11
It would have been a lunatic try anyhow, Logan thought as he faced the wall. Behind him, Royall was ministering to Dr. Jackman, but Logan felt sure that if he swung round, Royall would not miss.
“Here, a little brandy,” Royall was saying, rather in the tone of a nurse. “Come round now, Dr. Jackman. It’s no time for fancies.” There was a sound as if Royall were gently slapping Jackman’s cheeks. “That’s it, sir: are you quite awake now, Dr. Jackman?”
Jackman’s voice came choked and faint, but grew in power after the first few words. “Askival,” Jackman was saying. “Askival—where is he? And Lagg?”
“Take hold of yourself, Dr. Jackman. We’ve this fellow Logan to deal with. Very well, Logan: come over here and sit down.”
For the present, Royall had assumed command. With his revolver he gestured toward the chair in which Logan had sat during the chess-match, and Logan took it without protest. Royall continued to stand. On the other side of the table, Jackman seemed in possession of his faculties again.
“We’d best search this man,” Royall said. He slipped a hand inside Logan’s jacket, still standing at Logan’s back, and found his wallet. Logan did not move: Jackman was watching him keenly, his hand on the pistol. They would find no identification in the wallet, for Logan had put his passport and anything else with his name on it into the knapsack.
“No, sir, there’s nothing with a name, worse luck,” Royall murmured. “Stand up and take off your jacket, Logan.” Logan did as he was told. In a moment Royall thrust the jacket back to him. “And no labels, Dr. Jackman. The man must be an old hand at his game.”
“Tompkins searched his room this morning?” Jackman asked.
“Yes; and he found nothing but a razor and the like. No papers—and not even the canvas sack this man brought with him. I suppose he burnt it in the fireplace, or else flung it out of the window and down the cliff to the sea.”
“Have a man look along the rocks at low tide,” Jackman said. “Yes, our friend Logan undoubtedly has had experience as an agent of some sort.”
“You needn’t bother to have a man risk his bones on those weedy ledges,” Logan told them. “I burnt the sack on the coals, last night.” He trusted that Mary had tucked away the pack in some really secure hidie-hole.
“For your circumstances, Logan,” Royall muttered, “you seem unreasonably cheerful. I shouldn’t care to find myself in your present situation.” Royall ran his hands carefully along Logan’s trousers and into his pockets. “No, Dr. Jackman—no knife, and no papers stitched into the linings.”
“Why,” said Logan, “I suppose a man might as well laugh as cry. And then, don’t you know, it’s not I who need to fash—as we true-born Scots say. It’s you gentlemen who will have to make your peace, if you can, with the men that will be here all too soon for your comfort.”
“Sit down again, Logan,” Royall ordered. “You needn’t sing that tune for us. If you had any people at your back, we’d have seen them before this.”
“Oh?” Logan answered, amicably. “And who do you suppose took Carruthers? Donley was dead hours before you missed Carruthers, remember.”
Jackman and Royall stared at each other, silent. In that moment, Logan almost felt a touch of pity for them. Both must have been reared and educated well enough—very well, indeed. What flaws of character or intellectual false turnings had brought them into this ruthless business, he could not tell. They might have commenced, like others, full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology, with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors. Ideological fanaticism had made of Jackman the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not the lust for women’s bodies. Jackman’s was the libido dominandi, the tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death. And in the flame of that lust for power, Jackman and Royall would be burnt up, today or next week or next month: they were at the end of their devil’s bargain, and the fiend would claim his own.
Now, in this oppressive silent moment, the conviction came to Logan that these two artists of disintegration were more frightened than he. He felt surprised to find himself thinking clearly enough, almost ruminating, in this tension that made electric the ancient room with the painted ceiling. Because frightened, Jackman and Royall were the more dangerous; but also their brains were stagnant with dread.
Fear, it crossed Logan’s mind, is the normal condition of man, after all. Quiet ages and safe lands are the rare exceptions in history. Nowadays the tides of disorder were gnawing at whatever security and justice still stood in the world, quite as the swell round Carnglass sought to bring down that heap of gray stones to the mindless anonymity of the ocean. With growing speed, the brooding spectre of terror, almost palpable in Carnglass, was enveloping the world. This island was the microcosm of modern existence.
