“Never say die,” the young man encouraged. “Take my hand. It is my left. I am holding my automatic in my right.”
They groped forward. Action was at the moment necessary to keep Joan from losing her mind. On and on they stumbled. Each step they expected to plunge heels-over-head into another deep chasm but persistently they followed the twisting meanderings of the passage.
Suddenly Joan stopped and sniffed the air, trembling violently.
“There—there—is something alive in this place,” she muttered feebly. “I—I—smell something awful—horrid, and—and—I—feel—a—sinister—presence.”
Epworth sniffed with his nostrils. The scent was now overpowering, musty, terrifyingly rotten.
“You must be mistaken about there being living beings in here,” he protested. “That smell would indicate that we have stumbled on the crickets’ graveyard.”
“Or, or, or,” Joan caught his hand convulsively to keep from screaming, “their commissary department. Maybe—maybe—living beings are confined here until they rot, and are then eaten as food.”
Epworth could not suppress the shudder that swept over him from head to foot.
CHAPTER XVIII
In the Chamber of Horrors
“It—it—is a chamber of horrors,” Joan gasped. “I know there is a ghost in this place or some living thing. I can feel it; I can hear a slight movement.”