Part 30 (2/2)

”All these small lifts are not electrical, but are worked by hydraulic power, the station for which is in the City and not below on the earth.”

I shall never forget the extraordinary sight as we stepped from the lift. The mist here was nothing like so thick as it was above. This was owing to the fact that a hundred feet above our heads there was the immense ceiling of steel plates and girders upon which the City rested.

As I said before, on all three sides this second service City was open to the air, but not above. Consequently the mist moved in tall white shapes like ghosts; it entirely surrounded one group of huts and left another great vista of buildings plain to the eye. Here a gaudily painted gable thrust itself out of the white sheet; there, through a proscenium of clinging wool, one saw the gray interior of a machine-room. A chill twilight brooded everywhere. There wasn't a single lamp burning, and from one end to the other lay the desolation of utter silence.

I leant against the jamb of the lift door, and, despite the cold, the sweat ran down my body in a stream.

Pu-Yi raised a thin arm over his head and it seemed to clutch crookedly at the somber panoply aloft.

A high, thin wail came from his parted lips and went mournfully away down the deserted streets and empty habitations.

For myself, I had been so stunned that I couldn't think, but my friend's despairing call seemed to jerk some cog-wheel within the brain and start again the mechanism of thought.

I gripped him by the shoulder.

”There isn't a soul here,” I rasped out. ”What does it mean, what on earth does it mean?”

”There should be three hundred at least,” he answered.

I broke away at a run, flung open the first door I came to and peered in. It was some sort of a sleeping-room, there were bunks and couches all around the walls. Each one of them was empty. I had time to see that, and also that a stand of short carbines and cutla.s.ses was full of weapons.

Then I had to back out quickly for the late inmates had left an odorous legacy behind them.

Pu-Yi faced me.

”That was one of the patrol rooms,” he said.

Then I remembered our coming two days ago.

”Mulligan!” I cried. ”n.o.body could get here except through the guard-room, n.o.body could leave here except through that, could they?”

”Not unless they threw themselves from the side of the tower.”

”Well, it's quite impossible to believe that three hundred people have committed suicide during the night without a sound being heard. Quick!

let's get to the bottom of this.”

Pu-Yi led. He didn't seem really to run, only to glide along the ghostly streets and pa.s.sages. But I had hard work to keep up with him, all the same. My mouth felt as if it had been sucking a bra.s.s tap. The most deadly fear clutched at my heart--that noiseless, pattering run through the deserted town in the air, accompanied always by the mouthing, gibbering ghosts of the mist, was appalling.

We dashed down the last corridor and were brought up by a stout door.

Pu-Yi bent down to the handle, turned it gently, and--it opened.

We tiptoed into that room. Directly I was over the threshold, the spiritual odor of death, of violent death, came to me.

A fire of logs was still burning redly upon the hearth. For the rest the room was lit only by its skylight, through which filtered a dirty and opaque illumination which was only sufficient to give every object a shape of the sinister or bizarre. The red glow from the fire glistened upon the polished screen of steel which divided the room into two portions. And it also fell, redly, upon something else.

This was the corpse of Mulligan.

It was seated in a chair which had been pulled up to the screen with its back towards it, as if in mockery and derision of its power to keep it.

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