He proceeded from the thoughts of her—to which he would later and frequently return—to more immediate realities. The odor of the darkened study was musty, heavy with the smell of leather and wood and the muslin coverings of the furniture in a room that apparently had not been aired all summer. (Inefficiency on the part of Geraldine, who should have seen to that.) The air was so unpleasant that a cigarette or a cigar would have made it worse. Then he had a happy inspiration: since he was dining at the Gibbsville Club, which had long since exhausted its supply of wine, he would treat himself to a bottle of champagne from his own cellar. He was not a connoisseur of champagnes, but almost any he owned would serve the purpose of getting rid of the mustiness of the study, which had lodged in his mouth and nostrils. He would take the bottle to the club with him and he might even share it with one of the dreary men who ate and slept there. If he drank half a bottle at dinner, he probably would sleep better on the train. He congratulated himself on his inspiration and reached out with a sure hand for the light switch. He pulled the chain switch on one lamp.
He got up and turned the gargoyle in the fireplace that opened the panel of the passageway. From force of habit he closed the panel behind him and was again in total darkness. Then something went wrong. Perhaps the transitions from darkness to light to darkness; perhaps the heavy sleep in the bad air; perhaps an incomplete recovery from the extreme provocation by Kitzmiller. Whatever the cause, he fell.
The stairway in the secret passageway wound around a central post and the steps were of uneven width, from zero to eight inches. He missed the first step completely, and he fell to the cellar, buffeted from side to side all the way down. Before even coming to a jolting stop on the cellar floor he knew that his leg was broken. The pain seemed to prolong the fall, and when at last it ended and he lay still, he wondered why he had not landed sooner. In the blackness he was wholly blind and strangely deaf until a silence entered his ears and he realized that he had created the silence by pausing in the midst of his screaming. The lower half of his left leg had twisted itself crazily and did not belong to the rest of him except as the source of his agony. He reached down, impelled by irresistible curiosity, and forced his fingers along his trouser-leg until he could touch the broken skin. Beyond that his fingers would not go, and for the first time he fainted. But consciousness returned immediately; the pain was too lively for quick relief, and he was trying to shout again. Now a previously unnoticed pain competed with the shrill agony of his leg. He put his fingers to the right side of his skull and touched a sticky substance that he knew was blood. The scalp was cut. The roaring sound he was hearing could have been his own voice in a cave, and this passageway was a sort of cave. In the blindness of the dark he could not tell whether he had actually lost his sight, a symptom he vaguely remembered as having to do with a skull fracture. He held up his left wrist; he could not see the dial of his watch. He was blind.
He did not need his sight to observe the next development. It came out of his nostrils without extra pain but with an urgency that was like a bursting dam. It cascaded over his mouth and sickened him, and now he knew that he was going to die. He lost consciousness once more and this time when he awoke he found that his body—not he—was fighting for breath. A compartment of his intellect contained the information that he could not last the night, and that it would be morning before anyone would help him. Who would miss him? He had made no engagement for dinner. A woman in New York (he could not think of her name) was expecting him to telephone her, tomorrow. The man whom he had last seen, Kitzmiller, would not be here tomorrow. And who knew of the existence of the secret passageway? One man, Hibbard, and no one else but the vanished craftsmen who had built it. And so this was the way it all ended, to die hoping to die because there was no hope of living. He screamed again, but the cry was muffled by the stuff that was strangling him. Then soon—always soon, no matter when—came the moment that no one has ever told anyone about. And no one will ever tell anyone about, because it is a secret that belongs to Them.
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