The Secret House

Poltavo was offering in his eager way to betray the men who sat in the darkness listening to his treachery. They heard the motor-car's arrival outside, and presently T. B.'s voice announcing his temporary retirement. They heard the slam of the door, and the key click in the lock, and then Dr. Fall stepped forward, pressed a spring in the rough woodwork in front of him and one of the panels of the room slid silently back.

Poltavo did not see his visitors until they stood over him, then he read in those hateful faces which were turned toward him an unmistakable forecast of his doom.

"What do you want?" he almost whispered.

"Do not raise your voice," said Farrington in the same tone, "or you are a dead man." He held the point of a knife at the other's throat.

"To where are you taking me?" asked Poltavo, ghastly white of face and shaking from head to foot.

"We are taking you to a place where your opportunity for betraying us will be a mighty small one," said Fall.

There was a horrible smile on his thin lips, and Poltavo, with a premonition of what awaited him beyond the tunnel, forgot the menacing knife at his throat and screamed.

Hands gripped him and strangled the cry as it escaped him. Something heavy struck him behind the ear and he lost consciousness. He awoke to find himself travelling smoothly along the rock gallery. He was half lying, half reclining on Fall's knees. He did not attempt to move; he knew now that he was in mortal peril of his life. No word was spoken when he was dragged roughly from the car, placed in another elevator and whirled upwards, emerging into a little chamber at the end of the underground corridor which ran beneath the Secret House.

A door was opened and he was thrust in without a word. He heard the clang of the steel door behind him, and the lights came on to show him that once again he was in the underground room where he had been confined before.

There was the table, there was the heavy chair, there in the far corner of the room was the barred entrance to the other elevator. Anyway he was free from the police; that was something. He was safe just so long as it suited the book of Farrington and his friend to keep him safe. What would they do? What excuse could he offer? They had overheard the conversation between himself and T. B., he knew that, and cursed his folly. He ought to have kept away from Moor Cottage. He knew there was something sinister about the place, but T. B. should have known that even better than he. Why had T. B. left him?

These and a thousand other thoughts shot through his mind as he paced the vaulted apartment. They were in no hurry to feed him. He had almost forgotten what time it was; whether it was day or night in that underground vault into which no ray of sunlight ever penetrated. They had left him with the handcuffs on his wrists; they would come and relieve him of these encumbrances. What were their plans with him? He felt his pockets carefully. T. B. had taken away the only weapon he had had, and for the first time for many years Count Poltavo was unarmed.

His heart was beating with painful rapidity and his breath came laboriously. He was terror-stricken. He turned to find the door through which he had come, and to his surprise he could not see it. So far as he could detect, the stone wall ran without a break from one end of the apartment to the other. Escape could not lie that way; of that he was satisfied. There was nothing to do but to wait, with whatever patience he could summon, to discover their plans. He did not doubt that he was to suffer. He had forfeited all right to their confidence, but if this was to be the only consequence of his ill-doing he was not greatly worried. Count Poltavo, as he had boasted before in this identical room, had been in some tight corners and had faced death in many strange and terrible guises, but the inevitability of doom was never so impressed upon his mind as it was at this moment when he lay guarded by a hundred secret forces in the tomb of the Secret House.

He had one hope, a faint one, that T. B. would discover the method of his exit from the room in Moor Cottage and would track him here.

Evidently the occupants of the Secret House had the same fear, for even here, in the quietness of his underground prison, Poltavo could hear strange whining noises, rumbling, and groaning and grinding, as though the whole of the house were changing its construction.

He had not long to wait for news. A corner lift came swiftly down and Fall stepped briskly towards his prisoner.

"T. B. Smith is in the house," he said, "and is making an inspection; he will be down here in a moment. In these circumstances I shall have to betray one of the secrets of this house." He caught the other roughly by the arm and half led, half dragged, him to a corner of the room. Handcuffed as he was, Poltavo could offer no resistance. Dr. Fall apparently only touched one portion of the wall, but he must have moved, either with his foot or with his hand, some particularly powerful spring, for a section of the stone wall swung backwards revealing a black gap.

