Puppet on a Chain

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was early afternoon when I got back to Amsterdam and the sun that had looked down on Maggie's death that morning had symbolically gone into hiding. Heavy dark cloud rolled in from the Zuider Zee. I could have reached the city an hour earlier than I did, but the doctor in the put-patients department of the suburban hospital where I'd stopped by to have my face fixed had been full of questions and annoyed at my insistence that sticking-plaster — a large amount of it, admittedly — was all I required at the moment and that the stitching and the swathes of white bandaging could wait until later. What with the plaster and assorted bruises and a half-closed left eye I must have looked like the sole survivor from an express train crash, but at least I wasn't bad enough to send young children screaming for their mothers.

I parked the police taxi not far from a hire-garage where I managed to persuade the owner to let me have a small black Opel. He wasn't very keen, as my face was enough to give rise in anyone's mind to doubts about my past driving record, but he let me have it in the end. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall as I drove off, stopped by the police car, picked up Astrid's handbag and two pairs of handcuffs for luck, and went on my way.

I parked the car in what was by now becoming a rather familiar side-street to me and walked down towards the canal. I poked my head around the corner and as hastily withdrew it again: next time I looked I merely edged an eye round.

A black Mercedes was parked by the door of the Church of the American Huguenot Society. Its capacious boot was open and two men were lifting an obviously very heavy box inside: there were already two or three similar boxes deeper inside the boot. One of the men was instantly identifiable as the Reverend Goodbody: the other man, thin, of medium height, clad in a dark suit and with dark hair and a very swarthy face, was as instantly recognizable: the dark and violent man who had gunned down Jimmy Duclos in Schiphol Airport. For a moment or two I forgot about the pain in my face. I wasn't positively happy at seeing this man again but I was far from dejected as he had seldom been very far from my thoughts. The wheel, I felt, was coming full circle.

They staggered out from the church with one more box, stowed it away and closed the boot. I headed back for my Opel and by the time I'd brought it down to the canal Goodbody and the dark man were already a hundred yards away in the Mercedes. I followed at a discreet distance.

The rain was falling in earnest now as the black Mercedes headed west and south across the city. Though not yet midafternoon, the sky was as thunderously overcast as if dusk, still some hours away, was falling. I didn't mind, it made for the easiest of shadowing: in Holland it is required that you switch your lights on in heavy rain, and in those conditions one car looked very like the dark shapeless mass of the next.

We cleared the last of the suburbs and headed out into the country. There was no wild element of pursuit or chase about our progress. Goodbody, though driving a powerful car, was proceeding at a very sedate pace indeed, hardly surprising, perhaps, in view of the very considerable weight he was carrying in the boot. I was watching road signs closely and soon I was in no doubt as to where we were heading: I never really had been.

I thought it wiser to arrive at our mutual destination before Goodbody and the dark man did, so I closed up till I was less than twenty yards behind the Mercedes. I had no worry about being recognized by Goodbody in his driving mirror for he was throwing up so dense a cloud of spray that all he could possibly have seen following him was a pair of dipped headlamps. I waited till I could see ahead what seemed to be a straight stretch of road, pulled out and accelerated past the Mercedes. As I drew level Goodbody glanced briefly and incuriously at the car that was overtaking him, then looked as incuriously away again. His face had been no more than a pale blur to me and the rain was so heavy and the spray thrown up by both cars so blinding that I knew it was impossible that he could have recognized me. I pulled ahead and got into the right-hand lane again, not slackening speed.

Three kilometres further on I came to a right-hand fork which read 'Kasteel Linden 1 km 5 I turned down this and a minute later passed an imposing stone archway with the words 'Kasteel Linden' engraved in gilt above it. I carried on for perhaps another two hundred yards, then turned off the road and parked the Opel in a deep thicket.

I was going to get very wet again but I didn't seem to have much in the way of options. I left the car and ran across some thinly wooded grassland till I came to a thick belt of pines that obviously served as some kind of windbreak for a habitation. I made my way through the pines, very circumspectly, and there was the habitation all right: the Kasteel Linden. Oblivious of the rain beating down on my unprotected back, I stretched out in the concealment of long grass and some bushes and studied the place.

