and craned to get a sight. The jailers began hurrying them out of
the building. The redheaded man was crouching in the far corner of the
black box.

The turnkey caught the end of my sleeve, and hurried me out of the door.

"Come away," he said. "Come out of it.... Damn my good nature."

We went swiftly through the tall, gloomy, echoing stone passages. All
the time there was the noise of the prisoners being marshalled somewhere
into their distant yards and cells. We went across the bottom of a well,
where the weeping December light struck ghastly down on to the
stones, into a sort of rabbit-warren of black passages and descending
staircases, a horror of cold, solitude, and night. Iron door after iron
door clanged to behind us in the stony blackness. After an interminable
traversing, the turnkey, still with his hand on my sleeve, jerked me
into my familiar cell. I hadn't thought to be glad to get back to that
dim, frozen, damp-chilled little hole; with its hateful stone walls,
stone ceiling, stone floor, stone bed-slab, and stone table; its rope
mat, foul stable-blanket, its horrible sense of eternal burial, out of
sound, out of sight under a mined mountain of black stones. It was so
tiny that the turnkey, entering after me, seemed to be pressed close up
to my chest, and so dark that I could not see the colour of the dirty
hair that fell matted from the bald patch on the top of his skull; so
familiar that I knew the feel of every little worming of rust on the
iron candlestick. He wiped his face with a brown rag of handkerchief,
and said:

"Curse me if ever I go into that place again." After a time he added:
"Unless 'tis a matter of duty."

I didn't say anything; my nerves were still jangling to that shrieking,
and to the clang of the iron doors that had closed behind me. I had an
irresistible impulse to get hold of the iron candlestick and smash it
home through the skull of the turnkey--as I had done to the men who had
killed Seraphina's father... to kill this man, then to creep along the
black passages and murder man after man beside those iron doors until I
got to the open air.

He began again. "You'd think we'd get used to it--you'd think we
would--but 'tis a strain for us. You never knows what the prisoners will
do at a scene like that there. It drives 'em mad. Look at this scar.
Machell the forger done that for me, 'fore he was condemned, after a
sermon like that--a quiet, gentlemanly man, much like you. Lord,