"Get in there," said Fall, and pushed him into the darkness.

A few moments later T. B. Smith, accompanied by three detectives, inspected the room which Poltavo had left. There was no sign of the man, no evidence of his having so recently been an occupant of his prison house. For an interminable time Poltavo stood in the darkness. He found he was in a small cell-like apartment with apparently no outlet save that through which he had come.

He was able to breathe without difficulty, for the perfect system of ventilation throughout the dungeons of the Secret House had been its architect's greatest triumph.

It seemed hours that he waited there, though in reality it was less than twenty minutes after his entrance that the door swung open again and he was called out.

Farrington was in the room now, Farrington with his trusty lieutenant, and behind them the one-eyed Italian desperado whom Poltavo remembered seeing in the power house one day, when he had been allowed the privilege of inspection.

Some slight change had been made in the room since he was there last. Poltavo's nerves were in such a condition that he was sensitive to this variation. He saw now what the change was. The table had been drawn back leaving the chair where it was fixed.

Yes, it was a fixed chair, he remembered that and wondered why it had been screwed to the wood block floor. Dr. Fall and the engineer grasped him roughly and hurried him across the room, thrusting him into the chair.

"What are you going to do?" asked Poltavo, white as death.

"That you shall see."

Deftly they strapped him to the chair; his wrists and elbows were securely fastened to the arms, and his ankles to the legs of the massive piece of furniture.

From where he sat Poltavo confronted Farrington, but the big man's mask-like face did not move, nor his eyes waver as he surveyed his treacherous prisoner. Then Fall knelt down and did something, and Poltavo heard the ripping and tearing of cloth.

They were slitting up each trouser leg, and he could not understand why.

"Is this a joke?" he asked with a desperate attempt at airiness.

No reply was made. Poltavo watched his captors curiously. What was the object of it all? The two men busy at the chair lifted a number of curious-looking objects from the floor; they clamped one on each wrist, and he felt the cold surface of some instrument pressing against each calf. Still he did not realize the danger, or the grim determination of these men whose secret he would have betrayed.

"Mr. Farrington," he appealed to the big man, "let us have an understanding. I have played my game and lost."

"You have indeed," said Farrington.

They were the first words he had spoken.

"Give me enough to get out of the country," Poltavo appealed, "just the money that I have in my pocket, and I promise you that I will never trouble you again."

"My friend," said Farrington, "I have trusted you too long. You forced yourself upon me when I did not desire you, you thwarted me at every turn, you betrayed me whenever it was possible to betray me, or whenever it was to your advantage to do so, and I am determined that you shall have no other chance of doing me an injury."

"What is this foolery?" asked Poltavo, in a mixture of blind fear and rage. They had unlocked the handcuffs and taken them off him, and now for the first time Poltavo noticed that the curious bronze clamps on his wrists were attached by thick green cords to a plug in the wall.

He shrieked aloud as he saw this, and the full horror of the situation flashed upon him.

"My God," he screamed, "you are not going to kill me?"

Farrington nodded slowly.

"We are going to kill you painlessly, Poltavo," he said. "It was your life or ours. We do not desire to cause you unnecessary suffering, but here is the end of the adventure for you, my friend."

"You are not going to electrocute me?" croaked the man in the chair, in a hoarse cracked voice. "Don't say that you are going to electrocute me, Farrington! It is diabolical, it is terrible. Give me a chance of life! Give me a pistol, give me a knife, but fight me fair. Treat me as you will; hand me to the police, anything but this; for God's sake, Farrington, don't do this!"

The doctor reached down and lifted a leather helmet from the floor and placed it gently over the doomed man's head.

"Don't do it, Farrington." Poltavo's muffled voice came painfully from behind the leather screen. "Don't! I swear I will not betray you."

Farrington made a little signal and the doctor walked to the wall and placed his hand upon a black switch.

