Then occurred a movement which nearly brought a cry from my startled lips. A hand, reaching slowly out through the darkness, came in contact with my knee, and clutched it. That contact, coming as it did without warning, without reason, sent a horripilating chill through all my body. The wonder was that I did not kick out, like a frightened colt, or start to flail about me with my flashlight. All I did, however, was to twist and swing away. Yet before I could get to my feet, the hand had clutched the side of my coat. And as those clutching fingers held there, I heard a voice whisper out of the darkness:
"Here, take this," and the moment I heard it I was able to breathe again, for I knew it was Creegan. "You may need it."
He was holding what I took to be a policeman's night-stick up in front of me. I took it from him, marveling how he could have re-entered that room without my hearing him.
"There's a light-switch against the wall there, they say," was his next whispered message to me. "Find it. Keep back there and throw it on if I give the word."
I felt and pawed and padded about the wall for an uncertain moment or two. "Got it?" came Creegan's whispering voice across the darkness.
He did not speak again, for a newer sound fell on both his ears and mine. It was a sound of prodding and prying, as though the men below were jimmying at their loosened square of planking.
I leaned forward, listening, for I could hear the squeak and grate of the shifting timber block. I did not hear it actually fall away. But I was suddenly conscious of a breath of cooler air in the room where I stood and the persistent ripple of water against pile-sides.
Then I heard a treble voice say, "A little higher."
The speaker seemed so close that I felt I could have stooped down and touched his body. I knew, even before I saw the spurt of flame where he struck a match along the floor, that the man was already half-way up through the hole. I could see the dirt-covered, claw-like hand as it held the match, nursing the tiny flame, patiently waiting for it to grow. It was not until this hand held the flaring match up before his very face that Creegan moved.
That movement was as simple as it was unexpected. I had no distinct vision of it, but I knew what it meant. I knew, the moment I heard the dull and sickening impact of seasoned wood against a human skull-bone.