Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“We were there at the foot of the ridge when it happened,” answered Magwitch. “The M.P.P.’s and the others had climbed the ridge, and when they reached the top, they were slaughtered — every man, woman and child who went up there, we have little doubt. They were to leave the valley. They left it, of course, but only through forfeiture of their lives.”

Oscar, suddenly seised by a terrible fear for his own safety now that there be Outland marauders with guns poised to do harm to him, made a vaulting leap past Howler and scudded away.

Howler looked over the faces of those who were come to make his job difficult and then capitulated to the inevitable, unfastened the ring of keys that depended from his belt, and turned it over to Muntle. “Is it true that we are all to be drowned?” he asked fearfully of the reinstated sheriff.

Muntle nodded. “There is to be a cataclysmic flood of this valley, yes.”

“Then we must leave Dingley Dell without delay,” said Mr. Fagin, who was flanked on either side by his wife and daughter with whom he had just been reunited.

I shook my head and explained to the growing crowd why such action would not be prudent. Already we had begun to hear a stray gunshot now and then, which I suspected came from an Outland sniper meeting up with some Dinglian acting upon those very same thoughts of escape. “By the bye, Howler, from whom did you hear that we were to be drowned?”

“From one of those we keep in the attic. I believe that Professor Chivery was the one who said it.”

“Take us to him,” said I. “Take Muntle and me up to those who reside beneath the roof, for my nephew is there and Muntle’s own brother.”

“How do you know this?” asked Howler with a look of surprise.

“We know more than you can possibly imagine,” said Antonia, examining the ring of keys in her hand. “Mrs. Pilkins, Miss Casby, Mrs. Lumbey. You will come with me. The rest of you, take these other keys. Be quick about it. All must be removed from this place immediately. Muntle, Trimmers: whither shall we take them?”

“To the Respectable Hospital for now,” offered Dr. Timberry.“Those who still require care beyond what a family’s restorative embrace can give them.”

“Which of these keys opens to the door to the attic room, Howler?” I asked.

Howler shook his head. “I don’t have that one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Fibbetson still has it. Dr. Towlinson gave me all of the keys prior to his departure but one. That one I was to get from Fibbetson, but he refused to give it up to me.”

“You fool!” thundered Muntle. “How could you have let him keep it, when Towlinson directed that you should have it?”

“It never pays to tussle with that man. And how was I to know that they would not be returning? No one tells me anything.” Howler had become flustered. His agitation manifest itself in a head that would not stop shaking and hands that had suddenly taken up a circumstantial tremor. Spenlow Howler was clearly a man at his breaking point.

“Think, Howler: is there any other way into that room?”

“There is only the door, and it cannot be breached without a battering ram.”

“Then we must find a battering ram and break it down,” suggested my literally minded sister-in-law Charlotte. “My boy is there. We simply must find a way to release him!”

Indeed, Charlotte and Gus both knew now that their son was alive and where he was being kept, for I had a made a point of finally divulging the facts of his whereabouts as the three of us were being transported to our respective addresses of incarceration. Knowledge that their son was no longer abroad had, no doubt, been of great comfort to them during these last two days, and I was happy finally to be able to unburden myself of the weight of it once and all.

“You cannot break down that door, as hard as you try,” explained Howler in a pet of exasperation. “For it was made of solid steel for the express purpose of putting all thought of escape out of the minds of those who would dwell behind it.”

“Lest all the secrets of the Outland and the Tiadaghton Project be revealed,” said I in an undertone of disgust. “Still, Howler, take Muntle and me to the door and we will find out what can be done from inside by the inmates themselves to assist in their rescue.”

What had already been done was this: the plaster had been carved and chipped and chopped away, and the under-boards of strong wood cut and pried back enough to emit a sliver of light into the room. The sliver was being broadened inches by inches through the application of clawing, splinter-lacerated hands and rude makeshift tools: Quilp’s dull whittling knife, the leg of a chair, the iron cross bar from one of the room’s now disassembled cots. “What do you see below?” asked George, as my nephew put his eye to the open slit in the wood.

“There is glass here, but it is so dirty, I cannot see anything through it.”

“Can you crack it, boy?” asked Quilp. “Can you crack it with this knife if you jab it through the cleft in the wood?”

“I’ll try,” said Newman, taking the knife from the whittler. Newman began to thrust the blade through the narrow space that had been carved away in the wood — to jab and stab until finally the glass was penetrated, the whole pane shattering and falling away.

Nearby, walking along the cobbled lane that ran behind the asylum grounds, was Uriah Graham and his friend, the Vicar Upwitch. In the course of stopping all whom they would meet to send them to the All Souls Church for an emergency assembly, the librarian Graham, hearing the sound of the breaking glass, looked up in time to see sparkling shards and splinters raining down from the top of the large building. “Look, Slingo. Do you see it? A pane of glass has broken from that high window. Someone is up there, Slingo. Do you see?”

The men leapt over the paling and raced across the back lawn. “Halloa up there!” Upwitch cried. “Can anyone hear me?”

Newman turned to his companions in the attic room. “Someone is calling from below, but the opening is too narrow for me to see them. And they will not hear me.”

George Muntle nodded, pulled the boy aside and began to yank and pull and pry at the wood with his frenzied hands. George’s fingers began to bleed profusely from his efforts, but he did not stop until he, in turn, was pulled away by one of the other men in the room — a larger man with an even more powerful grip. Together the two men took turns by dint of the energetic, elemental force in their own strong hands to free themselves and their mates from the room that had entombed them for such a long and terrible season in their lives. The crease of light that angled across the room’s wood and plaster-strewn floorboards began to widen as the portal expanded. The room grew brighter too as the carapace of the men’s long imprisonment became violently ripped away. Into the dank, musty, stifling space irrupted the fragrance of trees and flowers and freshly mowed glass. Into the attic tomb wafted the call of two men below who represented that which was so strange to those locked inside: a desire from someone not within that room that they should be free, that they should be allowed to leave forever that place which had for so long entrapped both their bodies and their beleaguered spirits.

Newman returned to the spot where George Muntle and the other man had broken through, a large opening having now been created there. “I see them!” cried Newman. “Do you see me ?” he called down. “Do you hear me?”

“We do, Newman! By God, we most certainly do!” Upwitch waved both hands in the air as my joyous nephew put his head entirely outside the freshly created portal.