It would be ridiculous to deny that I was frightened, so I won’t. I was scared, and badly scared. Two fit men against one semi-invalid, four good arms against one, two undoubtedly skilled and cunning knife-fighters against a man who’d never even carved up a lump of cooked dead meat far less a live human being. And this wasn’t the time to learn. But it was the time to do something, and do it very quickly indeed before one or other of them caught on to the idea that at five yards I was a target that could hardly be missed and changed over from a stabbing to a throwing grip on his knife.
I rushed at them, right hand and knife over my shoulder as if I were wielding a club, and both of them fell back an involuntary couple of paces, maybe because of the foolhardy recklessness of it, more likely because of the respectful fear which Orientals habitually show in the presence of madness. I brought the knife whistling forward over my shoulder and with the tinkling of glass from the smashed overhead light and the flick of my left thumb on the torch switch the cave became as pitch-black as the tomb it really was.
It was essential to move, and move as fast as possible before they realised that I had the double advantage of having a torch and being in the position to lash out indiscriminately with my knife in the hundred per cent certainty that I would be stabbing an enemy, whereas they had a fifty per cent chance of stabbing a friend. Reckless of the noise I made in that utterly silent chamber, I pulled away the occluding plaster on the face of the torch, slipped off my sandals, ran three heavy steps in the direction of the entrance, stopped abruptly and sent both sandals sliding along the ground to thud softly against the- wooden door.
Had they been given another ten seconds to take stock of their position, to work out the possibilities, probably the last thing they would have done would have been to rush headlong to the source of the sudden noise. As it was, they had been given barely five seconds altogether in which to think, and the immediate and inevitable reaction must have been that I was trying to escape. I heard the quick patter of bare feet, the sound of a brief scuffle, a soft thud and an explosive gasp of agony that was lost in the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor.
Four swift soundless steps on my stockinged feet, a flick of the left thumb and they were pinned in the white glare of the torch, a tableau vivant but for their unnaturally petrified rigidity which gave them for all the world the appearance of a group sculpted from marble. They stood face to face, their chests almost but not quite touching. The man on my right had his left hand twisted in his companion’s shirt front while his right hand was pressed against the other’s body, just below waist level: the man on the left, his face averted from me, was arched over backwards like an overstrung bow, both hands locked over the right hand of his companion: the ridged and straining tendons turned the hands into waxen claws, the knuckles gleamed white like polished bone. I could see the blood-stained point of a knife sticking out two inches from the small of his back.
For two seconds, perhaps three-it seemed far longer than that-the man on the right stared unbelievingly into the face of the dying man, then the realisation of his lethal blunder and the awareness that death stood now at his own elbow broke the horror-numbed spell that had held him in thrall. He struggled frantically to withdraw his knife but the last agonies of his friend had locked right hand and knife fast in an iron-bound grip. He swung round desperately on me, his left arm flying upwards and outwards in a gesture that was half blow, half an attempt to shield himself from the beam I’d now directed into his shrinking eyes, and for a moment he had no guard left. The moment was enough and to spare. The blade of my knife was twelve inches long but for all that I jarred both wrist and knife as the hilt struck home against the breast-bone. He coughed once, a brief convulsive choked sound and drew his thin lips far back from the fast-clenched teeth in to a hideous and blood-flecked grin: then the blade of my knife snapped and I was left with only the hilt and an inch of steel in my hand as the two men, still locked together, swayed over to my right and crashed heavily on to the limestone floor of the cave.
I shone the torch beam down on the faces at my feet, but it was a superfluous precaution, they would never trouble me again. I recovered my sandals, picked up the fallen knife and left, closing the door behind me. Once outside I leaned my weight against the tunnel wall, hands hanging by my side, and drew in great deep lungfuls of pure fresh air. I felt weak, but put it down to my damaged arm and the foul air inside that tomb, the brief and violent episode on the other side of that door had left me curiously unaffected, or so I thought until I felt the pain in my cheek muscles and jaw and realised that my lips were strained back in involuntary imitation of the death’s head grin of the man I had just killed. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the overstrained muscles of my face.
It was then that I heard the singing. This was it, Bentall’s tottering reason had gone at last, the shock of what I’d just seen and done had overstrained more than the facial muscles. Bentall unhinged, Bentall round the bend, Bentall hearing noises in his head. What would Colonel Raine have said if he knew his trusty servant had gone off his trolley? He would probably have smiled his little invisible smile and said in his dry dusty voice that to hear singing in an abandoned mine-working, even a mine under the control of murderous impostors and patrolled by equally murderous Chinese, was not necessarily evidence of insanity. To which his trusty servant would have replied, no, it wasn’t, but to hear a choir of English women singing ‘Greensleeves’ most certainly was.
For that was what I was hearing. Women’s voices and singing ‘Greensleeves’. Not a recording, for one of the voices was slightly off-key and another trying to harmonise with what I could only regard as a very limited degree of success. English women, singing ‘Greensleeves’. I shook my head violently but they still kept at it. I clasped my hands over my ears and the singing stopped. I took them away and the singing started again. Noises in the head don’t stop when you put your hands over your ears. Maybe the fact that there were English women down in that mine was crazy, but at least I wasn’t. Still like a man in a trance, but careful, for all that, to make not the slightest whisper of sound, I pushed myself off the door and went padding down the tunnel to investigate.
The sound of the singing swelled abruptly as I followed a ninety degree turning to the left. Twenty yards away I could see a faint backwash of light against the left side of the tunnel where it seemed to make another abrupt turning, this time to the right. I drifted up to this corner like a falling snowflake and poked my head around with all the dead slow caution of an old hedgehog taking his first wary squint at the world after a winter’s hibernation.
Twenty feet away the full width of the tunnel was blocked by vertical iron bars, spaced about six inches apart, with an inset grille door. Ten feet beyond that were a similar set of bars, with a similar door. Halfway between the two doors, suspended close to the roof, a naked bulb threw a harsh light over the small table directly beneath it and the two overalled men who sat one on either side of the table. Between them were a pile of curiously shaped wooden blocks and I assumed that they were playing a game, but it wasn’t any game I’d ever seen. But whatever it was, it was obviously a game that called for concentration to judge by the irritated looks both men gave in the direction of the darkened space that lay behind the second set of bars. The singing showed no sign of stopping. Why people should be singing after midnight struck me as inexplicable until I remembered that to people imprisoned in a darkened cave day and night must have no meaning. Why they should be singing at all I couldn’t even begin to imagine.