The wonder stick

by Stanton A. Coblentz

It was the discovery that his torch was nearly burned out that brought Ru back to reality. Without light in these dayless corridors, he would be helpless!—he would be worse than helpless, he would be lost beyond rescue! Like a dreamer suddenly aroused, he wheeled about, then turned back at a sprint, following the devious windings at reckless speed. The torch, fanned by the swiftness of his flight, burned threateningly low; the molten fat rolled down over his fingers, and he felt the searing heat of the flames. But with the grip of madness he clutched that life-bearing brand; and with the fury of madness he raced through those shadowy labyrinths. He could not be far from the entrance, he thought—another moment, and he should see the welcome light of day.

But the moment passed, and he did not see the light of day. Instead, he paused at last in utter bewilderment. Unexpectedly, the gallery branched in several directions—and he could not remember coming this way before! Was he lost? he asked himself in terror. Which way should he go? But there was no time for debating—choosing at random, he shot off down one of the corridors.

Another minute, two minutes passed—still no sign of the daylight. His alarm rose to an over-mastering horror; his torch sank to a little sputtering point that his scorched hands could scarcely hold. Reason had left him utterly; his mind was a blur of blind passions, passion to escape, at any price to escape; his breath came by furious gasps; his legs sagged beneath him; but still he stumbled on and on, like a harried beast close pressed by the huntsmen.

Then suddenly, from somewhere ahead of him, there came a strange whirring, a murmur as of many wings. Abruptly he stopped; his heart gave a great leap—and just at that instant the torch went out.

As a blackness deeper than the blackness of midnight closed about him, there came a low whine from just beside him. Sinking down to the rocky floor, he pressed as if for protection against the huddled form of Wuff—his sole companion amid that appalling emptiness.

Only in the remotest recesses of his old cave had Ru known a darkness such as this. The gloom was absolute; a blind man could have seen as well as he. Yet never before had he felt so intensely the need of eyes. Out of the depths of the cavern that strange whirring still proceeded, a flapping as of great wings, as of gigantic birds. Louder and louder it grew, louder and louder although never less eery, until Ru could have sworn that the air was filled with enormous evil shapes, gliding back and forth in wide loops and circles through the thick cavern air.

For many minutes he sat hunched on the floor, his hands pressed into the thick fur of Wuff. He did not dare to move; he was afraid that his very breathing would betray him; intermittently the whirring continued, sometimes nearer, sometimes more remote, then gradually dying down altogether, until the silence seemed more terrible than sound, and he had visions of stealthy marauders creeping up on him in the dark. And still a mad eagerness to escape possessed him. Panic-stricken and yet helpless, he suffered all the torments of hopeless captivity—his whole being was aflame with desire for the free air, the open fields, the light of the sun.

At length the darkness and the silence became too oppressive to endure. With no plan in mind, with a brain too overheated to conceive a plan, he began to walk slowly away. Fumbling for his course like a sightless old man, he groped along the wall, sometimes cutting his hands on sharp projections of the rock, sometimes bruising his bare feet on unseen stalagmites. At his side Wuff trotted, as bewildered as himself—at times Ru could hear the heavy breathing or feel the bushy form brushing against his legs. Where he was going he had no idea; he only knew that he was curving in and about, bending and twisting and winding in a series of loops that merely added to the confusion in his mind. Perhaps he had a vague notion that, at some sudden turn, the longed-for daylight would greet him—but, if so, the hope died slowly in his heart. The blackness was everywhere unbroken, everywhere opaque and impenetrable, as if no sun or star had ever shone—and the farther he advanced, the more unlikely did it seem that he would ever regain the open.

Now, as he forced his way haltingly through the invisible, his first frenzied desire to escape had given place to a steadier but scarcely less horrifying emotion—a preying dread that would not leave him, but that persisted and grew while he felt for his path along dark passageway after dark passageway. What unspeakable monsters prowled in these labyrinthine recesses? To his impressionable mind, accustomed from infancy to thinking of all places as populated with evil beasts and still more evil spirits, there could be no doubt that unseen eyes were spying upon him, unseen claws clutching and preparing to strike—and he expected each instant to feel the stroke of rending talons or fangs, or to go writhing on the floor in deadly conflict with some unknown adversary.

Blindfolded though he was, he was not long in realizing that he was wandering through sections of the cave that were new to him. Time after time the galleries divided into two or even three passages, and he had necessarily to select at random. That he had chosen wrongly became more and more apparent as he advanced and found himself even more hopelessly entangled. The corridors had ceased to run upon the level; now and then he was faced with a sharp descent, and he would turn back sooner than take the risk of falling; again, he was confronted with a steep rise, which likewise he would seek to avoid; and once or twice he entered what was apparently a blind alley, and paused in bewilderment before a wall through which he could find no exit. He was impeded, also, by having occasionally to creep on hands and knees beneath a drooping ceiling, and several times he crawled through a slit in the wall so narrow as to admit him only with much crowding; while, by way of contrast, he had sometimes a sense of ample spaces and wide distances, as though the vaulted roof were high above and the walls far apart.