CHAPTER XII
THE TOMB-BOUND MAN
Mr. Guest had visited his victim and had gone.
Supper was over. Beef-tea and phosphorous! and Mr. Guest had said hismocking words of good-night.
"Sleep well, Mr. Rathbone! I shall not be compelled to ask you to wearthat pretty metal cap until to-morrow, so I won't turn out the light.You have a book to read, you've had your supper, and I wish you apleasant time alone. No doubt you will occupy your leisure in thinkingof Miss Marjorie Poole. You'll recall that occasion in a certain roomhung with pink, when you kissed her by the side of the piano in thewhite and gold case! I know you often recall that happy incident."
He had closed the heavy steel door with a last chuckle of malice andpower, leaving the prisoner white and shaking with fear. How did thissinister and devilish gaoler know his intimate thoughts?
He groaned deeply, and then, as he had done a thousand times before,gazed round the place in which he was in terror-struck amazement. Wherewas he? _What_ was this horrible prison with all its strangecontrivances, its inexplicable mysteries?
He was in a large stone cell, brilliantly lit at this moment by twoincandescent electric bulbs in the vaulted ceiling far above his head. Along time ago now, how long he could not have said, he was GeraldRathbone, a man living in the world, seeing the sunlight and breathingthe air of day. He had been Gerald Rathbone, moving honourably among hisfellow men, seeing human faces, hearing the music of human voices, anaccepted lover, and a happy man.
That was long ago, a dream, a vision which was fading away. It seemedyears since he had heard any voice but that of the pink, hairless manwho fed him and whose slave he had become.
Once more the prisoned thing that had been Gerald Rathbone gazed roundthe cell, striving with terrible intensity of thought to understand itand penetrate its mysteries. Here he had been put and here he hadremained ever since that sickening moment when he had been talking toSir William Gouldesbrough. He had been standing in front of the baronet,when his arms had been gripped from behind and unseen fingers held adamp cloth, with a faint sickly and aromatic smell, over his face. Anoise like the rushing of great waters sounded in his ears, there was asense of falling into a gulf of enveloping blackness.
He had awakened in the place which he was now surveying again, withfrightful and fascinated curiosity.
In the brilliant light of the electric bulbs every object in the cellwas clearly seen. The place was not small. It was oblong in shape, somesixteen feet by twelve. The walls were built of heavy slabs of Portlandstone cemented together with extreme nicety and care. The door of thecell was obviously new. It was a heavy steel door with a complicatedsystem of locks--very much like the door of a safe. The whole place,indeed, suggested that it had been used as a strong-room at some time orother. There was no window of any kind in the cell. In the centre of thearched roof there was a barred ventilator, and close by an electric fanwhirled and whispered unceasingly. The sound made by the purring thingas it revolved two thousand times a minute was almost the only soundGerald Rathbone heard now.
The floor of the cell was covered with cork carpet of an ordinarypattern. The victim cast his glance on all this without interest. Then,as if he did so unwillingly, but by the force of an attraction he couldnot resist, he stared, with lively doubt and horror rippling over hisface, at something which stood against the opposite wall. He saw a longnarrow couch of some black wood, slanting upwards towards the head. Thecouch stood upon four thick pedestals of red rubber, which in their turnrested upon four squares of thick porcelain. The whole thing had theappearance of a shallow box upon trestles, and at the head was a curiouspillow of india-rubber. At the side of this thick pad was acollar-shaped circlet of vulcanite clamped between two arms ofaluminium, which moved in any direction upon ball-pivots.
He stared at this mysterious couch, trying to understand it, to realizeit.
He rose from the narrow bed on which he sat, and advanced to the centreof the cell--to the centre, but no further than that.
Around his waist a circlet of light steel was welded, and from it thinsteel chains ran through light handcuffs upon his wrists, and werejoined to steel bands which were locked upon his ankles. And all thesechains, hardly thicker than stout watch-chains, but terribly strong,were caught up to a pulley that hung far above his head and, in itsturn, gave its central chain to another pulley and swivel fixed in theroof.
In the half of his cell where his little bed was fixed, the prisoner hadfair liberty of movement, despite his shackles. He could sit or lie,use his hands with some freedom. But whenever he attempted to cross theinvisible line which divided one part of the cell from the other, thechains tightened and forbade him.
He stood now, straining to the limit of his bonds, gazing at the longcouch of black wood, with its rubber feet, its clamps and collar at thehead.
Above the mysterious couch, upon a triangular shelf by the door, wassomething that gleamed and shone brightly. It was a cap of metal, shapedlike a huge acorn cup, or a bishop's mitre. From an ivory stud in thecentre of the peak, coils of silk-covered wire ran to a china plug inthe wall.
Rathbone stood upright for several minutes gazing at these things. Thenwith a long, hopeless sigh, to the accompanying jingle of his fetters,he turned and sat down once more upon his bed.
As prisoners do, he had contracted the habit of talking aloud tohimself. It was a poor comfort--this mournful echo of one's ownvoice!--but it seemed to make the profound solitude more bearable for amoment. He began a miserable monologue now.
"I _must_ understand it!" he said. "That is the first step of all, if Iam to keep my brain, if there is ever to be the slightest chance ofescape, I must understand this terrible and secret business.
"What are these fiends doing to me?
