Red Masquerade - Louis Joseph Vance
But in full tide the tirade faltered, Victor seemed to forget his anger or
else to remind himself it was puerile in contrast with the mortal issues
that now confronted him.
He turned to Sofia eyes of cold fire in a wintry countenance.
"So," he pronounced, slowly, "it appears you are to have your way, after
all, and more speedily than either of us reckoned. You are to die, and so
am I, this day--you in my arms. Well, it is time, I daresay, when I permit
myself to be duped and overreached by police spies like your persevering
father and lover. Yes; I am ready to pay the price of my fatuity--but not
until they had paid me for their victory--and dearly. Come!"
He motioned to the Chinese to reclose and fasten the trap-door, and
grasping Sofia's wrist with cruel fingers hurried her back through the
hallway.
Repeated breaks of pistol-fire guided them to the front room, a racket
echoed in diminished volume from the street.
In an atmosphere already thick with acrid fumes of smokeless powder two men
held the windows, firing through loopholes in iron-bound blinds of oak. At
their feet a third squatted, reloading for them as occasion required. As
Sofia and Victor entered one man dropped his weapon and, grunting, fell
back from his window to nurse a shattered hand. Releasing the girl without
another word, Victor caught up the pistol and took the vacant post.
Instantly, on peering out, he fired once, then again. Evidently missing
both shots, he settled to await a better target, eyes intent to the
loophole. In the course of the next few minutes he changed position but
once, when, after firing several more shots, he tossed the empty weapon to
the man on the floor and received a loaded one in exchange.
Seeing him thus employed, altogether forgetful, Sofia began to back toward
the hall, step by cautious step, keeping her attention fixed to Victor
throughout. But he seemed to be completely preoccupied with his
markmanship, and paid her no heed.
Nevertheless, when she at length found courage to swing and dart away
through the door, Victor flung three curt words to the fellow at his feet,
who grunted, rose, and glided from the room in close chase.
The guard at the front door was not so busy as Sofia had hoped to find him,
not too interested in the progress of siege operations outside to note her
approach and look round from his peephole with a menacing grin of welcome;
and his unmistakable readiness, as pistol in hand he took a single step
toward her, drove the girl back to the foot of the stairs.
Then the other came swiftly after her, and Sofia swung in panic and
stumbled up the steps. There were others up above, two to her certain
knowledge, possibly many more of Victor's creatures; but if only she could
find some sort of refuge in the uppermost fastnesses of the rookery,
perhaps ...
Like a shape of smoke wind-driven, she sped up the first flight, then the
second, only pausing at the head of the third and last flight to throw
hunted glances right, left, and behind her.
Overhead a skylight with dingy panes diffused a dull blue glimmer which
discovered a yawning door at her elbow, a pocket of black mystery beyond,
and on the uppermost steps of the staircase her patient yellow shadow, his
upturned eyes inscrutable but potentially revolting with their very
concealment of the intent behind them.
Impossible that a worse thing could await her beyond that dark
threshold....
She crossed it in one stride, swung the door to, and set her shoulders
against it.
Outside she heard the shuffling footfalls pause. The knob rattled. But
instead of the inward thrust against which she stood braced, there came the
least of outward pulls, as if to make sure that the latch had caught; and
after a brief pause a key grated in the lock, was withdrawn, and the
slippered feet withdrew in turn.
When her lungs ceased to labour painfully, she took her courage in both
hands and began to explore, groping blindly through darkness, encountering
nothing till she blundered into a table which held a glass lamp for
paraffin oil, like those in use below.
Fumbling over the top of the table, she found matches, struck one, and set
its fire to the wick.
The flame waxed and grew steady in a crusted chimney, revealing a room with
a slant ceiling and two dormer windows, boarded; in one corner a cot-bed
with tumbled blankets, near this a low wooden stand, with a pipe, spirit
lamp, and other paraphernalia of an opium smoker--no chairs, not another
stick of furniture of any kind.
Removing the lamp, the girl set it on the floor, and pushed the table over
against the door. By not so long as half a minute would its reinforcement
delay Victor when he made up his mind to get in. But in such emergencies
the human kind is not impatient of the most futile expedients.
There was nothing more she could do. She stood still, listening. The rattle
of pistol fire three floors below continued in fits and starts, but the
sound of it was oddly unreal, resembling more stammering explosions of a
string of firecrackers than snaps of the whiplash of Death.
She tried one of the windows without encouragement, but at the other found
a board with a loose end, which she pried aside, till through begrimed
glass she could see a ghastly, weeping sky of daybreak and, by craning her
neck, peer down into the dark gully of the street.
