 The heat from the hall struck him like a physical blow as he plunged through the front door; the air scorched his lungs like a gust from a red-hot oven. At the far end of the hall long sheets of flame were sweeping greedily up a huge pair of velvet curtains. Smaller flames were dancing over a rug, and leaping with fiercer eagerness up the blackening banisters of a wide staircase. The paint on the broad beams crossing the high ceiling was bubbling and boiling under the heat, and occasionally small drops of it fell in a scalding rain to take hold of new sections of the floor. The Saint hardly checked for an instant before he went on. He dodged across the hall like a flitting shadow and leapt up the stairs four at a time. Fire from the banisters snatched at him as he went up, stung his nostrils with the smell of his own scorching clothes. On the upper landing the smoke was thicker. It made his eyes smart and filled his throat with coughing; his heart was hammering with a dull force that jarred his ribs; he felt an iron band tightening remorselessly around his temples. He stared blearily down the corridor which led in the direction he had to go. Half way along it, great gouts of flame were starting up from the floorboards, waving like monstrous flowers swaying in a blistering wind. It could only be a matter of seconds before the whole passage would plunge down into the incandescent inferno below. The Saint went on. It was not so much a deliberate effort as a yielding to instinctive momentum. He had no time to think about being heroic--or about anything else, for that matter. In that broiling nightmare a second's hesitation might have been fatal. But he had set out to do something, knowing what it might mean; and so long as there was any hope of doing it his only idea was to go on. He kept going with nothing to carry him on but the epic drive of a great heart that had never known what it was to turn back for the threat of danger. He came out in a clear space on the other side of the flames, beating the sparks from his sleeves and trousers. Open doors and glimpses of disordered beds on either side of the passage showed where various rooms had been hastily vacated; but the door of the room at the very end was closed. He fell on the handle and turned it. The door was locked. ... For one dizzy second his brain whirled. And then his lips thinned out, and a red glint came into his eyes that owed nothing to the reflections of the fire. Again he fought his way incredibly through the hellish barrier of flame that shut off the end of the corridor. The charred boards gave ominously under his feet, but he hardly noticed it. He had remembered noticing something through the suffocating murk on the landing. As he beat out his smouldering clothes again he located it--a huge medieval battleaxe suspended from two hooks on the wall at the top of the stairs. He measured the distance and jumped, snatching eagerly. The axe came away, bringing the two hooks with it, and a shower of plaster fell on his face and half blinded him. That shower of grit probably saved his life. He slumped against the wall, trying to clear his streaming eyes; and that brief setback cheated Death for the hundredth time in its long duel with the Saint's guardian angel. For even as he straightened up again with the axe in his hands, about twenty feet of the passage plunged downward with a heart-stopping crash in a swirl of flame, leaving nothing but a gaping chasm through which fire roared up in a fiendish fountain that sent him staggering back before its intolerable heat. The last chance of reaching that locked room was gone. Leslie Charteris (1938; edited 1959) |