Then the reason why revealed itself. Taron Ling stood astride of a dark
hole, oval shaped and smooth edged—an undiscoverable hole to whoever
regards a sacred image as a thing not to be moved or too closely examined.
Taron Ling thrust a leg in the hole to show that there were steps beneath it.
He tugged Blair’s arm and signed to him to go down.
“Go ahead.” Blair ordered.
He obeyed. For a moment Blair hesitated. Why not return to the entrance
and try to signal to the men. whose job it was to keep him under observation,
to come out of the jungle and follow? He could have done that in less than a
minute. Not to do it was to add to the risk he was running. However, he
decided those men probably knew their business or they would not have been
picked for the job. and Taron Ling, with an arm up through the hole, seized
his right foot to guide it downward to the top step. As long as Taron Ling
was in front, not behind him, the odds were enough in his favor to make the
risk worth taking. So he went into the hole, not sgueezing through too
easily, and he discovered by their feel that the steps were of rough-hewn
rock, irregularly spaced, descending at a steep angle. He was thirsty. He
wished he had had a drink before he started out.
He could see backward up through the hole, but not downward. When he
hesitated, Taron Ling from beneath took his foot and tried to guide it, but
Blair kicked the hand away. Neither man spoke. The heat was suffocating. The
dust of dry bat-dung rose with an acrid stench. Blair sat and groped downward
one step at a time, beating his hands against the stone from time to time to
get the bat-filth oft his fingers.
Trying to judge how far he had gone, he glanced upward and saw the
Bat-Brahmin’s face—or he supposed it was his—a silhouette framed
in the egg-shaped hole. After that it grew suddenly darker—then totally
dark, and when he looked upward he could see nothing at all. The Bat had
closed the opening. Taron Ling laughed, but the sound had no overtone: it was
mirthless.
Then darkness became full of dread. Blair struck a match. Excitement
glared in Taron Ling’s eyes. The match burned Blair’s fingers. He struck
another, trying to see upward.
“Can you open that from below?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Is there another way out?”
“No.”
“Any water?”
“No.”
The fear of thirst strikes panic. Blair started to climb upward, but Taron
Ling’s hand clutched his ankle. He kicked hard. The man clung; he had the
strength of a gorilla.
“You obey,” said his voice in the dark, “or you die.”
Blair sat on a step and struck another match. It showed him Taron Ling’s
face, sweat-wet, grinning with intention. Murder? What for? Money? He had
none.
“What do you want?” he demanded. Then the match went out. He struck
another; there were eight or nine remaining.
“I will have obedience.” said Taron Ling.
He let go of Blair’s ankle and descended backwards on hands and knees into
total darkness. When the match burned out he spoke:
“Obey me and live. Disobey me and die. You think”—his voice throbbed
and boomed— “that you were followed here, because you saw a signal. You
believe those men will come for you. eh? They are Wu Tu’s men and Zaman
Ali’s. I taught them the police signals. Is it likely I should take such
pains to trap you. and neglect that? The commissioner’s men and Howland’s
men—oh yes, yes, I know Howland—have been misled. That was a
little silly easy matter. You are at my mercy.”
“What do you want?” Blair repeated. It was no use wishing he had not come.
It was no use waiting until thirst should begin to torture him. He must use
his wits while he had any left, and that necessity began to restore his
self-control.
“You obey me, not Wu Tu,” said Taron Ling’s voice.
Thoughts raced through Blair’s brain. Why had Taron Ling deliberately
quarreled with the Bat-Brahmin? Had there been no other way of inducing the
man to haul the image back over the hole and shut them in? As for
thirst—his mouth was already dry from fear and the heat and the stench
of bat-filth— Taron Ling, too, would feel that presently. Judgment, he
knew, and logic are among the first of the human faculties that wilt and
vanish under the strain of trespass amid psychic arts that deceive no one
more than the practitioner. All competent policemen know that. But even a
professed occultist, persuaded by his own hypnotic skill that he was almost
superhuman, would be unlikely to defy thirst. Not even a madman would do
that. Taron Ling did not seem to be quite mad—yet; the road where
madness lies in wait is sometimes long and devious.
He struck another match. Out of the darkness something fell into his lap.