Immediately before me stretched a circular gravelled driveway which led off to my right to the archway I'd just passed. Beyond the gravel lay the Kasteel Linden itself, a rectangular four-storeyed building, windowed on the first two stories, embrasured above, with the top turreted and crenellated in the best medieval fashion. Encircling the castle was a continuous moat fifteen feet in width and, according to the guide-book, almost as deep. All that was lacking was a drawbridge, although the chain pulleys for it were still to be seen firmly embedded in the thick masonry of the walls: instead, a flight of about twenty wide and shallow stone steps spanned the moat and led to a pair of massive closed doors, which seemed to be made of oak. To my left, about thirty yards distant from the castle, was a rectangular, one-storeyed building in brick and obviously of fairly recent construction.

The black Mercedes appeared through the gateway, crunched its way on to the gravel and pulled up close to the rectangular building. While Goodbody remained inside the car, the dark man got out and made a complete circuit of the castle: Goodbody never had struck me as the kind of man to take chances. Goodbody got out and together the two men carried the contents of the boot into the building: the door had been locked but obviously Goodbody had the right key for it and not a skeleton either. As they carried the last of the boxes inside the door closed behind them.

I rose cautiously to my feet and moved around behind the bushes until I came to the side of the building. Just as cautiously I approached the Mercedes and looked inside. But there was nothing worthy of remark there — not what I was looking for anyway. With an even greater degree of caution I tip-toed up to a side window of the building and peered inside.

The interior was clearly a combination of workshop, store and display shop. The walls were hung with old-fashioned — or replicas of old-fashioned — pendulum clocks of every conceivable shape, size and design. Other clocks and a very large assortment of parts of other clocks lay on four large work-tables, in the process of manufacture or reassembly or reconstruction. At the far end of the room lay several wooden boxes similar to the ones that Goodbody and the dark man had just carried inside: those boxes appeared to be packed with straw. Shelves above those boxes held a variety of other clocks each having lying beside it its own pendulum, chain and weights.

Goodbody and the dark man were working beside those shelves. As I watched, they delved into one of the open boxes and proceeded to bring out a series of pendulum weights. Goodbody paused, produced a paper and proceeded to study it intently. After some time Goodbody pointed at some item on this paper and said something to the dark man, who nodded and went on with his work: Goodbody, still studying the paper as he went, passed through a side door and disappeared from sight. The dark man studied another paper and began arranging pairs of identical weights beside each other.

I was beginning to wonder where Goodbody had got to when I found out. His voice came from directly behind me.

'I am glad you haven't disappointed me, Mr Sherman.'

I turned round slowly. Predictably, he was smiling his saintly smile and, equally predictably, he had a large gun in his hand.

'No one is indestructible, of course,' he beamed, 'but you do have a certain quality of resilience, I must confess. It is difficult to underestimate policemen, but I may have been rather negligent in your case. Twice in this one day I had thought I had got rid of your presence, which, I must admit was becoming something of an embarrassment to me., However, I'm sure third time, for me, will prove lucky. You should have killed Marcel, you know.'

'I didn't?'

'Come, come, you must learn to mask your feelings and not let your disappointment show through. He recovered for a brief moment but long enough to attract the attention of the good ladies in the field. But I fear he has a fractured skull and some brain haemorrhage. He may not survive.' He looked at me thoughtfully. 'But he appears to have given a good account of himself.'

'A fight to the death,' I agreed. 'Must we stand in the rain?'

'Indeed not.' He ushered me into the building at the point of his gun. The dark man looked around with no great surprise: I wondered how long had elapsed since they had the warning message from Huyler.

'Jacques,' Goodbody said. 'This is Mr Sherman — Major Sherman. I believe he is connected with Interpol or some other such futile organization.'

'We've met,' Jacques grinned.

'Of course. How forgetful of me.' Goodbody pointed his gun at me while Jacques took mine away.

'Just the one,' he reported. He raked the sights across my cheek, tearing some of the plaster away, and grinned again. 'I'll bet that hurts, eh?'

'Restrain yourself, Jacques, restrain yourself,' Goodbody admonished. He had his kindly side to him; if he'd been a cannibal he'd probably have knocked you over the head before boiling you alive. 'Point his gun at him, will you?' He put his own away. 'I must say I never did care for those weapons. Crude, noisy, lacking a certain delicacy — '

'Like hanging a girl from a hook?' I asked. 'Or stabbing one to death with pitchforks.'

