At the far end of the hall they entered another passage. On that side of the castle, shafts of full moonlight came through the tall windows, but they were so begrimed with the dirt of ages that it was impossible to see out of them. Nevertheless, Roger could see enough to realise that this part of the building was in almost total ruin. As they advanced, holes showed in the roof, a bat flitted by, the undrawn curtains hung beside the windows in moth-eaten rags. Here and there great festoons of cobwebs hung from the ceiling and swayed gently in the draught they made in passing.
They turned into another corridor and then another. No sound reached them but that of the sudden scuttling of a rat. Yet Roger remained uneasy, still fearful that Jemima might be leading him into a trap. Why, he wondered, should her bedroom be where it was, while Susan's was so far from it, in the ruined part of the castle? The silence was eerie, the whole atmosphere of the place fraught with evil.
Another bat sailed by. Roger started back. Jemima turned and smiled at him. About fifteen feet further on she suddenly took two quick paces forward, threw up her free hand and pressed it against an iron flambeau holder on the wall, then gave a sardonic laugh.
Without a second's warning, the floor beneath Roger gave way. His feet slid from under him. He fell backward on to a steep, sloping ramp. Instinctively he threw out both his hands sideways, to stop himself from sliding further. They met only flat, cold stone. There was nothing he could cling to. Smoothly, his weight carried him down, down, down, down into the stygian darkness.
25
Render unto Satan
Time, it is said, is an illusion. Without doubt, as assessed by the human mind, it can differ immensely, according to circumstances. The last hour of an afternoon class at school, on a subject at which one is bad, under a master one hates, can seem endless; whereas a long evening spent together by two people who are in love flashes by so rapidly that it seems over almost before it has begun. As Roger slid down the shute on his back, his descent seemed interminable to him, and thoughts sped through his brain with the speed of lightning.
He must have been mad to trust Jemima. He had let her send him to his death. After all he had heard of her, how could he possibly have been such a fool as to be taken in by her clever acting? Never, never should he have followed her blindly, unless he had had a loaded pistol to hold against her back. Perhaps it would have been excusable to let her lead him fifty or sixty feet, but once they left the comparatively modern wing of the castle he should have been warned. If both girls had been prisoners of the witch, why should they not have been quartered together, or at least in rooms near each other? When walking down those long passages, inhabited by flitting bats and scurrying rats, where dim moonlight showed the webs of a thousand generations of spiders hanging from ceilings and walls even a schoolboy would have realised that his guide was not taking him to Susan's room.
Frantically he thrust out his hands and elbows, endeavouring to check his swift descent, for he had no doubt at all that death awaited him at the bottom of the slope. During the years he had visited many ancient castles in France, Spain, Russia, Sweden and other countries, and in several of them he had been shown traps similar to this. They were called oubliettes. In mediaeval times many an unsuspecting guest had been led by a host, who had some secret reason for wanting to get rid of him, along a dim corridor until the host pressed a spring on the wall, and a trapdoor in the floor flapped open. The wretched guest fell through it, hurtled down a hundred feet or more and, a few minutes later, was choking out his life in the blackness of an underground cistern fed with water from the castle moat.
Roger heard the trapdoor above him slam, cutting him off for ever from light and life. Even if he could have checked his downward slide and turned over, the slope was too steep for him to have crawled up it and attempted to force open the trap. There was no escape. Except, yes. It was just possible that the oubliette ended in a waterway tunnel, large enough to swim through, to the lake. But if that were so, how long was the tunnel? How deep was the water in it? Would there be enough space between the water and the ceiling for him to breathe while swimming? If not, it was certain that he would drown.
These lightning flashes of thought and terror probably followed one another in less than a minute. Without warning, the angle at which he was sliding suddenly changed. The slope abruptly ceased, his feet shot forward and he came to rest flat on his back on a solid floor. His relief was instantaneous. It was not an oubliette. Yet it might be. Perhaps only a foot or so ahead of him there was a perpendicular drop, and by luck he was now lying on a broad ledge, the speed of his descent not having been sufficient to carry him over the edge.
His speculation lasted only seconds. There came the sound of quick movement ahead of him, then a voice cried sharply:
'Who is that?'
Again relief flooded through him, acompanied by surprise, concern and the answer to one of the riddles he had been puzzling over for several days past.
'Charles!' he exclaimed. 'So they've made you a prisoner. And now I'm one, too.'
'Uncle Roger!' cried the voice out of the darkness. 'How in the world. . . . But stay still a moment while I make a light.'
There came the scraping of a tinder box, a sudden glow, then the rising flame from a candle wick enabled Roger to get an idea of his surroundings. They were in a circular dungeon about twenty feet in diameter. From some six feet up the walls tapered in a cone, but the light was not sufficient for Roger to see where they met the roof. Opposite the shute down which he had come there were ranged four low platforms, about six feet long by three feet wide, on short, square legs. On one of them was a straw-filled palliasse and some blankets, where Charles had been sleeping; on another a pile of books, three candlesticks and a number of loose candles. On a third were a tin basin, soap, towels and two wooden platters with fish bones and a cut cake on them. Beside the last stood a six-gallon stone jar and, between it and the place where he was now sitting up, there was a round hole in the floor which evidently served as a latrine.
As Roger was looking round, Charles said, 'I supposed you to be still in France with Talleyrand. How come you to be here? And who led you into this trap?'
Roger's reply needed only a few quick sentences, then he asked, 'But you, Charles? What happened to you in Dublin? Did you trace Susan to this place and then got caught ? Is she here ? Is she all right ?'
'Yes, she's here and, as far as I know, well. At least she was a little over a fortnight ago. I have not seen her, but we spoke together.'
'Is it true that the O'Brien woman persuaded her and Jemima to become witches? 'Twas that Lady Luggala wrote to your mother.'
'I know. But 'tis not true—at least as far as Susan is concerned. Jemima, I'd wager, has long been a witch, although Susan did not know it. She suspected nothing until she was brought face to face with Katie. She recognised her at once after having seen her at the New Hell Fire Club. She was taken there over a year ago by . ..'
‘I am aware of that,' Roger interrupted. 'Your mother repeated to me all you had told her of it. Tell me what you know of the sequence of events in Dublin.'
'After I left for Spain, that bitch Jemima laid herself out to win Susan's confidence and affection. In February, for some reason of which I am in ignorance, Maureen Luggala left London for Dublin, taking Jemima with her. As Jemima and Susan were such close friends, she was also invited to come over for a fortnight's visit, and she accepted. She had a pleasurable time doing the social round, and her first letters to my mother, asking to be allowed to stay on for a while, were genuine. Then, when my mother insisted on her returning, she told Maureen that she must. The following night they put a drug in her drink and, while she was unconscious, brought her here. Soon after she came to, Katie came to the room in which they had put her to bed, and mesmerised her. It must have been then, while under the occult influence of the witch, that she wrote the letter defying my mother and saying she intended to remain in Ireland with Jemima through the summer. When she came out of her trance Katie told her that if she made no trouble she would be well treated, but must remain locked in her room. Naturally, my poor beloved was distraught. But what could she do? Her clothes had been taken from her, and even had they not how could she escape from this place, surrounded as it is by water?'