Death in the dusk

by Virgil Markham

The corridor—no one there, apparently. The dinner-room—no one there for certain. The kitchen—now I was in unknown territory. I waited, listened, breathless. Only the whistle of a bat outside, the creak of a timber within. I ran the shifting circle of my torch about the walls, across the floor. A cockroach, devil’s coachman, fled across the flags, and a great moth with eyes glimmering green fluttered toward me from some corner. There on its pillar hung the gate-house key; there, beside the chimney-place where a modern stove presided, was the door I sought.

With prodigious care I passed through this portal, for besides leading ultimately to the bowels of the earth, it ushered me at first into a passage off which opened the precincts of the servants. These half-subterranean chambers lay beneath the dinner-room and conservatory. While I stole past the doors, I had audible evidence a-plenty that the dwellers within were sleeping soundly enough.

This passage I was traversing had a distinct downward tendency and stretched underneath the corridor of the ground floor. It terminated in a door which, when I passed my light over it, appeared very black and cumbrous. The key was in the lock.

To my surprise, when by a series of graded pressures I commenced to turn this key, it moved easy and soundless, as if very recently oiled. Beyond was a winding stone stair.

By way of sensible precaution I removed the key and brought it with me, having no wish to be immured in the depths for any cause whatsoever. The stairs, a dozen or so in number, brought me to the entrance of another passage beneath the first, leading me in exactly the opposite direction. While it proceeded it widened into a goodly cellar, and I made out the yawning mouths of bins on either side, a comforting sight. There were dark archways leading to other caverns. And when I stamped, an unmistakable hollow sound came from below, proof that some buried chamber existed there.

The trap-doors by which one gained these sub-cellars, Crofts had said, were long disused, inch-deep in dust. And a few seconds later I came upon one of them, a heavy iron plate in the floor, clamped down with a clumsy padlock—but the dust was cleared away, and the padlock was not fastened at all! I picked the thing up from where it was lying by the flange, and stared at it stupidly. It would never lock anything again; it had been forced.

Now, surely, this was none of Salt’s work; he had promised to do no more than inspect the dust-covered entrances. It became increasingly evident that someone had preceded me in this search, someone careful not to be detected while he came, but careless whether it was known that he had been. God forbid that he was still below!

With one fierce tug I lifted the door by a ring in the centre; it fell backward with a heavy clang, and an atmosphere of choking damp came up from the hole it left.

A stair descended therein, very steep and narrow, with a thinnish fuzzy coating which must have been dust, though where it came from would have been difficult to tell. In the dust there were footprints, big footprints.

I didn’t like it, but I went on down. The rough stone walls were crumbling with water-rot and the sheer decay of age. While the air grew more smothering, I ran my head into stalactitic cobwebs and rubbed elbows with evil fungi sprouting in every crevice.