Chesterton Pequena historia de Inglaterra
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311. Davis Suzannah Lekarka i kowboj
Forward, Robert L Rocheworld 3 Ocean Under the Ice
Anthology Shifting Steam
śąyczenie
Dorota SumiśÂska Autobiografia na czterech śÂapach
Webber Meredith Slub na pustkowiu
Harrison Harry Stalowy Szczur 6 Narodziny Stalowego Szczura
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the tranquil Highland voice. "It looked so unnecessary."
"You must be ghastly strong," said Turnbull.
"One is, when one is mad," was the careless reply, "and it had
worn a little loose in the socket. Even now I've got it out I
can't discover what it was for. But I've found out something a
long sight funnier."
"What do you mean?" asked Turnbull.
"I have found out where A is," said the other.
Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up
communications which made his meaning plain. By that time the two
captives had fully discovered and demonstrated that weakness in
the very nature of modern machinery to which we have already
referred. The very fact that they were isolated from all
companions meant that they were free from all spies, and as there
were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to be baffled.
Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells; that
machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patient
violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual
suggestion, opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to
let in a small man, in the exact place where there had been
before the tiny ventilation holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into
MacIan's apartment, and his first glance found out that the iron
spike was indeed plucked from its socket, and left, moreover,
another ragged hole into some hollow place behind. But for this
MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long oblong
ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The
small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that
short oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That
individual looked at it with a puzzled face.
"What is in there?" he asked.
MacIan answered briefly: "Another cell."
"But where can the door of it be?" said his companion, even more
puzzled; "the doors of our cells are at the other end."
"It has no door," said Evan.
In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister
feeling crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself.
The notion of the doorless room chilled him with that sense of
half-witted curiosity which one has when something horrible is
half understood.
"James Turnbull," said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, "these
people hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more
than any man feared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy
and galloping in order to capture us and wipe us out--in order to
kill us. And they have killed us, for you and I have only made a
hole in our coffins. But though this hatred that they felt for us
is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and more plain and
practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet it is not
we whom the people of this place hate most."
A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's
spine; he had never felt so near to superstition and
supernaturalism, and it was not a pretty sort of superstition
either.
"There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan,
in his low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper.
God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor
window, nor lowered through any opening above. I expect these
iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned
machinery for walling him up. He is there. I have looked through
the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him long, because
his face is turned away from me and he does not move."
Al Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their
outlet in rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown
room.
It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that
it was doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted
a large black A like the B and C outside their own doors. The
letter in this case was not painted outside, because this prison
had no outside.
On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares
had maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which
was startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous
head was ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