'Come, come, let us not distress ourselves.' He sighed. 'Even the best of you people are so clumsy, so obvious. I had, I must confess, expected rather more from you. You, my dear fellow, have a reputation which you've totally failed to live up to. You blunder around. You upset people, fondly imagining you are provoking reactions in the process. You let yourself be seen in all the wrong places. Twice you go to Miss Lemay's flat without taking precautions. You rifle pockets of pieces of paper that were put there for you to discover, and there was no need,' he added reproachfully, 'to kill the waiter in the process. You walk through Huyler in broad daylight — every person in Huyler, my dear Sherman, is a member of my flock. You even left your calling card in the basement of my church the night before last — blood. Not that I bear you any ill-will for that, my dear fellow — I was in fact contemplating getting rid of Henri, who had become rather a liability to me, and you solved the problem rather neatly. And what do you think of our unique arrangements here — those are all reproductions for sale…'

'My God,' I said. 'No wonder the churches are empty.' 'Ah! But one must savour those moments, don't you think? Those weights there. We measure and weigh them and return at suitable times with replacement weights — like those we brought tonight. Not that our weights are quite the same. They have something inside them. Then they're boxed, Customs inspected, sealed and sent on with official Government approval to certain — friends — abroad. One of my better schemes, I always maintain.'

Jacques cleared his throat deferentially. 'You said you were in a hurry, Mr Goodbody.'

'Ever the pragmatist, Jacques, ever the pragmatist. But you're right, of course. First we attend to our — ah — ace investigator, then to business. See if the coast is clear.'

Goodbody distastefully produced his pistol again while Jacques made a quiet reconnaissance. He returned in a few moments, nodding, and they made me precede them out of the door, across the gravel and up the steps over the moat to the massive oaken door. Goodbody produced a key of the right size to open the door and we passed inside. We went up a flight of stairs, along a passage and into a room.

It was a very big room indeed, almost literally festooned with hundreds of clocks. I'd never seen so many clocks in one place and certainly, I knew, never so valuable a collection of clocks. All, without exception, were pendulum clocks, some of a very great size, all of great age. Only a very few of them appeared to be working, but, even so, their collective noise was barely below the level of toleration. I couldn't have worked in that room for ten minutes.

'One of the finest collections in the world,' Goodbody said proudly as if it belonged to him, 'if not the finest. And as you shall see — or hear — they all work.'

I heard his words but they didn't register. I was staring at the floor, at the man lying there with the long black hair reaching down to the nape of his neck, at the thin shoulder-blades protruding through the threadbare jacket. Lying beside him were some pieces of single-core rubber-insulated electrical cable. Close to his head lay a pair of sorbo-rubber-covered earphones.

I didn't have to be a doctor to know that George Lemay was dead.

'An accident,' Goodbody said regretfully, 'a genuine accident. We did not mean it to happen like this. I fear the poor fellow's system must have been greatly weakened by the privations he has suffered over the years.'

'You killed him,' I said.

'Technically, in a manner of speaking, yes.'

'Why?'

'Because his high-principled sister — who has erroneously believed for years that we have evidence leading to the proof of her brother's guilt as a murderer — finally prevailed upon him to go to the police. So we had to remove them from the Amsterdam scene temporarily — but not, of course, in such a way as to upset you. I'm afraid, Mr Sherman, that you must hold yourself partly to blame for the poor lad's death. And for that of his sister. And for that of your lovely assistant — Maggie, I think her name was.' He broke off and retreated hastily, holding his pistol at arm's length. 'Do not throw yourself on my gun. I take it you did not enjoy the entertainment? Neither, I'm sure, did Maggie. And neither, I'm afraid, will your other friend Belinda, who must die this evening. Ah! That strikes deep, I see. You would like to kill me, Mr Sherman.' He was smiling still, but the flat staring eyes were the eyes of a madman.

'Yes,' I said tonelessly, 'I'd like to kill you.'

'We have sent her a little note.' Goodbody was enjoying himself immensely. 'Code word "Birmingham", I believe… She is to meet you at the warehouse of our good friends Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, who will now be above suspicion for ever. Who but the insane would ever contemplate perpetrating two such hideous crimes on their own premises? So fitting, don't you think? Another puppet on a chain. Like all the thousands of other puppets throughout the world — hooked and dancing to our tune.'

