Free Young Torless by Robert Musil

and their nostrils were filled with a musty smell as though from long-unopened trunks.
    The three boys, who knew the way well, nevertheless went along very cautiously, step for step, careful to avoid tripping on any of the ropes pulled tight across the floor as traps and alarm-signals.
    It was some time before they reached a little door on their right, only a short distance from the wall separating this place from the attic.
    When Beineberg opened this door they found themselves in a narrow room under the top landing. It looked fantastic enough in the light of a small, flickering oil-lamp, which Beineberg had lit.
    The ceiling was horizontal only where it was directly under the landing, and even here only just high enough for one to be able to stand upright. Towards the back it sloped away, following the line of the stairs, until it ended in an acute angle. The thin partition wall at the opposite side of the room divided the attic from the staircase, and the third wall was formed by the brickwork on which the stairs rested. It was only the fourth wall, in which the door was, that seemed to have been added specially. Doubtless it had been built with the intention of making a small room here to keep tools in, unless perhaps it owed its existence only to a whim on the part of the architect, in whom this dark nook had inspired the medieval notion of walling it up to make a hiding-place.
    However that might be, apart from these three boys there was doubtless scarcely anyone in the whole school who knew of its existence, and still less anyone who thought of putting it to any use.
    And so they had been free to furnish it entirely according to their own fantastic notions.
    The walls were completely draped with some blood-red bunting that Reiting and Beineberg had purloined from one of the store-rooms, and the floor was covered with a double layer of thick woolly horse-blanket, of the kind that was used in the dormitories as an extra blanket in winter. In the front part of the room stood some low boxes, covered with material, which served as seats; at the back, in the acute angle formed by the sloping ceiling and the floor, a sort of bed had been made, large enough for three or four people, and this part could be darkened by the drawing of a curtain, separating it from the rest of the room.
    On the wall by the door hung a loaded revolver.
    Törless did not like this room. True, the constriction and isolation it afforded appealed to him; it was like being deep inside a mountain, and the smell of the dusty old stage-scenery gave rise to all sorts of vague sensations in him. But the concealment, those trip-ropes to give the alert, and this revolver, which was meant to provide the utmost illusion of defiance and secrecy, struck him as ridiculous. It was as though they were trying to pretend they were leading the life of bandits.
    Actually the only reason why Törless joined in was that he did not want to lag behind the other two. Beineberg and Reiting themselves took the whole thing very seriously indeed. Törless knew that. He also knew that Beineberg had skeleton keys that would open the doors of all the cellars and attics in the school building, and that he often slipped away from lessons for several hours in order to sit somewhere-high up in the rafters of the roof, or underground in one of the many semiruinous, labyrinthine vaults-by the light of a little lamp, which he always carried about with him, reading adventure stories or thinking his thoughts about supernatural things.
    He knew similar things of Reiting, who also had his hidden retreats, where he kept secret diaries; and these diaries were filled with audacious plans for the future and with exact records of the staging, and course of the numerous intrigues that he instituted among the other boys. For Reiting knew no greater pleasure than to set people against each other, subduing one with the aid of each other and revelling in favours and flatteries obtained by extortion, in