Slaves of Sleep & the Masters of Sleep

CHAPTER FOUR Jan went round and round his small cell like a white rat spinning about a pole. And his head went faster than he. He shook the bars and yelled at the departing mate, but Malek had no further heed for him. Growing terror caused him to shout at the guard, but the marid, too, was most indifferent. And so it was that Jan dizzied himself by pacing the walls. He could stand a berating, perhaps, and even face a flogging without really cracking, but this situation was the stuff of which madness was made. He had long since ceased to doubt that he was here because, after all, he was here. And what in the name of God did they mean to do with him? Again he besought information from the marid. The guard was small, with a solitary eye in the middle of his head and a twist to his back, garbed in a single cloak. His lack of shoes was backed by ample reason. He had hoofs. “Be quiet,” said the marid at last. “Better you sleep.” And with that he faced the other way and was wholly deaf. At long, long last Jan wearied himself to exhaustion. He sank down on the pile of blankets and buried his face in his arms, striving to gather and tie the loose ends of his nerves. His strange position was bad enough, but not even to be himself …! Who and what was this “Tiger”? True, he had some slight resemblance to Jan Palmer, but that was not enough. Tiger was known here, known for a bad actor, it seemed. But if Jan Palmer was now Tiger, where was Tiger? He could not answer that and the weight of it was the proverbial straw. His mind went wholly blank and he lay in apathy. Once or twice he reasoned that this was still the jail. But each time he lifted his head to prove it, there was the marid in all his evil dignity. Yes, and in the damp air was the hissing sound of the clean hull carving through the waves, that and the song of wind through rigging far, far above. This was a sea, an unknown sea. This was a brig of a ship, the like of which had not sailed the seas for a hundred years and more. It was too much. And at last Jan dozed, drifting more deeply into slumber. To no avail. He had no more than shut his eyes when he was startled by the slam of iron-barred doors and the rattle of dishes which immediately followed. Voices were hollow in the concrete hall and Jan sat up. He looked carefully all around him. It was no marid at the door but a blue-coated policeman engaged in shoving a tray of food under the door. “You gonna sleep forever?” said Diver Mullins, scraping halfheartedly at his lathered face. “Y’rolled and tossed all night long. I hardly got a chance to close m’eyes.” “I … I’m sorry,” said Jan, blinking at the cell around him and experiencing an uplift of heart. Thankfully he took a deep breath only to choke on the disinfectant in the air. But that hardly lessened his thankfulness. It was quite plain to him now that the ship and the ifrīts had been of the substance of nightmares. And, more than that, when he looked in the glass and found that Jan Palmer’s sickly visage gazed back at him, he wanted to shout for joy. “Geez, for a gent that’s about to be stretched,” said Diver Mullins, “you sure can put on the happy act.” “Beg pardon?” said Jan. “It ain’t right,” said Diver petulantly. “You commit a moider after supper and you wake up singin’ like a canary bird.” “Murder?” “Don’t tell me,” said Diver, “that you went and forgot about it.” Jan groaned and sank back on his bunk. He held his face in his hands to steady himself as the black ink of memory drowned him. Murder. He was in here for murder. An ifrīt named Zongri had killed a man named Frobish and now they were going to hang a hopelessly innocent Palmer for the deed. “Now I done it,” said Diver. “I’d ruther you’d chirp than beller, my fine-fettered friend. Cheer up. They only hang a man once.” So saying he hauled the tray close to him and speared the soggy hot cakes with every evidence of appetite. “C’mon and eat.” Jan, mechanically ready to obey almost anybody, accordingly hitched a stool up to the table and took the offered plate. He even went so far as to butter the dough blankets and convey a forkful to his mouth. And then he found out what he was doing and gagged. He crawled to his bed and sprawled upon it, face down. “They ain’t as bad as that,” said Diver. “’Course, in lotsa jails they serve lots better belly paddin’, but my motto is to take what y’can get your hooks into and don’t ask too many questions. Nobody never measured me for a noose or even said they was going to, so I ain’t had a lot of experience. But, hell, you hadn’t ought to let it get you down like that. You get borned and then you live awhile and then somebody knocks you off or you get pneumonia or something and there you are. Now, take me, I don’t have the faintest notion of how I’ll meet m’Maker. The information ain’t to be had. But you, now, that’s different. It’s all cut and dried and you ain’t got to worry about it anymore. So that’s that. C’mon and have some hot cakes before they get cold.” As Jan made no move to answer the invitation, Diver philosophically conveyed