about on the ropes, he felt no rung-slat under his foot, and halted, twirling back and forth like a top in space. Did they mean him to fall and break his legs or back? “It doesn’t reach,” he called up. The echo was melancholy.

“Jump for it,” Jackman’s voice sounded ever so faintly above.

“I’ll be damned if I do,” Logan roared back.

“You’ll be damned if you don’t,” called Jackman, “for we’ll loose the ladder at this end, and you’ll fall anyhow, and there’ll be no way back.”

Waiting was no comfort. Logan relinquished his hold on the ladder, expecting his end. But he fell only six or seven feet, bruising his back on the jagged stone floor, which was quite dry. He could hear the rustle of the ladder being hauled up. The light of the lantern glimmered at the top of the Bottle, and a head was thrust over the mouth of the shaft, silhouetted against the petrol glare.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” Jackman said, “shriek when you care for our company.” He laughed. Then he said something else, more faintly; but Logan thought it was, “Once you put me here, Askival.” There came a scraping sound from above, and the lid was dragged back over the Bottle’s mouth, cutting off Logan from the world. He was shut into the tomb now, as in his dream on the second night in Carnglass. As if the stone cover had not been coffin-lid enough, an iron door had stood ajar, Logan remembered, at the entrance to the crypt, a big key in the lock. No doubt they would turn the key. Goodbye, Mary MacAskival.

12

In the Whiskey Bottle, it would not do to brood more than a man might help, for that way lay despair: especially when one thought of what might be done to Mary MacAskival, high above. So Logan busied himself, at first, in creeping round the circumference of the Bottle’s floor, feeling everywhere. There was nothing to feel but lumpy naked rock, everywhere gouged by ancient chisels.

The batter of the circular sides made it impossible for him even to think of climbing, fly-like, toward the mouth. These pleasures soon were exhausted. His watch had not worked well since he splashed ashore in Carnglass, and perhaps that was to the good. Already he was hungry and thirsty; but this last must be chiefly a psychological oppression, as the damp air of Carnglass made it unnecessary for a man to drink much water a day.

Although he had been in the place but a quarter of an hour, probably, the problem of fresh air began to worry Logan. It was silly to think about it so soon, of course: the immense cubic capacity of the Bottle would give him oxygen enough for a long time, and conceivably enough to support life leaked beneath the rude stone at the mouth, anyway. But one thought about such things in the Bottle, for lack of aught else to do.

In all that dead island, the Whiskey Bottle was the deadest place. Not even an insect could live here; and the place was so dry that, perhaps, not even a lichen could cling to the sloping walls. One could think only of dead things: of the deformed skeleton found on this floor, and the presences that drifted through Jackman’s guilty brain. It wouldn’t do for a man to think such thoughts: not for a man who meant to keep his wits about him. If ever they let him out of the Bottle, he would need all the wits and all the strength he could muster. The best thing to do, then, was to sleep. Luckily, Logan was very tired from the strain of the past several days, and from having had so little sleep last night, what with his colloquy with Mary MacAskival. And sleep never had come hard to him, in the worst of times and places. He groped about the rough floor until he found a tolerable area upon which to stretch himself, and there he lay down, his head on his arm, and soon drifted off. Dreams came, hideous dreams; but afterward they were all a blur to him. Now and then he tossed and woke imperfectly; then, like a sick man, he sank back into the sanctuary of the unconscious.

How many hours later it was that a noise woke him, he could not say. What could make a noise in the Bottle? Nothing living. It was a faint dragging noise. Then high overhead, he could perceive the faintest half-moon of light. Someone was dragging back the stone lid of the Bottle, slowly.

Would Jackman and Royall pull him out and put him to more direct torture? If they had tormented the truth about him out of Mary MacAskival, the odds were that they would put him into the sea, as a man who knew too much of them, and whose death might be explained with tolerable ease. It might be easier for him to refuse to come up, and hope that aid might come from the mainland in time. They could descend, of course, and tie him, and haul him to the top; but that would mean a fight. If they shot him, that would be evidence of foul play, supposing his body ever were washed up.

Now something scraped and rustled, and barely brushed the top of his head: it must be the rope ladder. Reaching up, he grasped the thin strip of wood that was the bottom rung. Still Jackman, if he were above, said nothing. But a light probed downward toward Logan; someone up there held an electric torch. He had might as well take this dubious chance. Although it had been long since Logan had gone in for gymnastics, he had strong arms, and so contrived to pull his chin up to the level of the bottom rung, get a fresh grip, and bring up his legs. And then he commenced the swaying climb toward the Bottle’s mouth.

As he neared the top, the torch dazzled him. Then a hand caught his, helping him over the edge to the floor of the crypt. No sooner had Logan got to his feet than a pair of arms was flung around his neck, and a small body hung for a moment upon his, in fright and delight. “They’ve broken no bone of you, Hugh?” said Mary MacAskival. Before he could reply, she kissed him, and then flashed the electric torch the length of his body, as if to be sure he were all there. “Don’t speak above a wee whisper,” she murmured in his ear, “and come over here, for we must be off.” Taking his hand, she led him through the dark toward a corner of the crypt.

“One glimpse of you, anyway,” said Hugh. Taking the torch, he sent the beam over and behind her. She was barefoot, but with a pair of little walking-shoes slung round her neck. On her back she had Logan’s own rucksack, looking as if it were crammed with things. Her back was to what seemed to be the low circular coping of a well, with a derelict windlass above it.

