Quill's Window

by George Barr McCutcheon

II — Anxiety that touched almost upon despair hastened his steps. Abandoning caution, he ran recklessly up the path among the rocks, stumbling and reeling but always keeping his feet, and came at last to the gloomy, forbidding facade of Quill's Window. Here he groped along the wall, clawing for the sunken cleats with eager, trembling hands. He knew they were there—somewhere. Not only had he seen them, he had climbed with ease, hand over hand, ten or a dozen feet up the cliff. He had shuddered a little that day as he looked first over his shoulder and then upward along the still unsealed stretch that lay between him and the mouth of the cave, seventy or eighty feet away. But that was in broad daylight. It would be different now, with darkness as his ally.

He remembered thinking that day how easy it would be to reach Quill's Window by this rather simple route. All that was required was a stout heart, a steady hand, and a good pair of arms. All of these were bestowed upon him by magic of darkness. It was what the light revealed that made a coward of him. Why, he could shut his eyes tight and go up that cliff by night as easily as—but where were the slots?

At last his hand encountered one of the sharp edges. He reached up and found the next one above,—and then for the first time realized that his eyes had been closed all the time he was feeling along the cold surface of the rock. He opened them in a start of actual bewilderment. The blackish mass rose almost sheer above him, like a vast wall upon which the moon cast a dull, murky light. He closed his eyes again and leaned heavily against the rock. His heart began to beat horribly. He felt his courage slipping; he wondered if he had the strength, the nerve to go on; he saw himself halfway up that endless wall, clutching wildly to save himself when a treacherous hand-hold broke loose and—

He opened his eyes and tried to pierce the shadows below the rocky path. Was it best to hide in that hole up there, after all? Would it not be wiser, now that he had a fair start, to keep on up the river, trusting to—

A chorus of automobile horns in the distance came to his ears suddenly,—a confused jumble of raucous blasts produced by many cars. The alarm! The search was on! The wild shriek of a siren broke the stillness near at hand, followed a few seconds later by the gradually increasing roar of an engine as it sped up the dirt road not three hundred yards to his left,—the road that ran past the gate on the other side of the hill. God! They were getting close!

Another and even more disturbing sound came to him as he stood with his fingers gripping one of the little ledges, the toe of his shoe fumbling for a foothold in another. Somewhere back on the trail he had just traversed, a rock went clattering down to the river. He heard it bounding—and the splash as it shot into the water.

He hesitated no longer. Shutting his eyes, he began the ascent....

A dark object turned the corner of the cliff below and moved slowly, cautiously along the wall. Suddenly it stopped. From somewhere in the gloom ahead came a strange and puzzling sound, as of the dragging of a tree limb across the face of the rock. The crouching object in the trail straightened up and was transformed into the tall, shadowy figure of a man.

For many seconds he stood motionless, listening, his eyes searching the trail ahead. The queer sound of scraping went on, broken at intervals by the faint rattle of sand or dirt upon the rocky path. At last he looked up. Far up the face of the cliff a bulky, shapeless thing was crawling, slowly but surely like a great beetle.

The watcher could not believe his eyes. And yet there could be no mistake. Something WAS crawling up the sheer face of the cliff, a bulging shadow dimly outlined against the starlit sky.