His torso was dull red with the heat and his face was black. “Food,” he panted. “Mustn’t forget the sack of food.” His eyes blazed. “Well, what are you idiots waiting for? The trench is a fizzle! And that damned wind—”
They crouched before the wind, moaning with it.
“No time for anything but to get under cover,” croaked Ellery. “The house is burning in a hundred places already and we couldn’t stop it now with a brigade. A few pails of water over the gables...” He laughed himself, a demon dancing against a backdrop of fire. “The cellar — where’s the cellar, for God’s sake? Doesn’t anyone know where the cellar is? Lord, what unmitigated idiots! Talk, will you, somebody?”
“The cellar,” they chanted obediently, fixing glassy eyes on his face. They were a company of half-naked dead, dirty white Zombies in a purgatory of their own. “The cellar.”
“Behind the stairs,” gurgled Mrs. Xavier; her gown was torn away from one shoulder and her hands were bruised and blackened. “Oh, hurry, hurry.”
And then they were tumbling down the hall. Mrs. Xavier made for a thick solid door set beneath the rising stairs which led to the upper floors. They jostled one another in their frantic efforts to get through the doorway.
“Dad,” said Ellery quietly. “Come on.”
The Inspector started, wiped his white lips with a shaking hand, and followed. Ellery stumbled to the kitchen through a hall cloudy with bitter smoke; he dug madly in the closets, tossing things about. He found pans, pots, kettles. “Fill ’em up from the tap,” he directed, between hacking coughs. “Hurry. We’ll need water. Lots of it. No telling how long we’ll be...”
They struggled down the hall with their slopping burdens. At the cellar door Ellery shouted: “Holmes! Smith! Get this water down!” and without waiting they staggered back to the kitchen for more.
They made six trips, filling all the large containers they could find — tin buckets, an empty butter tub, wash basins, an old boiler and other objects as variegated and nondescript. And then, at last, Ellery stood at the top of the stairs as the Inspector tottered down into the cool cement chamber, as gloomy and dark and vast as a mountain cavern.
“Is the bag of food down there, somebody?” he croaked before he closed the thick door.
“I’ve got it, Queen,” called up Dr. Holmes.
Ellery slammed the door shut. “One of you women give me some cloth — anything.”
Ann Forrest struggled to her feet. Beside Ellery in the darkness she ripped off her dress.
“I don’t suppose I’ll — need it much longer, Mr. Queen,” she said, and her voice trembled even as she laughed.
“Ann!” cried Dr. Holmes. “Don’t! There’s the material of the bag—”
“Too late,” she said, almost gaily; but her lips quivered. “Good girl,” muttered Ellery. He grabbed the dress and began to tear it into strips. The scraps he stuffed at the bottom of the door. When he rose, he put his arm about the girl’s white shoulders and together they descended to the cement floor below.
Dr. Holmes was waiting with a filthy old khaki coat which reeked of dampness. “Dug it up here. One of Bones’s winter coats,” he said hoarsely. “Ann — I’m sorry...”
The tall girl shivered and draped the coat about her shoulders.
Ellery and Dr. Holmes bent over the sack which had been dropped by the airman and ripped it open. Protected by thick padding were bundles of medicine bottles — antiseptics, quinine, aspirin, salves, morphine; and hypodermics, adhesive tape, absorbent cotton, bandage. There were other bundles, too — sandwiches, a whole ham, loaves of bread, jars of jam, bars of chocolate, thermos bottles of hot coffee...
The two men doled out the food and for some time there was no sound but that of champing jaws and long gulps. The thermos bottles passed around from hand to hand. They ate slowly, savoring each mouthful. In each mind was the same thought: that this might be their last earthly dinner... Finally they could eat no more, and Ellery gathered the remains of the meal carefully and stowed them in the sack again. Dr. Holmes, his naked torso criss-crossed by welts and scratches, went among them quietly with the antiseptics, cleaning their wounds, taping, bandaging...
Then there was no more to be done, and he sank upon an old egg crate and buried his face in his hands.
They sat about on old packing-cases, in the coal bin, on the stone floor. A single bulb shed weak yellow light above them. Faintly they could hear the dull roar of the fire outside. It seemed nearer, much nearer.
Once they were startled by a series of booming explosions.
“The gasoline in the garage,” muttered the Inspector. “There go the cars.”
No one replied.
And once Bones rose and disappeared in the darkness. When he returned he rasped: “Cellar windows. I’ve stuffed ’em full of old metal things and flat stones.”
No one replied.
And so they sat, drooping and hopeless, too exhausted to weep or sigh or stir, staring dully at the floor... waiting for the end.
Chapter XIX
The Queen’s Tale
Hours passed, how many they neither knew nor cared. In that vast dim cavern there was no night or day. The puny illumination of the feeble bulb was their sun and moon. They sat like stones and except for their uneven breathing they might have been already dead.
For Ellery it was a queer vertiginous experience. His thoughts veered from death to life, from barely glimpsed vistas of remembered fact to flitting phantoms of his aroused fancy. Pieces of the puzzle returned to annoy him. They persisted in invading his brain cells and storming his consciousness. At the same time he chuckled mirthlessly to himself at the instability and inconsistency of the human mind, which stubbornly wrestled with problems of comparative unimportance while the big things were ignored or at best evaded. What did one murderer more or less matter to a man facing his own extinction? It was illogical, infantile. He should be occupied with making his private peace with his private gods; instead he worried about trivialities.
Finally, too weak to resist, he sighed and gave himself over wholly to thoughts of the case. The others abut him receded; he closed his eyes and brooded with a weary return of his old concentrative energy.
When he opened them again after the passage of an eternity, nothing had changed. The twins still crouched at the feet of their mother. Mrs. Xavier still sat upright on a packing case, her head resting against the rough cement wall, eyes closed. Dr. Holmes and Miss Forrest still sat side by side, shoulder to shoulder, unmoving. Smith still squatted on an old box, head bowed and naked arms dangling between his Falstaffian thighs. Mrs. Wheary still lay in a heap on the coal pile, her arm flung over her eyes; and Bones still sat cross-legged beside her, as unblinking as a graven image.
Ellery shivered and stretched his arms. The Inspector, seated on a box beside him, stirred.
“Well?” mumbled the old man.
Ellery shook his head, struggled to his feet, and stumbled up the cellar stairs. They moved then and regarded him dully.
He sat down on the top step and pulled out a little of the stuffing in the crevice below the door. A puff of thick smoke made him blink and cough. He replaced the stuffing hastily and weaved his way downstairs again.
They were listening, listening to the hissing roar of the flames. It came from directly overhead now.
Mrs. Carreau was crying. The twins stirred uneasily and tightened their grip on her hands.
“Isn’t the air — getting worse?” asked Mrs. Xavier thickly.