the second portion to his own plate and, with the usual appetite of the very thin, put them easily down and finally, having cleared the tray, looked mournfully under the napkins to locate more. His search unavailing, he slid it back into the corridor and fell into a conversation with a counterfeiter across the block. With great leisure, as men do when they know they have lots of time to pass, they discussed the latest inmate with great thoroughness and Diver, after fishing for coaxing, finally laid aside an air of mystery and divulged Jan’s story. “Hophead, huh?” said the counterfeiter. “Yeah, guess so. He don’t eat nothin’ and that’s another reason. He evidently is feelin’ the mornin’ after, no doubt.” “I know where I can get him some,” said the counterfeiter confidentially. “Yeah? When he gets over his fit I’ll ask him if he wants it. He had nightmares last night fit to shake the place down.” “Yeah, I heard him.” “Snow’s pretty awful stuff.” “Ain’t it,” said the counterfeiter. “Why, oncet I had a sniffer in my outfit—Goo-goo, the boys called’m—and this here Goo-goo …” Jan tried not to listen, even stuffing his ears with the edge of the blanket, but one story led to another and finally they got on the subject of being hanged. “So they sprung the trap three times on this gent,” said the counterfeiter, “and it wouldn’t sag with him. They’d take him off and put him back and try her again and still she wouldn’t work. Well, the guy fainted finally, but they brought him around and put him on the trap once more. Well, sir, this time she sure worked. He dropped like a rock and the rope snapped his spine like you’d c***k walnuts. But how do you like that, huh? Three times and it don’t work.” “Leave it to the Law,” said Diver. “They can’t even hang a man straight.” “Somebody coming,” said the counterfeiter. The block fell silent, watching the approach of the visitors. All but Jan clung to the bars, for he was in a state of coma induced by the late conversations. “Hiyah, Babe,” said a jailbird down the row. “Geez, some looker,” said Diver, now that he could see the party. A series of such comments and calls ran the length of the place and then the party stopped before Jan’s door while a jailer, with much important key rattling, got the lock open. Diver backed up and gave the prostrate Jan a wicked kick to wake him. Resentfully, Jan sat up, about to protest, but all such thought left him when he found that Alice Hall stood before him. She had carried herself like a sentry through the block just as though the jailbirds did not exist and now, with a tinge of pity upon her lovely face, she stood taking off her gloves and studying Jan just as though she were about to begin an operation to change his luck. “Well, well, well, my boy,” said a very, very, very, very hearty voice—one which the owner fondly thought capable of carrying him, someday, to the Senate. “What are they doing to you?” Jan dragged his eyes away from Alice and woke up to the presence of two others in his cell—Shannon, Bering Sea Steamship’s legal department head, and Nathaniel Green. Shannon was very plump and so fitted his manner to the recognized one for all plump men. He was very hearty, very well met and very reassuring, though there were those (who had no doubt lost cases to him) who said it was all sham. The fellow’s mouth, in its absence of a sufficient chin and nose, looked like nothing if not a shark’s. One supposed he had to turn over on his back to eat, so tightly and immobilely did his fat neck sit in his collar. Jan looked nervous and was not at all sure that he wanted to talk to these two gentlemen. He resented their presence all the more because Alice Hall was there, and how badly he wanted to have her sit on the small stool and hear his flood of grief and then give him very sound advice in return. Didn’t her brave face have a tinge of pity in it? “Have you out in no time,” said Shannon, sitting down on Diver’s bunk so that Diver had to hastily get out of his way. “Don’t mind me,” said Diver resentfully. Shannon twirled his hat and paid no attention to anything save the crown of the bowler. He was getting serious now, evidently opening up a whole weighty library of immense legal tomes in his head. “Yes, my boy, serious as this is, we should have no difficulty in getting you freed, eh, Mr. Green?” “Of course,” said Green swiftly. He hadn’t seated himself at all, and looked as though he was about to hurry off on some important errand or other. “Must be done. The company, you understand, is in no such position that it can bear this publicity. Look,” and he jerked a sheaf of papers out of his pocket and tossed them to the bunk beside Jan where they fanned out into blazing headlines, “MILLIONAIRE SHIPOWNER SLAYS PROFESSOR” and the like. Jan shuddered when he saw them and drew back. “Ha, ha, I don’t blame you,” said Shannon. “But people forget. Never mind that sort of thing. The point is, we want your version of this … er … crime. Then, we’ll demand a bail to be set and take you home.” He got serious once more. “Now, to begin, just how did this thing happen?”