The earthy, cellary smell of the place still seemed to be about him as it had been last night. "It's full of rats," he repeated.
"Oh, ah-undoubtedly," said the rector. "Well, gentlemen?"
They pushed forward along the passage. These walls were uneven with ragged stones, and dark green moss patched the cracks; a rare place, Rampole thought, for typhoid fever. Now scarcely anything could be seen, and they blundered forward by holding to one another's shoulders.
"We should have brought a flashlight," growled Sir Benjamin. "There's an obstruction―"
Something struck the weedy stone floor with a dull crash, and they jumped involuntarily.
"Manacles," said Dr. Fell from the gloom ahead. "Leg irons and such. They're still hanging from the wall along here. That means we're entering the wards. Look sharp for the door."
It was impossible, Rampole thought, to straighten out the tangle of passages; though some small light filtered in once they had passed the first of the inner doors. At one point a heavily grated window, sunk in the five-foot thickness of the wall, looked out upon a dank, shaded yard., It had once been paved, but it was now choked in weeds and nettles. Along one side a line of broken cell-doors hung like decayed teeth. Weirdly, just in the centre of this desolate yard grew a large apple tree in white bloom.
"The condemned ward," said Dr. Fell.
Nobody spoke after that. They did not explore, nor did they ask their conductor to explain the meaning of certain things they saw. But, in one airless room just before they came to the staircase for the second floor, they saw the Iron Maiden by the light of matches; and they saw the furnaces for certain charcoal fires. The Iron Maiden's face wore a drowsy, glutted smile, and spiders swung in webs from her mouth. There were bats flopping around in that room also, so that they did not linger.
Rampole kept his hands clenched tightly; he did not mind anything but the things that flicked against his face, briefly, or the feeling that something was crawling up the back of his neck. And you could hear the rats. When they stopped at last before a great door, bound in iron, along a gallery on the second floor, he felt that he was out of it; he felt as though he had just plunged into clear cool water after sitting on an anthill.