CHAPTER XII
THE TOMB-BOUND MAN
Mr. Guest had visited his victim and had gone.
Supper was over. Beef-tea and phosphorous! and Mr. Guest had said his mocking words of good-night.
"Sleep well, Mr. Rathbone! I shall not be compelled to ask you to wear that pretty metal cap until to-morrow, so I won't turn out the light.
You have a book to read, you've had your supper, and I wish you a pleasant time alone. No doubt you will occupy your leisure in thinking of Miss Marjorie Poole. You'll recall that occasion in a certain room hung with pink, when you kissed her by the side of the piano in the white and gold case! I know you often recall that happy incident."
He had closed the heavy steel door with a last chuckle of malice and power, leaving the prisoner white and shaking with fear. How did this sinister and devilish gaoler know his intimate thoughts?
He groaned deeply, and then, as he had done a thousand times before, gazed round the place in which he was in terror-struck amazement. Where was he? _What_ was this horrible prison with all its strange contrivances, its inexplicable mysteries?
He was in a large stone cell, brilliantly lit at this moment by two incandescent electric bulbs in the vaulted ceiling far above his head. A long time ago now, how long he could not have said, he was Gerald Rathbone, a man living in the world, seeing the sunlight and breathing the air of day. He had been Gerald Rathbone, moving honourably among his fellow men, seeing human faces, hearing the music of human voices, an accepted lover, and a happy man.
That was long ago, a dream, a vision which was fading away. It seemed years since he had heard any voice but that of the pink, hairless man who fed him and whose slave he had become.
Once more the prisoned thing that had been Gerald Rathbone gazed round the cell, striving with terrible intensity of thought to understand it and penetrate its mysteries. Here he had been put and here he had remained ever since that sickening moment when he had been talking to Sir William Gouldesbrough. He had been standing in front of the baronet, when his arms had been gripped from behind and unseen fingers held a damp cloth, with a faint sickly and aromatic smell, over his face. A noise like the rushing of great waters sounded in his ears, there was a sense of falling into a gulf of enveloping blackness.
He had awakened in the place which he was now surveying again, with frightful and fascinated curiosity.
In the brilliant light of the electric bulbs every object in the cell was clearly seen. The place was not small. It was oblong in shape, some sixteen feet by twelve. The walls were built of heavy slabs of Portland stone cemented together with extreme nicety and care. The door of the cell was obviously new. It was a heavy steel door with a complicated system of locks--very much like the door of a safe. The whole place, indeed, suggested that it had been used as a strong-room at some time or other. There was no window of any kind in the cell. In the centre of the arched roof there was a barred ventilator, and close by an electric fan whirled and whispered unceasingly. The sound made by the purring thing as it revolved two thousand times a minute was almost the only sound Gerald Rathbone heard now.
The floor of the cell was covered with cork carpet of an ordinary pattern. The victim cast his glance on all this without interest. Then, as if he did so unwillingly, but by the force of an attraction he could not resist, he stared, with lively doubt and horror rippling over his face, at something which stood against the opposite wall. He saw a long narrow couch of some black wood, slanting upwards towards the head. The couch stood upon four thick pedestals of red rubber, which in their turn rested upon four squares of thick porcelain. The whole thing had the appearance of a shallow box upon trestles, and at the head was a curious pillow of india-rubber. At the side of this thick pad was a collar-shaped circlet of vulcanite clamped between two arms of aluminium, which moved in any direction upon ball-pivots.
He stared at this mysterious couch, trying to understand it, to realize it.
He rose from the narrow bed on which he sat, and advanced to the centre of the cell--to the centre, but no further than that.
Around his waist a circlet of light steel was welded, and from it thin steel chains ran through light handcuffs upon his wrists, and were joined to steel bands which were locked upon his ankles. And all these chains, hardly thicker than stout watch-chains, but terribly strong, were caught up to a pulley that hung far above his head and, in its turn, gave its central chain to another pulley and swivel fixed in the roof.
In the half of his cell where his little bed was fixed, the prisoner had fair liberty of movement, despite his shackles. He could sit or lie, use his hands with some freedom. But whenever he attempted to cross the invisible line which divided one part of the cell from the other, the chains tightened and forbade him.
He stood now, straining to the limit of his bonds, gazing at the long couch of black wood, with its rubber feet, its clamps and collar at the head.
Above the mysterious couch, upon a triangular shelf by the door, was something that gleamed and shone brightly. It was a cap of metal, shaped like a huge acorn cup, or a bishop's mitre. From an ivory stud in the centre of the peak, coils of silk-covered wire ran to a china plug in the wall.
Rathbone stood upright for several minutes gazing at these things. Then with a long, hopeless sigh, to the accompanying jingle of his fetters, he turned and sat down once more upon his bed.
As prisoners do, he had contracted the habit of talking aloud to himself. It was a poor comfort--this mournful echo of one's own voice!--but it seemed to make the profound solitude more bearable for a moment. He began a miserable monologue now.
"I _must_ understand it!" he said. "That is the first step of all, if I am to keep my brain, if there is ever to be the slightest chance of escape, I must understand this terrible and secret business.
"What are these fiends doing to me?
