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quivers of impending unconsciousness as the drug began to descend on my
nervous system.
A movement behind my would-be captor sent my heart thudding in wild
anticipation, until I realised that the man looking in the door over the tweed
shoulder also wore a false beard. Swooping disappointment made me peevish, and
I opened my mouth to complain at the lack of imagination in their disguises,
but to my consternation, what came from my mouth bore little resemblance to
English. The newcomer looked at me and spoke from a great distance.
 She ain t asleep yet?
 In a minute. She s not far  And at his words, the compartment began to close
in on me. My field of vision narrowed, from luggage racks and seats to the
figures crowding the doorway, to two heads and a torso, and finally to the
small scar that emerged from the false moustache and puckered the first man s
lip, and the word far reverberated in my brain as FARFARFarFarfarfarfarfar and
erased me.
When I woke, I was blind.
I was also violently and comprehensively ill onto the cold, hard surface I lay
on, and when eventually I turned with a groan to escape the noxious stuff, I
found that most of my body was in direct contact with the stones. Blind,
stripped to my underclothing, and ill, I thought muzzily. Mary Russell, this
is going to be very unpleasant. I laid my hot face back onto the cool stones
and thought no more.
The second time I woke, I was still blind, still nearly naked, and felt just
as ill. I did not vomit, although the sharp stink in the air made it a
temptation and my mouth tasted unspeakably foul. I clawed my swarming hair out
of my face, ran an automatic knuckle up the bridge of my nose to shove my
absent spectacles into place, and then with an effort pushed myself upright. I
wished I had not. My head pounded, my stomach quivered, and the darkness
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
seemed to become denser, but I stayed sitting, and slowly I recovered.
I was alive. There was that. In the dark, in an unknown place, held captive
for an unknown reason by an unknown number of enemies, clothed in nothing but
knickers and camisole, without so much as my glasses and hairpins as weapons,
but alive.
That I had lived was not in itself terribly reassuring. I sat on the stones,
my head in my hands, and tried to think through the throbbing. After half an
hour, I had come up with two small conclusions: First, my captor was a man of
no mean ability, a remarkably intelligent, efficient, and daring individual
who showed no signs of the gaol-bird in his manner and who was, therefore,
among the more successful criminals. If one knew where to look, it should not
prove difficult to find him assuming I should happen to escape his clutches.
Second, my mind seized on one chance remark: He had said that bullets were
unimaginative. I could not help but reading into that choice of word the idea
that he had something in mind for me, not just locking me in a hold. Not at
all a nice thought.
He was no one I knew, personally or by reputation, which made for another
question: Whom was he working for, or with? Who had arranged to pick me up so
efficiently and ruthlessly and had me dumped into this hole? I assumed that it
had something to do with the Temple, but I had to admit that there was no
concrete reason for that assumption, that my life was sufficiently complicated
to offer other possibilities. A voice from the past, taking revenge for
something Holmes and I had done long ago? Or was I merely a pawn, captured to
bring Holmes into a trap? My thoughts ranged and snatched at threads,
meandering their way into the more remote reaches of reality. Marie hated me
sufficiently to do this, although I had to wonder if she would not rather have
merely crushed me beneath a lorry or had me shot. Perhaps I had been kidnapped
by one of the Berlin-bound Americans, to keep me from presenting my paper. An
academic rival, of Duncan s perhaps, set to ruin us both? Or my aunt! Breaking
the will by driving me mad, proving me to be incompetent, putting me and my
father s fortune back into her hands&
That snapped me down to earth. My aunt was mercenary, but she had neither the
brains nor the acquaintances to do this, and if I had seriously considered
that, well, my mind was indeed in a fragile state. I shook my head to clear
it, swore at my hag s mat of hair, and forced myself to my feet. Best to
concentrate on the escaping side of things. Time to find out where I was.
The place I was in, other than being as black as a cow s stomach, was cool,
but not dangerously so, paved in big uneven stones, and, I thought, large. To
confirm it, I cleared my throat and said a few experimental words, more for
the sake of the echoes than because I expected an answer.
 Hello? Hello? Is anyone here?
The ceiling was not too high and the walls, some of them, not too distant. I
got to my feet cautiously, found the pressure inside my skull receding, and
began to shuffle forward with my hands waving about in front of me. I had no
idea how much ground I had covered, with the dark pressing in on my face and
eardrums like a silent cacophony, filled not only with mundane horrors such as
cobwebs and rats (silent ones) but with lurking presences as well, hands
reaching out to touch me. When my fingers finally stubbed against cold stone,
I threw myself up against its upright bulk like a shipwrecked sailor on a
beach and felt like embracing it.
The walls were fitted stone, my exploring fingertips told me, not brick:
large, finely textured blocks. I turned left, changed my mind and turned
right, and set out with my left hand bumping along the stone, my right hand
out in front, literally inching forward until I came to another wall, joining [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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