Ellery Queen's The Golden 13, page 33
“No,” Hugh said, and from the sudden eagerness in his voice, I felt that this was the exact moment he had been looking for. “I’ll do better than that. I’ll show it to you.”
He stood up brusquely and the rest of us followed suit—except Elizabeth, who remained in her seat. When I asked her if she wanted to come along, she only shook her head and sat there watching us hopelessly as we left the room.
We were bound for the cellars, I realized when Hugh picked up a flashlight along the way, but for a part of the cellars I had never seen before. On a few occasions, I had gone downstairs to help select a bottle of wine from the racks there, but now we walked past the wine vault and into a long, dimly lit chamber behind it. Our feet scraped loudly on the rough stone, the walls around us showed the stains of seepage, and warm as the night was outside, I could feel the chill of dampness turning my chest to gooseflesh.
When the doctor shuddered and said hollowly, “These are the very tombs of Atlantis,” I knew I wasn’t alone in my feeling, and felt some relief at that.
We stopped at the very end of the chamber, before what I can best describe as a stone closet built from floor to ceiling in the farthest angle of the walls. It was about four feet wide and not quite twice that in length, and its open doorway showed impenetrable blackness inside. Hugh reached into the blackness and pulled a heavy door into place.
“That’s it,” he said abruptly. “Plain solid wood, four inches thick, fitted flush into the frame so that it’s almost airtight. It’s a beautiful piece of carpentry, too, the kind they practiced two hundred years ago. And no locks or bolts. Just a ring set into each side to use as a handle.” He pushed the door gently and it swung open noiselessly at his touch. “See that? The whole thing is balanced so perfectly on the hinges that it moves like a feather.”
“But what’s it for?” I asked. “It must have been made for a reason.”
Hugh laughed shortly. “It was. Back in the bad old days, when a servant committed a crime—and I don’t suppose it had to be more of a crime than talking back to one of the ancient Loziers—he was put in here to repent. And since the air inside was good for only a few hours at the most, he either repented damn soon or not at all.”
“And that door?” the doctor said cautiously. “That impressive door of yours which opens at a touch to provide all the air needed—what prevented the servant from opening it?”
“Look,” Hugh said. He flashed his light inside the cell and we crowded behind him to peer in. The circle of light reached across the cell to its far wall and picked out a short heavy chain hanging a little above the head level with a U-shaped collar dangling from its bottom link.
“I see,” Raymond said, and they were the first words I had heard him speak since we had left the dining room. “It is truly ingenious. The man stands with his back against the wall, facing the door. The collar is placed around his neck, and then—since it is cleverly not made for a lock—it is clamped there, hammered around his neck. The door is closed, and the man spends the next few hours like someone on an invisible rack, reaching out with his feet to catch the ring on the door which is just out of reach. If he is lucky he may not strangle himself in his iron collar, but may live until someone chooses to open the door for him.”
“My God,” the doctor said. “You make me feel as if I were living through it.”
Raymond smiled faintly. “I have lived through many such experiences, and, believe me, the reality is always a little worse than the worst imaginings. There is always the ultimate moment of terror, of panic, when the heart pounds so madly you think it will burst through your ribs, and the cold sweat soaks clear through you in the space of one breath. That is when you must take yourself in hand, must dispel all weakness, and remember all the lessons you have ever learned. If not!”
He whisked the edge of his hand across his lean throat. “Unfortunately for the usual victim of such a device,” he concluded sadly, “since he lacks the essential courage and knowledge to help himself, he succumbs.”
“But you wouldn’t,” Hugh said.
“I have no reason to think so.”
“You mean,” and the eagerness was creeping back into Hugh’s voice, stronger than ever, “that under the very same conditions as someone chained in there two hundred years ago you could get this door open?”
The challenging note was too strong to be brushed aside lightly. Raymond stood silent for a long minute, face strained with concentration, before he answered.
“Yes,” he said. “It would not be easy—the problem is made formidable by its very simplicity—but it could be solved.”
“How long do you think it would take you?”
“An hour at the most.”
Hugh had come a long way around to get to this point. He asked the question slowly, savoring it. “Would you want to bet on that?”
“Now, wait a minute,” the doctor said. “I don’t like any part of this.”
“And I vote we adjourn for a drink,” I put in. “Fun’s fun, but we’ll all wind up with pneumonia, playing games down here.”
Neither Hugh nor Raymond appeared to hear a word of this. They stood staring at each other—Hugh waiting on pins and needles, Raymond deliberating—until Raymond said, “What is this bet you offer?”
“This. If you lose, you get out of the Dane house inside of a month, and sell it to me.”
“And if I win?”
It was not easy for Hugh to say it, but he finally got it out. “Then I’ll be the one to get out. And if you don’t want to buy Hilltop, I’ll arrange to sell it to the first comer.”
For anyone who knew Hugh it was so fantastic, so staggering a statement to hear from him, that none of us could find words at first. It was the doctor who recovered most quickly.
“You’re not speaking for yourself, Hugh,” he warned. “You’re a married man. Elizabeth’s feelings have to be considered.”
“Is it a bet?” Hugh demanded of Raymond. “Do you want to go through with it?”
