From London Far (6 page)

Blood… Meredith remembered that he had killed somebody. He had shot an unknown criminal called Vogelsang through the head as a sort of precautionary measure. And another criminal, Bubear, he had at least very decisively knocked out. These were definitive acts. That a little water would clear him of this deed was most assuredly untrue. But unspeakable as was his horror at having killed a man, the main result, he found, was to make him particularly determined not to be killed himself.

He felt cautiously over the revolver and tried to remember how often it had already been fired. Even if he were to be killed – and the girl too – there would be some satisfaction in selling life dearly. Meredith frowned into the darkness as he discovered in himself the strength of this conviction. It was sufficiently pagan; nay, magical, even – for did it not proceed from some obscure comfort in the thought of drawing vanquished enemies with him into the shades? Meredith found that his fingers were no longer exploring the surface of the weapon to any practical purpose – his ignorance, indeed, was too complete to receive any intelligible information from their reports – but were simply caressing it as a hunter might caress a cherished hound… At this moment the girl grabbed him by the sleeve and, doubled up, once more began to run.

Dodging round crates and shapeless canvas packages, he presently discovered that the thought of the hunter’s hound had come to him through the simplest prompting of sense. There was, in fact, a hound on the job. Perhaps, indeed, there were two. A very terrible baying, interspersed with slobberings, sniffings, and growls, now mingled with the shouted orders and the warehouse noises farther off. And the primitive sound released some fresh spring of chemicals in Meredith’s blood-stream. For the first time he felt afraid. It is true that fear came to him in a sudden apprehension of the true horror of Actaeon’s story – the youth by Artemis transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs. But although this was the image, the emotion was such as the rudest savage might feel. He was afraid. And he found that, although his joints were no longer supple and he had to run crouched near the floor, he was making better speed than the girl.

Nature had had its moment; nurture supervened. He stopped and turned acknowledging that the rearguard was his place. And as he did so he sighted the bloodhound – for it was that – not six yards behind her. There was more light now, but he must have imagined more of the brute than he actually saw: a slavering, lolloping creature grotesquely compounded of the filmic Pluto and early impressions of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Meredith waited until the girl was abreast of him; then he carefully directed the revolver towards the oncoming creature and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, the bloodhound did not respond at all as Vogelsang had done, but advanced with momentum upon the two of them. They dropped behind a packing-case and it pounded by.

Again they ran, knowing that the creature was wheeling fast behind them. And now the noise was redoubled; a second animal was on the trail and bearing down upon them in flank. A moment later they had reached some boundary of the piled-up crates and packages and were stumbling helplessly across a nightmarishly empty floor.

The hounds were behind them, and so close that the chase seemed pretty well over. Meredith remembered that in his waistcoat pocket was a penknife with a blade perhaps two inches long. By no stretch of delirious hope could it be conceived as of the slightest avail, but Meredith fumbled for it as he ran, glancing down as he did so. The motion was almost the end of him, for it distracted his attention from his headlong course and a moment later a collision with a skeletal object, upright and unyielding, knocked most of the breath out of his body. Then he realized that they had attained at last a corner of this enormous chamber, and that what he had charged into was a narrow spiral staircase of cast iron disappearing into the darkness above. He shoved the girl against the lower steps and automatically she began to climb. He followed tumbling on her heels; there was a rush and snap as he did so; he felt the tail of his jacket rend and part; and then he was spiralling upwards free from immediate pursuit. There are few obstacles which a human being can negotiate and a bloodhound in full cry cannot. But a narrow spiral staircase is one. The advantage of bipedal progression comes into play at once.

They corkscrewed rapidly upwards – so rapidly that when Meredith glanced below him the floor appeared to rotate. The surface of the earth, he thought, must look like this from an aeroplane gone into a spin. But at least the two bloodhounds were becoming no more than dark canine smudges, and the figures of several men who had now appeared from the shadows were foreshortening themselves with satisfactory speed. Moreover, no more shots had been fired, and although this no doubt merely signified that they were judged more valuable alive (for a time) than dead, it gave the affair for the moment the feel of a no more than slightly nightmarish hide-and-seek.

