"Why," he repeated aloud — "why was Anthony so strong in the arms?"
"Or, if you want more questions," boomed the doctor, sitting up straight, "why is the destiny of everybody so intimately concerned with that well? Everything leads straight to the well. - There's Anthony's son, of course, the second Starberth who was a governor of this prison. He's the one who threw us all off the track. He died of a broken neck, like his father, and started the tradition. If he'd died in bed, there wouldn't have been any tradition, and we could examine the death of Anthony, his father, without any hocus-pocus. We could see it as the isolated problem it is. But it didn't happen that way. Anthony's son had to be governor of this prison when the cholera wiped out most of its inmates, and those poor devils went mad down in their airless cells. Well, the governor of the prison went mad from the same fever. He had it, too, and his delusions were too strong for him. You know what an effect that diary of his father's had on all of us? Then what sort of effect do you imagine it had on a nervous, bogey-ridden man who had been stricken with cholera in the bogey-ridden nineteenth century? What do you suppose is the effect on the brain of living just above the exhalations of a swamp where hanged men have been thrown to rot? — Anthony could hardly have hated his own son enough to want him to get up from his bed in delirium and throw himself from that balcony. But that's what the second governor did."
Rumbling, Dr. Fell exhaled his breath so hard that it almost blew out the candle, and Rampole jumped. For a moment the big room was quiet: dead men's books, dead men's chairs, and now the ancient sickness of their brains had become as terrible here as the face of the Iron Maiden. A rat scurried across the floor. Dorothy Starberth had put her hand on Rampole's sleeve; you would have said that she saw ghosts.
"And Anthony-?" Rampole put in, with an effort.
For a time Dr. Fell sat with his big shock of hair bowed.
"It must have taken him a long time," he remarked, vacantly, "to have worn so deep a groove in the stone. He had to do it all alone, and in the dead of night-time, when nobody could see him. Of course, there were no guards on that side of the prison, so he could escape unnoticed… Still, I'm inclined to think he had a confederate for the first few years, until he could develop his own strength. His own terrific strength would come with patience, but until then he had to have a confederate up raise and lower him. Probably, afterwards, he did away with the man…."
"Wait, please!" said Rampole, hitting the table. "You say that the groove was worn by a rope because Anthony spent years…"
"Hauling himself up and down it."
"Into the well," the other observed, slowly. He. had a sudden vision of a weird spiderish figure in black, swinging on a rope under the night sky. A lamp or two would be burning in the prison. The stars would be out. And Anthony would dangle by night where dead men dangled in daytime, working his way down to the well..
Yes. Somewhere down in that broad well, God knew where, he had spent year's in hollowing out a cache. Or possibly every night he had swung down to examine his treasures there. The reek from the well would dissolve his own sanity as it later dissolved his son's; but more subtly, for he was a harder man. He would see dead men climbing up from the well to knock at his balcony door. He would hear them whispering together at night, because he had decked their flesh with his wealth, and planted gold among their bones. Many nights he must have seen the rats eating in the well. It was only when he saw the rats in his own bed that he believed the dead men were coming to carry him down with them, soon.