It would not do to have this lying here, unsprung. I found a thicker branch and, after taking a moment to brace my feet, drove its end into the paddle.
The trap jumped off the ground, scattering leaves and dirt in all directions, and the jaws slammed shut, snapping my branch in two. I was quite startled, and may have cried out. I stood there for a few long seconds, gazing at this inert pile of metal, its lethality spent, and imagining what I might have done had it broken my leg as it had the branch. Nothing, I suppose. I might have been able to pull the stake from the ground and drag myself back to the road, where I supposed I would have waited for a passing vehicle. But by then, the trapper would likely have emerged from hiding to get a look at his quarry.
Of course this gave me an idea. I stepped back into the darkness of the trees, about twenty feet from the track, and about twenty feet east of where the trap had been set. I found a spot at the base of a tree, where a very narrow sight line allowed me to peer between two other tree trunks. It was through this gap that I could watch for the trapper.
I waited. I am experienced in remaining perfectly still for long periods of time, so this was not a problem. After half an hour, though, I decided that no one would come after all, and I stood up in order to continue on my way.
It was then that I saw him.
He did not, as I had hoped, expose himself on the overgrown track. Instead, he appeared to have been doing exactly what I had been doing — sitting twenty feet back from the other side, and waiting. I could see little of him through the trees, and what I could make out seemed little more than a pale blur against the forest gloom, a suggestion of movement, a specter. I believed I could make out a narrow frame, and long arms, as he moved out of the shadows. But then he entered a shaft of sun that had wandered down through the canopy, and in an instant he was gone, subsumed by the light.
I blinked, but my eyes had not deceived me. He was there, and now he had disappeared.
My disappointment at the failure of my ruse was now compounded by profound unease. If this was Doctor Stiles, his expertise with these woods was even more advanced than I had imagined, and his powers in them almost supernatural. Furthermore, I had revealed myself before I even reached the castle, and thus any advantage I might have enjoyed was now lost. He would be expecting me now, and would be prepared. And what of the bear trap? There could be more — or another pit, or some other danger beyond imagining. I would have to move more carefully now, calculating the likely safety of any possible route. In addition, I had to outwit and outmaneuver a once-celebrated psychologist, beating the old man at his own game.
Well, I did have the advantage of relative youth, and while I possessed no advanced degrees, I was nevertheless adept at second-guessing an enemy. It was likely that the Doctor had not anticipated this particular series of events — my almost, but not quite, falling into his trap, then springing it intentionally and spying on him — and so had planned according to other possibilities. Most likely, he would have planted his traps along the easiest route, assuming that I would fall prey to them if I missed the first. If so, he didn’t know me as well as he liked to think. My own experience with stealth, and evasive maneuvering, was considerable.
I decided to proceed as I had been about to when I found the trap. Carefully, I continued southwest for some fifty yards, poking the ground in front of me with a branch and examining the forest floor for signs of recent activity. Several times I stopped and cleared a patch of ground, convinced I had come upon another trap or pit. But each time I was mistaken. It was better, I told myself, to be safe than sorry.
Eventually I arrived at the southeast corner of the rock — the “toe” that had given me access to the summit, some days before. I peered at it from the cover of the woods, waiting to see if the Doctor, or anyone else, would pass by. Ten minutes later, no one had. The sunshine was bright and warm — I could feel the warm air rolling off the rock and into the trees — but I resisted its call. Instead, I continued to skirt the edge of the rock from deep within the forest, never letting it entirely out of my sight, but never revealing myself to whomever might be waiting in the clearing that surrounded it. It took me a good half hour to make my way clockwise to the northeast corner, and in that time I found no traps, and saw no sign of the Doctor.
I was facing, from my vantage point just behind the treeline, the back of the rock’s “ankle.” Just to the east stood the castle’s northwest tower — one of the two lowest, and the most damaged by time and weather. The north curtain wall led farther off to the east, while the western wall hugged the nearly vertical cliff of the “ankle.”
I say “hugged,” but in fact there was a narrow gap between the rock and the wall, owing to the natural unevenness of the cliff. This gap was approximately fifteen feet away from where I now stood. It was midafternoon, however, and the sun had sunk low enough so that the shadows of the trees covered the clearing. If I were to make for that gap, I would be exposed for the two seconds it would take me to cross the ten feet between the trees and the wall. But owing to the shadows, and my camouflage clothing, I believed I could make it without being detected. And since the figure I’d spied fleeing the scene of the foiled trap had been moving in a direction that would have taken him to this very spot, it was the last place from which he might be anticipating my approach. I decided to take the risk. Slowly, quietly, I moved close to the edge of the clearing; from behind a tall pine I surveyed the tower, the high cliff edge, the curtain wall. And then I ran.
Nothing happened. I reached the gap and wedged myself into it, the quiver containing my bow and arrows chafing against my back. The gap was even wider than I had assumed it to be, and, after moving several feet into the darkness, I rested comfortably there for a moment, catching my breath.
It was cold in the gap, with a strong smell of fungus and dead leaves. The ground beneath my feet was spongy, and the rock face felt massive and comforting behind me. I looked up at the strip of sky overhead. A hawk crossed it, circling. The only sound was that of my own breaths.
My original plan had been to wait here for my quarry to reveal himself. But some impulse, fueled by instinct or memory, caused me to move further into the gap. The cliffside was as irregular as it had appeared from the clearing, but it was obvious now that a man could move all the way to the southwest tower from here without much difficulty. And now, as my eyes adjusted to the dim, I realized that, in fact, a man had, and did. The spongy ground was quite clean and even, covered by a bed of pine needles; a faint depression ran down the center of it, as though it was frequently tamped down by human feet. The castle wall was impressively straight, and tilted slightly inward; I assumed it must be thicker at the base than at the top, assuring that it could not be breached from the ground. I entertained, briefly, the notion that I might be able to scale the wall by pressing my back against the rock and “walking” up, but I could see this was impossible: the gap at the top might have been as wide as five feet.
I pressed on, toward the center of the wall. A cloudbank had rolled in, and was now covering up the gap with a uniform gray; the light dimmed. It was then that I made an interesting discovery.
I had just inched around a bulge in the rock face, and found that the gap just beyond it widened considerably, for a length of perhaps six feet. The ground here was well worn, particularly right at the foot of the wall.
The key detail, however, was the wall itself. Its impenetrable mortared stone face was interrupted, at knee height, by what appeared to be a block of wood, snugly inserted in place of a single stone. It was approximately eighteen inches high by two feet wide, was depressed about two inches into the rock face, and bore a large iron handle, right in the center, fastened to its surface by large bolts.