Black Alibi (28 page)

Minutes went by. He looked up once, at the patch of black over him. It was still night. How long a night lasted—sometimes. But not when you are dying.

He rose to his feet at last, began hobbling painfully along toward where the inset rejoined the main part of the alley. A piece of gravel had got into one of his shoes, climbing around inside there, and was half killing him. He had to stop finally, brace his foot against the wall, and strip off the offending shoe. He shook it out, felt along the sole of his sock to make sure the irritant was not imbedded in that. It was, and it rolled into the hollow of his hand.

The dangling shoe dropped with a clump, and he flicked on his light, turned it into his palm. Something winked there in its creases. A diminutive oblong, tiny but bright. A microscopic tube. A bead. One of those things from her dress.

It had only been hurting him since he’d come out of there.

He shoveled his foot back into the shoe, ran up the short steps and inside once more.

He only found it at last because he knew there was something there to be found now and he wouldn’t quit looking until he had. It was a lead trap set into the floor and indistinguishable in size or color from the massive paving blocks set around it. He’d missed it because he’d been chiefly occupied with the walls until now, not the littered flooring underfoot, which had seemed solid. His quest had been for a gap, an orifice, not anything of this sort.

He was squatting down by it now, getting excited. It had a flattened ring nosed through it. He pried that up and pulled, and the whole thing tilted up quite easily, on a sort of chain-brace arrangement on the underside.

He shot his light down into it, to reveal a narrow oblong pit, with breakneck stone steps leading down, but from the side, not lengthwise. On the lowest step of all there was another of those tiny winking points of light, like the one that had rested in his palm awhile ago, outside.

“This is for me,” he told himself with grim conviction.

What it was, where it went to, he didn’t know; only that she’d come this way, so he was going to come this way, too. A cold long-buried air arose in his face, like something from another world, as he disappeared down into it by sections, like someone being swallowed in a quicksand: first his legs, then his thighs, then his middle. Finally it closed over his head.

There was a tunnel stretching before him, almost to infinity, it seemed. It was shored at the sides and top by age-blackened beams, like a mine shaft. As he moved along it eating up distance, he almost received the impression of standing still. There was always still more empty blackness out there ahead of the furthermost limits of the beam of his light. Once his light swam over the droppings of some animal, weeks old and half dust.

So it had been down in here—at one time.

A few paces farther on he shied suddenly, gave an instinctive quirk to the gun he was holding in readiness, as something white gleamed out at him unexpectedly. It was a bodiless skull, nestled there in the angle of one of the shoring beams, grinning teeth to ground as if biting it. It was ivory smooth with centuries of fleshlessness.

Then just when he thought this passage was never going to reach anywhere, never end, his light head suddenly foreshortened, deflected upwards by steps before him again.

Up over them was the same type of chained trap that had admitted him just now at the other end. He put his foot to the lowest step, and then stopped for a moment. Something made him put his light out and sheathe it in the waistband of his trousers, before he reached upward to open the enclosure. The gun he retained. He knew he was getting near the end of the trail now.

It lifted without any more recalcitrance than its complement at the other end, showing, if nothing else, that both had seen frequent use lately. It was not, though, nor could it be expected to be, completely noiseless. It whined as it went upward, and the chains jangled as they stayed it.

As he came up into the dark, he was uncannily aware of some other presence near him. Some bated presence that had detected him first, and was holding itself craftily motionless. He could feel the skin across the back of his neck tighten, and he began fanning his gun warily against the sightless gloom that faced him. He took a cautious step away from the topmost step. Then another.

A current of air set in flux by some unseen movement near him reached him too late.

The bore of a gun ground into his backbone with electrifying lack of preliminary and, as though it were the nozzle of a powerful vacuum cleaner, seemed to draw him from behind into paralyzed motionlessness.

A hand, as cold with tension and deadly purpose as his own, suddenly came to rest on his, took away the gun. A surly voice breathed close to his ear, “
Quieto!
” Before he could identify it further, there was a snap and a light flashed on full in his face, blinding him.