“We daren’t talk now,” the girl said, “for we’ll have but a quarter of an hour, at best, before Niven gives the alarm. He’s sentry at the garden door on the floor above. I told him I was taking you food and water, which you’re not supposed to have, and he let me pass, for he knows I am a red-haired witch. Jackman will thrash the poor fellow within an inch of his life when he finds we’re gone. Niven never thought I could get out with you, of course. If he’d known that, even I couldn’t have seduced him.”

“Seduced him?”

She chuckled. “Oh, don’t be silly. Has Dr. Jackman been telling you more lies about me? I mean, subverted his loyalty to Jackman. I gave Niven five pounds and nearly a full bottle of rum. All right now, Hugh: take off your trousers.”

He was bemused. “Whatever for?”

“Why, silly, we’re going down the cistern, and there’s water in it, and you might catch your death of cold outside, with wet trousers. I think you may keep your shirt on; we sha’n’t go so deep, I hope. Here, take the pack, and carry it, and stuff your trousers in it. I can kilt up my skirt once we’re at the level of the water, but you could hardly slip off your trousers in the middle of the shaft. You’d best take off your shoes and stockings, and sling them round your neck, the way I have, too. You needn’t be shy: I’ll go down first, and I’ll point the torch the other way.”

Logan stared into the cistern. In the beam of the torch, he could see rusted iron rungs set into the masonry, leading downward; but they ended in still water. “If we’re to drown, Mary,” he said, “it had might as well be in the sea.”

“What with the gutters of the tower being half clogged,” she went on, “the water level down there is very low nowadays--twelve or fifteen feet, at best--and I feared they might find the arch, but they haven’t. It’s perfectly feasible: Malcolm Mor and I did it four years ago, like a bomb. Why, it’s a lark, Hugh; come along. The last one down is an old maid.” Hiking her skirt halfway up her white thighs, Mary MacAskival stepped over the well-coping, swung round, and began to descend the slimy iron rungs. “I locked the crypt door on the inside, for I have keys, you know,” she whispered up, “but Niven may be pounding on it any second, so be quick with you.”

There was nothing for it but to obey this madcap. Down Logan went into the cistern; he hoped the old rungs would hold. Once his foot caught the girl’s fingers, and she suppressed a cry. He heard a faint splash of water below, and turned the torch downward, looking between his bare legs. Mary MacAskival, her skirt held up almost to her shoulders, was more than waist-high in the black water. “There is nothing in the world,” she volunteered, “quite like a cold tub. Now do as I do, and mind your head, for from floor to ceiling is scarcely more than four feet.” She vanished.

Dismayed, Hugh Logan descended to his waist in the cold water. Then, on his left, he saw the arch of which Mary had spoken: a round-headed masonry arch, very old. The cistern water came to within two feet of the crown of it. Gingerly, Logan stretched out a leg, found the floor of a passage under the arch, gripped Mary’s outstretched hand thrust back from the passage, and swung himself from the iron rungs to a low tunnel nearly filled with water; he had to stoop so that his face cleared the surface by only a few inches, and his little pack, strapped to his back, scraped against the roof.

Squeezing his hand, Mary MacAskival pulled him along the black passage, the torch-beam gleaming on the water. She had her skirt twisted round her neck. “One thing’s certain,” she panted, “they’ll not hear us here. In the old days, this place was flooded altogether, except when The MacAskival let water out of the cistern so that men could enter the passage. Malcolm Mor--he was the old gardener, remember?--told me that his father’s father’s father’s uncle knew of this place, though no living man had seen it for a hundred years and more. Malcolm and I found it out together. We had grand larks.”

After six yards or so, the floor began to slope upward, fairly sharply; and after a dozen yards, they were free of the water. “No trousers for you yet, modest Hugh,” Mary said, though she had let her skirt fall into place. “There is water still to come.” A moment later, they entered a small square rock chamber, beyond which loomed another narrow passage. “The Picts made this, as they made the Whiskey Bottle, Hugh. Look there.” She pointed the torch toward one wall, and by it Hugh made out a faint band of carving on the wall: little hooded and caped figures, faceless, some riding on queer little ponies. “This was a chapel, I think, or a tomb; but we haven’t a moment to spare just now.” She led the way into the further passage, the floor of which sloped downward again. “We’re far beyond the Old House now, Hugh.”

The passage shot abruptly downward, and then ended in a solid barrier of living rock. Did the girl mean them to crouch here indefinitely, on the chance that help might come from the mainland before they starved? “I think the Picts dug all this for a temple,” she was saying, “or a king’s tomb; but the MacAskivals used it as a sortie-port in time of siege, or a way of escape if worst came to worst. Oh, I’m not strong enough. Tug at it, Hugh!” She was kneeling on the rough floor. Handing the torch back to her, Hugh Logan felt under his hands a thick stone slab, roughly rectangular. He tugged. It could be slid to one side, far enough to allow them to squeeze through to whatever lay beneath. And beneath was more water. But this water splashed and sucked, and the strong stench of seaweed came up from it; and from beyond came the roar of the wild Carnglass tide.

“We’re to go into that, Mary?” But Mary MacAskival already had swung her handsome bare legs through the gap. The water just below snarled and surged in the cave, as if full of murderous desire. “It’s past midnight, Hugh, and the tide has ebbed.” She jumped down.