At first she thought it empty; but presently her straining vision made out
two huddled shapes upon the farther sidewalk, close under the walls of a
public house whose sign she could just barely decipher: the Red Moon.
Then, about to draw back from the window, she saw five men, oddly
foreshortened figures from that lofty coign of view, leave the Red Moon by
one of its bar entrances, bearing between them a heavy beam of wood, and
with this improvised battering-ram aimed at the door to the besieged house,
charge awkwardly across the cobbles.
The house spat fire from door and windows, a withering blast. In the middle
of the street the beam was abandoned, three of its fool-hardy bearers took
to their heels, each shaping an individual course, while one lay still upon
the wet black stones, and another, apparently wounded in the legs, sought
pitifully to drag himself by his arms, inch by inch, out of the zone of
fire. But presently his efforts grew feeble, then he, too, lay stirless,
prone in the sluicing rain.
The girl shrank back from the window, hiding her eyes as if to blot out
that picture.
The light, that is to say the absence of it in true sense, the angle of
view, and the distance, all had conspired to prevent her from making sure
that neither her father nor Karslake were of those four whose broken bodies
cluttered the street. But the fear and uncertainty were maddening....
She wheeled suddenly toward the door: the ancient stairs were creaking
beneath a measured tread. She made an offer to add her weight to that of
the table, but checked and fell back immediately, seeing the folly of
sacrificing her strength, the wisdom of saving it to serve her when
finally....
The creaking ceased, the wards of the lock grated, the knob turned, the
door was thrust open--the table offering little hindrance if any. From the
threshold Victor eyed the girl with a twitching grin.
"The time is at hand," he announced with a parody of punctilio. "We have
beaten them off in the street, but they have found the tunnel from the
cellar of the Red Moon, and are attacking from the river besides. So, my
dear, it ends for us...."
In silence, shoulders to the wall farthest from the door, Sofia watched him
unwinking. The lamp at her feet painted the tensely poised young body and
bloodless face with quaint, stagey shadows.
Victor's glance ranged the cheerless room.
"I think you understand me," he said.
She might have been a waxwork dummy out of Madame Tussaud's.
A white blaze of madness transfigured Victor's countenance. He took one
step toward Sofia.
In movements so precisely coordinated that they seemed one and
instantaneous, the girl stooped, caught up the lamp, and threw it with all
her might. Victor ducked his head. The lamp sailed on, described a
descending curve through the open doorway into the well of the staircase,
struck, and exploded. In the clutches of the maniac, Sofia was aware of the
lurid glare, momentarily gaining strength, that filled the rectangle of the
doorway.
In through this last, while iron hands tightened on her throat and
consciousness grew dark with closing shadows, a man's shape passed, then
another....
The grip on her throat grew lax, the hands left it free. She reeled, but
somebody caught her up and bore her swiftly from the room, leaving two who
fought together like beasts on the floor, locked in each other's arms,
rolling and squirming, rearing and flopping....
The scorch of flames stung her cheek, but she forgot that when their broken
light made visible the features of Karslake above the arms wherein she lay
cradled.
Turning aside from the staircase, Karslake bore her to the ladder leading
to the skylight, whose broken glass crunched beneath his heels at every
step.
In the open air he pulled up for a moment's rest, but continued to hold
Sofia in his arms. The wind raved about them, buffeted them, tore their
breath away, rain pelted them like birdshot; but they clung to each other
and were unaware of reason for complaint.
Presently, however, Karslake remembered, and anxiously endeavoured to
disengage from these tenacious arms.
"Let me go, dearest," he muttered. "I must go back--I left your father to
take care of Victor, and--"
As if evoked by his very solicitude Lanyard emerged from the skylight
hatch, waved a hand in gay salute, then turned to stare down into the
flaming pit from which he had climbed.
After a little he fell back a pace. Then slowly, with the laboured
movements of exhaustion, Victor worked head and shoulders through the
opening and dragged himself out upon the roof.
On all fours he held in doubt, his head moving from side to side like the
head of a stricken beast, seeking his enemy with dazzled eyes. Then he made
Lanyard out and, pulling himself together for the supreme effort, launched
at his throat with the pounce of a great cat.
Lanyard met him halfway, caught him in the middle of his bound, wound wiry
arms round the man and held him helpless.
His voice rang clear above the crackle of flames:
"Victor! have you forgotten how you threatened one night, twenty years ago,
to follow me to the very gates of Hell, and what I promised you--that, if
you did, I'd push you inside? Or did you think I would forget?"
He cast the man from him, backward, down into the hungry maw of that
inferno....