And here in the haunted stronghold of the Old House of Fear, Jackman and Royall and their gang found themselves caught in their own snare. Even the dull criminals below stairs, huddled tipsily by the kitchen fire, were unmanned by a dim sense of catastrophe, caught up in a horror of the empty island, where mist and silence seemed to have made away with time, so that Glasgow and Liverpool and London were fancies out of an illusory past.
Jackman himself, with his distraught imagination, his ruined talents once near to genius, fancied himself snared here by destiny, condemned to give reality to a myth. And was he wrong? In the Old House, Logan doubted where the realm of spirit ended and the realm of flesh began.
In this dead island, all Jackman’s cleverness lay frustrated, and the strange chance or power that had brought Logan to Carnglass on this day seemed to fill the close air in that forgotten tower-room. For Edmund Jackman, Logan might be something not quite canny, at once a man and an occult agent. Even for Royall, Hugh Logan must seem a retributive figure, from Party or police, mercilessly calm with the knowledge that others were not far behind him.
For all their effort to behave as if they still were masters of the island, a tautness almost hysterical had crept into Jackman and Royall, and their voices were strained. What for years they had dealt out to others, now waited for them; and they had forgotten the meaning of mercy. There was no justice to which they could appeal. By fear they had lived; and now the fear which they and their sort had carried throughout the world was claiming them also. Having murdered order, these two at last were cast into the outer darkness.
Jackman was speaking. Had something like a quaver crept into that urbane and sardonic voice? “Well, Royall,” he was saying, “what will we do with this Logan?”
Royall shifted uncertainly behind Logan’s chair. This man, it occurred to Logan, saw the growing madness in his leader, and yet was loyal—his last link with old-fangled human affections.
“Dr. Jackman,” Royall said, “I have a theory concerning our friend Logan. I believe he’s one of Vlanarov’s people.”
Jackman now spoke with his old decisiveness, as if another spirit had entered into that sinister body, and as if what had happened during the preceding half hour had quite washed away from his memory. “Possibly,” Jackman commented. “Quite possibly. The thought had crossed my mind, too. If he should be, perhaps we can arrive at satisfactory terms. Well, Logan?”
Logan devoutly wished, at this juncture, that he had studied more attentively the recent history of Eastern Europe. If he had fought in Europe, rather than in the Pacific, that might have been of some help; or had he been in intelligence, rather than the infantry. As it was, the name Vlanarov told him a little, but not enough. If memory served him aright, Vlanarov was such a one as Jackman, but a much bigger fish. Logan rather thought that Vlanarov had been at Bela Kun’s side in Hungary, a generation ago, and in Madrid during the Civil War, and after 1945 a terror in Poland. Through all the vicissitudes of Party feuds and all the eddies of ideology in the buffer states, the shadowy but formidable figure of Vlanarov had glided scatheless. No one ever saw a photograph of the man. It had been his peculiar talent to anticipate the triumph of particular factions within the Soviet states, and to shift masterfully in precisely the proper moment from one interpretation of Marxist doctrine to the corrected version. Whenever a vanquished clique fell to its ruin, Vlanarov sorted through the wreck for such survivors as might still do mischief to the new Party orthodoxy, and clipped their claws and their wings for them—or something worse. Certain Trotskyites called Vlanarov “The Vulture.”
This much, Logan recalled. And he could see that conceivably the pose of being one of Vlanarov’s people, at watch upon Jackman’s schemes, might save his neck. But the great difficulty was that he knew far too little of Party intrigues to play this role to the full. For that matter, he was not precisely sure that Vlanarov still was alive: Royall might be setting a trap for him.
“Yes,” Royall was saying, “I fancy that he’s a Vlanarovite, sent over by Bruhl from Brussels, to report on our work. Only one of that sort could have made away with Donley so efficiently.”
Jackman, now tense and erect in his chair, nodded. “Logan,” he said, “if you come from Bruhl or Vlanarov, with instructions for us or perhaps for a survey—why, tell me now. After all, you can’t expect to remain anonymous much longer, because tomorrow or next day I should receive word from Glasgow, and perhaps from Paris.”
