some chips of wood, and a couple of shards of porcelain and glass. These, I tucked against the head of my bed. I had also found the first of the pillars I had known must be there, supports to the ceiling over my head. There ought to be two or three of them—without interest other than for their possible use to hide behind. More interesting was the way in which my fingers had known the massive pillar was there a moment before I had touched it: For a vivid instant Holmes was leading me with sure steps through the fog.
I ate more of the tasteless bread, drank some water, continued my back-and-forth sweep. I found the second pillar, though no third one, and when I turned back to the bed, I found I had a sense of where it lay. Not precisely, and I did not have enough faith to drop my hands, but I could tell roughly where it was, and I went to it. My findings had accumulated, including now two walnut-sized knobs of rock, a handful of smaller ones, a horn button, and— treasure of treasures—a bent and rusty nail, about two and a half inches long. I tucked everything under my bed, then on second thought removed half of it and carried it over to one of the corners, pushing it into the lee of a slightly raised stone on the floor. I stood, pushed back my nonexistent glasses, and returned to my mat.
How long had I been in this place? The bearded killer had said the drug lasted three or four hours, but there was no way of knowing how many had been spent in transporting me here. Say, four hours drugged, and half an hour sleeping after I had been sick, then approximately four and a quarter hours in mapping out my surroundings. Between eight and ten hours, I thought, since I had drunk from the silver flask. It was Sunday morning; it felt much later.
How long before they returned?
I reached for the water gourd and felt a twinge, not from the knife cut, which seemed to have been given a fresh dressing, but from the inside of my left elbow. As I was fairly comprehensively bruised and aching, I had not taken much notice before this, but now I explored it with the fingertips of my right hand, and in a moment I knew that if the lights were to come on, I should see in the soft area over the veins a red welt with a pinprick in the centre—or rather, a needle prick.
Someone expert with a needle had either given me an injection, directly into the vein, or else drawn a blood specimen. The latter did not seem likely, but with what had I been injected? A second dose of sleeping potion? And if so, why into the vein? How long
I was blind, in more ways than the one. It was something to do with Margery Childe—that much I could see; after that, the light faded. Was Margery herself doing this? Or was it part of another attempt on her life, removing me from hindering it? That could not be—I had already removed myself, by boarding the train for Oxford. Was I to be freed, as my abductor had told me, only to appear responsible for her death, or would there be two dead bodies, with blatant clues for the police force? Or, yet a third possibility: that I was to be freed but rendered harmless.
Unable, perhaps, to identify my captor?
Blinded perhaps?
The horror of the dark crawled over me then, and I knew that I was indeed blind, that my little farce of feeling all over the walls was lit clearly by an overhead bulb while observers in high windows watched the antics of a wretched, half-naked girl-woman with a madwoman’s matted hair and scars all over her body, skirting not very successfully the pool of her vomit, hugging to herself a jug of water and a piece of stale bread, secreting a pathetic collection of stones in the corner of her—
I heard nothing, but there were vibrations where there had been stillness, in the stones beneath my feet and the air against my cheeks. I rapidly arranged the gourd where it had been, put near it the remainder of the loaf with the intact section of crust turned to the door, and threw myself on the floor in an attitude meant to suggest death.
A lock turned, then a bolt, and another bolt. Hinges groaned open and—light! Gorgeous, wavery, bouncing, blinding light. And an oath. I tried to ready myself to spring up, without visibly breathing. Tiny, quick breaths. Several feet at the door, entering.
“Close it.” That was my abductor’s voice, restricted still by the false beard.
Hinges groaned again; the door thudded; boots scuffed the stones. The light came closer, my eyelids reddened as it neared my face, and I came up running, hit the lamp from the man’s hand and sprinted for the door, and had my fingers on the handle before my head jerked back painfully and I went down on my knees. I hit out and the man grunted, but he did not let go of the hold on my hair, and in a second they were all on me, and I was caught.
“Don’t hit her,” said the leader, and they did not, merely slammed me up against the wall. I winced away from the dazzle of his electric torch in my eyes.
“Hold her.” I thought at first the obvious, but it quickly became apparent that it was a very different sort of invasion they had in mind. The man holding my left arm pulled it away from the wall, stretching my wrist out from my body while his other hand pinned my shoulder against the stones.
“Bring the other lamp.” When I saw what my abductor was pulling out of his pocket, I went berserk. I nearly freed myself, and it ended only when three burly men, bruised, bitten, and bleeding all, held me down on the floor and their leader put his hand over my nose and mouth and cut off my air. My frantic attempts to bite the man or free myself from his fingers exhausted my air; the room began to fade. When my air and my panic had both run out, he took his hand away, and as I gulped great draughts of air, he got to work.
I had never before experienced the sheer inexorable power of strong men. In utter humiliation and near abject terror, I could only look on as That Man knotted a silk scarf cruelly tight around my upper arm, took out a dark velvet case containing an already-filled hypodermic syringe, probed the hollow of my arm with knowledgeable fingers, and injected me directly into the vein. He slid his blunt fingers under the knot, loosed the scarf, and stood away.
And my body exploded. My every cell woke up and shouted in recognition of the substance being pumped through my veins, and a rush of pure, raw sensation flooded over me like a huge, slow electrical wave, leaving me quivering from the soles of my feet to the back of my head in what I can only describe as ecstasy. As it went through me, it seemed to shear my mind straight down the centre and split it, so that for perhaps a minute I experienced a sort of palimpsest of consciousness, a simultaneous awareness of events as they were now and as they had been six years and three months before.
I was aware of the stones at my back, the sharp smell of spilt paraffin, and the moan that issued from my twenty-one-year-old throat, a sound obscene even to my own ears and which caused the men pinning me down to cackle and joke among themselves as they stood away from my body and set about cleaning up the broken lamp and the old vomit.
At the same time, and every bit as vivid, was the hospital bed beneath me, the medicinal hospital stink of cleaning fluid and ether, the rustle of clothes moving, and voices: American voices. A man’s authoritative American voice, but it was not my father’s voice; never again my father’s voice.
Mama? But the word was too far down in my throat to find its way out. Words around me, weighty words that surfaced like bubbles from a murky pool from the vague noise I lay in:
Someone was ill in this clean, bright room. Someone began to groan, a wavering sound that instantly cut off the words and replaced them with a more urgent rustle, a few curt commands. There was too much light in this room, terrible and harsh and white, and white shapes moving around me, topped with darker blobs—hair, heads, hands, touching me, a face coming into focus, emitting furry noises. I closed my eyes, felt the pain build like a demon, possessing me, hip and chest and head, building, and then another groan, higher in pitch, and hands, these ones cool and deft, and a brief flurry of angry sounds followed by a sharp jab in my upper arm, and then a wavering sensation as if the room were a celluloid film beginning to melt in front of the projectionist’s bulb before it rippled and faded from view.
Back in the darkening cellar, I was sick again, this time into a canvas bucket I found in my hands. The clang of bolts echoed long in the cellar, leaving me on the cold and lonely stones in the darkness. When the echoes had faded, it was immensely quiet, apart from my laboured breathing and the heavy reverberations within my skull. I patted around me until I came across the straw pallet, moved over to it, and tried to grasp something that was me in the maelstrom. All I came up with was, appropriately enough, Job.
“I have made my bed in the darkness,” I said aloud, and began to giggle dangerously. After a while, I put my head down, and I wept.
I was not at the time certain what He had injected me with, but it was similar enough to the painkillers I had