I said: 'You know, of course, that you are quite mad?'

'Tie him up,' Goodbody said harshly. His urbanity had cracked at last. The truth must have hurt him.

Jacques bound my wrists with the thick rubber-covered flex. He did the same for my ankles, pushed me to one side of the room and attached my wrists by another length of rubber cable to an eyebolt on the wall.

'Start the clocks!' Goodbody ordered. Obediently, Jacques set off around the room starting the pendulums to swing: significantly, he didn't bother about the smaller clocks.

'They all work and they all chime, some most loudly,' Goodbody said with satisfaction. He was back on balance again, urbane and unctuous as ever. Those earphones will amplify the sound about ten times. There is the amplifier there and the microphone there, both, as you can see, well beyond your reach. The earphones are unbreakable. In fifteen minutes you will be insane, in thirty minutes unconscious. The resulting coma lasts from eight to ten hours. You will wake up still insane. But you won't wake up. Already beginning to tick and chime quite loudly, aren't they?'

This is how George died, of course. And you will, watch it all happen. Through the top of that glass door, of course. Where it won't be so noisy.'

'Regrettably, not all. Jacques and I have some business matters to attend to. But we'll be back for the most interesting part, won't we, Jacques?'

'Yes, Mr Goodbody,' said Jacques, still industriously swinging pendulums. 'If I disappear — '

'Ah, but you won't. I had intended to have you disappear last night in the harbour but that was crude, a panic measure lacking the hallmark of my professionalism. I have come up with a much better idea, haven't I, Jacques?'

'Yes, indeed, Mr Goodbody.' Jacques had now almost to shout to make himself heard.

The point is you're not going to disappear, Mr Sherman. Oh, dear me. no. You'll be found, instead, only a few minutes after you've drowned.' 'Drowned?'

'Precisely. Ah, you think, then the authorities will immediately suspect foul play. An autopsy. And the first thing they see are forearms riddled with injection punctures — I have a system that can make two-hour-old punctures look two months old. They will proceed further and find you full of dope — as you will be. Injected when you are unconscious about two hours before we push you, in your car, into a canal, then call the police. This they will not believe. Sherman, the intrepid Interpol narcotics investigator? Then they go through your luggage. Hypodermics, needles, heroin, in your pockets traces of cannabis. Sad, sad. Who would have thought it? Just another of those who hunted with the hounds and ran with the hare.'

'I'll say this much for you,' I said, 'you're a clever madman.'

He smiled, which probably meant he couldn't hear me above the increasing clamour of the clocks. He clamped the sorbo-rubber earphones to my head and secured them immovably in position with literally yards of Scotch tape. Momentarily the room became almost hushed — the earphones were acting as temporary sound insulators. Goodbody crossed the room towards the amplifier, smiled at me again and pulled a switch.

I felt as if I had been subjected to some violent physical blow or a severe electrical shock. My whole body arched and twisted in convulsive jerks and I knew what little could be seen of my face under the plaster and Scotch tape must be convulsed in agony. For I was in agony, an agony a dozen times more piercing and unbearable than the best — or the worst — that Marcel had been able to inflict upon me. My ears, my entire head, were filled with this insanely shrieking banshee cacophony of sound. It sliced through my head like white-hot skewers, it seemed to be tearing my brain apart. I couldn't understand why my eardrums didn't shatter. I had always heard and believed that a loud enough explosion of sound, set off close enough to your ears, can deafen you immediately and for life: but it wasn't working in my case. As it obviously hadn't worked in George's case. In my torment I vaguely remembered Goodbody attributing George's death to his weakened physical condition.

I rolled from side to side, an instinctive animal reaction to escape from what is hurting you, but I couldn't roll far, Jacques had used a fairly short length of rubber cable to secure me to the eyebolt and I could roll no more than a couple of feet in either direction. At the end of one roll I managed to focus my eyes long enough to see Goodbody and Jacques, now both outside the room, peering at me with interest through the glass-topped door: after a few seconds Jacques raised his left wrist and tapped his watch. Goodbody nodded in reluctant agreement and both men hurried away. I supposed in my blinding sea of pain that they were in a hurry to come back to witness the grand finale.

