Out Of The Silence by Erle Cox — Read

FOR a little space Alan could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. With wildly beating heart and shaking hands he reached for his lamp, and without rising from his seat he turned its glare into the gloom beyond. Then he sat staring before him, big-eyed and wondering. What he saw was a bare circular apartment about twelve feet in diameter. Immediately inside the doorway was a small landing not more than 3 feet square, surrounded on two sides by a balustrade of the same familiar concrete about three feet high, while from the third side appeared a flight of steps that curved with the wall down into the darkness. Right before him near the low ceiling on the opposite wall his eyes were held by a tablet, on which stood out in bold relief three groups of characters, one below the other. The characters were evenly spaced, the top group having three, the middle four, and the lower one six. Moving his light slightly from side to side, Alan's eyes rested on the doorway. "Well! May I be hanged, what's become of the door?" for truly it had vanished. He had heard no sound as it opened, and within there was no trace of it. Then with a chuckle of pleasure he solved the mystery: there was a foot-wide groove where it had been, and flashing his light to his feet he saw that it had slipped downwards into the thickness of the wall till its upper edge came exactly to a level with the floor.

Allowing for eighteen inches outside, a foot for the thickness of the door, and another eighteen inches inside Alan estimated the thickness of the wall to be about four feet, and four feet of such material as he knew it to be composed of meant practical indestructibility. In spite of his quivering excitement, Dundas held himself in hand. His previous experience had made him very wary, and the possibility of unpleasant results made him curb his impatience to investigate further. Without leaving his seat, he turned the light over every visible portion of the interior. Again the tablet with its bold inscription took his eye, and he studied the characters long and thoughtfully. "It might be an address of welcome," he mused, "or, again, it might be a notice to keep off the grass. Looks like a mixture of Russian and Hebrew, with a dash of Persian. Anyway, it's been dead a lot longer than any of the dead languages I've rubbed against, and methinks I'll find no Rosetta stone lying about." Then he turned his light to the winding staircase. "It would appear," he went on, half to himself, "as if I'd found an entrance from the attic, and if I go downstairs I'll come on the furnished apartments." He half rose, but came to rest again in answer to a warning thought. "Alan, my son, it behoves you to move carefully, or you may find yourself in a nasty fix. The architects of this problematically desirable building were no second-raters."