"The time's up," Martin shouted back, "and I'm unlocking this door."
He did so, after which he pushed the iron door partly open with a squeak and squeal of hinges. There was a ringing clatter as he threw the key inside on the floor.
"Thanks' he added, "for an entertaining evening. You're free, and I'm free too."
The thought of Stannard's company, on the way back, almost revolted him. In his exuberance he felt like talking to empty air instead, so that he could use rich words unheard. Putting Stevenson in his pocket, and picking up the lamp, he took long strides to get away from there.
Faintly, once, he thought he heard Stannard calling something after him. But the light-found the white-string guideline with ease; amazing he hadn't noticed it before! Nevertheless, in his daylight mood, it was of a pattern with all the other incidents of last night.
Every action, every speech, had seemed quite natural at the time; even inevitable. Yet now, when the images unreeled before him — those evil forces (imagined?) in the condemned ceil, a fencing-match in which he had nearly been murdered by the sedate Dr. Laurier, a blood-stained dagger, an alarm-bell With its rope in the cell, an amorous passage with Ruth Callice — it became a phantasmagoria which struck him with wonder. The little talk with Ruth seemed to him inconsequential, as though it had never happened; even amusing. He would tell Jenny about it -
In less than two minutes, at rustling quick-step through what was now only a dreary storage-building, he reached the main gate. All phantasmagoria, like that skeleton in the clock. Briefly he wondered what Sir Henry Merrivale might have been doing with the skeleton in the clock.
Through the arched frame of bars like a portcullis, he saw that the tall iron gates stood wide open. Beyond lay thick white.mist, drifting and with rifts in it; the mist would presently vanish before heat and sun, but meantime it muffled the world in eeriness.
As he passed the opening in the portcullis, switching off the lamp and putting it in his pocket, Martin laughed aloud at this so-called eeriness." He could have danced or hit the air a right-hander. Then, just outside the prison gates as a rift in the mist floated past, he saw Jenny herself. She was obviously waiting.
For a moment he stood still, with a notion that this might be part of the fantasy.