Tony heaved the stone back into place.

“You can see,” he said, “why I don’t recommend solitary exploring. If something went down there, it wouldn’t come up.”

He led the way along the corridor outside the kitchen, dismissing a series of closed doors with the comment, “More storerooms.”

At the end of the corridor we found something that couldn’t be dismissed so casually.

Stairs led down into Stygian darkness, far below ground level. Below was a short corridor with three doors opening onto it. The doors were of iron, with bolts as thick as Tony’s arm. In the upper half of each door was a small barred opening that could be closed by a sliding iron plate.

We didn’t need Tony’s keys. The doors had not been locked for centuries, not since the last Count of Drachenstein had given up his seignorial privileges of imprisonment and execution to the state. But the doors looked functional, even now.

“They will squeak,” Tony warned, and pushed on the first door.

Squeak was hardly the word. The hinges screamed like a wounded animal.

I was secretly relieved when the flashlight showed no heap of moldering bones, no grinning skeleton held erect by rusted chains. There was nothing in the cell, not even a bench or a shard from a broken water bowl. It was simply a square, windowless stone box about eight feet by eight. Yet there was an aura in that room which would have made human bones seem like meaningless stage props. The cell stank of fear and despair; a miasma of ancient agony shrouded the walls like fog. It required all the courage I possessed to step into that evil little room. From the sound of Tony’s breathing I suspected he didn’t like it either.

The walls and floors seemed to be solid. The second cell was a duplicate of the first, and the third, which was so small that neither of us could stand erect in it, was equally unproductive. Tony let me precede him in a retreat which closely resembled flight, and neither of us stopped running until we stood panting in the Great Hall, with a closed door between us and the grim medieval kitchen.

I don’t know how Tony passed the rest of the day; I spent quite a lot of time washing. I was gray with dust and sticky with perspiration, but I kept on washing long after my surface was clean. The stink of those cells had penetrated to the bone.