Two men were guarding the foot of the staircase, but making no attempt to climb it. The other men were withdrawing hastily, dragging the bloodhounds with them – a manoeuvre the motive of which would have been obscure had not, at this moment, a dozen powerful lights snapped on overhead.

And now the whole situation was instantaneously clear. The place was indeed a species of bulk store or depository of surprising length and breadth and quite astounding height; this interminable spiral staircase led up through several galleries apparently appropriated to the accommodation of lighter articles; and the men who were hauling off the bloodhounds were making for a large lift or enclosed hoist which also linked the galleries at the other end of the hall. Even as Meredith realized this, men and dogs gained their objective and the lift was shooting upwards on a course parallel to theirs. Meredith and the girl, however, had a substantial start, and as a result they gained the topmost gallery on one side in the identical moment at which the lift gained it on the other. They ran, pounding along an openwork, cast-iron floor such as Meredith associated with scientific penitentiaries designed by Jeremy Bentham. The men debouched and ran, together with the dogs, which appeared, however, to be conceiving a disrelish for the whole affair. The men ran, the dogs slithered and slobbered, Meredith and the girl ran until they abruptly saw that running was useless. There was no longer any possibility of keeping ahead, for the men had branched left and right, and whichever way they went it must be straight into the arms of their pursuers.

Or so it seemed – until beneath their feet a fantastic prospect opened. Besides the lift and the staircase there was a third route down: a sort of giant slippery-dip which plunged earthwards in a dizzying succession of hairpin bends and was presumably employed for the easy delivery of objects of an altogether unbreakable sort. At this Meredith, whose acquaintance with fun fairs was something less than small, stared for a moment uncomprehendingly. But the girl had leapt to it without a pause, and Meredith followed. He had time only to see their baffled pursuers turn again for the lift, and to recall fleetingly Gallileo’s formula for bodies moving freely on an inclined plane, when there was a shout from somewhere down below and the whole place disappeared in total darkness. Hurtled from side to side as his battered and breathless body involuntarily negotiated the hairpin bends, and plunging with a steady acceleration into a mere black pit beneath, Meredith profoundly felt the truth of the Virgilian assertion that easy is the descent to hell.

And now would come the bump.
Nunc animis opus, Aenea
– thought Meredith, his mind jumping some hundred lines of the poem –
nunc pectore firmo
. In fact, take a deep breath… He landed on what he suspected was partly a pile of old sacking and partly the girl. The girl and he scrambled to their feet and ran – this time merely from the habit of running, since in the pitch darkness which now enfolded them it was impossible to direct their course upon any rational calculation of chances. They ran and Meredith had the impression that the men were running too – there being no novelty in this except in the obscure impression that they were now running
away
. And upon this impression Meredith would perhaps have halted for better assurance had he not been momentarily unnerved by a new element in the monstrous confusions around him.

This was the shrill reverberation of a high-pitched electric bell which had begun to ring somewhere up in the darkness. The urgent sound had scarcely made itself heard when there was a banging of doors and clattering of feet dying away on distant corridors; and almost at the same moment Meredith and the girl stumbled over something at once soft and massive that lay in their path. The something dismally howled and simultaneously another something fell over them limply but weightily from behind. All this was accompanied by a doggy smell and Meredith, seizing upon so illuminating a scrap of sense-data, conjectured that he, the girl, and the bloodhounds had unwittingly involved themselves in a single complicated tangle. Moreover, they had done so on ground which felt oddly insecure; the floor was gently swinging and twisting beneath them; and Meredith, feeling this, threshed out in sudden unreasoning panic. Both beasts were now abjectly whimpering, and Reason would have told Meredith that as Hounds of the Baskervilles they had fallen altogether short. But Reason had for the moment nodded and Meredith’s only instinct was to lay hold on some weapon with which he could belabour the slavering brutes about him. And even as this urgency came upon him his hand in the darkness closed upon what seemed the handle of some such implement as he required. The handle gave – but only some inches, and moving in an arc. At the same moment he was tumbled over again by one of the bloodhounds and the handle slipped from his grasp. And in the same moment, too, there was a deep purr as of some powerful mechanism coming into operation; the floor rose up and punched Meredith hard as he lay on it; a second later his whereabouts was evident; he, the girl, and the abominable if ineffective dogs were hurtling rapidly skywards in the lift.