“I think before I answer that, there is something to be explained.” Raymond paused, then went on slowly, “I am afraid I gave the impression—out of false pride, perhaps—that when I retired from my work it was because of a boredom, a lack of interest in it. That was not altogether the truth. In reality, I was required to go to a doctor some years ago, the doctor listened to the heart, and suddenly my heart became the most important thing in the world. I tell you this because while your challenge strikes me as being a most unusual and interesting way of settling differences between neighbors, I must reject it for reasons of health.”
“You were healthy enough a minute ago,” Hugh said.
“Perhaps not as much as you would want to think, my friend.”
“In other words,” Hugh said bitterly, “there’s no accomplice handy, no keys in your pocket to help out, and no way of tricking anyone into seeing what isn’t there! So you have to admit you’re beaten.”
Raymond stiffened. “I admit no such thing. All the tools I would need even for such a test as this I have with me. Believe me, they would be enough.”
Hugh laughed aloud, and the sound of it broke into small echoes all down the corridors behind us. It was that sound, I am sure—the living contempt in it rebounding from wall to wall around us—which sent Raymond into the cell.
Hugh wielded the hammer, a short-handled but heavy sledge, which tightened the collar into a circlet around Raymond’s neck, hitting with hard even strokes at the iron which was braced against the wall. When he was finished, I saw the pale glow of the radium-painted numbers on a watch as Raymond studied it in his pitch darkness.
“It is now eleven,” he said calmly. “The wager is that by midnight this door must be opened, and it does not matter what means are used. Those are the conditions, and you gentlemen are the witnesses to them.”
Then the door was closed, and the walking began.
Back and forth we walked—the three of us—as if we were being compelled to trace every possible geometric figure on that stony floor. The doctor with his quick impatient step, and I matching Hugh’s long nervous strides. A foolish, meaningless march, back and forth across our own shadows, each of us marking the time by counting off the passing seconds, and each ashamed to be the first to look at his watch.
For a while there was a counterpoint to this scraping of feet from inside the cell. It was a barely perceptible clinking of chain coming at brief, regular intervals. Then there would be a long silence, followed by a renewal of the sound. When it stopped again, I could not restrain myself any longer. I held up my watch toward the dim yellowish light of the bulb overhead and saw with dismay that barely twenty minutes had passed.
After that there was no hesitancy in the others about looking at the time, and, if anything, this made it harder to bear than just wondering. I caught the doctor winding his watch with small brisk turns, and then a few minutes later try to wind it again, and suddenly drop his hand with disgust as he realized he had already done it Hugh walked with his watch held up near his eyes, as if by concentration on it he could drag that crawling minute hand faster around the dial.
Thirty minutes had passed.
Forty.
Forty-five.
I remember that when I looked at my watch and saw there were less than fifteen minutes to go, I wondered if I could last out even that short time. The chill had sunk so deep into me that I ached with it. I was shocked when I saw that Hugh’s face was dripping with sweat, and that beads of it gathered while I watched.
It was while I was looking at him in fascination that it happened. The sound broke through the walls of the cell like a wail of agony heard from far away, and shivered over us as if it were spelling out the words.
“Doctor!” it cried. “The air!”
It was Raymond’s voice, but the thickness of the wall blocking it off turned it into a high thin sound. What was clearest in it was the note of pure terror, the plea growing out of that terror.
“Air!” it screamed, the word bubbling and dissolving into a long-drawn sound which made no sense at all.
And then it was silent.
We leaped for the door together, but Hugh was there first, his back against it, barring the way. In his upraised hand was the hammer which had clinched Raymond’s collar.
“Keep back!” he cried. “Don’t come any nearer, I warn you!”
The fury in him, brought home by the menace of the weapon, stopped us in our tracks.
“Hugh,” the doctor pleaded, “I know what you’re thinking, but you can forget that now. The bet’s off, and I’m opening the door on my own responsibility. You have my word for that.”
“Do I? But do you remember the terms of the bet, Doctor? This door must be opened within an hour—and it doesn’t matter what means are used! Do you understand now? He’s fooling both of you. He’s faking a death scene so that you’ll push open the door and win his bet for him. But it’s my bet, not yours, and I have the last word on it!”
I saw from the way he talked, despite the shaking tension in his voice, that he was in perfect command of himself, and it made everything seem that much worse.
“How do you know he’s faking?” I demanded. “The man said he had a heart condition. He said there was always a time in a spot like this when he had to fight panic and could feel the strain of it. What right do you have to gamble with his life?”
“Damn it, don’t you see he never mentioned any heart condition until he smelled a bet in the wind? Don’t you see he set his trap that way, just as he locked the door behind him when he came to dinner! But this time nobody will spring it for him—nobody!”
“Listen to me,” the doctor said, and his voice cracked like a whip. “Do you concede that there’s one slim possibility of that man being dead in there, or dying?”
“Yes, it is possible—anything is possible.”
“I’m not trying to split hairs with you! I’m telling you that if that man is in trouble every second counts, and you’re stealing that time from him. And if that’s the case, by God, I’ll sit in the witness chair at your trial and swear you murdered him! Is that what you want?”
