“We are undone,” he cried; “you are undone. At the hour of three another monk is to enter on his hour of recollection.” And he added, in a lower tone of horror inexpressible, “I hear his steps in the passage.” At the moment he uttered these words, the key, that I had never ceased to struggle with, turned in the lock. The door opened, the passage lay free to us. My companion recovered himself at the sight, and in the next moment we were both in the passage. Our first care was to remove the key, and lock the door on the inside; and during this, we had the satisfaction to discover, that there was no one in the church, no one approaching it. Our fears had deceived us; we retired from the door, looked at each other with a kind of breathless, half-revived confidence, and began our progress through the vault in silence and in safety. In safety! my God! I yet tremble at the thought of that subterranean journey, amid the vaults of a convent, with a parricide for my companion. But what is there that danger will not familiarize us with? Had I been told such a story of another, I would have denounced him as the most reckless and desperate being on earth—yet I was the man. I had secured the lamp (whose light appeared to reproach me with sacrilege at every gleam it shed on our progress), and followed my companion in silence.
Romances have made your country, sir, familiar with tales of subterranean passages, and supernatural horrors. All these, painted by the most eloquent pen, must fall short of the breathless horror felt by a being engaged in an enterprise beyond his powers, experience, or calculation, driven to trust his life and liberation to hands that reeked with a father’s blood. It was in vain that I tried to make up my mind—that I said to myself, “This is to last but for a short time,”—that I struggled to force on myself the conviction that it was necessary to have such associates in desperate enterprises;—it was all in vain. I trembled at my situation—at myself, and that is a terror we can never overcome. I stumbled over the stones—I was chilled with horror at every step. A blue mist gathered before my eyes—it furred the edges of the lamp with a dim and hazy light. My imagination began to operate, and when I heard the curses with which my companion reproached my involuntary delay, I began almost to fear that I was following the steps of a demon, who had lured me there for purposes beyond the reach of imagination to picture. Tales of superstition crowded on me like images of terror on those who are in the dark. I had heard of infernal beings who deluded monks with the hopes of liberation, seduced them into the vaults of the convent, and then proposed conditions which it is almost as horrible to relate as to undergo the performance of. I thought of being forced to witness the unnatural revels of a diabolical feast—of seeing the rotting flesh distributed—of drinking the dead corrupted blood—of hearing the anthems of fiends howled in insult, on that awful verge where life and eternity mingle—of hearing the hallelujahs of the choir, echoed even through the vaults, where demons were yelling the “black mass” of their infernal Sabbath.—I thought of all that the interminable passages, the livid light, and the diabolical companion, might suggest.
Our wanderings in the passage seemed to be endless. My companion turned to right, to left—advanced, retreated, paused—(the pause was dreadful)!—Then advanced again, tried another direction, where the passage was so low that I was obliged to crawl on my hands and knees to follow him, and even in this posture my head struck against the ragged roof. When we had proceeded for a considerable time (at least so it appeared to me, for minutes are hours in the “noctuary” of terror—terror has no “diary”), this passage became so narrow and so low, that I could proceed no farther, and wondered how my companion could have advanced beyond me. I called to him, but received no answer; and, in the darkness of the passage, or rather hole, it was impossible to see ten inches before me. I had the lamp, too, to watch, which I had held with a careful trembling hand, but which began to burn dim in the condensed and narrow atmosphere. A gush of terror rose in my throat. Surrounded as I was by damps and dews, my whole body felt in a fever. I called again, but no voice answered. In situations of peril, the imagination is unhappily fertile, and I could not help recollecting and applying a story I had once read of some travellers who attempted to explore the vaults of the Egyptian pyramids. One of them, who was advancing, as I was, on his hands and knees, stuck in the passage, and, whether from terror, or from the natural consequences of his situation, swelled so that it was impossible for him to retreat, advance, or allow a passage for his companions. The party were on their return, and finding their passage stopped by this irremoveable obstruction, their lights trembling on the verge of extinction, and their guide terrified beyond the power of direction or advice, proposed, in the selfishness to which the feeling of vital danger reduces all, to cut off the limbs of the wretched being who obstructed their passage.