Belmonte’s voice suddenly sounded, full-tone. “My God, it’s you,
hombre!
I nearly—”

“What did you run out on me like that for?” the American railed angrily.

“Sh, keep your voice down!” the other cautioned. He handed him his gun back. “My instinct told me to follow that carriage. I had no time to warn you. Even so, he nearly gave me the slip. When I finally caught up with it, three blocks away from the alley, it was already empty—”

“How long have you been in here?”

“Only a few minutes ahead of you. I was only beginning to look around when I heard you coming up through the trap—”

“What is it? What is the place anyway?”

“It’s the old underground dungeons of the Inquisition. That must have been a secret passage they built in the old days. There’s dozens and dozens of little cells, it’s honeycombed with them. Come on, I’ll show you how far I’d gotten when you interrupted me. Don’t make any noise, he’s somewhere down around here.”

Although they had been anything but noiseless, there was no indication that anything around them in the dark had heard—or was there to hear. A cautious spurt or two of Manning’s torch showed him what Belmonte had presumably already discovered for himself before his arrival: that they were in a crumbling, vaulted corridor, squat stone pillars every few yards supporting the succession of arches that roofed it. Between each two were grim-looking iron doors.

“You take this side, I’ll take the other,” Belmonte breathed.

They separated, were immediately lost to one another in the gloom. From then on a brief flicker of torchlight every few moments, quickly doused again, alternating from side to side, marked their progress. Occasionally there was a querulous whimper of hinges, but many of the iron plaques were already askew from age, didn’t need to be moved at all. One or two were gone entirely. Behind them in every case, were mortar and packedearth cubicles, most of them little bigger than the delayed-action coffins they had eventually proved to be for their inmates.

The endless succession of niches holding these vents unexpectedly right-angled, cut across to meet Belmonte’s side. Meaning this catacomb had ended here. In its lateral face there was but a single iron door. Manning reached it first, having outdistanced his companion in the forward search. The cartwheel of his light lapped over it momentarily, then quickly dissolved again.

He shot it briefly downward at the floor, in a signal to Belmonte. The latter came up beside him in the dark. Manning’s voice was less than a whisper. It had to be guessed at. “Don’t make any noise. Put your hand to this one.”

“Warm.”

“Warmer than the rest, anyway; they’re all stone-cold. Something going on behind it—”

He started feeling along it tenderly with splayed fingers for the old-fashioned staple grip his light had shown him before. Before he could complete the gesture, Belmonte had elbowed him aside, his own hand was on it instead. There was a dangerous sort of quietness about the South American all at once, as though he’d been waiting a long time for this approaching moment.

The thing swung out past them on its appointed arc, and a flash of unreality, of fantasy, exploded into view.

It was that their minds, conditioned to the realistic, couldn’t assimilate what their eyes were trying to show them. This must have been the torture chamber of this whole cruel place of correction and exorcism. Against the wall were strange outlines that the modern mind had no names for: things well forgotten, left behind, as the race progressed away from its childish delight in pulling wings off flies. Chains hanging like fungi, and iron girdles riveted into the wall, and a thing like a hand printing press, to cripple the straight bones nature had formed.

They seemed to have been carried back four hundred years. Beyond that, even, into the nevernever land of demonology and medieval allegory. The place was in use again.

Again, as in the long ago, the lurid red of fire glowed within the stone kiln at the end of the enclosure, with its open flue above; once used for turning iron bars red-hot or melting dipperfuls of lead. And again, as in the long ago, the subject lay senseless atop the thick, curved-top block, somewhat similar to a butcher’s chopping block. A subject, this time, in a twentieth-century beaded evening gown, or the tatters that were left of it. Legs dangling down over the end of it, one silver slipper fallen off and lying on the floor. Her head fell back the other way, neck arched, hair streaming free and seeming to move in the moving firelight.

Between her and it was poised a grotesque silhouette. Something that belonged on a feudal coat of arms. An upright animal. The lion, or leopard, rampant. The outline of the cat head could be seen, two small triangular ears thrusting up.

