"In you go," Lady Rackrent nudges. Basil really is pretending to have a lot of difficulty stepping over the bodies. He glances up at you, and without even being conscious that you'd decided, she sprint across the parlor, and hurdle over the bodies into the black passage. A bullet whizzes by your head and you drop to the ground.
"Are you hit?" Basil asks, crouching over you?
"I don't know."
In one movement, he lifts you up and slings you over his shoulder, as if you are already a corpse. More bullets follow you as you make your way further into the darkness. You can hear them bouncing off the stone walls, dripping with condensation and slime.
"She's going to follow us and kill us," you cry.
"She can't fit into the passageway," he says, stopping short and easing you onto the floor. "Why do you think she left the bodies right there at the threshold? She's probably trying to wedge herself inside now. Let's hope she gets stuck." All the while he's talking, he's examining you, rather roughly. There's a burn mark on your right sleeve, but no wound underneath. You're having trouble hearing, but you seem to have escaped the bullets.
"Basil!" you shriek! "There's blood on your shirt!" You pull the tails out of his waistband and find a mess of gore.
"It's nothing," he says, wincing and getting up.
"Nothing!"
"Darby. It's not the kind of thing that will kill me. We need to move on."
"Do you think the bullet's in there?" you ask, incredulously.
"How would I know. But can we move on before I die of blood loss?"
With an instinct you did not know you possessed, you begin to tear the sleeves off his shirt. Under normal circumstances, you doubt you'd have the strength for it. First one and then the other, you rip away and tie together. You feel something like Florence Nightingale when you wrap them around this waist and tie them tightly. He yells so loud that you jump.
"Good girl," he says when catches his breath. "That will help stop the bleeding."
"Basil, what's our plan?" you ask, tears in your eyes. As it turns out, you're not really made for these sorts of adventures.
"We're got to get to a phone, and avoid Lady Rackrent. That's going to be hard since she knows the only two places we can come out are the parlor and your suite."
"Yes, but there are two of us and one of her," you point out.
"True. But I don't want to split up. I can't risk you getting shot."
"Well, what then? Should we make for the trap door, or go back into the parlor?" You frown intensely. "I can't go back into the parlor," you blubber. "She was just shooting at us in there."
Basil doesn't have time to cater to your tears. "I know. I only wish we could find those paintings and use them as a shield, but I've no idea where she's put them."
"Should we look for them?"
"And give her more time? No. Anyway, she might be crazy enough to shoot us through one of them anyway."
"I think the fact that she's crazy is something we can take for granted at this point."
Basil agrees. Together, you decide that she's probably ferrying her great bulk in between the parlor and your suite. Should the trap door even begin to shift and grate, chances are she will be on top of it, faster then a tiger, and shooting down into the blackness.
"But if we distract her by shifting it a little, we won't have time to get away before she starts shooting. That ladder is awkward and we'd be easy targets laying at the foot of it."
"We've got to get out through the parlor. But we need some kind of defense in place of a weapon. Even if you get into the parlor without her knowing, she certainly locked the doors."
"She knows the floor plan of this place a lot better than we do," you point out morbidly. "I don't see how we can find an exit before she finds us."
There's no use hypothesizing and wasting time. You creep back to the passageway and, with painful slowness, Basil emerges from the passageway into the parlor. Without saying a word, he waves you forward. You streak through the parlor and across the foyer without a moment's hesitation. Following his lead, you chase him into the swinging door that leads to the kitchen. He stops short and he bump into him, making him groan a little, in pain. You're standing over the body of the new maid, shot in the back.
"In here!" he hisses, climbing into the pantry. He pulls the door shut and stations himself in front of a small crack. The idea is to be absolutely quiet and hope that Lady Rackrent doesn't find you. "She must be making rounds of the place," Basil whispers. You're huddled so closely together, his bloody shirt is beginning to soak through to your skin. "I think she's coming."
Sure enough, cat-like padding, amazingly quiet and eerie for such a large woman, is heard faintly coming toward the door. Basil seems to freeze; not a comforting sensation since he's the only one who can see anything. The footsteps are definitely coming closer to the pantry. She must have heard you moving toward the kitchen. In the dark, you see Basil's hand reach up and grab a heavy tin from off the shelf. In a flash, the door opens and Basil lunges forward. You heard a sickening thud and a loud crash. Lady Rackrent is laying on the floor with a nasty open cut on her forehead.
