Explore "The Black Abbot" by Perley Poore Sheehan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE Black Abbot had either a curious sense of humor or a queer gift for the refinements of torture. For a time he'd appeared to forget Shattuck entirely. He ordered tea. He smoked a pipe, and the odor of this was that of English tobacco flavored with a drug that Shattuck couldn't identify. And all the time that he was doing this he wound and rewound and played off the same old roll of a mechanical piano just back of Shattuck's head. What the tune was, Shattuck would never know. Here and there was a bar or a phrase that seemed vaguely familiar at first. But the rest was clatter and bang, a stuttering lapse, then a fresh explosion of clanging discord.
Shattuck shut not only his eyes but his ears. He did this by a mental effort, remembering that he'd been practically crazy once--from a blow on his head--and might get that way again. Gradually, he controlled his breathing as well. The silk cord was near the strangulation point about his neck.