The two feline claws were poised over her in striking position, about to descend, to stroke, softly, gently at first, just tearing the remnants of clothing, just scratching the smooth white skin below. Then faster, faster, deeper, deeper, as the frenzy mounted—and the life-tide welled forth.

Manning could feel his senses trying to darken out, in some form of vertigo or dizziness, because this thing wasn’t there, wasn’t real; so that when his faculties cleared again it would be gone. Just the empty unlit chamber would be there, the way it probably was. He also wanted to get sick for a minute, because animals don’t stand upright, and men—who do—don’t have short pointed ears and spade-shaped feline heads, as this apparition did.

A voice screamed something unintelligible, but not from over there, from somewhere close beside him. A revolver shot cracked, and he thought it was the cleanest, loveliest sound he’d ever heard. The
thing
, whatever it was, reared up even higher than before, claws threshing the air, then started to go over backwards.

The revolver exploded a second time. The thing in the background went down faster, rolled over with an air of finality, lay there inert; jaguar, or man, or jaguar-man.

Manning could feel himself stumbling forward; he lurched to his knees beside the trestle, picked her limp form up in his arms, held her protectively clasped to him, but more in a state of bewilderment than active helpfulness. Presently he became aware of a heart beating somewhere close to his own, and he knew she wasn’t dead.

The revolver kept crashing out, meanwhile, and a sort of chant of vengeance accompanied it. “That’s for Conchita.”
Bam
. “And that’s for Conchita.”
Bam
. “And that’s for all the others.”
Bam
. “But this, this one is for Conchita all over again!”

Brief flashes kept flickering over Belmonte’s face, lighting it momentarily from below each time.

“Belmonte, quit,” Manning remonstrated at last. “Pull yourself together. The thing’s dead ten times over.”

But the revolver kept on clicking emptily, over and over again.

After a while, he took the empty gun away from Belmonte, and said, “Take care of the girl.” Belmonte took the girl from him and carried her out of the place. Manning went over closer to the huddled form lying on the ground, and stood looking down at it. It had fallen face downward. He turned it over with his foot. He bent down for a moment, just once, then straightened up again.

When Belmonte came back presently, Manning was standing beside the kiln, thrusting a small deep-curved shovel down into it. Before Belmonte knew what he was about, he had tipped it up again, overturned it. A freshet of live coals spilled down over the exposed face on the floor, forming a glowing puddle, blanketing it. They only darkened momentarily, then almost immediately they had brightened again as fiercely as ever. Dank steam struggled up between the livid nuggets, like thin snakes.

Manning threw down the shovel and they both came away fast.

They sat sipping small stinging brandies in the morning sunlight, at a little café on the Alameda. A shoeshine boy was crouched at Belmonte’s feet. All around them life was going on as usual. It was hard to believe that just a few hours ago, not a stone’s throw from here—

“If you hadn’t lost your head the way you did—” Manning began.

Belmonte tossed the bootblack a coin to get rid of him. “I lost my head?” he smiled. “On the contrary, I kept my head very well. There is no capital punishment down here. The most they could have given him, by statute, is twenty years to life.” He shrugged. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I see what you mean,” Manning assented.

“One thing I don’t understand,” Belmonte mused. “How did it get into the chapel in the first place? The entrance was locked tight; the police had to take crowbars to it themselves when they were looking for it that first night, you remember?”

“The chapel is roofless, just four walls and open sky. My conjecture is it ran into the doorway of the house immediately adjoining, came out on the roof, or some projecting ledge, of that, and seeing its escape cut off, jumped from there down into the opening offered by the ruined chapel, unseen by anyone against the surrounding blackness. A leap from such a height wouldn’t be prohibitive for an animal of its type, particularly spurred on by fear.

“He got hold of it in some way, anyway, we know that much. Your revolver, last night, deprived us of ever finding out the exact details. Probably stunned it with a big rock and dragged it back through that tunnel, that he’d already been using for some time past.”