Part 30 (1/2)
Why neither of us had observed the fact before I cannot conjecture; but a key was in the lock!
Perhaps the traffic of the night afforded no more dramatic moment than this. The house which we were come prepared burglariously to enter was thrown open, it would seem, to us, inviting our inspection!
Looking back upon that moment, it seems almost incredible that the sight of a key in a lock should have so thrilled me. But at the time I perceived something sinister in this failure of the Lord of the Has.h.i.+s.h.i.+n to close his doors to intruders. That Carneta shared my doubts and fears was to be read in her face; but her training had been peculiar, I learned, and such as establishes a surprising resoluteness of character.
Quite noiselessly she turned the key, and holding a dainty pocket revolver in her hand, pushed the door open slowly!
An odour, sickly sweet and vaguely familiar, was borne to my nostrils. Carneta became outlined in dim, reddish light. Bending forward slightly, she entered the room, and I, with muscles tensed nervously, advanced and stood beside her.
I perceived that this was a cellar; indeed, I doubt not that in some past age it had served as a dungeon. From the stone roof hung the first evidence of Eastern occupation which the Gate House had yielded; in the form of an Oriental lantern, or fanoos, of rose-coloured waxed paper upon a copper frame. Its vague light revealed the interior of the hideous place upon whose threshold we stood.
Straight before us, deep set in the stone wall, was the tiny square window, iron-barred without, and glazed with red gla.s.s, the light from which had so deeply mystified us. Within a niche in the wall, a little to the left of the window, rested an object which, at that moment, claimed our undivided attention the sight of which so wrought upon us that temporarily all else was forgotten.
It was the red slipper of the Prophet!
”My G.o.d!” whispered Carneta--”my G.o.d!”--and clutched at me, swaying dizzily.
A few inches from our feet the floor became depressed, how deeply I could not determine, for it was filled with water, water filthy and slimy! The strange, nauseating odour had grown all but unsupportable; it seemingly proceeded from this fetid pool which, occupying the floor of the dungeon, offered a barrier, since its depth was unknown, of fully twelve feet between ourselves and the farther wall.
There was a faint, dripping sound: a whispering, echoing drip-drip of falling water. I could not tell from whence it proceeded.
Almost supporting my companion, whose courage seemed suddenly to have failed her, I stared fascinatedly at that blood-stained relic. Something then induced me to look behind; I suppose a warning instinct of that sort which is unexplainable. I only know that upholding Carneta with my left arm, and nervously grasping my revolver in my right, I turned and glanced over my shoulder.
Very slowly, but with a constant, regular motion, the ma.s.sive door was closing!
I s.n.a.t.c.hed away my arm; in my left hand I held the electric torch, and springing sharply about I directed the searching ray into the black gap of the stairway. A yellow face, a malignant Oriental face, came suddenly, fully, into view! Instantly I recognized it for that of the man who had driven Ha.s.san's car!
Acting upon the determination with which I had entered the Gate House, I raised my revolver and fired straight between the evil eyes! To the fact that I dropped my left hand in the act of pulling the trigger with my right, and thus lost my mark, the servant of Ha.s.san of Aleppo owed his escape. I missed him. He uttered a shrill cry of fear and went racing up the wooden stair.
I followed him with the light and fired twice at the retreating figure. I heard him stumble and a second time cry out. But, though I doubt not he was. .h.i.t, he recovered himself, for I heard his tread in the corridor above.
Propping wide the door with my foot, I turned to Carneta. Her face was drawn and haggard; but her mouth set in a sort of grim determination.
”Earl is dead!” she said, in a queer, toneless voice. ”He died trying to get--that thing! I will get it, and destroy it!”
Before I could detain her, even had I sought to do so, she stepped into the filthy water, struggled to recover her foothold, and sank above her waist into its sliminess. Without hesitation she began to advance toward the niche which contained the slipper. In the middle of the pool she stopped.
What memory it was which supplied the clue to the ident.i.ty of that nauseating smell, heaven alone knows; but as the girl stopped and drew herself up rigidly--then turned and leapt wildly back toward the door--I knew what occasioned that sickly odour!
She screamed once, dreadfully--shrilly--a scream of agonizing fear that I can never forget. Then, roughly I grasped her, for the need was urgent--and dragged her out on to the floor beside me.
With her wet garments clinging to her limbs, she fell prostrate on the stones.
A yard from the brink the slimy water parted, and the yellow snout of a huge crocodile was raised above the surface! The saurian eyes, hungrily malevolent, rose next to view!
The extremity of our danger found me suddenly cool. As the thing drew its slimy body up out of the poor I waited. The jaws were extended toward the prostrate body, were but inches removed from it, dripped their saliva upon the soddened skirt--when I bent forward, and at a range of some ten inches emptied the remaining three loaded chambers of my revolver into the creature's left eye!
Upchurned in b.l.o.o.d.y foam became the water of that dreadful place....
As one recalls the incidents of a fevered dream, I recall dragging Carneta away from the contorted body of the death-stricken reptile. A nightmare chaos of horrid, revolting sights and sounds forms my only recollection of quitting the dungeon of the slipper.