Charles Rex

by Ethel M. Dell

The first thing that struck him was the emptiness of the place. It seemed to catch him by the throat. There was something terrible about it.

Behind him the door clanged, and the sound seemed the only sound in all that wonderful June night. It had a fateful effect in the silence—like the tolling of a bell. Something echoed to it in his own heart, and he knew that he was afraid.

Desperately he flung his fear aside and moved forward to the parapet. The wall was thick, but between the battlements it was only the height of his knee. Below was depth—sheer depth—stark emptiness.

He looked over and saw the stone terrace dimly lit by the stars far below him. The gardens were a blur of darkness out of which he vaguely discerned the glimmer of the lake among its trees.

His heart was beating suffocatingly; he struggled to subdue his panting breath. She was somewhere close to him of course—of course. But the zest of the chase had left him. He felt dizzy, frightened, sick. He tried to raise his voice to call her, and then realized with a start of self-ridicule that it had failed him. He leaned against the parapet and resolutely pulled himself together.

Then he went forward and found himself in a stone passage, actually on the castle wall, between two parapets; the one on his left towering above the inner portion of the castle with its odd, uneven roofs of stone, the one on his right still sheer above the terrace—a drop of a hundred feet or more.

The emptiness and the silence seemed to strike at him with a nebulous hostility as he went. He had a vague sense of intrusion, of being in a forbidden place. The blood was no longer hot in his veins. He even shivered in the warmth of the summer night as he followed the winding walk between the battlements.

But he was his own master now, and as he moved forward through the glimmering starlight he called to her:

"Toby! Toby, I say! Come out! I'm not playing."

He felt as if the silence mocked him, and again that icy construction about the heart made him catch his breath. He put up a hand to his brow and found it wet.