Free The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes by Sterling E. Lanier Page B

boulder the size of my head crashed down just behind us. An idea full of terror crossed my mind. Would we be able to see the tunnel entrance, the gap in its roof, should the moon not be shining? As it turned out we couldn't, but it didn't matter.
     
                  "I simply ran into the ladder, almost knocking my addled brains out. James made me go first, and I didn't argue. You know, I still had the Ferrara sword in one hand; dumb stubbornness, I guess, but I carried it out of that hellhole and later put it back on the wall myself.
     
                  "As I climbed out, the moon came out again and flooded the landscape with pale light . But the groaning and cracking in the earth hadn't halted for a minute, and I was damned glad to see my friend's head appear at the top of the ladder. His face was pale and his eyes were half shut . It was I who grabbed him this time and hauled away until he was out of the hole. I got one arm under his shoulder and we lurched off away from the castle toward the east . One moment we were on the slippery rock of the point, the next we were on soft turf, and I never felt gladder of common dirt in my life.
     
                  " 'Go on,' he gasped. 'We are not safe yet I know!'
     
                  "Up the slope we went, more at a crawl than a walk, I may say, until neither one of us could go a step further, and we simply collapsed into the moist verdure of the hills.
     
                  "Behind us, the grandfather of all breaking noises cut loose and we sat up and stared. The whole great finger of stone on which the castle sat was separating from the land!
     
                  "Slowly, inexorably in the moonlight, the cliff leaned out and away. There were rending and screeching noises deep down in the earth, and even where we crouched, the ground shook as though with an earthquake.
     
                  "James stood up, and that stern look of majesty was never clearer in the moonlight . 'Accursed be thy stones forever!' he shouted over the shattering noise of the cliff fall.
     
                  'Lie in the sea bottom until the end of time and never trouble the world again!' As he spoke the whole promontory point, fortress and all, vanished, and a splash roared up like some vast water spout and left us drenched. When the water had left our eyes, a ragged cliff edge ran some dozen yards away from us. Beyond this there was ... nothing.
     
                  " 'So passes Caer Dhub ,' said James in a strange voice. 'So passes the last of an evil lost in time. And I too pass, yet I will ...' He never finished telling me what he would do because he had fainted. I was nigh on doing so myself, being exhausted as well as dripping wet. But someone had to get back to Avalon House, or else we would both die of exposure.
     
                  "I covered him with my jacket and in my soaked, boiled shirt, or the remnants of one, began to stumble over the faint trace Lionel's people had left on the slope. I don't know how long I had been putting one foot down after the other when I saw lights ahead and heard voices. I called out in a croak like that of an asthmatic frog and they heard me. I remember hands holding me up, but nothing more. Apparently I managed to tell them about James before I passed out, but I remember none of it, not until I woke up in my own bedroom at Avalon.
     
                  "I lost a whole day there, I later discovered. They found us at about four a.m., and I woke to an afternoon sun going down two days after that! That's what I call needing a rest, eh?
     
                  "Well, I got myself up and dressed and wandered downstairs. And here are James and Isobel having tea! You would have thought I'd slipped away five minutes earlier to visit the w.c. With my head full of the last time I had seen James, I could hardly believe my own