The Black Bag

by Louis Joseph Vance

Be that as it might—he almost lost his head when he realized this—escape was already cut off by the way he had come. Some one, or, rather, some two men were entering the alley. He could hear the tramping and shuffle of clumsy feet, and voices that muttered indistinctly. One seemed to trip over something, and cursed. The other laughed; the voices grew more loud. They were coming his way. He dared no longer vacillate.

But—which passage should he choose?

He moved on with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice, maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account of himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drink and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive lure, he picked up his heels and ran. Those behind him, remarking with resentment the amazing fact that an intimate of the mews should run away from liquor, cursed and made after him, veering, staggering, howling like ravening animals.

For all their burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to the uproar.

Caught thus between two fires, and with his persecutors hard upon him, Kirkwood dived into the nearest black hole of a passageway and in sheer desperation flung himself, key in hand, against the door at the end. Mark how his luck served him who had forsworn her! He found a keyhole and inserted the key. It turned. So did the knob. The door gave inward. He fell in with it, slammed it, shot the bolts, and, panting, leaned against its panels, in a pit of everlasting night but—saved!—for the time being, at all events.

Outside somebody brushed against one wall, cannoned to the other, brought up with a crash against the door, and, perforce at a standstill, swore from his heart.

"Gorblimy!" he declared feelingly. "I'd 'a' took my oath I sore'm run in 'ere!" And then, in answer to an inaudible question: "No, 'e ain't. Gorn an' let the fool go to 'ell. 'Oo wants 'im to share goo' liker? Not I!..."

Joining his companion he departed, leaving behind him a trail of sulphur-tainted air. The mews quieted gradually. Indoors Kirkwood faced unhappily the enigma of fortuity, wondering: Was this by any possibility Number 9? The key had fitted; the bolts had been drawn on the inside; and while the key had been one of ordinary pattern and would no doubt have proven effectual with any one of a hundred common locks, the finger of probability seemed to indicate that his luck had brought him back to Number 9. In spite of all this, he was sensible of little confidence; though this were truly Number 9, his freedom still lay on the knees of the gods, his very life, belike, was poised, tottering, on a pinnacle of chance. In the end, taking heart of desperation, he stooped and removed his shoes; a precaution which later appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, in view of the racket he had raised in entering, but which at the moment seemed most natural and in accordance with common sense. Then rising, he held his breath, staring and listening. About him the pitch darkness was punctuated with fading points of fire, and in his ears was a noise of strange whisperings, very creepy—until, gritting his teeth, he controlled his nerves and gradually realized that he was alone, the silence undisturbed. He went forward gingerly, feeling his way like a blind man on strange ground. Ere long he stumbled over a door-sill and found that the walls of the passage had fallen away; he had entered a room, a black cavern of indeterminate dimensions. Across this he struck at random, walked himself flat against a wall, felt his way along to an open door, and passed through to another apartment as dark as the first.

Here, endeavoring to make a circuit of the walls, he succeeded in throwing himself bodily across a bed, which creaked horribly; and for a full minute lay as he had fallen, scarce daring to think. But nothing followed, and he got up and found a shut door which let him into yet a third room, wherein he barked both shins on a chair; and escaped to a fourth whose atmosphere was highly flavored with reluctant odors of bygone cookery, stale water and damp plumbing—probably the kitchen. Thence progressing over complaining floors through what may have been the servants' hall, a large room with a table in the middle and a number of promiscuous chairs (witness his tortured shins!), he finally blundered into the basement hallway.

By now a little calmer, he felt assured that this was really Number 9, Frognall Street, and a little happier about it all, though not even momentarily forgetful of the potential police and night-watchman.