"She won't be out long," Basil says, peeling the pistol away from her fingers. "An ox like this her can rear back up at any moment."
"Should we whack her again?" you ask.
He looks at you seriously. "I don't want to kill her, Darby." He wrenches the phone off the cradle and shakes his head. "Line is dead."
"Try another one!" you shout.
"Darby, if one phone is dead, they'll all be dead. Believe me." He grabs your hand and tows you around the two bodies and into the foyer. As you had expected, the main door is locked. The windows appear to be un-openable, a design feature perhaps from the days when people thought fresh air was dangerous to your health. "We don't have time for this bullocks," he mutters, grabbing a vase off a plinth and hurling it through a window."
Finally, you are outside in the courtyard! And... surrounded by the moat. "Aha!" Basil yells, and then grabs his side. "A rowboat!" He turns it over with his foot, from where it's resting against a turret. Fresh blood seems to be seeping through his shirt.
"Let me," you say, pushing forward. He push the thing with all your might until it plops into the water. Just before it's out of reach, you manage to grab the side of it. You probably should have thought of that first. "You get in first," you order, "I'll row."
"Fine by me," Basil smiles, holding his side.
It barely takes a moment to cross the moat. You're distracted, terrified that Lady Rackrent will appear in the courtyard with a rifle or a canon. By the time she does emerge, you have just cleared the steep hill and are well on your way into the town. Instead of crossing to the street where your walk would be a lot shorter and easier, you stick to the fields and woods, where Lady Rackrent's car is unlikely to find you. It takes nearly an hour, but eventually you see the little riot of buildings that make up Bantry Bay.
You run ahead to the first one, which happens to be a tiny tea room and urgently ask for use of the phone. The woman can see that something is frightfully amiss, and dials the emergency number for you. When the ambulance screeches up ten minutes later, Basil is unconscious and you are feeling dangerously faint as well. Side by side, the two of you are loaded onto stretchers and slid into the back of the ambulance like two drawers in a card catalog. It will be a few hours before the police get the full story out of you, but there's no rush; you're stuck in the hospital overnight while they 'observe you'. Basil is on the other side of the curtain, jotting notes in his journal.
You can't sleep until you know that the police have found Lady Rackrent and that she is under lock and key. It takes them a considerable time to find her, since she is hiding in an old priest's hole under the floor in her closet. It's almost midnight when they bring you the news that she's been apprehended. Immediately, you fall into a deep, narcotic sleep.
"Basil!" you shout into the telephone a couple of days later, "Come over here quick! You won't believe what I've found!"
"I'm still at the museum," he whispers, cupping the receiver. "Didn't we say we'd meet at eight?"
"We did, but this is far too important."
"You haven't seen Lady Rackrent?" he asks, irrationally.
"Of course not. Just come!"
You sit on the steps of the Sleeping Bee and wait for about ten minutes before a cab screeches up in a cloud of dust and Basil jumps out, clutching his bandaged torso. "What on earth...?"
"Come with me!," you say, grabbing his arm and dragging him around the corner to stand in front of the greengrocers. "I came this way on the night I met you at the Devil's Punchbowl."
"Fateful night that it was," he adds.
"And I noticed this statue of a soldier on horseback."
"Yes?"
"Notice anything interesting about him?"
"Him or the horse?" Basil asks.
"Him!" you shout, pulling the travertine nose from out of your purse.
Basil's mouth drops open in astonishment. "My God, he has no nose!"
"Not only that," you say, flipping to your watercolors of noses and nose holes, "But I think it might be a perfect fit."
For an injured man, Basil is freakishly fast in climbing the base of the statue. He groans when he rolls over onto the pedestal. Then he mounts the horse the way any rider would and is sitting behind the incomplete soldier.
"Drum roll please," he calls, holding the nose aloft.
You make the best drumroll you can, for someone who's not very musical. He lifts up the nose and holds it in front of the statue's face. You realize you're no longer drumming, but holding your breath. He presses the nose onto the face. It's a seamless fit.
"A perfect match!" he shouts.
He has just enough time to jump down and start running before the policeman shouting at him arrives at the intersection.
"No more chases!" you gasp, easily out of breath.
"No more chasing it right. We're starting again on a ice even keel. How does that sound?"
You hook your arm through his, tweed on tweed. "It sounds safe and wonderful," you sigh, as the two of you disappear inside the Devil's Punchbowl.
THE END
