mortmain

{Part Four}

"After you, Mister Skidd," said Blather, waving his sausage fingers with perverse delicacy in front of his grotesquely bulging waistcoat. "After you!"

Skidd hesitated in the doorway. He retched when another puff of the foul air assailed his nostrils. Behind him he could hear Blather's breath whistling through his fleshy nostrils. The lightbulb continued to swirl in crazy arcs above the moist and mossy steps. Skidd barely had time to wonder how a modern office could even have a doorway like this when he felt the tip of Mister Blather's file pressing into his kidneys, and the heavy cake-laden voice spat into his ear, "Today, if you please, Mister Skidd."

Heaving a sigh, and wondering if he'd remembered to turn the light off in his own kitchen that morning, Skidd reached for the wet and rusty chain which ran down, down parallel to the stairs and took his first step.

The air became more unbearable the further down they went, Skidd all the while bracing himself with one hand, and waving his other hand nervously in front of him, trying to fend off contact with, well, who knows what might be lurking in such a subterranean cavern?

As the unlikely pair wound their way deep underground beneath the city, the stench abated and Skidd began to breath tentatively through his nose again. Blather even let up on the pressure, and dropped a couple of stps behind, occasionally stopping altogether to wheeze and cough. Skidd knew that there must be absolutely no possibility of escape, or else Blather wouldn't have bothered to let him draw even slightly ahead. Mister Blather may well appear to the casual observer to be more beast than man, but Skidd knew that in such fellows animal cunning was a very sharp sixth sense indeed.

Skidd look at his watch. And looked again. It had stopped. He was sure he'd wound it that morning. He shook his wrist and raised his watch to his ear. In the thick silence of the interminable stone stairwell, he heard nothing. Damn and blast the thing.

Blather caught Skidd's attention with an exceedingly phlegmy cough. The latter stopped and looked up behind him. Something glinted in the half-darkness. Then, with a muffled pop, the light went out.

{To be continued...}