It seemed as if there must be a hundred of those steps, though actually they were about the same number as had been in the winding stair. At length I saw that I had come to the last of them, for the big footsteps tramped across a lumpy floor, athwart the glistening path of a snail. The door was earth, soggy and covered with that same thin dust-layer.
Midnight was midnight there indeed. Without my torch, I should never have returned a sane man. Nor did my light, dancing about from wall to wall, make it endurable. Fungi grew riotously everywhere, and the cobwebs, black as a funeral, hung down thick from the vaulted ceiling, like infamous hair. One or two spiders darted out and scurried immediately back into their loathsome jungle. Whenever I shifted my light, I had a feeling that from the place left in darkness the vile growth was reaching out tentacles to grasp and cling to me.
I intended to make my business here as brief as possible, but first I must find what the other visitor had been doing before me. I followed the big footprints across the marshy floor, and noted a thick mark drawn beside them. Something had been dragged.
Then the traces ceased, and I drew back suddenly with a cry at my lips. I had had a narrow escape.
There was little to tell that the floor stopped here, for like it the water was covered with an unclean growth. I stood on the brink of the water-pit, where Aidenn’s lord had once drowned thirty wretches in a single day! If ever a place was accurst for the cruelties performed there, this is it.
Over the stagnant pit the ghastly festoons hung so thick that the torchlight could scarcely pierce the darkness to the farther wall. From that wall a queer shape protruded, round like an enormous barrel, but too vague to be identified.
I suddenly caught sight of an object beside me on the verge of the water. A stake had been driven into the earth through the gathered-up mouth of a large cloth bag. The bottom of the bag hung over the edge and down into the water, and the weight of its contents drew the whole bag taut.
I gave a prolonged look through the shaggy gloom, where the black streamers faintly shivered in the air my body had stirred. Was some obscene presence spying on me from the murk?
Banishing fear, I wrenched up the stake, lifted the bag from the pool, and let its burden fall upon the floor. Stark and stiff, with its eyes staring, its tongue thrust out, its fur tousled into knarls and lumps, its claws extended, the enormous cat of the sisters Delambre lay outstretched at my feet. I stooped over the body; my fingers touched a cord drawn tight about the neck.
So Maryvale had made this abysmal journey before me, and there had been substance in his madness when he announced that Parson Lolly is no more. Since bullets would not kill, with cord and water he made assurance double. The long despairing cry will never shudder down the Vale again.