Then suddenly I sat up, my nerves stretched taut to a stifled scream. There was a light in the gallery beyond the sloping.
I tried to tell myself I was seeing things, that the darkness was playing tricks on my eyes. But I could see the cleft quite plainly, like an old doorway and it was all yellow with light. I stood up. Perhaps it was Manack coming back. The light seemed to be getting stronger. Then a long-drawn out cry curdled my blood. It was a soft wailing sound that dragged itself through the galleries and came echoing back in wail after wail, growing fainter each time. It came again. It was a woman's cry — a mad, wailing, echoing cry. And slowly the light grew brighter in the shaft beyond the sloping.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mad Manack
I don't know what I expected to come along that gallery. I stood there, clutching at the wet rock of the walls and my blood pounded in my ears. But for the darkness of the gallery behind me, I think I would have run. The light grew steadily brighter till the walls glistened and I could see the rotten stulls of the sloping thrust out like arms from the sloping rock. If it were human I knew it couldn't cross that gap. But I don't think I thought it was human. No man brought up on the old tinners' tales could possibly have thought that wild cry human.
At last the light itself appeared. It was attached to a miner's helmet and the miner himself came steadily on towards the slope. I thought of all the men who must have lost their lives down here. The mine was old. Two or three centuries of tinners must have worked down here, burrowing down from above and in from the cliffs. Many would have been killed.
I wailed in a sweat of fear to see what the thing would do when it reached the rotten lagging. Would it come on — or would it stop?
The figure reached the gap, stopped and then swung itself against the rock, feeling for the staples.
It was human.
But it wasn't Manack. It was much smaller than Manack. It wasn't his son either, or Slim or Friar. I hesitated. I hadn't been seen. I was in the shadow of my part of the gallery. The miner failed to find the expected foothold, drew back and bent down, looking for the staples that should have been there. The beam of his lamp shone like a disc of light straight at me. Then I found my voice. 'Who are you?' I asked.