What woke him he did not know at the time, or for nearly twenty-four hours afterwards.
But it was a noise. It made him start up, nerves twitching; it made him jump to his feet, miry-eyed, and peer round until he realized where he was. His first impression, possibly created by a dream, was that the alarm-bell on the roof was ringing.
'If you hear the alarm-bell in the night,' someone had said, 'it will mean we are in serious trouble.'
But a bell would have gone on ringing. Besides, a deeper memory suggested, this had been something like a crash: not very loud, yet loud enough to jolt thin sleep. Martin's head remained mazy. By concentration on his wrist-watch, he saw the hour was two o'clock. Then Stannard flashed through his mind. Yanking the lamp off the wall, he hurried to the iron door and played the beam inside.
'Stannard!' he yelled.
The oak door to the execution shed was still closed. So was the other one. 'Stannard! Are you all right?'
To his relief he heard the 'Yes! Quite!' of the other's unmistakable tones, muffled by the oak door.' But in the voice was a curious wild inflection which in his relief he did not stop to analyze.
He groped for the key in his pocket, but hesitated. He would not offer Stannard the insult of asking whether he wanted to be let out
What vaguely puzzled Martin, as he returned to his seat was the fact that he had been able to sleep in the place of bogles. But this wasn't the place of bogles. Wasn't there some legend about iron, cold iron, keeping them off?
It was within the rules, both stated and implied, to sleep if you could. You could drowse in the rocking-chair, or even on the ruddy gallows-trap. Martin hung the lamp on the wall again, his hand heavy.
When he leaned back against the wall, he felt no sense of crick in the neck or stiffness in the back. His senses were padded. Once more, from here, he bellowed out at Stannard; and very, faintly Stannard's voice told him to mind his own damned business.
‘Right you are, Mr. Great Defender.
Sleep coiled insidiously, sleep soothed with shadow narcotics.
Though it might have been unusual under such circumstances, Martin afterwards remembered his dreams as being cozy and pleasant. He became somehow entangled with the love-scene between Blanche and Denis in
Look out!
This time what woke him was toppling off the bale, his hands and arms in semi-consciousness saving him as he struck the floor. It was an ugly feeling, that sense of a helpless fall. But he was awake, chilly and sharply wide- awake, when he crawled up from the dirt-sting of the floor.
The corridor swam in a dim grey twilight which seemed as dingy as the prison. Outside the tall barred windows he could detect a white mist, wisps of it, past grime-speckled panes. Once more he consulted his watch. Two minues to four o'clock.
A great exultation sang in him, though he felt as if he had slept in a barrel. It was nearly all over. Give it dead to the time — exactly to the ant-busy travelling of the watch's secondhand — and then unlock the door.
The beam of the lamp still shone straight across, against murky daylight Stevenson, unread, had sprawled open on the floor. If there could be degrees of silence, Pentecost Prison seemed more utterly silent now than at any time during the night. And Stannard?
Martin let the full two minutes tick round. Then, drawing the large key out of his pocket, he went over to the iron door.
'Stannard!' he shouted.
Chapter 11
Shading his eyes, Martin peered through the grille. Grey traces, very faint, showed a vertical glimmer along the edge of the execution shed door, which stood about an inch
open. Obviously, as in the case of the condemned cell, that room must have some kind of window. 'Stannard!' he called, with the same formula. 'Are you all right?’
'I'm here. I'm—' The voice seemed to answer somewhat hollowly, and from a distance away, though the oak door stood a little open. Odd, perhaps. Who cared?
'The time's up,' Martin shouted back, 'and I'm unlocking this door.'
He did so, after which he pushed the iron door partly open with a squeak and squeal of hinges. There was a ringing clatter as he threw the key inside on the floor.
'Thanks' he added, 'for an entertaining evening. You're free, and I'm free too.'
The thought of Stannard's company, on the way back, almost revolted him. In his exuberance he felt like talking to empty air instead, so that he could use rich words unheard. Putting Stevenson in his pocket, and picking up the lamp, he took long strides to get away from there.
Faintly, once, he thought he heard Stannard calling something after him. But the light-found the white-string guideline with ease; amazing he hadn't noticed it before! Nevertheless, in his daylight mood, it was of a pattern with all the other incidents of last night.
Every action, every speech, had seemed quite natural at the time; even inevitable. Yet now, when the images unreeled before him — those evil forces (imagined?) in the condemned ceil, a fencing-match in which he had nearly been murdered by the sedate Dr. Laurier, a blood-stained dagger, an alarm-bell With its rope in the cell, an amorous passage with Ruth Callice — it became a phantasmagoria which struck him with wonder. The little talk with Ruth seemed to him inconsequential, as though it had never happened; even amusing. He would tell Jenny about it -
In less than two minutes, at rustling quick-step through what was now only a dreary storage-building, he reached the main gate. All phantasmagoria, like that skeleton in the clock. Briefly he wondered what Sir Henry Merrivale might have been doing with the skeleton in the clock.
Through the arched frame of bars like a portcullis, he saw that the tall iron gates stood wide open. Beyond lay thick white.mist, drifting and with rifts in it; the mist would presently vanish before heat and sun, but meantime it muffled the world in eeriness.
As he passed the opening in the portcullis, switching off the lamp and putting it in his pocket, Martin laughed aloud at this so-called eeriness.' He could have danced or hit the air a right-hander. Then, just outside the prison gates as a rift in the mist floated past, he saw Jenny herself. She was obviously waiting.
For a moment he stood still, with a notion that this might be part of the fantasy.
By coincidence, Jenny also wore slacks and a sweater coloured brown, with a light coat thrown over her shoulders. As soon as he saw her, other considerations of feminine appeal were forgotten. Her yellow hair curled to her shoulders. She was smoking a cigarette, which she instantly threw away. They ran towards each other.
‘I was never away,' Jenny confessed. 'I thought I could take that train. But I couldn't face it I told the taxi- driver to come back. Because—' She stopped. 'So you'd have paid five hundred pounds just to learn where I'd gone?'
'If that butler has blabbed, the old lady will sack him.'
'Dawson,' said Jenny, 'isn't a butler. I suppose he is, in a way, and Grandmother insists on calling him that He's butler and handyman too; we don't employ much of a staff of servants. Anyway, I caught him when he was going to take your money. I was afraid you could hear me whispering in the background.'
Realization bumped him. 'Come to think of it I heard something.'
'Of course I rang up Mr. Anthony after you did, and said it was all a joke and he wasn't to send any cheque. Dawson nearly wept Then I made him ring you and give the address, or you might have come to the Manor. But —'
Here, raising her blue eyes, Jenny began such a bitter denunciation of her own character, such a writhing of self-loathing, that it would have been considered strong even by her worst enemy.
'Martin, I knew you had to go through with that 'bet' I wouldn't have you back out That's what makes me so