Hugh’s head sank forward on his chest, but his hand still tightly gripped the hammer. I could hear the breath drawing heavily in his throat, and when he raised his head, his face was gray and haggard. The torment of indecision was written in every pale sweating line of it.
And then I suddenly understood what Raymond had meant that day when he told Hugh about the revelation he might find in the face of a perfect dilemma. It was the revelation of what a man may learn about himself when he is forced to look into his own depths, and Hugh had found it at last.
In that shadowy cellar, while the relentless seconds thundered louder and louder in our ears, we waited to see what he would do.
Editorial Note: Now that you have finished Mr. Ellin’s story, you realize that it belongs in the great tradition of “challenge” tales—in the literary stream of Mark Twain’s Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance (1871), Frank R. Stockton’s The Lady, or the Tiger? (1884), and W. W. Jacobs’ The Lost Ship (1898). You also realize that Mr. Ellin’s story does not merely recreate a riddle of the past, or simply offer a new variation. Actually, it is an extension of the great tradition—a 1954 version which, 16 years later, still reveals the most serious dilemma of our time.
Mr. Ellin’s story calls for more than the usual “reader participation.” Entirely apart from the question of whether Raymond did or did not have a heart condition, we are left with this speculation: What did Hugh decide to do? To win his-bet—at any cost, possibly of his very soul? Or to lose the bet—and thus become a man of heart and conscience as well as of brain?
In the sense of posing a problem and giving no solution in the story itself, Mr. Ellin follows in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Frank R. Stockton. But The Moment of Decision is not a pure riddle like Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance or The Lady, or the Tiger? Those earlier classics presented the reader with unanswerable questions: Mr. Ellin’s riddle if answerable. Readers have but to look into their own hearts: for it is really your dilemma too—the dilemma of people everywhere—the dilemma of nations, even of civilizations, in this new atomic, men-walking-on-the-moon age. . .
FIRST PRIZE WINNER NUMBER 11
A. H. Z. Carr’s First Prize Winner of 1955 has not lost, with the passing of the years, one atom of its profoundly disturbing quality, or one atom of its timeliness; quite the contrary, although the story was written 15 years ago, its implications are even more timely today. The story has actually grown in contemporary urgency.
When Mr. Carr asked some of his closest friends to read the manuscript 15 years ago, he was startled at the intensity of their reactions; the story seemed to cause a great deal of “inner turbulence” in everyone who read it, and that was a decade and a half ago. . .and many things have happened since then which today would surely intensify that “inner turbulence.” For, of course, The Black Kitten can now be read, as it should have been then, on more than one level of understanding. . .
The Black Kitten
by A. H. Z. Carr
The Reverend Dr. Walter Sloane sat in the little book-crammed room that he called his study, composing a sermon on Religion and the Fight Against Crime. The process of creation was not aided by his seven-year-old daughter Ellen, who was tramping up the stairs of the house sounding like a regiment, and calling, “Little Black Sambo! Here, Little Black Sambo!” Her adored kitten was lost regularly several times a day—one of Elly’s dark schemes, he suspected, for creating a small but noisy crisis to compel his attention.
He knew where the tiny thing was—somewhere in the study; he had heard its plaintive mew a little while before. To open the door and invite Elly in to find the kitten, as she expected, would utterly derail his train of thought, so he decided to finish at least the paragraph he was working on before capitulating.
“Sambo-scrambo!” yelled Elly in the corridor. Her father smiled and winced at the same time—a complicated facial gesture that summed up his feelings of the moment about Elly. After a while Elly galloped away, miaowing lustily. “We must recognize,” he wrote, “that the police are a punitive, not a preventive, force in the fight against crime. We cannot expect them to assume the whole burden of. . .”
He reached for his stubby briar pipe, which had gone out, debated for an instant whether to go through the ritual of emptying, cleaning, filling, lighting, and tamping, and compromised by putting a match to what tobacco remained in the bowl; but the first whiff was acrid, and before laying it aside he looked at the pipe as if it had betrayed him. Taking up the pen, he wrote down some words: “Throughout history, there has been only one power. . .”
“Little Black Sambo is a dambo!” Elly, who herself had the wide-eyed willfulness of a spoiled kitten, would often bring the syllable “dam” into her soliloquies; she had learned that it made adults look at her. He focused on the slow sentence before him: “Throughout history only one power has consistently struck at the roots of criminality—the power of religion, reaching the masses with its great moral principles.”
It would not be a popular sermon, he realized. Too abstract. A dangerous adjective in his profession.
His lean, big-boned face grew taut. A certain polite restlessness in his congregation had of late suggested that they were finding these large, remote subjects somewhat tiresome. They had liked him better when he encouraged them to think that God took a friendly interest in their personal problems.
He recalled remarks overheard as people were leaving church the previous Sunday. Not one word had been said about the sermon; they were all talking about a sour note struck by the organist in the closing hymn, and he could have sworn that they were almost grateful for it. Not that he blamed them. He knew, better than they, that the power to fill the church with the flutter of angel’s wings had left him. It would be sheer hypocrisy on his part to try to recapture that vein.