"Let me go through the whole thing slowly and in order."
He began to reconstruct the scenes of his frequent torture, with thelogic and precision with which he would have worked out a proposition ofEuclid. It was the only way in which he could keep a grip upon a failingmind; a logical process of thought alone could solve this horridmystery.
What happened every day, sometimes two or three times a day? Just this.He would be lying on his bed, reading, perhaps, if the electric lightswere turned on. There would be a sudden creak and rattle of the bigpulleys high up in the roof, a rattle which came without any warningwhatever.
Then the central chain, to which all the other thinner chains werefastened, would begin to tighten and move. Slowly, inch by inch, as ifsome one were turning a winch-handle outside the cell, the chain woundup into the roof. As it did so, the smaller chains, which were fixed tothe steel bands upon his limbs, tightened also.
Struggle as he might, the arrangements and balance of the weights wereso perfect that in less than a minute he would be swinging clear of thebed, as helpless as a bale of goods at the end of a crane.
Then the upward movement of the chain would stop, the door open with aclicking of its massive wards, and Guest would come in.
In a moment more Gerald always found himself swung on to the long blackcouch. His neck was encircled by the collar of thick vulcanite, his headwas bent upwards by means of an india-rubber pillow beneath it, hishands and feet were strapped to the framework of the couch.
And finally Guest would take the metal cap and fix it firmly upon hishead, pressed down to the very eyes so that he could in no way shake itoff. The man would leave the cell, sometimes with a chuckle or amalicious sentence that seemed full of hidden meaning, sometimes insilence.
And then the electric light invariably went out.
Rathbone never knew how long he was forced to remain thus in the dark,the subject of some horrible experiment, at the nature of which he couldonly guess. The period seemed to vary, but there was no possible test oftime. Long ago time had ceased to exist for him.
Release would come at last, release, food and light--and so the dreadfulsilent days went on.
"What are these devils doing to me?"
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The hollow voice of reverie and self-communing cut into the silence likea knife.
"It must be that I am being made the victim of an awful revenge andhatred. Charliewood was the decoy and tool of Gouldesbrough; it was allplanned from the first. Marjorie was never really relinquished byGouldesbrough. He meant all along to get me out of the way, to getMarjorie back if he could. All this is clear enough. I thought I wasdealing with an honourable gentleman, and a great man, too great tostoop even to anything petty or mean. I have been dealing with desperateand secret criminals, people who live hideous double lives, who walk theworld and sit in high places and do unnameable evil in the dark. Yes!That is clear enough. Even now, perhaps, my darling is once more in thepower of this monster Gouldesbrough!"
The thin voice failed and died away into a tortured whimper. The tallform shook with agony and the rattle of the steel chains mingled withthe "purr," "purr" of the electric fan in the roof.
By a tremendous effort of will Rathbone clutched at his thoughts again.He wrenched his mind back from the memory of his dreadful plight to thesolving of the mystery.
Till he had some glimmering of the _meaning_ of what was being done tohim, he was entirely hopeless and helpless.
He began to murmur to himself again.
"In the first place Gouldesbrough has got me out of the waysuccessfully. I have disappeared from the world of men, the field isclear for him. But he has not killed me. For some reason or other,dangerous though it must be for him, he is keeping me alive. It surelywould have been safer for him to have murdered me in this secret place,and buried me beneath the stone flags here? I am forced to conclude thathe is keeping me for an even worse revenge than that of immediateextinction. It is torture enough to imprison me like this, of course.But, if the man is what I feel he is--not man, but devil--would he nothave tortured me in another way before now? There are dreadful painsthat fiends can make the body suffer. One has read of unbearable agoniesin old books, in the classics. Yet nothing of the sort has been done tome yet, and I have been long in this prison. My food has been plentifuland of good quality, even definitely stimulating I have thought attimes.
"It is obvious then that I am not to be subjected to any of the horrorsone has read of. What _is_ being done to me? when, each day, I am fixedrigidly upon that couch, and the brass helmet is put upon my head, whatis going on? I cannot feel any sensation out of the ordinary when I amtied down there. I am no weaker in body, my faculties are just asunimpaired when I am released as they were before. At least it seems soto me. I can discover no change in me either, mental or physical.
"Something is being done by means of electricity. The coils of wire thatlead from the helmet to the plug in the wall show that. The way in whichthe couch is insulated, the vulcanite collar, the rubber pillow, alllead to the same conclusion. At first I thought that a torturing currentof electricity was to be directed into the brain. That my faculties, myvery soul itself, were to be dissolved and destroyed by some subtlemeans. But it is not so. There is no current coming to me through thewire. Nowhere does my head touch metal, the cap is lined throughout withrubber. But yesterday, as my gaoler held up the helmet to examine itbefore putting it on my head, I had an opportunity of seeing the wholeinterior for the first time.
"There was very little to see! At the top was a circular orifice whichseemed to be closed by a thin disc of some shining material. That wasall. It looked just like the part of a telephone into which one speaks.My brain, my body, are not being acted upon. Nothing is being slowlyinstilled into my being. _Can it be that anything is being taken away?_"
He bent his head upon his hands and groaned in agony. All was dark andimpenetrable, there was no solution, no help. He was in the grip ofmerciless men, in the clutch of the unknown.
The electric light in the cell went out suddenly.