"I will not betray you," said the man in the chair in hollow tones. "Give me a chance. I will not tell them anything that you – "

He did not speak again, for the black switch had been pressed down and death came with merciful swiftness.

They stood watching the figure. A slight quivering of the hands and then Farrington nodded and the doctor turned the switch over again.

Rapidly they unfastened the straps, and the limp thing which was once human, with a brain to think and a capacity for life and love, slipped out of the chair in an inanimate heap upon the ground.

So passed Ernesto Poltavo, an adventurer and a villain, in the prime of his life.

Farrington looked down upon the body with sombre eyes and shrugged his shoulders.

He had opened his mouth to speak and Fall had walked to the switchboard and was about to put the deadly apparatus out of gear, when a sharp voice made them both turn.

"Hands up!" it said.

The stone door, through which Poltavo had passed to his doom from the corridor without, was wide open, and in the doorway stood T. B. and a little behind him Ela, and in T. B.'s hand was a pistol.

CHAPTER XX

T. B. Smith's inspection of the Secret House had yielded nothing satisfactory; he had not expected that it would; he was perfectly satisfied that the keen, shrewd brains which dominated the menage would remove any trace there was of foul play.

"Where now?" asked Ela, as they turned out of the house.

"Back to Moor Cottage," said T. B., climbing into the car. "I am certain that we are on the verge of our big discovery. There is a way out of the cottage by some underground chamber, a way by which first Lady Constance and then Poltavo were smuggled, and if it is necessary I am going to smash every panel in those two ground floor rooms, but I will find the way in to Mr. Farrington's mystery house."

For half an hour the two men were engaged in the room from which Poltavo had been taken. They probed with centre bits and gimlets into every portion of the room.

The first discovery that they made was that the oaken panels of the chamber were backed with sheet iron or steel.

"It is a hopeless job; we shall have to get another kind of smith here to tear down all the panellings," said T. B., lighting the gloom of his despair with a little flash of humour.

He fingered the tiny locket absently and opened it again.

"It is absurd," he laughed helplessly. "Here is the solution in these simple words, and yet we brainy folk from the Yard cannot understand them!"

"God sav the Keng!" said Ela ruefully. "I wonder how on earth that is going to help us."

A gasp from T. B. made him turn his face to his chief.

T. B. Smith was pointing at the piano. In two strides he was across the room, and sitting on the stool he lifted the cover and struck a chord. The instrument sounded a little flat and apparently had not received the attention of a tuner for some time.

"I am going to play 'God save the King,'" said T. B. with a light in his eyes, "and I think something is going to happen."

Slowly he pounded forth the familiar tune; from beginning to end he played it, and when he had finished he looked at Ela.

"Try it in another key," suggested Ela, and again T. B. played the anthem. He was nearing the last few bars when there was a click and he leapt up. One long panel had disappeared from the side of the wall. For a moment the two men looked at one another. They were alone in the house, although a policeman was within call. The main force was gathered in the vicinity of the Secret House.

T. B. flashed the light of his indispensable and inseparable little electric lamp into the dark interior.

"I will go in first and see what happens," he said.

"I think we will both go together," said Ela grimly.

"There is a switch here," said T. B.

He pulled it down and a small lamp glowed, illuminating a tiny lift cage.

"And here I presume are the necessary controlling buttons," said T. B., pointing to a number of white discs; "we will try this one."

He pressed the button and instantly the cage began to fall. It came to a standstill after a while and the men stepped out.

"Part of the old working," said T. B.; "a very ingenious idea."

He flashed his lamp over the walls to find the electrical connection. They were here, as they were at the other end, perfectly accessible. An instant later the long corridor was lighted up.

"By heavens," said T. B. admiringly, "they have even got an underground tramway; look here!"

At this tiny terminus there were two branches of rails and a car was in waiting. A few minutes later T. B. Smith had reached the other end of the mine gallery and was seeking the second elevator.

"Here we are," he said – "everything run by electricity. I thought that power house of Farrington's had a pretty stiff job, and now I see how heavy is the load which it has to carry. Step carefully into this," he continued, "and make a careful note of the way we are going. I think we must be about a hundred feet below the level of the earth; just gauge it roughly as we go up. Here we go."