Fifteen minutes before I was unconscious, Goodbody had said. I didn't believe a word of it, nobody could stand up to this for two or three minutes without being broken both mentally and physically. I twisted violently from side to side, tried to smash the earphones on the floor or to tear them free. But Goodbody had been right, the earphones were unbreakable and the Scotch tape had been so skilfully and tightly applied that my efforts to tear the phones free resulted only in reopening the wounds on my face.

The pendulums swung, the clocks ticked, the chimes rang out almost continuously. There was no relief, no let-up, not even the most momentary respite from this murderous assault on the nervous system that triggered off those uncontrollable epileptic convulsions. It was one continuous electric shock at just below the lethal level and I could now all too easily give credence to tales I had heard of patients undergoing electric shock therapy who had eventually ended up on the operating table for the repair of limbs fractured through involuntary muscular contraction.

I could feel my mind going, and for a brief period I tried to help the feeling along. Oblivion, anything for oblivion. I'd failed, I'd failed all along the line, everything I'd touched had turned to destruction and death. Maggie was dead, Duclos was dead, Astrid was dead and her brother George. Only Belinda was left and she was going to die that night. A grand slam.

And then I knew. I knew I couldn't let Belinda die. That was what saved me, I knew I could not let her die. Pride no longer concerned me, my failure no longer concerned me, the total victory of Goodbody and his evil associates was of no concern to me. They could flood the world with their damned narcotics for all I cared. But I couldn't let Belinda die.

Somehow I pushed myself up till my back was against the wall. Apart from the frequent convulsions, I was vibrating in every limb in my body, not just shaking like a man with the ague, that would have been easily tolerated but vibrating as a man would have been had he been tied to a giant pneumatic drill. I could no longer focus for more than a second or two, but I did my best to look fuzzily, desperately around to see if there was anything that offered any hope of salvation. There was nothing. Then, without warning, the sound in my head abruptly rose to a shattering crescendo — it was probably a big clock near the microphones striking the hour — and I fell sideways as if I'd been hit on the temple by a two-by-four. As my head struck the floor it also struck some projection low down on the skirting board.

My focusing powers were now entirely gone, but I could vaguely distinguish objects not less than a few inches away and this one was no more than three. It says much for my now almost completely incapacitated mind that it took me several seconds to realize what it was, but when I did I forced myself into a sitting position again. The object was an electrical wall-socket.

My hands were bound behind my back and it took me for ever to locate and take hold of the two free ends of the electrical cable that held me prisoner. I touched their ends with my fingertips: the wire core was exposed in both cases. Desperately, I tried to force the ends into the sockets — it never occurred to me that it might have been a shuttered plug, although it would have been unlikely in so old a house as this — but my hands shook so much that I couldn't locate them. I could feel consciousness slipping away. I could feel the damned plug, I could feel the sockets with my fingertips, but I couldn't match the ends of the wire with the holes. I couldn't see any more, I had hardly any feeling left in my fingers, the pain was beyond human tolerance and I think I was screaming soundlessly in my agony when suddenly there was a brilliant bluish-white flash and I fell sideways to the floor.

How long I lay there unconscious I could not later tell: it must have been at least a matter of minutes. The first thing 1 was aware of was the incredible glorious silence, not a total silence, for I could still hear the chiming of clocks, but a muffled chiming only for I had blown the right power fuse and the earphones were again acting as insulators. I sat up till I was in a half-reclining position. I could feel blood trickling down my chin and was to find later that I'd bitten through my lower lip: my face was bathed in sweat, my entire body felt as if it had been on the rack. I didn't mind any of it, I was conscious of only one thing: the utter blissfulness of silence. Those lads in the Noise Abatement Society knew what they were about.

The effects of this savage punishment passed off more swiftly than I would have expected, but far from completely: that pain in my head and eardrums and the overall soreness of my body would be with me for quite a long time to come — that I knew. But the effects weren't wearing off quite as quickly as I thought, because it took me over a minute to realize that if Goodbody and Jacques came back that moment and found me sitting against the wall with what was unquestionably an idiotic expression of bliss on my face, they wouldn't be indulging in any half measures next time round. I glanced quickly up at the glass-topped door but there were no raised eyebrows in sight yet.

