soul on this floor, Mr. Who-bloody-is-it, and everyone on the floor below has been told there’s a madman spending the night, given to fits. Keep your lip shut, and if we come back with the notebooks, we’ll go easy on you.”
Willis Pule nodded happily. “Mummy says I can cut out your tripes,” he assured me enthusiastically, “and feed them to the bats.”
“The bats,” I said, wondering why in the world he had chosen the definite article, and watching him pocket the razor. So it was the notebooks... Both of them donned webby-looking shawls and toddled out the door like the Bedlam Twins, she covering me all the time with the revolver. The door shut and the key clanked in the lock.
I was up and searching the place for a window, for another key, for a vent of some sort—for anything. The room was on the inside of the hallway, though, and without a window. And although both of them were lunatics, they were far too canny to leave spare keys roundabout. I sat down and thought. The Crown and Apple wasn’t five minutes’ walk. They’d get into my room right enough, search it in another five minutes, and then hurry back to cut my tripes out. Revolver or no revolver, they’d get a surprise when they pushed in through the door. She would make him come through first, of course, to take the blow... I studied out a plan.
What the room lacked was weapons. She had even taken the wooden paddle with her. There were a couple of chairs that would do in a pinch, but I wanted something better. I had worked myself into a bloodthirsty sort of state, and I was thinking in terms of clubbing people insensible. Chairs were too spindly and cumbersome for that.
I went to town on the bedstead—a loose-jointed wooden affair that wanted glue. Yanking the headboard loose from the side rails, I listened with satisfaction as the mattress and rails bumped to the floor, loud enough to alert anyone below that the visiting lunatic was doing his work. Then I leaned on one of the posts of the headboard itself, smashing the headboard sideways, the posts straining to tear away from the cross-members. Dowels snapped, wood groaned, and after a little bit of playing ram-it-against-the-floorboards the whole thing went to smash, leaving the turned post free in my hands. I hefted it; I would have liked it shorter, but it would do the trick.
The doorknob rattled just then. They were back, and quick, too. Either that or else maybe the landlady, noticing that the lunatic had been doing his job too well, had come round to investigate. I slid across to stand by the door, thinking that I wouldn’t smash the landlady with my club, but would simply push past her instead, and away down the stairs. If it was a man, though...
Whoever it was was having a terrible time with the lock. It seemed like an eternity of metallic clicking before the door swung to. I tensed, the club over my shoulder. A man’s face poked in from the dark hallway, the rest of the head following. I closed my eyes, stepped away from the wall, and pounded him one, slamming the club down against the back of his head, and knowing straight out that it wasn’t Willis Pule at all, but someone perhaps even more deadly: it was Higgins, the academician-gone-to-seed, still gripping a skeleton key in his right hand.
The blow left him half senseless, knocking him onto his face on the floor. He lay writhing. I stepped across, thinking to give him another one, a sort of cricket swing to the cranium, but he was already down and I couldn’t bring myself to do it—something I’m happy about today, but which took all my civilized instincts at the time.
The door lay open before me, and I was out of it quick, bolting for the stairs, throwing the post onto the floor of the hallway, and wondering about Higgins sneaking around like that. He wasn’t expected; that was certain. He had seen them both go out, perhaps, and had crept in, no doubt searching for the very notebooks that they were off ransacking my room for. They weren’t in league, then, but were probably deadly enemies. The Pules would take good care of him if they found him on the floor of their room.
I peered cautiously down the dark and empty stairwell, and then leaped down the stairs three at a