“No, Jackman, I don’t think you will.” Logan had resolved to sound as much like a Vlanarovite as possible, without being expected to furnish proof positive. “You’ve contrived to get your boats burnt for you by a stupid old Irishman. You’ve had part of your wireless stolen”—Jackman started at this—“and you’ve no way of sending word to shore. And you saddled yourself with the clumsiest set of agents that ever I set eyes upon. Gare, that drunken incompetent; Dowie, who’s fit only for filching sixpences from slum boys; Jock Anderson, all swagger and no nerve. We gobbled the lot of them.” Logan opened his right hand wide and closed it hard, as if crushing something within. “They’re awa’ doon the water, Jackman. An old hand like you! One would think you had turned to drink. But you’ve turned to old wives’ tales, instead.”
Jackman bit his lip. “Do you mean—do you mean they’ve been taken?”
“Liquidated is our word, Dr. Jackman. They were, after all, depreciated assets. And were I you, Jackman, I’d look sharp. What have you accomplished here in Carnglass? The rags and tags of information you’ve collected in foraging round the islands are next to worthless. We have better ways of mapping those missile sites. And playing with gelignite, like a boy with firecrackers! You’d never get the stuff past the guards at the installations, if you seriously tried: these hangdog fellows you’ve collected here in Carnglass haven’t the heart or the mind for it. You drove out your only experienced man, Donley, so that he had to be liquidated for fear he’d talk. Unauthorized enthusiasm! It will be your ruin, Jackman.”
“But after all,” Royall put in eagerly, “Bruhl himself gave his consent to this project.”
“Tentative consent is one thing,” Logan said; “approval of blunders in operation is another.”
Jackman ran his fingers across his forehead in his old gesture of incertitude. “Logan,” he said, “I believe you really are from Vlanarov’s people. You’re a Party intellectual: you’ve the look and tone of it. In short, you’re a man we can talk with. You must know as well as we do what has gone wrong with this scheme. The people in the Continent want action from me, but they’ll take no risks nor spend any money. For that matter, they’ll give me no men. I am expected to extort the funds from old women, conscript a set of criminals and hold them together by blackmail and intimidation, and pay the penalty by myself, with my own neck, if everything falls in pieces.
“For years those people have used Royall and me in this way. Edmund Jackman, who ought to be forming policy at the upper levels, set to leading a gang of banditti at the back of beyond! It’s enough to craze a man. As one intellectual to another, do you see any justice in that? Bureaucracy on the one hand, fanatic ideological rigidity on the other; and the best minds in the Party, like yours and mine, fallen between the stools. In my situation, what would you have done differently?” He was almost wheedling.
“I’m not authorized to offer any opinion on that subject, as yet,” Logan said, with what he hoped was an enigmatic smile.
“Perhaps I had better make it clear, Logan,” Royall put in, “that Dr. Jackman’s association with Beria arose solely from necessity, and from his obedience to Party discipline. We regret as much as anyone does what happened to Vlanarov’s father.”
“Do you have a cigarette?” said Logan. “I suppose lunch will be ready soon.”
“Logan,” Jackman demanded, intensely, “are you here to supplant me? If you are, why this shilly-shallying? Can’t you have the decency to present your instructions?”
“Why, I’m in no position as yet to give definite orders, Jackman. The decisions must be yours; I decline any responsibility. But this I will suggest: disarm your men, lock up the guns, and give me the keys to the gunroom and the cellars where you keep the gelignite. Send all the men down to the New House except Tompkins and Royall. Light a beacon, or send up flares, and put Carnglass in communication with the mainland through ordinary channels. Leave me in charge of the Old House. Then wait the turn of events. If you do this, I’ll put in my good word for you with my superiors.”
This was spreading it perilously thick, Logan thought, but one might as well be taken for a tiger as for an alley-cat.
Jackman sucked in his breath. “You ask too much, Logan, whoever or whatever you are. Is this some plan to make Royall and me the scapegoats? To hand us over to the police or intelligence, possibly, by way of covering some one else’s blunders? I’ve been treated that way before, Logan, and I’ll not endure it again. Sooner than that—sooner than the gaol or the gallows—I’d walk into the cellars and detonate the gelignite. I’d rather blow Carnglass into pebbles than be the dupe once more.”
“You asked for suggestions, Jackman. I told you I’d assume no responsibilities.” Logan had not dared to hope that Jackman actually would fall into his impromptu snare; but at least it served to bewilder Jackman and Royall.
