pressure he had accidentally applied. At the same time, a dull grinding sound came from beneath. In a moment the light from the torch below was shut off.
“What happened?” the girl inquired.
“I think my shoulder tripped something that closed the mouth of this shaft!” Gord answered excitedly. “This must be a secret means of escape placed here by some bygone lord-and long forgotten, no doubt, else the passage would have been shut tight and we would now be worming our way hopelessly toward some deep sink or cistern.”
Gord felt the beautiful girl shudder at the thought of what fate could have been theirs. He helped her move up until her feet were braced against the lowest of the metal rungs. Then he felt his way a few feet farther upward, confirming to himself that the metal bars did indeed progress up the chimney, and that they were strong enough and anchored well enough to hold under his weight. The thoughtfulness of the builder in making them thick was appreciated by Gord, although he was sure that time and decay had weakened them sufficiently to bring breakage from hard or heavy usage. Neither he nor Evaleigh would be so careless as to unduly strain these metal rungs.
Positioned just above the girl, he pulled out the candle stub once again, sparked the tinder, and got the wick alight. Sure enough, more rungs led upward, reaching into the darkness beyond the area illuminated by the tiny candle flame.
“I’ll ascend slowly, one rung at a time,” he told Evaleigh. “You climb just behind me, being careful not to place all of your weight on any one rung, and holding firm so as not to slip or fall. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I can do it easily here. This is just like a ladder!” Evaleigh sounded slightly hysterical, but she climbed calmly enough. She also climbed quickly, so that Gord was forced to stop looking back to watch out for her and instead devote his attention to keeping a good pace ahead of her.
The shaft led them up no more than another thirty feet. Then it opened into a cylindrical cell about twenty feet in diameter, the vertical passage coming out about three feet from the base of the wall. The center of the cell’s domed ceiling was about eight feet above Gord’s head. There was nothing in the place except a tangled heap of old, filthy rags lying a short distance from the shaft opening and an ancient lantern a few feet away to the other side. The latter still held the remains of a thick candle. This Gord set burning with the small taper he held, extinguishing it as the larger one came to life.
“How do we get out of this place?” asked Evaleigh uneasily as she gazed at the unbroken expanse of stone that formed the walls of the cell.
“No place such as this would exist,” Gord told her in reply, “unless the builder had made some means of exit. Its purpose is secret escape, and therefore we must look for a hidden means of egress. Unless the entrance is secret too, the rest would not be, lady,” Gord explained.
“Oh,” said the girl, brushing dirty hand against smudged cheek. “But how do we find a secret means of leaving this tiny place? The air here is bad, I can hardly breathe, and the walls seem to enclose and suffocate me!”
“Help me look for marks on floor or wall, which could mean stone moving on stone,” Gord said as he put down the lantern near the center of the chamber. “Don’t worry-it won’t take long, for I am skilled in this sort of thing, being a thief.” Gord too noticed that the air within the room was stuffy and stale. It was damp and reeking as well, and he suspected that their breathing and the flaming candle helped to make it worse.
So, there was more than one reason for them to hurry. They might still be pursued from below, if there was a way to open the chimney from the other side. And certainly, they had to get out of this chamber before the bad air overcame them. Both of those facts seemed almost immaterial to Gord at the moment, however, for something else was creeping over him. Gord’s spine crawled and an insufferable sense of foreboding seemed to weigh upon his whole being, almost as if the cell were indeed contracting, closing in to crush and entomb them both. What was wrong?
There was a faint stirring behind him. Gord spun, catlike, his hand going instantly to his dagger. There was a little puff of dust just above the pile of rags…. Had some air blown just then? Evaleigh was already busy inspecting their prison, working the area of the chamber farthest from the pile of rags, and she seemed oblivious to any incipient menace. Gord scolded himself silently, shrugged, and set about to join her in the search. His imagination was getting the better of his common sense-and that was no way to get out, he told himself. Still, no harm in keeping his dagger at the ready….
