He was still uncomfortably cold, though, as he opened the door. With one hand he unbuttoned his overcoat and with the other he reached gropingly for the electric light button on the wall. He fumbled around for it a few seconds, then swore softly in vexation because he had not noticed by daylight just where it was located.
Groping with both hands, now, he stumbled around the none-too-commodious room, feeling for the push button on the wall. He paused once and took inventory of his pockets and cursed his luck for lack of another match.
Then he went to hunting in the dark again--until his hand came full against a living body....
_IV._
The body stirred, eluding Defoe’s contact.
Defoe fell to quaking once more, but it was not the trembling of the chill this time. He opened his mouth to challenge the intruder, and all he could do was swallow and gag at the words that stuck in his throat.
A pressure against the pit of his stomach--a firm shove of hand upon his shoulder--and Defoe found himself stepping backward until it seemed he must have walked the length of the ship. But of course he hadn’t--he hadn’t even left the stateroom--and suddenly he was tumbled on to the edge of the berth, the pressure against his abdomen increasing.
A vague nausea gripped him. He clutched at his abdomen and his fingers wrapped themselves around the barrel of an automatic pistol. The pressure against his body became unbearable, piercing.... Defoe crumpled back into the berth and the convulsive effort restored his speech.
“What the hell are you doing?” he exploded. “Get out of here! What are you trying to do--stab me with a pistol?”
The incongruity of his question aroused a titter of amusement from the invisible presence.
“No, I only wished to make sure you weren’t trying to get away.”
That Voice again!--_here_! Defoe cringed in a sort of abject fear.
“What are you--_who are you_?” Defoe struggled to keep his voice steady, struggled, indeed, to keep his reason from flying out of balance and shattering into a thousand pieces of driveling idiocy.
“Call me anything you care to,” replied the Voice in the dark.
“I don’t believe you are--_anything_ at all! I think you are all a dream, a nightmare, a damnable hallucination that I can’t get rid of! To hell with you! I’m going to go down to the smoking-room and--smoke you out of my mind! I’m going to stay in the light from now on, day and night, until I get over this morbid dreaming!”
Defoe really thought he meant it all, until the pressure against his stomach made him doubt his courage and defiance.
Perhaps it was the nausea--maybe seasickness; he never had thought of that!--that was griping at his vitals like the insistent pressure of a steel-barreled weapon.
“Sit down, Mr. Defoe!” commanded the Voice. “I’ve got something to say to you.”
“To hell with you!” Defoe repeated, almost hysterically now. His hands clutched at the pressure again--and once more the pistol barrel sent him squirming back into the recesses of the berth.
“I want to talk to you some more about the Bland case,” went on the Voice, unperturbed by the other’s outburst. “When are you going to confess?”
“Confess?” Defoe parried. “Confess what?”
“Confess that you knew Bland was innocent when you convicted him,” said the Voice.
“But I didn’t.” It was like wrestling with one’s conscience, Defoe thought, this interminable denying of Bland’s innocence. He was wearying of it all; his mind was revolting at the repeated “third degree” of this mysterious Voice. Soon, he feared, his brain would refuse to function.
“But you’ve said you did,” the Voice insisted.
“When? It’s a lie!” exclaimed Defoe.
The Voice chuckled, sending a shudder through the man crouching in the corner of the berth.
“You probably don’t know, Mr. Defoe, that for a number of years you have had the treacherous habit of talking in your sleep--talking volubly, excitedly, sometimes almost reconstructing entire incidents in your talk for the benefit of anyone who might happen to be listening.”
“Well?” asked Defoe.
“Simply this: Manuel has overheard enough to--”
“Manuel?” broke in Defoe. “What’s he got to do with it!”
“I forgot to tell you,” the Voice apologized. “The Cuban is my confederate--former member of the Secret Police of Havana, you know. I saved his life during the Spanish war and--well, he’s paying back an old debt, as he calls it. He let me in and out of your house, and tipped me off about this trip. You see, Manuel had overheard you say, in your sleep, that you convicted an innocent man of murder. So I knew your conscience--”
“Are you trying to be my conscience? Are you trying to plague me into confessing? Are you--”
“No,” answered the Voice, “unless you choose to call me your conscience. I’m willing. You seem to be in need of one. Do you know, Mr. Defoe,” and the Voice took on a more affable tone, “you have been fearfully distracted the last few weeks or months. You need a rest--a _long_ rest!”