“And if we did disarm the men,” Royall volunteered, “who would keep off your friends outside? The ones that made away with Carruthers, and sent Rab mad? What’s your scheme, Logan—to liquidate all of us in Carnglass? To send us to join Gare and Dowie and Jock Anderson and Donley? To make sure that no one here ever has an opportunity to furnish evidence to the government?”
Inadvertently, he might have carried the game too far, Logan saw: he might get himself drowned for a commissar instead of a police-agent.
“Damn it,” Jackman almost shouted, the patch in the middle of his forehead twitching, “are you really from Vlanarov? Do you have another name?”
“I’ll tell you when there’s need for it,” was all Logan answered him. For Jackman was losing control of himself, and it was conceivable that he might shoot Logan where he stood.
“Now, now, Dr. Jackman,” Royall murmured, “if he is from Vlanarov, we’d best not....”
“No!” Jackman cried, his air of power returning to him. “No, you’ll tell me soon enough. If you’re sent by that mutual-admiration circle in the Continent, I’ll have that news out of you, and make you pay for it. And if you’re something worse, I’ll twist that truth from you. I know your medicine, Logan. You’re going into the Whiskey Bottle; there’s no man who can endure that place long. You’ll talk with me, and thank me for the chance.”
“Dr. Jackman, I really do think ...” Royall began, uneasily. But Jackman cut him off.
“Mr. Royall, get Anderson and Caggia. We’ll put our friend Logan away below stairs. The responsibility is mine. And while I’m at the Whiskey Bottle, you make the rounds of the house, Royall, and make sure all the men have ammunition enough.”
It never would do to let Jackman see any sign of weakness in him, for the man subsisted on others’ dread, and was most merciless, Logan guessed, when they were most piteous. Deliberately Logan gathered up the Table-Men and set them in their casket. “I thought you had a taste for sherry, Jackman,” he said, “but you seem to have whiskey in mind for me.” Jackman answered nothing. Then Anderson and Ferd entered. Anderson’s jaw was bound up in a bloody handkerchief, and the man looked murder at Logan.
In silence, Jackman and Anderson and Ferd Caggia took Logan down the worn stair in the thickness of the wall. They took him to the ground floor of the old tower, where first he had met Mary MacAskival only yesterday about this hour, though it seemed an age ago. And they shoved him toward one corner of that great vaulted empty room. In that corner, flush with the flagstones, a small stair twisted downward, below the level of the rock on which the Old House stood. Anderson thrust him forward with a curse, so that Logan staggered down the short flight, the three men behind him.
The place below was wholly dark. Caggia carried a petrol lantern, and he lit it and swung it round. This crypt, hollowed from the rock, apparently contained nothing but what looked like a broken windlass in a far corner, and what seemed to be a coil or heap of rope in a near corner. And in the middle of the floor was a circular lid or cover of stone, with an iron ring set into it. Caggia and Anderson commenced to drag back this lid.
This being, perhaps, his last appearance above ground, Logan thought he ought to improve the shining hour. “I do hope, Anderson,” he said, “that your jaw doesn’t pain you.” Anderson responded with an obscenity. “I am acquainted with your brother Jock in the Gallowgate,” Logan went on. “A lively man, Jock. He kicked me in the jaw not long ago.”
“Gude for Jock,” growled Anderson. “I’ll soon gie ye anither.”
“But we caught him, Davie Anderson,” Logan continued, “and put him where he’ll kick no more. We caught Jim Dowie and his wife Jeanie, too, and the others. And now all the world knows of the criminals of Carnglass.”
“Enough of that, Logan,” Jackman put in. Anderson and Ferd were standing by the open mouth of a pit or cistern, staring attentively at Logan. Jackman pressed the muzzle of the little pistol into Logan’s back and urged him toward the gulf. This must be the pit, for dead herring or dead men, described in Balmullo’s account of the Old House.
“Dr. Jackman,” Logan said in some haste, “I do trust that when, tomorrow or the next day, you decide in despair to blow up the Old House, yourself, and everyone round about, you will allow these two fine fellows to join me in this well of yours. It will probably be the safest place for some miles round. I doubt whether Anderson and Caggia are so ready to die as you are.”
Ferd Caggia’s perpetual grin diminished. He glanced appraisingly at Dr. Jackman. “Ferd,” said Logan, “presumably you will be brought to trial for treason, at the least, even if you escape Dr. Jackman’s gelignite. They tell me that you are an excellent shot. If I were you, I should endeavor to persuade Dr. Jackman to remain a comfortable distance from the crypt where he keeps the explosives.”