He pressed a button and up went the lift. They passed out of the little mine chamber, carefully propping back the swing door, and made their way along the corridor.

"This looks like an apartment," said T. B., as he stopped before a red-painted steel door in one of the walls. He pressed it gently, but it did not yield. He made a further examination, but there was no keyhole visible.

"This is either worked by a hidden spring or it does not work at all," he said in a low voice.

"If it is a spring," said Ela, "I will find it."

His sensitive hands went up and down the surface of the door and presently they stopped.

"There is something which is little larger than a pin hole," he said. He took from his pocket a general utility knife and slipped out a thin steel needle. "Pipe cleaners may be very useful," he said, and pressed the long slender bodkin into the aperture. Instantly, and without sound, the door opened.

T. B. was the first to go in, revolver in hand. He found himself in a room which, even if it were a prison, was a well-disguised prison. The walls were hung with costly tapestry, the carpet under foot was thick and velvety and the furniture which garnished the room was of a most costly and luxurious description.

"Lady Constance!" gasped T. B. in surprise.

A woman who was sitting in a chair near the reading lamp rose quickly and turned her startled gaze to the detective.

"Mr. Smith," she said, and ran towards him. "Oh, thank God you have come!"

She grasped him by his two arms; she was half hysterical in that moment of her release, and was babbling an incoherent string of words; a description of her capture – her fear – her gratitude – all in an inextricably confused rush of half completed phrases.

"Sit down, Lady Constance," said T. B. gently; "collect yourself and try to remember – have you seen Poltavo?"

"Poltavo?" she said, startled into coherence. "No, is he here?"

"He is somewhere here," said T. B. "I am seeking for him now. Will you stay here or will you come with us?"

"I would rather come with you," she said with a shiver.

They passed through the door together.

"Do all these doors open upon rooms similar to this?" asked T. B.

"I believe there are a number of underground cells," she answered in a whisper, "but the principal one is that which is near." She pointed to a red-painted door some twenty paces away from the one from which they were emerging. There was another pause whilst Ela repeated his examination of the door.

Apparently they all worked on the pick system, a method which medieval conspirators favoured, and which the Italian workmen probably imported from the land of their birth; a land which has given the world the Borgias and the Medicis and the Visconti.

"Stay here," said T. B. in a low voice, and Lady Constance shrank back against the wall.

Ela pressed in his little needle and again the result was satisfactory. The door opened slowly and T. B. stepped in.

He stood for a moment trying to understand all that the terrible scene signified. The limp body on the floor; the two remorseless men standing close by; Farrington with folded arms and his eye glowering down upon the dead man at his feet. Fall at the switchboard.

Then T. B.'s revolver rose swiftly.

"Hands up!" he said.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when the room was plunged in darkness, his companion was flung violently backward as the electrical control came into operation and the door slammed in Ela's face. He pressed it without avail. He brought to his aid the little needle, but this time the lock would not move.

Ela's face went chalk white.

"My God!" he gasped, "they've got T. B.!"

He stood for a moment in indecision. He had visualized the scene and knew what fate would befall his chief.

"Back to the gallery," he said harshly, and led the way, holding the woman's arm in support. He found his way without difficulty to the lift, sprang into it, after Lady Constance, and pressed the button… Now they were speeding along the sparking rail … now they were in the lift rising swiftly to the room in Moor Cottage. T. B.'s car was outside.

"You had better come with me," said Ela quickly.

Lady Constance jumped into the car after him.

"To the Secret House," said Ela to the chauffeur, and as the car drove forward he turned to the woman at his side.

"I will put you amongst your friends in a few moments," he said; "at present I dare not risk the loss of a second."

"But what will they do?"

"I pretty well know what they will do," said Ela grimly. "Farrington is playing his last hand, and T. B. Smith is to be his last victim."