"Let me go through the whole thing slowly and in order."
He began to reconstruct the scenes of his frequent torture, with the logic and precision with which he would have worked out a proposition of Euclid. It was the only way in which he could keep a grip upon a failing mind; a logical process of thought alone could solve this horrid mystery.
What happened every day, sometimes two or three times a day? Just this.
He would be lying on his bed, reading, perhaps, if the electric lights were turned on. There would be a sudden creak and rattle of the big pulleys high up in the roof, a rattle which came without any warning whatever.
Then the central chain, to which all the other thinner chains were fastened, would begin to tighten and move. Slowly, inch by inch, as if some one were turning a winch-handle outside the cell, the chain wound up into the roof. As it did so, the smaller chains, which were fixed to the steel bands upon his limbs, tightened also.
Struggle as he might, the arrangements and balance of the weights were so perfect that in less than a minute he would be swinging clear of the bed, as helpless as a bale of goods at the end of a crane.
Then the upward movement of the chain would stop, the door open with a clicking of its massive wards, and Guest would come in.
In a moment more Gerald always found himself swung on to the long black couch. His neck was encircled by the collar of thick vulcanite, his head was bent upwards by means of an india-rubber pillow beneath it, his hands and feet were strapped to the framework of the couch.
And finally Guest would take the metal cap and fix it firmly upon his head, pressed down to the very eyes so that he could in no way shake it off. The man would leave the cell, sometimes with a chuckle or a malicious sentence that seemed full of hidden meaning, sometimes in silence.
And then the electric light invariably went out.
Rathbone never knew how long he was forced to remain thus in the dark, the subject of some horrible experiment, at the nature of which he could only guess. The period seemed to vary, but there was no possible test of time. Long ago time had ceased to exist for him.
Release would come at last, release, food and light--and so the dreadful silent days went on.
"What are these devils doing to me?"
The hollow voice of reverie and self-communing cut into the silence like a knife.
"It must be that I am being made the victim of an awful revenge and hatred. Charliewood was the decoy and tool of Gouldesbrough; it was all planned from the first. Marjorie was never really relinquished by Gouldesbrough. He meant all along to get me out of the way, to get Marjorie back if he could. All this is clear enough. I thought I was dealing with an honourable gentleman, and a great man, too great to stoop even to anything petty or mean. I have been dealing with desperate and secret criminals, people who live hideous double lives, who walk the world and sit in high places and do unnameable evil in the dark. Yes!
That is clear enough. Even now, perhaps, my darling is once more in the power of this monster Gouldesbrough!"
The thin voice failed and died away into a tortured whimper. The tall form shook with agony and the rattle of the steel chains mingled with the "purr," "purr" of the electric fan in the roof.
By a tremendous effort of will Rathbone clutched at his thoughts again.
He wrenched his mind back from the memory of his dreadful plight to the solving of the mystery.
Till he had some glimmering of the _meaning_ of what was being done to him, he was entirely hopeless and helpless.
He began to murmur to himself again.
"In the first place Gouldesbrough has got me out of the way successfully. I have disappeared from the world of men, the field is clear for him. But he has not killed me. For some reason or other, dangerous though it must be for him, he is keeping me alive. It surely would have been safer for him to have murdered me in this secret place, and buried me beneath the stone flags here? I am forced to conclude that he is keeping me for an even worse revenge than that of immediate extinction. It is torture enough to imprison me like this, of course.
But, if the man is what I feel he is--not man, but devil--would he not have tortured me in another way before now? There are dreadful pains that fiends can make the body suffer. One has read of unbearable agonies in old books, in the classics. Yet nothing of the sort has been done to me yet, and I have been long in this prison. My food has been plentiful and of good quality, even definitely stimulating I have thought at times.
"It is obvious then that I am not to be subjected to any of the horrors one has read of. What _is_ being done to me? when, each day, I am fixed rigidly upon that couch, and the brass helmet is put upon my head, what is going on? I cannot feel any sensation out of the ordinary when I am tied down there. I am no weaker in body, my faculties are just as unimpaired when I am released as they were before. At least it seems so to me. I can discover no change in me either, mental or physical.
"Something is being done by means of electricity. The coils of wire that lead from the helmet to the plug in the wall show that. The way in which the couch is insulated, the vulcanite collar, the rubber pillow, all lead to the same conclusion. At first I thought that a torturing current of electricity was to be directed into the brain. That my faculties, my very soul itself, were to be dissolved and destroyed by some subtle means. But it is not so. There is no current coming to me through the wire. Nowhere does my head touch metal, the cap is lined throughout with rubber. But yesterday, as my gaoler held up the helmet to examine it before putting it on my head, I had an opportunity of seeing the whole interior for the first time.
"There was very little to see! At the top was a circular orifice which seemed to be closed by a thin disc of some shining material. That was all. It looked just like the part of a telephone into which one speaks.
My brain, my body, are not being acted upon. Nothing is being slowly instilled into my being. _Can it be that anything is being taken away?_"
He bent his head upon his hands and groaned in agony. All was dark and impenetrable, there was no solution, no help. He was in the grip of merciless men, in the clutch of the unknown.
The electric light in the cell went out suddenly.