Defoe was silent, hunched in the retreat of the berth. He had no fight left in him. Presently he fell to whimpering quietly, as a child does when it is punished beyond endurance and is too frightened to cry. The Voice, it seemed, missed the old combativeness, gone so quickly after Defoe’s late outburst, so it prodded the hunted man with its chief weapon--not its pistol, but its chuckle. This time it chuckled devilishly, aggravatingly, and it rasped against the tender sensibilities of the sniveling Defoe like salt in an open wound.
Then something broke what little bonds of restraint remained in Defoe. He sprang, catlike, to the outer edge of the berth and lunged for the arm that held the pistol. In the darkness his head struck the cross-support of the berth above and he slumped forward, half dazed by the blow.
Again the chuckle sounded in his ears, now ringing with the stunning impact; and again Defoe lurched forward, only to fall dizzily to the floor. He clambered clumsily to his feet, gripping the berth for a momentary prop.
Soon his head began to clear. He was assembling out of the maze of ache and buzzing in his ears and brain some sort of coherent idea of where he was and what had been happening.
“Now I know what it all means!” he burst forth presently. “You--you sneaking, cackling little conscience, get out of here! I’m going to cheat you if I have to become a drunkard or a dope fiend the rest of my life! I’m not going to let a conscience, or a voice or a chuckle, drive me to insanity--or to confessing--or to suicide!”
Defoe was steady enough now, supporting himself against the upper berth. His voice grew more strident.
“No, I’m not going to let my conscience get the best of me! You thought you could keep after me endlessly, but I’ll get rid of you. I’m never going to be bothered with you or your voice again! Never! Now get out of here! Get out of here, I say!”
The chuckle--a croaking, sepulchral chuckle it was now--answered him out of the darkness.
“You might tell me, before I go, if you know who really did kill the man Bland was convicted of murdering,” said the Voice. “I’m curious enough to wish to know his name.” And the Voice chuckled once more.
“Damn that cackle! I’ll tell you, if you choke off that infernal cackling! I’ll tell you--_yes_! _I_ can tell you, because _I did it_! _I_ committed that murder, you understand? _I_ did it! Now cackle all you want to! And I convicted Bland of it! Cackle, you damned little shriveled conscience! _Ho, ho, ho-ho-ho!_ I think it’s my turn--to--cackle--now!”
The words of the hysterical man rose to a maudlin scream that reverberated piercingly in the little stateroom.
“Now get out of here for good!” the raving Defoe shouted, recovering coherence of speech after a time. “Get out--before--I--”
A blinding glare of light came as Defoe reached for the door. The intruder had found the push button.
Defoe stared--then toppled to the floor.
“Bland! _Bland! You! It’s you...._”
And before the stranger that was Bland passed from the room he felt again of the heart of the craven hulk at his feet. The doctor had been right: The tumult in the breast of the twelfth juror had been too much.
If only Defoe had known that the Governor had pardoned Bland, his secret might have been safe forever.
_Walter Scott Story offers a new conclusion to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado”_
_The_ Sequel
Sobered on the instant--the padlock had clicked when Montresor passed the chain about my waist and thus fastened me to the wall--I stood upright in the little dungeon, the blood running cold in my veins.
With maniacal laughter, he withdrew from the niche, whipped a trowel from under his robe and began to wall up the narrow opening. I knew it was not a joke, a drunken jest. I saw that his drunkenness had fallen from him. The dying flambeau fell from my nerveless hand and cast a fitful bloody glow upon the whitened, dripping walls. I shook the chain frenziedly.
“For God’s sake, Montresor!” I cried.
He replied with a horrible, mocking laugh, and, like a devil from hell, lifted his voice with mine to show that it was idle to call for help.