Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

Chapter 3

The Talisman of Thoth

I should have thought to count those steps: I soon lost all sense of distance and of time. The passageway was narrow and angled downward, the rough-hewn stone arch of it high enough for him to walk upright, though not by much, and scarcely wide enough for me to walk by his side. I do not know how long the corridor could rationally have been, but long enough for a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the endless featureless dark stone walls were closing in, a stolen glance backward over my shoulder that was met with the utter blackness behind us. The lone candle he held before him remained the only light, and I wondered what should happen if it were to extinguish for the speed of his long, sure stride through the dank darkness. In that moment I was grateful for my black bombazine dress: it was not fitted so closely to my form as were the fashions of the day, and I had nothing but its weight to impede my movement. The wavering candle flame painted the edges of his vast black shape in a dim halo of hellfire, and he became a will o’ the wisp to follow down, down the blind sloping tunnel to whatever lay ahead, driven on at nearly a run, as if to outpace some unseen devil that followed us behind.

I heard his boots splash in shallow water, and then I felt the cold shock as my shoes dashed through the same, but the ground grew level after the puddle, the way ahead slick with a thin stagnant sheen that shimmered in the glow of his candlelight. More disconcerting was the feeling of space. I could see little of the ceiling, but nothing of the walls, and suddenly I longed for the claustrophobia of the downward corridor, illuminated and defined by the same candlelight that now touched nothing but emptiness on either side. There was a sense now and again in the still air of a draft gaping from the right or the left, an arch into a warmer or colder nothingness, a change in scent I could not place. I heard faint voices, or imagined them, before they vanished again. And still the sound of our footsteps went on, his rhythm and mine a poor fit, the hard swift falls of his boot heels on damp stone and my little shoes hurrying to keep pace.