Twice a day the small panel in his cell door had slid backward without sound, to frame, in the opening, the face of Dr. Elphinstone, like a face without a body, and without a soul.
The father of Black Steve Annister knew that it was not a dream that would pass, because, on the second day, the head had spoken. Travis Annister was scarcely a coward; he had fought like a baited grizzly when surprised in his Summer camp by the men who had brought him, under cover of the night, to this prison-house beyond the pale.
Now, at the voice, like the slow drip of an acid, Annister stared straight before him, with the gaze of a man who has abandoned hope.
“My dear Mr. Annister,” the voice had whispered, “the little matter of that check, if you please.... You will make it out to ‘Cash’.... Ah, that is good; I perceive you are—wise.”
It had not been the pistol in the lean, clawlike hand; nor the eyes, even, brooding upon him with the impersonal, cold staring of a cobra; Travis Annister might have refused if it had not been for those sounds that he had heard, the sights that he had seen when, taken at midnight from his cubicle, he had beheld the administration of the Cone.
And, like Macbeth, with that one sight, and the sight of that which came after, he had “supped full of horrors,” until now, at the bidding of that toneless voice, he had obeyed. Three times thereafter, at the command of his dark jailer, he had paid tribute, nor had he been, of all that lost battalion, the single victim; there had been others....
Now, separated from him scarce a dozen feet, a girl with golden hair sat, huddled, eyes in a sightless staring upon the stone floor of her cell. Cleo Ridgley had not been killed; she had been saved for a fate—beside which death would be a little thing—a fate unspeakable, even as had—Number Thirty-three.
Mary Allerton, removed from the others by a narrow corridor running cross-wise in the cell-block, watched and waited now for the signal of the man to whom she had dispatched that message, it seemed, a century in the past.
That morning they had found the rope; they had removed it without comment, while the ophidian gaze of the dark Doctor had been bent upon her with what she fancied had been a queer, speculative look: a look of anticipation, and of something more. So far she had been treated decently enough; her cell was wide and airy, plainly but comfortably furnished; but as to that look in the gray-green eyes of the Master of Black Magic—she was not so sure.
There came a sudden movement in the corridor without; a panting, a snuffling, and the quick pad-pad of marching feet. Mary, her eye to the keyhole of that door, could see but dimly; she made out merely the sheeted figures, like grim, gliding ghosts; the figure, rigid, on the stretcher, moving, silent, on its rubber-tired wheels. Then, at an odor stealing inward through the key-hole, she recoiled.