But in the small hours of one morning, as he returned to his room after a raid upon the kitchen, something happened which turned the rest of his winter into something less isolated but more terrible. He had left the corridor of carvings a mile or more behind, and was deep in his own realm, when he decided that instead of taking his usual path along the narrow and extended passageway to the east, he would explore an alternative corridor which, he imagined, would in its own good time lead to his own district.
As he proceeded he made, upon the wall, following his usual custom, the rough marks with white chalk which had more than once helped him to find his way back to familiar ground.
After about an hour of twisting and turning, of crossing the open junctions of radiating alleyways, of making a hundred arbitrary choices between this entrance and that, this winding descent and that cold incline to a wider passageway – he began to sweat with fear at the very thought of having taken no precautions for his return journey. He knew that he would never have found his way back without the chalk marks. Suddenly he began to feel hungry. At the same time, noticing that his candle was burning low, he drew another from the half-dozen or more that were always in his belt, and sitting down on the floor, placed his freshly lit candle carefully on the ground before him, and opening a long, narrow-bladed knife, began to cut himself a slice of bread.
To his right and left the darkness was as thick as ink. He sat illumined within the aura of candle flame, his face and rags and hands and hair dramatically lit. Behind him on the wall his shadow hovered heavily. He had stretched out his legs before him and was about to sink his teeth for the second time into the bread when he heard the peal of laughter.
Had it not been for its terrible strength and for the fact that it came from
But there was no question of this. It had nothing to do with him, or his imagination; he was not mad. But he knew that he was in the presence of madness. For the demoniacal cry or howl was something that brought Flay to his feet as though he were drawn upwards on a fish-hook – something that took him, without his knowing that he had moved, to the opposite side of the passage where, flattened against the wall as though at bay, and with his head lowered he stared at the cold bricks against which he had been leaning, as though the wall itself were affected by the lunacy it was hiding and was watching him, its every brick deranged.
Mr Flay could hear his sweat splashing on the stones at his feet. His mouth was leather-dry. His heart was thumping like a drum. And he had nothing to see. Only the candlelight shining steadily at the base of the opposite wall.
And then it came again, with a kind of double note – almost as though, whatever throat it was that was giving vent to this ghastly laughter, was curiously formed – as though it were able to throw out two voices at once.
There was no question of an echo for there was no repetition and no overlapping – but a kind of duplex horror.
This time, the high pealing note tailed off into a thin whine, but even in this ghostly termination there was the two-fold quality, the terrible, petrifying sense of double madness.
For some while after silence had returned, Mr Flay could not move. He had been struck. His sense of privacy had been shattered; his inability to rationalize and make sense out of the small hours was like an insult, an insult hurled against his narrow but proud mind. And his fear, his naked fear of something he could not see, but something which was within a few yards of him – it was this that froze his limbs.
But the silence continued and there was no repetition, and at last he picked the candle from the floor, and with more than one glance behind him, he moved rapidly back the way he had come, following the chalk marks until at last he arrived at the fateful parting of the ways. Thereafter he was on his own ground and he strode it without hesitation until he arrived at his room.
