Mark Twain's Medieval Romance (39 page)

“It depends,” Hugh said. “I don’t want any trick cigarette cases or rabbits out of hats or any damn nonsense like that. I’d like to see something good.”

“Something good,” echoed Raymond reflectively. He looked around the room, studied it, and then turned to Hugh, pointing toward the huge oak door which was closed between the dining room and the living room, where we had gathered before dinner.

“That door is not locked, is it?”

“No,” Hugh said, “it isn’t, it hasn’t been locked for years.”

“But there is a key to it?”

Hugh pulled out his key chain, and with an effort detached a heavy, old-fashioned key. “Yes, it’s the same one we use for the butler’s pantry.” He was becoming interested despite himself.

“Good. No, do not give it to me. Give it to the doctor. You have faith in the doctor’s honor, I am sure?”

“Yes,” said Hugh dryly, “I have.”

“Very well. Now, doctor, will you please go to that door and lock it.”

The doctor marched to the door, with his firm, decisive tread, thrust the key into the lock, and turned it. The click of the bolt snapping into place was loud in the silence of the room. The doctor returned to the table holding the key, but Raymond motioned it away. “It must not leave your hand or everything is lost,” he warned.

“Now,” Raymond said, “for the finale I approach the door, I flick my handkerchief at it”—the handkerchief barely brushed the keyhole—“and presto, the door is unlocked!”

The doctor went to it. He seized the doorknob, twisted it dubiously, and then watched with genuine astonishment as the door swung silently open.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Somehow,” Elizabeth laughed, “a false premise went down easy as an oyster.”

Only Hugh reflected a sense of personal outrage. “All right,” he demanded, “how was it done? How did you work it?”

“I?” Raymond said reproachfully, and smiled at all of us with obvious enjoyment. “It was you who did it all. I used only my little knowledge of human nature to help you along the way.”

I said, “I can guess part of it. That door was set in advance, and when the doctor thought he was locking it, he wasn’t. He was really unlocking it. Isn’t that the answer?”

Raymond nodded. “Very much the answer. The door
was
locked in advance. I made sure of that, because with a little forethought I suspected there would be such a challenge during the evening, and this was the simplest way of preparing for it, I merely made certain that I was the last one to enter this room, and when I did I used this.” He held up his hand so that we could see the sliver of metal in it. “An ordinary skeleton key, of course, but sufficient for an old and primitive lock.”

For a moment Raymond looked grave, then he continued brightly, “It was our host himself who stated the false premise when he said the door was unlocked. He was a man so sure of himself that he would not think to test anything so obvious. The doctor is also a man who is sure, and he fell into the same trap. It is, as you now see, a little dangerous always to be so sure.”

“I’ll go along with that,” the doctor said ruefully, “even though it’s heresy to admit it in my line of work.” He playfully tossed the key he had been holding across the table to Hugh, who let it fall in front of him and made no gesture toward it. “Well, Hugh, like it or not, you must admit the man has proved his point.”

“Do I?” said Hugh softly. He sat there smiling a little now, and it was easy to see he was turning some thought over and over in his head.

“Oh, come on, man,” the doctor said with some impatience. “You were taken in as much as we were. You know that.”

“Of course you were, darling,” Elizabeth agreed.

I think that she suddenly saw her opportunity to turn the proceedings into the peace conference she had aimed at, but I could have told her she was choosing her time badly. There was a look in Hugh’s eye I didn’t like—a veiled look which wasn’t natural to him. Ordinarily, when he was really angered, he would blow up a violent storm, and once the thunder and lightning had passed he would be honestly apologetic. But this present mood of his was different. There was a slumbrous quality in it which alarmed me.

He hooked one arm over the back of his chair and rested the other on the table, sitting halfway around to fix his eyes on Raymond. “I seem to be a minority of one,” he remarked, “but I’m sorry to say I found your little trick disappointing. Not that it wasn’t cleverly done—I’ll grant that, all right—but because it wasn’t any more than you’d expect from a competent locksmith.”

“Now there’s a large helping of sour grapes,” the doctor jeered. Hugh shook his head. “No, I’m simply saying that where there’s a lock on a door and the key to it in your hand, it’s no great trick to open it. Considering our friend’s reputation, I thought we’d see more from him than that.”

Raymond grimaced. “Since I had hoped to entertain,” he said “I must apologize for disappointing.”

“Oh, as far as entertainment goes I have no complaints. But for a real test—”

“A real test?”

“Yes, something a little different. Let’s say, a door without any locks or keys to tamper with. A closed door which can be opened with a fingertip, but which is nevertheless impossible to open. How does that sound to you?”

Raymond narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, as if he were considering the picture being presented to him. “It sounds most interesting,” he said at last. “Tell me more about it.”

“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 is 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 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 clearly 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 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 in a hard voice.

“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 had 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 he would 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.