It was a human skull.
“Dozens have died in here,” said Taron Ling’s voice. “This is the secret
way to Gaglajung that Ranjeet betrayed to the three kings.”
He tossed up another skull, then another. Blair hurled one skull back into
the darkness.
“Damn your eyes,” he answered, “get going. What’s your game? You know a
way out, that’s obvious.” He realized quite suddenly, and wondered why he had
not realized before, that the quarrel had been deliberately timed to make the
Bat close up the hole as an act of revenge. Possibly the Bat. did not know of
another way out. Probably he resented the discovery of a secret that he and
his antecedent impostors in office had kept for centuries. Whatever the
secret might be, probably the Bat had welcomed an excuse to conceal it again,
and let the intruders die parched in the dark. Conceivably the Bat had been
induced to reveal the secret in the first instance? or perhaps the mad hermit
had been induced to reveal it—by means of one of Taron Ling’s, hypnotic
tricks. Such tricks bring reaction in their wake. Anger sometimes breaks
hypnotic spells; it might have stirred the Bat’s evident madness to revolt
and revenge. Taron Ling would surely not have run that risk unless he knew,
or thought he knew, a way of escape.
Blair’s own competently governed anger began to come to his rescue. Why
should he have been picked for this job—he of all people —he who
hated all things that can not be stated in plain speech? The commissioner had
chosen him, knowing his prejudice. Why? Wu Tu had dared to try to hypnotise
him. Why him? Why had Henrietta treated him as if he were a disappointing
fool without wit or understanding? What the devil did this beast Taron Ling
mean by taking such pains to pursue and trap him? Why him? What did it all
mean? He would find out. Forward, into the trap. Obey orders!
“Go on!” he commanded. “Lead the way!” There was a sort of vertigo, as he
resisted a mesmeric effort to make him see things in the dark. He threw that
off. He went forward, downward, with a hand on either wall and his
riding-whip ready for action.
“Careful!” warned Taron Ling’s voice. “Here is danger!”
“Face it then!” he retorted, fighting-angry. He meant to hit the man if he
could reach him.
A fight in the dark would be better than views of invisible things that
crowded the—darkness, as they do in dreams, memories—spaceless,
void, intangible—the tiger, the shrine, the Bat’s face, the hermit’s,
Wu Tu’s eyes, the old Rangar and the god Ganesha, the commissioner’s
iron-gray smile—and then Henrietta.
“Go on!” he commanded. He would not ask questions. He would make the man
show him.
He trod on a rolling bone and almost fell, striking his spur upon the last
step. He sat down and removed his spurs, began to thrust them in his pocket
but threw them away savagely. They fell a prodigious distance; it seemed a
minute before he heard them strike on rock beneath him. Then he heard Taron
Ling up above him in front, scrambling over loose stones, some of which fell
and remeasured the depth of the darkness on his left hand.
He thrust outward to the right with the riding-whip and touched nothing.
Groping with his foot, he found the bone that had, tripped him. He picked it
up. It felt like a human thigh-bone. He threw it away to the right. It fell
what seemed an endless distance before he heard it strike bottom. Evidently
he was on a ledge between two precipices, and he hated precipices. He got
down on his hands and knees and crawled forward. The ledge was irregular. In
one place it was less than a foot wide; but it was only about twenty feet
long and he soon found a rough, sloping ramp at the end that led sharply
upward.
Remembering there were loose stones, he crawled up that carefully,
pausing, whenever he was sure of his hold, to listen for Taron Ling. But he
reached smooth, level rock without overtaking the man. Then he stood up and
reached out his arms in all directions, touching nothing.
There was no sound. He went forward,, feeling his way with the
riding-whip. Within a minute he had lost sense of direction. Forward,
backward, it was all the same fathomless, dark silence. Then he saw the
monster coming toward him—the same green-eyed head and belly on eight
writhing arms that had approached him in front of the tent. If it had been
real—if he had thought it was real, he could have faced it with less
horror. He groped for his matches, and struck one. The thing vanished. Taron
Ling stood grinning at him, ten feet away.
The match gave him a glimpse of cavern walls before it burned out and’
Taron Ling spoke.
“You are helpless!”