I stretched out on the floor again and resumed my rolling to and fro. I was hardly more than ten seconds too soon, for on my third or fourth roll towards the door I saw Goodbody and Jacques thrust their heads into view. I stepped up my performance, rolled about more violently than ever, arched my body and flung myself so convulsively to and fro that I was suffering almost as much as I had been when I was undergoing the real thing. Every time I rolled towards the door I let them see my contorted face, my eyes either staring wide or screwed tightly shut in agony and I think that my sweat-sheened face and the blood welling from my lip and from one or two of the reopened gashes that Marcel had given must have added up to a fairly convincing spectacle. Goodbody and Jacques were both smiling broadly, although Jacques's expression came nowhere near Goodbody's benign saintliness.

I gave one particularly impressive leap that carried my entire body clear of the ground and as I near as a toucher dislocated my shoulder as I landed I decided that enough was enough — I doubt if even Goodbody really knew the par for the course — and allowed my stragglings and writhings to become feebler and feebler until eventually, after one last convulsive jerk, I lay still.

Goodbody and Jacques entered. Goodbody strode across to switch off the amplifier, smiled beautifully and switched it on again: he had forgotten that his intention was not only to render me unconscious but insane. Jacques, however, said something to him, and Goodbody nodded reluctantly and switched off the amplifier again — perhaps Jacques, activated not by compassion but the thought that it might make it difficult for them if I were to die before they injected the drugs, had pointed this out — while Jacques went around stopping the pendulums of the biggest clocks. Then both came across to examine me. Jacques kicked me experimentally in the ribs but I'd been through too much to react to that.

'Now, now, my dear fellow — ' I could faintly hear Goodbody's reproachful voice — 'I approve your sentiments but no marks, no marks. The police wouldn't like it.'

'But look at his face,' Jacques protested.

'That's so,' Goodbody agreed amicably. 'Anyway, cut his wrists free — wouldn't do to have gouge marks showing on them when the fire brigade fish him out of the canal: and remove those earphones and hide them.' Jacques did both in the space of ten seconds: when he removed the earphones it felt as if my face was coming with it: Jacques had a very cavalier attitude towards Scotch tape.

'As for him — ' Goodbody nodded at George Lemay — 'dispose of him. You know how. I'll send Marcel out to help you bring Sherman in.' There was silence for a few moments. I knew he was looking down at me, then Goodbody sighed. 'Ah, me. Ah, me. Life is but a walking shadow.'

With that, Goodbody took himself off. He was humming as he went, and as far as one can hum soulfully, Goodbody was giving as soulful a rendition of 'Abide with me' as ever I had heard. He had a sense of occasion, had the Reverend Goodbody.

Jacques went to a box in the corner of the room, produced half a dozen large pendulum weights and proceeded to thread a piece of rubber cable through their eyelids and attach the cable to George's waist: Jacques was leaving little doubt as to what he had in mind. He dragged George from the room out into the corridor and I could hear the sound of the dead man's feels rubbing along the floor as Jacques dragged him to the front of the castle. I rose, flexed my hands experimentally, and followed.

As I neared the doorway I could hear the sound of the Mercedes starting up and getting under way. I looked round the corner. Jacques, with George lying on the floor beside him, had the window open and was giving a sketchy salute: it could only have been to the departing Goodbody.

Jacques turned from the window to attend to George's last rites. Instead he stood there motionless, his face frozen in total shock. I was only five feet from him and I could tell even from his stunned lack of expression that he could tell from mine that he had reached the end of his murderous road. Frantically, he scrabbled for the gun under his arm, but for what may well have been the first and was certainly the last time in his life Jacques was too slow, for that moment of paralysed incredulity had been his undoing. I hit him just beneath the ribs as his gun came clear and when he doubled forward wrested the gun from his almost unresisting hand and struck him savagely with it across the temple. Jacques, unconscious on his feet, took one involuntary step back, the window-sill caught him behind the legs and he began to topple outwards and backwards in oddly slow motion. I just stood there and watched him go, and when I heard the splash and only then, I went to the window and looked out. The roiled waters of the moat were rippling against the bank and the castle walls and from the middle of the moat a stream of bubbles ascended. I looked to the left and could see Goodbody's Mercedes rounding the entrance arch to the castle. By this time, I thought, he should have been well into the fourth verse of 'Abide with me'.

I withdrew from the window and walked downstairs. I went out, leaving the door open behind me. I paused briefly on the steps over the moat and looked down, and as I did the bubbles from the bottom of the moat gradually became fewer and smaller and finally ceased altogether.