Patricia Wentworth: The Girl in the Cellar

Miss Silver #32， 1961

She looked into the dead unbroken dark and had neither memory nor thought. She was not conscious of where she was, or of how she had come there. She was not conscious of anything except the darkness. She did not know if time had passed. There seemed to be no sense that it went by, but it must have done, because the moment when she knew nothing except the darkness had changed into a moment in which she knew that her feet were on stone, and that she must not move from where she stood.

A gradual knowledge invaded her, and with it a fear that was like the beginning of pain. She did not know how the knowledge came to her. She only knew that it was there. The stone under her feet was a step. It was a single step in a long stone flight. If she were to move she might fall, she did not know how far. The thought terrified her. It came to her, she did not know how, that it was not the unknown depth that was the terror behind her thought, but the thing that waited there. Her heart knocked and her knees shook. Whatever happened, she must not fall. Every instinct told her that. She felt behind her and found a step above the one upon which she stood. The darkness round her had begun to break into fiery sparks as she sank down and leaned forward with her head between her knees. Afterwards she was to think how strange it was that she should remember the right thing to do if you thought you were going to faint.

Presently the fiery sparks died out and the darkness was quite dark again. She put down her hand and felt the step on which she was sitting. It was cold and damp-and it was stone, just as she had known that it would be. Moving along it her hand touched something else. The warmer, drier feel of leather or plastic came to her. The thing moved with the movement of her hand. It was a handbag. She drew it towards her, set it in her lap, and felt for the clasp. It had an unfamiliar feeling. You ought to know how to open your own bag, but it felt strange-her fingers fumbled with it.

And then all at once the clasp moved and the bag was open. She slipped her hand inside it and felt the smooth, cool shape of the pocket-torch-felt it and let go of it again.

Of course she must have dropped her bag when she came down the steps. She had come down the steps with her bag, and she had dropped it. Why had she come down the steps? She didn’t know, any more than she knew who she was, or where this place might be. There was only one thing she did know, and that was that someone was lying dead at the bottom of the steps.

She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did know it, just as she knew with a sharp and terrible conviction that she must get away quickly, quickly, whilst she could. She got to her feet, when something halted the panic impulse. It was like a voice speaking in her mind. It said quite definitely, clearly, and soberly, ‘You can’t just run away and not see whether there is anything you can do.’

She remembered the torch, and was afraid. There was a dead girl lying at the foot of these stone steps. She knew it with the same ultimate certainty with which she knew that she was there herself, and she knew that she couldn’t just go away and leave her without looking with her eyes to back up that certainty. She took the torch out of the bag and switched it on. The small wavering beam cut the darkness and showed her what she had known she would see. She had known it because she had seen it before. She had stood as she was standing now, but the beam had been brighter then. It had come from a larger torch. She looked along this narrower, feebler beam and saw the girl lie there where she had pitched forward at the foot of the steps. She had been going down them, and she had been shot from behind. She lay with her hands stretched out and a dreadful wound in her head.

The girl on the steps went down the last six. She went round the body, keeping the light away from the head. She bent down and took hold of one of those outflung wrists. It was cold, and it was beginning to be stiff. There was no pulse. She straightened up and turned with the torch in her hand.

The place was a cellar, quite bare, quite empty. The light picked up splinters of glass. There was a broken torch that lay against the right side of the dead girl’s body. It came to her that it was the stronger torch which she had used on the other side of the black wall past which she could not go. She had used it, and she had dropped it, and it had rolled and come to rest beside the poor broken girl at the foot of the steps.

She turned now and went to the steps. There was nothing she could do, no help or comfort she could give. She must get away. She went up two steps, and then fear came on her. The lighted torch was in her hand. She switched it off and waited for her heart to stop knocking against her side. It took a long time to steady down. When at last it was going at a slower and more even pace, she opened her eyes again and saw very dimly the rising steps that were there in front of her and the shape of the doorway through which she must have come, a dimly lighted shape high up in a wall of darkness.

She began to walk up the steps towards the open door. She was conscious of two things only. They were on different levels of consciousness. One of them was the torch. It was in the bag again-she must have put it there. Her consciousness would not let go of it. She could feel the shape of it still in her hand, but it wasn’t there any longer. The bag was there. The other thing was on a different plane. She must get away. That was the flooding necessity. It struck her like one of those big waves which hit you when you are bathing in the sea and knock you down and break over you. When she looked back she could not really remember how she got out of the house, only that it wasn’t quite dark in the hall, and that the door-the front door-wasn’t latched. Her full consciousness, her memory, came back to the moment when she found herself standing at the end of the road and looking at the traffic that went by.

She sat in the bus. It was full of people, but she did not really see them. They were there, but she felt herself separate from them-apart. It was as if she was in one story and they in another, as if the stories had nothing to do with one another, as if there was something like a sheet of glass between them and her, between her consciousness and theirs, and no communication was possible.

There was money in her purse. When the conductor came round she took out a two-shilling bit and paid her fare. The curious thing was that when she was getting the money out she had no idea how much to give, and then quite suddenly she did know, so that what had begun as a vague adventure slipped over into a mechanical action too accustomed to need conscious thought.

When the bus stopped at the station she got out and looked about her. There ought to be luggage. She was going on a journey, and you don’t do that without luggage. It puzzled her, because just for a moment she could see her luggage-a trunk and a hat-box. She could see them quite clearly, but when she tried to see the name on them the whole thing went. She shut her eyes for a moment against the dizziness which followed. When she opened them it was all gone. She wasn’t sure about anything any more.

Someone touched her on the arm. A very kind voice said, ‘Are you all right?’