Such contrivances, Meredith told himself with some confidence, stop automatically upon reaching a point beyond which they are not designed to proceed. But even as he formulated this conviction his mind misgave him. For what was in no sense an express elevator built to haul one up sixty storeys, the machine, even in the darkness, was perceptibly moving with an altogether untoward acceleration. Was it possible – A bone-grinding, nerve-shattering jolt, followed by a deafening confusion of breaking, tearing, and rending noises, interrupted Meredith’s speculations. The world had turned topsy-turvy; he was spinning through space; he reached out and grabbed something warm, rough, and moist which even in this distracting moment he absurdly knew to be a bloodhound’s slavering and protruding tongue. He was falling perhaps from the top of the building to the bottom, but his chief horror was at a nervous inability to relinquish his grasp on this plainly unavailing lingual support… Then another sense came into play. He was looking at the evening star.

Hesperus, alone in the sky, is not to be mistaken. Around that remote patin of light, single and serene, Meredith rearranged his impressions. He lay in open air with a London sky above him; his horizon was a low parapet of artificial stone; the girl stood beside him, pulling up her stockings; behind her was the disrupted remains of that sort of penthouse which on the roofs of great buildings houses the upper mechanisms of lifts; and lying at her feet, reposeful as if posing for Sir Edwin Landseer, were two large, sleepy, friendly bloodhounds.

Meredith sat up. ‘Where’, he said, ‘is my curly-headed dog-boy?’

The girl let her skirt fall and stared at him. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

Meredith passed a hand across his forehead. ‘Dear me!’ he said. ‘You must please forgive me. I spoke quite at random. It was merely what Fuseli used to say of the young Landseer. Landseer, of course, drew animals admirably when very young.’

‘I see.’ The girl looked at Meredith anxiously in the early twilight. ‘I’m afraid you are in a bit of a daze. Something must have hit you on the head.’

‘I think not. I fear I have the habit of sometimes saying very inconsequent things. Indeed, it was just such a foolish utterance that gave me the
entrée
to our friends’ stronghold this evening.’ Meredith frowned. ‘Do you know, I think I must be a little dazed after all?
Entrée
must be replaceable by some good straightforward English word. But for the life of me I can’t put my tongue to it. By the way, have you ever clutched a dog’s tongue in the dark? It is a remarkable sensation, really remarkable.’

‘I suppose it must be.’ The girl now looked as if her mind on Meredith’s intellectuals was quite made up. ‘And now we’d better be going. Our perch here is still pretty unhealthy, if you ask me.’

Standing up, Meredith could now see farther about him. Landmarks familiar to him upon his diurnal academic occasions showed new and surprising proportions from this unwonted elevation. They were reassuring, nevertheless. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose we had better move on.’ He crossed tentatively to the low parapet bounding the flat roof upon which they had been precipitated. ‘Do you know, I can just distinguish Smirke’s portico? It looks uncommonly impressive in the evening light. But, so far as I can see, we are on a sort of island block. Escape appears impracticable without descending again into the building. How fortunate that these animals have composed their differences with us. Do you know anything about firearms, ma’am? If our assailants follow us to the roof it will be useful to know whether the capacities of this weapon are exhausted.’

The girl took Bubear’s revolver from his hand and looked at it. ‘Its capacities’, she said gravely, ‘are exhausted, sir.’ She looked about her. ‘But I don’t think anybody will follow us. And it’s just because nobody has followed that I think we had better be off. Call the dogs.’

Meredith turned uncertainly towards the animals. ‘Call them?’ he said.

‘Certainly. You wouldn’t leave them to it, would you? And it looks to me rather hopeful over this way.’ The girl had moved off to the farther side of the roof. ‘Well, I see it’s only a girder. I’d rather hoped for a fire-escape or at least a little iron bridge. Do you think you can manage it? I must say you’ve managed a great deal. And I’m frightfully grateful.’ The girl paused. ‘Sir,’ she added seriously.