A Mediterranean mystery

by Fred E. Wynne

Then they left me. I began to read my own article in the review, but I found that matters that had once seemed intensely interesting and important had become profoundly boring, and I slept.

I suppose it was exhaustion, but I slept most of that afternoon. I fed again and went to sleep again. So I spent those hours amid circumstances that from a distance would have seemed the most enthralling. But I had examined this weird subterranean chamber. Its bare rock faces had nothing more to tell my ignorance. I had not the knowledge or experience to interpret the history that might be graven on them.

I slept again lightly, and not for very long. Consciousness returned in the form of uneasiness. I was in utter darkness, but awake and alert. I was in no uncertainty as to my whereabouts or the recent events that had brought me there. I was not even quite sure that I had slept.

I knew I had but to stretch out my hand to find a box of matches and light my candle, but I found I could not make the effort. Fear kept my hand immobilised. I can say honestly that it was no mere superstitious dread of my surroundings. I was perfectly conscious of my unseen environment of hewn rock beneath the remote desert. I was untroubled by any thought of possible horrors enacted there in the distant past. Yet I was afraid, afraid of some human presence that I knew was there, invisible and unfelt, unheard, yet palpable in the darkness and silence which surrounded me. I lay there conscious that my face was distorted by fear, waiting, longing for something, anything that would stimulate any normal human sense. I think I could have welcomed the thrust of a dagger if it had ended that horrible suspense in the darkness of the old subterranean church of a forgotten religion.

Something moved near me and the spell was broken. I was aware of myself sitting up, my blanket thrown aside, my left arm doubled across my face by some defensive instinct.

“Who is that?” said a voice that must have been mine.

Without knowing what I did, my right hand went out and found the matches beside me. The box rattled faintly as I grasped it, and before it rattled again, before I could move it towards my left hand, my hand was seized and held in a soft firm grip.

I fell backwards again incapable of effort. “No light, effendi. Make no sound. There is danger.”

It was Jakoub’s voice, whispering.

I dreaded and feared the man, yet I knew his whisper was not that of my murderer. I felt that for the time at all events we were allies against some unknown danger threatening us both.