Edgar Wallace

Room 13 Edgar Wallace

OVER the grim stone archway was carved the words: PARCERE SUBJECTIS. In cold weather, and employing the argot of his companions Johnny Gray translated this as "Parky Subjects"-it certainly had no significance as "Spare the Vanquished" for he had been neither vanquished nor spared. Day by day, harnessed to the shafts, he and Lal Morgon had pulled a heavy handcart up the steep slope, and day by day had watched absently the red-bearded gatewarder put his key in the big polished lock and snap open the gates. And then the littleparty had passed through, an armed warder leading, an armed warder behind, and the gate had closed. And at four o'clock he had walked back under the archway and waited whilst the gate was unlocked and the handcart admitted. Every building was hideously familiar. The gaunt "halls," pitch painted against the Dartmoor storms, the low-roofed office, the gas house, the big, barn-like laundry, the ancient bakery, the exercise yard with its broken asphalt, the ugly church, garishly decorated, the long, scrubbed benches with the raised seats for the warders... and thegraveyard where the happily released lifers rested from their labours. One morning in spring, he went out of the gate with a working-party. They were building a shed, and he had taken the style and responsibility of bricklayer's labourer. He liked the work because you can talk more freely on a job like that, and he wanted to hear all that Lal Morgon had to say about the Big Printer.