“Am I?” He charged, striking out with his whip. He struck air twice, and
with the third blow struck home, following that with his left fist. Then he
felt himself clutched in frenzied fingers, so he kicked Taron Ling’s heel out
from under him. They fell together, and he heard Taron Ling’s head strike the
rock floor; then the clutch of his fingers relaxed and he lay still.
Another match. There was blood on the rock. Taron Ling lay dead, with a
broken skull, with one eye open. Six matches left. Silence. Dreadful
darkness. Then a fluttering blow in the face. It stank. A bat had struck
him.
How do the bats get out of here? he wondered. He wiped the smell of the
bat off his face and then stepped out with both hands stretched in front of
him until he found the cavern wall. He felt he had slain a monster, not a
human being. But what next, alone in all that darkness—
Then he had found the cavern wall by groping. Blair counted his remaining
matches. Six. He struck one. He could not afford enough light to search Taron
Ling’s clothing. The match revealed two dark openings, almost opposite each
other. He had completely lost sense of direction; in the struggle Taron Ling
had fallen sideways, not backwards, so that the position of his body afforded
no clue. He chose the wrong direction and nearly fell down the ramp up which
he had scrambled five minutes before. That increased his state, of panic, but
he found the wall again and felt his way along it to the other opening,
reserving his remaining matches for emergency. It was absolutely pitch-dark.
He could see nothing—not even his hand before his eyes; There was not
even an audible echo until he groped his way out of the cavern and into the
tunnel. Then the echo, of his footfall began to rumble along ahead of him, as
if the tunnel were crowded with hurrying men.
Whistling is one of the ways by which a man can recover his self-control.
He tried it, and his first effort was merely a Whisper, because his lips were
dry. The whisper made a sound in the tunnel like a.soft wind. That suggested
another thought. He wetted one finger as well as his lips, and held up the
finger. There was a perceptible, although very slight current of air. There
must be an opening somewhere. His second attempt to whistle was shrill and
off-key; the sound went shrieking an immeasurable distance, that might be
miles or might be an illusion due to the formation of the tunnel, the state
of his own nerves, and the darkness.
As the hollow shriek faded and died, it resembled a murmur of human voices
very far off. It occurred to him then for the first time that very likely
there were other people in the caverns. If so, they must certainly have heard
him. Taron Ling’s behavior was explainable on that supposition. It was
incredible that he could have set his trap so well without some organized
assistance. He had boasted that the watchers, whom Blair had mistaken for the
commissioner’s or Howland’s undercover men. were Wu Tu’s agents; and that was
conceivably true. If so, others of Wu Tu’s agents might be wafting at a
rendezvous for Taron Ling and perhaps also for himself, for some reason not
yet evident.
Assuming that to be true, Taron Ling’s motive could be guessed at. Both he
and Wu Tu had used hypnotic methods. Taron Ling had used a kind of third
degree, to create a mental condition quite familiar to psychologists, in
which the victim does what he is told. He had then demanded obedience to
himself, in place of Wu Tu. She. in Bombay, also had insisted on
obedience.
That might even mean, although it was improbable almost to the point of
impossibility, that Wu Tu herself was somewhere in the caverns, and that she
and Taron Ling were false allies, at secret cross-purposes. Anyhow, more than
probably there was a very definite reason why Taron Ling had behaved as he
did. Presumably he, Blair Warrender, in some way was important in the schemes
of a number of people, who might be expecting him. In the circumstances that
was an encouraging thought, and he whistled again, then shouted,
“Koi
hai?”
The shout went thundering along the tunnel like the voice of a multitude,
until the words lost shape and died away at last in a hollow
murmur—oi-ai—oi-ai—oi-ai. There was no answer. He waited
until the ensuing silence, became as” terrifying. as the darkness and he knew
he must go forward or lose all command of himself. The echo of his first
footstep made him jump nearly out of skin. He knew then exactly how
third-degree witnesses feel. He craved even Taron Ling’s company.
He spread his arms on the invisible wall and pressed his whole body
against it because he felt there was a precipice behind him, although he knew
there was not. He drove his toes against the wall, as if he stood on a narrow
ledge with his heels on nothing. Frantically he fought against thought,
fearing he might begin to see. things in the dark and go mad.