“Logan,” Jackman muttered in his ear, “do you want a bullet in your spine?”
“By no means, Dr. Jackman. And try not to forget that there will be people asking after me, very soon.” Would they try to throw him into the pit that stood open right by his feet?
“Kneel down,” Jackman told him, “and you may have a glimpse of the Whiskey Bottle. Do you know the Mamertine prison in Rome? This is very like, Logan, but deeper.”
Caggia had tied a long cord to the lantern, which now he lowered into the hole and swung in a circle, slowly, so as to show the interior of the place. Kneeling reluctantly, Logan made out an immense dry depth. The pit was shaped roughly like a bottle, narrow at the mouth and gradually widening, and going down, down. It was irregular, however, with bulges and depressions here and there in its sides, as if more the work of nature than of man. From the mouth, one could not get a clear view of the whole interior. The lantern sank lower and lower into the abyss, and still Logan could not perceive the bottom; then Caggia hauled it up. In this place, according to Balmullo’s history of Carnglass, had been found the deformed skeleton that the crofters had called the Firgower. If ever the pit had been filled with salt herring, it must have enabled the Old House to withstand a siege of months, supposing there was fresh water enough to drink.
Logan stood firm upon the lip of the Whiskey Bottle. Nothing but audacity, he felt, would discourage Jackman from indulging in a new atrocity at this moment. “Look sharp that our friend Dr. Jackman doesn’t put you, too, down this well, Caggia,” he remarked. “It must tell on one’s nerves to have a lunatic bent upon self-destruction for an employer.”
“There you’ll stay, Logan, until you feel inclined to talk with us,” Jackman said, rolling the words thickly. “If I don’t forget you. You’ll not eat or drink until we let you out—if we do. I won’t say when we’ll come back to inquire after you: it may be hours, or it may be days. A man does not stay sane very long in the Whiskey Bottle. If you come out in time, there’s no harm done. Scream when you wish to come out, and perhaps we will hear you. Better men than you have gone down and not come up alive. Down with you, now.”
Anderson had dragged from the corner a long rope ladder. He made it fast to two iron rings sunk in the floor of the crypt, and let the rope fall into the pit. “There you go,” said Jackman. “Goodnight to you, Mr. Logan.”
“I think I’ll not go,” Logan told them. They scarcely could carry him down the swaying rope ladder.
“In that event,” Jackman remarked—and Anderson sniggered—“we would have to pitch you in, and it’s nearly fifty feet to the bottom, so you would be broken. Or we would have to lower you in at a rope’s end, head first, with risk to your skull. I advise you to choose the ladder.”
There was nothing else for it. Logan set his feet and hands on the swaying ladder, and began to descend. As he went down, the feet of the three men disappeared from view, and presently he was in blackness. After what seemed eternity, swinging and twisting about on the ropes, he felt no rung-slat under his foot, and halted, twirling back and forth like a top in space. Did they mean him to fall and break his legs or back? “It doesn’t reach,” he called up. The echo was melancholy.
“Jump for it,” Jackman’s voice sounded ever so faintly above.
“I’ll be damned if I do,” Logan roared back.
“You’ll be damned if you don’t,” called Jackman, “for we’ll loose the ladder at this end, and you’ll fall anyhow, and there’ll be no way back.”
Waiting was no comfort. Logan relinquished his hold on the ladder, expecting his end. But he fell only six or seven feet, bruising his back on the jagged stone floor, which was quite dry. He could hear the rustle of the ladder being hauled up. The light of the lantern glimmered at the top of the Bottle, and a head was thrust over the mouth of the shaft, silhouetted against the petrol glare.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” Jackman said, “shriek when you care for our company.” He laughed. Then he said something else, more faintly; but Logan thought it was, “Once you put me here, Askival.” There came a scraping sound from above, and the lid was dragged back over the Bottle’s mouth, cutting off Logan from the world. He was shut into the tomb now, as in his dream on the second night in Carnglass. As if the stone cover had not been coffin-lid enough, an iron door had stood ajar, Logan remembered, at the entrance to the crypt, a big key in the lock. No doubt they would turn the key. Goodbye, Mary MacAskival.