Meredith Beyers - The Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 4, No. 3 — December 1921)

Campbell and Corrigan went at their job at once, but I had to wait for the next ebb tide, and before I left I made sure that one man at least would be on the edge of the cliff with a coil of rope in case things went wrong. I knew there wasn’t much chance for a capsized man among those rocks, but if I did hit trouble a rope was the only possible chance for my life.

I couldn’t find an Indian anywhere about the place. I think they had an idea I might want to go out there again. And so I had to go alone in a lighter canoe. The sea was a little smoother than before, or rather a little less rough. You couldn’t call it smooth at all. I crept in closer and closer, while Campbell watched from the top of the cliff. I didn’t dare use the glasses because the paddle took both hands, but I found the spot I had seen and kept my eyes on it. Plainer and plainer it grew as I edged toward it and I let out a whoop of satisfaction as I saw a narrow opening in the rock.

I waved an arm at Campbell and turned my head to make sure of the back track through the surf when I saw a big comber almost on top of me. I don’t know where it came from. They happen that way sometimes. But it was coming all right and I would have said my prayers if I had had time. It caught the little canoe like a barrel at the crest of Niagara, and in a huge surge of water and blinding spray, I dashed straight at the cliff.

I didn’t guide the canoe. God, or somebody else did that. But the next thing I knew, I flew between jagged rocks that scraped the sides of the canoe and then with a sickening lurch and a flop I slid into quiet water, twilight and then darkness. I had hit the fissure in the rocks and was inside a huge cave.

Two or three minutes later I had managed to pull myself together enough to look about. I was shivering more from the shock of being alive than anything else. But I managed to find matches and scrambled out into the shallow tide pool. I couldn’t see any roof about me, but I threw pebbles as high as I could without striking anything and when I shouted I decided from the sound that it must be mighty high. I had slid in about fifty feet and, lighting one match after another, I felt my way back into the darkness to see what was there.

Only a few steps had I taken when I came to a wall, which I could see was a sort of a shelf about twenty feet high, and climbed it. There on the rocky floor was the solution of our mystery, if not the key to it.

Four bodies. Four dead men twisted and broken as they fell to their death from far above. Adams, Hunt, Terwilliger and the boss’s friend, I had not a doubt, but I did not stop to make sure. My last match was in my fingers and I had some job ahead if I were not to join them.

Scrambling down the wall I splashed toward the sunlight at the mouth of the cave where the surf still boiled about the jagged rocks. To swim through it was impossible. My only chance was to find a pinnacle I could climb and trust to Campbell and his rope. Fortunately, there was one a few feet out of the opening, and, watching for a calmer moment, I leaped and caught it in my arms and clung there drenched and lacerated but above the pull of the receding waves.

Finally I managed to squirm around so I could look up and saw Campbell and Corrigan, flat on their stomachs, leaning over the edge of the cliff and waving to me. In a minute the rope was lowered with a loop on the end of it and into this I thrust my arms. They hauled me up with a few more bruises and cuts, but I was alive and the rest didn’t matter much.

Breathlessly I told Brierly what I had found and gave him the approximate measurements and directions of the cave. Quickly he paced it off and where do you think we located the spot above the pile of bodies? The bed in the king’s chamber!

We didn’t waste any more time then but went for Stanwood. He knew that something unusual was going on and was nervously pacing up and down the big living-room. Campbell and Corrigan grabbed him and we hustled him in beside the bed he had told us he had built.

“Stanwich,” Brierly snarled, and the man winced at the name, “you are standing directly above the bodies of four men you murdered. How did you do it and why?”

The words shook the man to his marrow, but he still kept part of his nerve. He denied the charge, denied his name, denied everything, but as I described what I had seen, he broke still further in a sort of superstitious terror, which I couldn’t understand for a time. Brierly was an adept at the game and as he picked up an axe and attacked the bed, the fellow leaped back with a squeal of alarm.

“So that’s it, eh?” said Brierly with a grin. “Come now, show us how it was done and save a lot of trouble.”

He gave up at that and showed the devil’s trap. Hidden in the head of the bed was a spring which, when he pressed ~ it, released another spring in the side of the couch, just where a man’s knee would rest when he climbed into bed. Securing a pole, he pressed this spring from a safe distance and swiftly the bed tilted at a sharp angle while a black hole opened in the floor for an instant and then closed again into its perfect jointures.

The scheme, he explained, as he grew calmer, was to set the spring at the head of the bed only when the trap was to receive a victim. At other times the room was perfectly safe. He might have set it for us, but did not believe we could ever prove anything against him and also feared that the fall of one of us would reveal his secret to the others.

His terror at my story, he explained, was due to the news that the bodies were still under the house. He had found the chimney opening into the cave when he came there to build the house and the trap was a culmination of the discovery, but he could hear the waves washing down below and believed that the bodies that fell through it would be washed away with the next tide. Then, if they were ever found, it would be supposed that they had tumbled from the cliff.

“But why did you kill these men?” Brierly demanded.

“I didn’t kill them,” he answered. “They fell while I was not here.”

“True, but you set the trap and then invited them here. Why did you do it?”

He was silent for a moment, then set his jaws and straightened his shoulders.

“They were enemies of my country,” he said. “They were making munitions to destroy my brothers. Why should I not destroy them?”

“But this house was built before the war,” Brierly insisted. “Why did you build this infernal trap?”

“Because,” he answered slowly, “Mr. Plainfield ordered this house built to entertain a king. I do not believe in kings. They are the enemies of mankind. He ordered a house ‘fit for a king.’ I made it so.”

We drew back, startled at the hate that gleamed in his eyes and at the cruel cunning of the radical bared before us. He saw his chance, and before we could stop him, leaped through the window. Another instant and he had thrown himself over the cliff to the rocks and surf below.

There isn’t much else to tell. We never found out who he really was. No, I haven’t said what king it was who sent me those letters. Perhaps you can figure it out for yourself.