CHAPTER XI
A TRAP
Max tried to find the door by which he had been thrown into the room. The upper portion was of glass, he supposed, remembering the red curtain that hung on the other side of it. But although he felt with his hands in the place where he supposed the door to be, he found nothing but wooden shelves, such as are usually found lining the walls of shops, and planks of rough wood.
He paused, and looked around him, hoping that when his eyes got used to the darkness some faint ray of light coming either through the boarded-up front or through the glass upper half of the door, would enable him to take his bearings, or, at any rate, to help him avoid that uncanny "something" in the middle of the floor.
But the blackness was absolute. Strain his eyes as he might, there was no glimmer of light in any direction to guide him, and he had used up his last match. So he went to work again with his hands. These rough planks were placed perpendicularly against the wall to a width of about three feet—the width of the door. Passing his fingers slowly all around them, he ascertained that they reached to the floor, and to a height of about seven feet above it. Evidently, thought he, it was the door itself that opened into the shop which had been carefully boarded up. As soon as he felt sure of this, he dealt at the planks a tremendous blow with his fist. He hurt his hand but did no apparent injury to the door, which scarcely shook. Then he tried to tear one of the boards away from the framework to which it was attached but without result. The nails which had been used to fasten it were of the strongest make, and had been well driven in.
Foiled in his attempt to get out of the room by the way he had come, Max moved slowly to the left, and at the distance of only a couple of feet from the door found the angle of the wall, and began to creep along, still feeling with hands and feet most carefully, in the direction of the front of the shop.
This side of the room presented no obstacles. The wallpaper was torn here and there; the plaster fell down in some places at his touch. A board shook a little under his tread when he had taken a few paces, but at the next step he made the floor seemed firm enough.
On turning the next angle in the wall he came to the shop door—the one leading into the stone passage outside. Here he made another attempt to force an exit, but it was boarded up as securely as the inner one, and the window, which was beside it, was in the same condition.
It by no means increased the confidence of Max as to his own safety to observe what elaborate precautions had been used by the occupants of the house to secure themselves from observation. He could no longer doubt that he was in a house which was the resort of persons of the worst possible character, and in a position of the gravest danger.
While opposite the window, he listened eagerly for some sound in the passage outside. If a foot passenger should pass, he would risk everything and shout for help with all the force of his lungs.
Even while he indulged this hope, he felt that it was a vain one. It was now late; traffic on the river had almost ceased; there was no attraction for idlers on the landing stage in the cold and the darkness.
He continued his investigations.
At the next angle in the wall, he came to more shelves, decayed, broken, left by the last tenant as not worth carrying away. And presently his feet came upon something harder, colder than the boards; it was a hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned into a shop, there had been a small fireplace. And on the other side of this, near the wall, was a collection of rubbish, over the musty items of which Max stumbled as he went. Old boxes, bits of carpet, broken bricks; every sort of worthless lumber.
And so, without accident, without incident, without hearing a sound but the faint noise of his own movements, Max got back to the point where he had started.
Then he paused and listened at the inner door.
In spite of everything, he refused to yield to the suggestion that Carrie had anything to do with his incarceration. Would she not, on finding that he had disappeared, make an effort to get him out?
While he was standing between doubt and hope, on the alert for any sound on the other side which should suggest the presence of the girl herself and give him the cue to knock at the door again, his attention was attracted by a slight noise which thrilled him to the marrow; for it came, not from outside, but from some part of the room itself, in which he had supposed himself to be alone with the dead body of a man.
Instantly he put his back to the door and prepared to stand on the defensive against the expected attack of an invisible assailant.
That was the awful part of it, that he could not see. For a moment he thought of creeping back to the rubbish heap in the corner and trying to find, amongst the odds and ends lying there, some sort of weapon of defense. But a moment's reflection told him that the act of stooping, of searching, would put him more at the mercy of an assailant than ever. There was absolutely nothing to do but to wait and to listen.
And the noise he heard was like the drawing of a log of wood slowly along the floor. This was followed by a dull sound, like the falling of a log to the earth.
And then there followed two sounds that made his flesh creep: The first was the creaking, and cracking of wooden boards, and the second was a slow, sliding noise, which lasted, intermittently for what seemed an hour.
When the latter noise ceased something fell heavily to the ground. That was a sound there was no mistaking, and then the creaking went on for what seemed a long time and ceased suddenly in its turn.
And then, again, there was dead silence, dead stillness.
By this time Max was as cold as ice, and wet from head to foot with the sweat of a sick terror. What the sounds meant, whence they proceeded, he could not tell, but the horror they produced in him was unspeakable, never to be forgotten.
He did not move for a long time after the sounds had ceased. He wanted to shout, to batter with his fists on the doors, the window. But a hideous paralysis of fear seemed to have taken possession of him and benumbed his limbs and his tongue.
Max was no coward. He was a daring rider, handy with his fists, a young man full of spirit and courage to the verge of recklessness, as this adventure had proved. But courage must have something to attack, or at least to resist, before it can make itself manifest; and in this sickening waiting, listening, watching, without the use of one's eyes, there was something which smacked of the supernatural, something to damp the spirits of the bravest man.
There was nothing to be gained, there was, perhaps, much to be risked, by a movement, a step. So Max felt, showing thereby that he possessed an instinct of sane prudence which was, in the circumstances, better than bravery.
And presently he discerned a little patch of faint light on the floor, which gradually increased in size until he was able to make out that it was thrown from above, and from the corner above the rubbish heap.
Max kept quite still. The relief he felt was exquisite. If once he could have a chance of seeing the man who was in the room with him, and who he could not doubt was the person who had thrown him in, Max felt he should be all right. In a tussle with another man he knew that he could hold his own, and a sight of the ruffian would enable him to judge whether bribery or force would be the better weapon with him.
In the meantime, he watched the light with anxious eyes, determined not to move and risk its extinction until he had been able to examine every corner of the little shop.
And as he looked, his eyes grew round, and his breath came fast.
There was no counter left, no furniture at all behind which a man could hide. And the room, except for the rubbish in the corner, a small, straggling heap, was absolutely bare.
There was no other creature in it, dead or alive, but himself.
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