The Skeleton in the Clock

Then they made a sharp turn to the right They were in a narrow aisle — just broad enough for walking in a straight line — between the bales on one side and a grey-brick wall, with doors, on the other.

'You'll get used to the atmosphere,' Stannard called from ahead, where his light bobbed and splashed. His voice went up in reverberations, which seemed to roll back at them through dust-puffs from the bales. 'They had a ventilating system. Quite a good one.'

And Martin's imagination, heightened and tautened, began to bring this prison to life: with doors opening, bells ringing, the blank-faced men in the grey garb.

Just before the war he had visited Eastaville, a local prison like this one. He had been given only glimpses, which came back as much in sounds as in visual images. The wing they called B Hall: with its high tiers of cells facing each other across an open space, and a steel-woven net slung between to prevent suicides. Each oak cell- door painted yellow. Stung by bells, the unending shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, or march, march, march. A sense of suffocation; and the voice of a blue-uniformed prison officer 'Quiet, there!' A workshop: 'Quiet, there!' A line of grey men, stiffly at attention near the door of the Governor's room, to get punishment or make complaint: 'Quiet, there''

'Turn to the right, here!' called Stannard.

Martin, peopling unseen corridors and galleries with old shades out of Eastaville, realized that they had all been shuffling as the aisle narrowed. Ruth coughed in the dust

Their turn led them through an aisle of bales, then into another one between bales and wall with another line of doors (notcell-doors) to the right.

'Why,' Martin asked, 'do cell-doors look so repulsive when they're painted yellow?'

'I beg your pardon?' demanded Dr. Laurier, adding to the burst of echoes which rolled to upper and outer air. — 'Never mind!' said Martin.

Ruth, a gallant little figure in red sweater and black slacks, not quite so tall as Jenny, turned around and smiled at him.

'Here we are,' announced Stannard.

Martin's heart jumped a little, then went on (it seemed to him) normally. With the image of Jenny in his mind, with what he had heard about Jenny over the 'phone, he told himself he was the calmest person there. This was going to be easy.

They emerged, one by one, into a completely cleared space.. The beams of the three lamps converged. You could see that the corridor was ten feet wide. Ahead of them, cutting off the corridor, was a grey-brick wall; and into this was set an iron door, with a very small barred opening in it so that you could peer and talk through.

Stannard's breath was noisy in his nostrils. 'Here are the premises,’' be explained. 'I have not even looked into the rooms. I have done nothing except oil the lock of this door.'

He held up the key he had shown to Ruth and Martin that afternoon. He fitted it into the lock. And, with a squealing creak of hinges, the iron door swung inwards.

A sudden animation seized that whole group, and they began talking twenty to the dozen. Martin afterwards supposed he must have talked too.

The babble of their voices carried them through into a passage some eight feet wide and twenty feet long, ending in a dead-wall facing them. It was floored with very dirty asphalt In the wall to the left, eternally the grey- brick, was a door which faced across to a corresponding door on the right.

Stannard, taking one of the lamps from Ricky, propped it up a little slantways against the floor and the dead-end wall so that it should shine straight down the passage.

'Would you like first—' he put his hand on the knob of the left-hand door—'to see the execution shed first?'

'No!' cried Ruth. 'The other one. I mean, the beginning. I mean, after all, the condemned cell is the beginning.'

Stannard turned to the other door.

'I have always understood,' rattled Dr. Laurier loudly, 'the condemned cell really is a room, with wall-paper and religious pictures.'

'Oh, yes,' said Stannard. (Damn the man, thought Martin; his voice rasps on you like a lecturer's). 'Oak door,' he went on. 'Notice the little glass peep-hole high up. The condemned man had two warders — or wardresses, if it happened to be a woman — with him or her every instant of the time. That peephole was for the hangman.'

'Hangman?' Ricky's voice went up.

'To judge weight and height for the proper drop.'

Stannard had difficulty with the iron knob. Ricky wrenched open the scraping door. The first thing their lights picked up, inside, was a dilapidated rocking-chair.

And now the pull and swirl, of what Stannard had called atmosphere or vibrations, began to creep round Martin Drake. He could imagine someone sitting in that rocking-chair, someone who started up and cried, 'Get out!' No, this wasn't going to be too easy. Martin subconsciously felt that, when he and Stannard drew lots, he would be the one to be locked up.

'Look there!' Stannard was saying. 'Over in the corner. The rope.'

'Rope?' Ruth almost screamed. 'Not—?'

'No, of course not Easy, my dear!'

'I'm all right How dare you say I'm not all right?'

'Do you remember, this afternoon, when I told you about Hessler, the multilator of women's bodies? That he tried to escape from the condemned cell?'

'Yes. No! What about him?'

'The mercy and tact of our Prison Commission,' cried Dr. Laurier, 'are beyond praise. That picture of Our Saviour on the Cross is truly moving.'

'Hessler, Ruth, managed to smuggle potassium cyanide into this room. He used it—'

‘To k-kill himself?'

'No. On the guards. In cups of cocoa. When they staggered and tried to shout, he made a break.

My History of the Penal System is very discreet Undoubtedly they knew how he did it but they won't say. In some fashion he got from here into the garden between this wing and the next He had a rope thrown over a spike in the wall. They winged him with a revolver as he was climbing, and he fell back into a flower-bed. Hessler…'

'listen, old boy,' Ricky's voice hissed in Martin's ear. He seized his companion's wrist, and twisted it 'Over there! To the right!' A pause. 'Well, damn me to perdition if…'

Ricky's exclamation drew round the slightly glazed eyes of the others.

'Afterwards,' continued Stannard, 'the prison governor insisted an alarm-bell be installed here. Idiot! Prize, thundering idiot! Look at that hanging rope over there! As if…'

But the others were not listening. They saw what seemed a crowning incongruity.

In the far corner, grimy but only a few touched with rust lay a much smaller but better collection of rapiers and daggers than Martin had seen at Willaby's on Friday.

The rapiers were flung down in a heap, as they had lain for many years. The white lamp-beam played over cup-hilts, swept-hilts, ring-hilts, both the pointed and the double-edged. Ricky's eyes were fixed on a little ivory tag attached to one handle. Behind the rapiers stood a row of ancient dusty medicine-bottles, corked, and several empty bottles of whisky.

'Either I've got hallucinations,' snapped Ricky, 'or those swords belonged to my father.'

'Your father?' exclaimed Ruth.

'Ages ago,' Ricky tugged at his collar, 'my father had a collection. Did you know that?' (Sir Henry Merrivale, had he been present would have growled assent). 'He got tired of 'em; Grandmother Brayle said he gave the stuff away; he put up those old guns you can see in the Green Room. But I could swear, from that writing on the tags…’

He hurried over, catching his own reflection in a dust-furred mirror where so many of the despairing must have looked, and bent down.

'You remember, Dr. Laurier?' he added.

Dr. Laurier, for a moment hypnotized, uttered what for anybody else would have been a cry of delight He darted over to the rapiers, pulling at one so that others rattled and tumbled down.