"Are you, my good fellow, still seeking entrance to the abbey?" he asked.
I bowed. That the gesture had in it more of mockery than of humility seemed only in character, no doubt.
"It is our profoundest wish, sir," I replied.
"Then let me show you. There is indeed a tunnel," he said. "It is sealed at the abbey end, walled up there in my father's time, or perhaps my grandfather's. The current prince himself does not know of this passage."
"Sealed!" I said. "Then how are we to get through?"
"It is simple enough," he explained. "I will give you tools—hammers, a prying bar. Stout fellows such as yourselves will have no difficulty getting through that thin wall at the far end of the passage. You will then find yourselves in the remotest corner of one of the abbey's storerooms. But—and this is important—you will seal up that wall again, as soon as you have broken out. And then you must hide your tools, put them down one of the many wells within the abbey's cellars. Otherwise the prince may discover the tunnel—know that someone has just come in, bringing possible contagion—and hunt you down, and—"
Montresor broke off here, and with a swift movement of his foot flattened and smeared a scurrying beetle on the stone floor. For a moment, we considered the result in thoughtful silence.
"The prince," he concluded, "fears one thing only. And that is the Red Death."
And so we agreed to Montresor's plan. The only problem was Valdemar. He would have to be left behind. I could hardly speak openly of this difficulty with my companions while Montresor was within earshot. But Ligeia perceived the difficulty at once. With a dramatic flourish of her cloak she turned to me suddenly.
"Edgar, I have given this more thought," she announced, a quaver to her words, a quiver to her lip. "I cannot accompany you. I fear to enter the stronghold of a prince whose cruelty is legendary. You must go on without me."
Was there once, or was there still, I suddenly wondered, some special tie between these two—Ligeia and Valdemar—which did not depend upon mesmerism? Odd thought. I was uncertain where it had come from or why it seemed possibly appropriate.
Montresor stared at her as if he were about to argue. But we were a formidable group, obviously strong and somewhat reckless. He elected to remain silent.
A snore reached us from Fortunato's direction. He had passed out, slumped on his stone ledge.
Peters eyed him, then advanced and took his cap and bells and tried them on. The sleeper stirred but did not wake as Peters stripped him of his motley jacket, too. Montresor watched but said nothing.
Peters and I took up the torch and tools. Then—Emerson following—we entered the dark tunnel. I had been surprised, in the alcove where we had obtained the tools, to catch a glimpse of a tub holding a quantity of freshly mixed mortar.
The passage was low, crooked, overgrown with spiderwebs. Plainly, it had not been used in many years.
We had not gone far before a bend in the passage took us out of sight of the two watching figures, Ligeia and Montresor, and the slumped form of Fortunato in his white linen. A hundred paces and I knew Ligeia was on the stair, Grip upon her shoulder, on her way to a distant bedroom, leaving the others to their own devices. I could almost hear Grip repeating his wine-drinkers' joke.
He paced the decks of an ancient vessel, knees shaky, joints aching. Occasionally, he groped among his navigational instruments of tarnished brass and greening bronze. Mumbling to himself, he would go topside to take readings, polar mists drifting above the waters, ice floes sliding by. His ancient crew lurched about him and strange birds called from overhead. At times it seemed that someone attempted to address him in words mumbled and low, catching at his sleeve, pursuing him on his rounds. But always, when he turned, the figure would flit away, fade. The words never came quite clear. He would return to his cabin then, to rummage and reflect... .
Poe awoke in a cold sweat, hands trembling. There had been so many dreams, some of them utterly terrible—such as that of the pit and the pendulum—and while this lacked the horror of that one or the grotesqueries of the encounter with King Pest and his court, it bore an intolerable element of loss and abandonment. He massaged his damp temples.
... As if he had sailed beyond human ken, he reflected, past all normal commerce of thought and feeling. And yet must he go on, against the winds and the tides of change and becoming. Lost, lost.
VIII
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy.
Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror.
It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it.
The Imp of the Perverse, Edgar Allan Poe
And so we followed the long, secret tunnel through the catacombs, to its end against a blank stone wall.
We listened carefully, we listened long at this place, but we could hear nothing. We looked for light at the interstices between stones where the mortar had crumbled away, but we could see none.
So we attacked the wall with hammers and bar. The antique dust powdered our clothes, skin, and hair, got in our eyes and mouths; but soon we had made an opening large enough to admit a person into the lowest level of Prospero's stronghold.
On the other side, Peters, Emerson, and I emerged into a storeroom crowded with huge crates and bales whose contents we wasted no time trying to guess. Quickly, by the flickering torchlight, we piled back stones we had removed, closing the wall at our point of entry, leaving the tools just outside in the tunnel.
Of course we had no mortar, but in this dim corner the chance of any inspection seemed remote. To make that chance still smaller we managed to shift a large crate to a place where it shadowed any sign of our labors.
"What now, Eddie?" Peters asked.
"I say we go topside and try to blend in." I considered his borrowed motley. "We're entertainers. You're dressed for the part. I'm not."
"You juggle? Know any acrobat tricks?"
I shook my head.
"Afraid not."
"Then I guess you're an animal trainer. Emerson, c'mere." The ape leapt down from a crate and came to him. "You be takin' yer orders from Eddie, we go upstairs. Unnerstan'?"
Emerson shambled over and stared at me. I extended my right hand.
"Shake," I said.
The simian reached forward, seized my hand and pumped it.
"I'd guess," I said, "there'll be a pretty big crowd to run things—servants, cooks, whores, soldiers, entertainers. If they've only been in here a few days they can't all know each other yet. A couple of new faces among the entertainers shouldn't be likely to startle anyone. I'll take Emerson up and see how we blend. Why don't you wait an hour or so, then come up and try the same thing."