“I will work on the opposite side, over here,” he said. “Take your time, lady. Better to be certain than miss the clue we must find.”
Evaleigh, who was bent over scrupulously examining every inch of the floor and wall in her vicinity, only muttered a distracted agreement. Gord turned and went toward the curving stone across from her. He started to kick the bundle of mildewed cloth near the base of the wall, but somehow he was unable to bring his booted foot into contact with such unwholesome material. The heap actually had a manlike form, Gord noted as he gazed down at it-too long, too thin, but manlike nonetheless.
Then, even as he stared in horrible fascination, the rags silently twitched and twisted themselves into an even closer semblance of humanity, and from the heap an odor of mold and putrescent flesh wafted its way into Gord’s nostrils. Gord took a step back with an involuntary gasp of fear and disgust. The stuff was trying to form itself! Whatever it was, it meant them no good, and they were trapped with it!
Fortunately, Evaleigh was engrossed in her search. She had not looked in Gord’s direction for some time, and apparently the stench that rose from the rags was not potent enough to reach her attention.
“I think I feel something,” she called, keeping her back to Gord as she spoke and running her hand along an area low on the wall she was examining.
“Good work, my lady!” Gord replied with a shudder as the rag-thing flopped wetly in its efforts to raise its upper half. “I’ll join you in just a moment.”
Now the man-shaped clump of rotting fiber was in a position similar to that of a person seated on the ground, armlike appendages propping its headless torso upright, the “legs” drawing toward the body so as to enable it to arise to a fully erect stance! And a thick, wormy thing was slowly arising from within that horrible torso-a thing of sickly gray with yellow, pulsing veins visible through its membranous skin.
If this worm-creature was the “head” of the rag “body,” Gord knew what to do. Without hesitation, he stepped forward and swung the keen dagger in an arc. A moldy twist of rags flew upward, as an arm would to block a blow, but the razor-edged blade cut through the filthy cloth and struck the worm just below the bulbous upper protrusion that must have been its head.
Reeking matter splattered the nearby wall and ran down it in viscous, gray-yellow strands. The severed bulb fell noiselessly onto the rags and left a foul stain on the fabric and stone it touched as it rolled a few feet and disappeared down the shaft. A sigh seemed to issue from the heap of rags, an almost-human sound. Then the whole pile collapsed back into formlessness, making a disgusting, squishy sound as it did so.
“Gord, what are you doing?” Evaleigh, on hands and knees, was looking sidewise in his direction, over her shoulder. “Stop poking around in those dirty old tatters and help me! I think I have our way out!”
Gord shook away his horror and disgust, surreptitiously wiped his blade on a bit of the rags, and slipped the dagger back into its sheath as he advanced across the cell. “What have you found?” he replied, pretending nothing had happened, as he picked up the lantern from the center of the chamber and moved closer.
“Here!” cried the girl. “The exit is right here! You were right, dear Gord, my rescuer! The place was easy to find.”
Gord peered at the spot she was pointing to, holding the lantern close and willing his hand not to shake. The entire episode with the rag-thing had consumed only a few seconds of time, but the memory of it would last much longer.
After a few seconds of careful scrutiny, Gord managed to make out faint scratches on the edge of a block that protruded slightly from the wall. On his own it would have taken him hours to detect these marks, unless he was very lucky and caught the striations just so in a good light. Evaleigh had not had the benefit of such illumination. Gord looked at the girl with new respect. Perhaps the tales he had heard about elven eyesight were true, in which case thank gods for her heritage!
“Move back just a little please, dear lady, and I shall try to find the means by which it is opened,” he said to her and moved to examine the wall with eye and fingers. “You are keen-eyed and clever indeed, lady!”
“Thank you, sir!” Evaleigh replied with a small curtsey and a note of cheerfulness in her voice for the first time since this escapade had begun.