In the darkness of the underground chamber T. B. faced his enemies, striving to pierce the gloom, his finger in position upon the delicate trigger of his automatic pistol.

"Do not move," he said softly; "I will shoot without any hesitation."

"There is no need to shoot," said the suave voice of the doctor; "the lights went out, quite by accident, I assure you, and you and your friends have no need to fear."

T. B. groped his way along the wall, his revolver extended. In the gloom he felt rather than saw the bulky figure of the doctor and reached out his hand gingerly.

Then something touched the outstretched palm, something that in ordinary circumstances might have felt like the rough points of a bass broom. T. B. was flung violently backwards and fell heavily to the ground.

"Get him into the chair quick," he heard Farrington's voice say. "That was a good idea of yours, doctor."

"Just a sprayed wire," said Dr. Fall complacently; "it is a pretty useful check upon a man. You took a wonderful assistant when you pressed electricity to your aid, Farrington."

The lights were all on now, and T. B. was being strapped to the chair. He had recovered from the shock, but he had recovered too late. In the interval of his unconsciousness the body of Poltavo had been removed out of his sight. They were doing to him all that they had done to Poltavo. He felt the electrodes at his calf and on his wrists and clenched his teeth, for he knew in what desperate strait he was.

"Well, Mr. Smith," said Farrington pleasantly, "I am afraid you have got yourself into rather a mess. Where is the other man?" he asked quickly. He looked at Fall, and the doctor returned his gaze.

"I forgot the other man," said Fall slowly; "in the corridor outside." He went to the invisible door and it opened at his touch. He was out of the room a few minutes, and returned looking old and drawn.

"He has got away," he said; "the woman has gone too."

Farrington nodded.

"What does he matter?" he asked roughly; "they know as much as they are likely to know. Put the control on the door."

Fall turned over a switch and the other renewed his attention to T. B.

"You know exactly how you are situated, Mr. Smith," said Farrington, "and now I am going to tell you exactly how you may escape from your position."

"I shall be interested to learn," said T. B. coolly, "but I warn you before you tell me that if my escape is contingent upon your own, then I am afraid I am doomed to dissolution."

The other nodded.

"As you surmise," he said, "your escape is indeed contingent upon mine and that of my friends. My terms to you are that you shall pass me out of England. I know you are going to tell me that you have not the power, but I am as well acquainted with the extraordinary privileges of your department as you are. I know that you can take me out of the Secret House and land me in Calais to-morrow morning, and there is not one man throughout the length and breadth of England who will say you nay. I offer you your life on condition that you do this, otherwise – "

"Otherwise?" asked T. B.

"Otherwise I shall kill you," said Farrington briefly, "just as I killed Poltavo. You are the worst enemy I have and the most dangerous. I have always marked you down as one whose attention was to be avoided, and I shall probably kill you with less compunction because I know that but for you I should not have been forced to live this mad dog's life that has been mine for the past few months. You will be interested, Mr. Smith, to learn that you nearly had me once. You see the whole wing of the house in which Mr. Moole lies," he smiled, "works on the principle of a huge elevator. The secret of the Secret House is really the secret of perfectly arranged lifts; that is to say," he went on, "I can take my room to the first floor and I can transport it to the fourth floor with greater ease than you can carry a chair from a basement to an attic."

"I guessed that much," said T. B. "Do you realize that you might have made a fortune as a practical electrician?"

Farrington smiled.

"I very much doubt it," he said coolly; "but my career and my wasted opportunities are of less interest to me at the moment than my future and yours. What are you going to do?"

T. B. smiled.

"I am going to do nothing," he said cheerfully, "unless it be that I am going to die, for I can imagine no circumstance or danger that threatens me or those I love best which would induce me to loose upon the world such dangerous criminals as yourself and your fellow-murderers. Your time has come, Farrington. Whether my time comes a little sooner or later does not alter the fact that you are within a month of your own death, whether you kill me or whether you let me go."

"You are a bold man to tell me that," said Farrington between his teeth.

T. B. saw from a glance at the blanched faces of the men that his words had struck home.