Chapter Thirty Three
"Willkommen zu Hölle"
Donnelly couldn't understand it.
After all, from what he had gleaned from Frank Brennan, to reach the door to the old culvert beneath the road at the front of the hotel, was very simple. And yet now, down here in the sombre shadows beneath the Shelbourne, Donnelly wasn't so sure. It had certainly sounded very easy, but somehow, he appeared to have lost his bearings. Had Brennan set him up? Donnelly hoped very much not, because, if he had, there would come a reckoning with Frank which he could guarantee Brennan would not much like.
And there was something else down here too; something that Donnelly could not quite comprehend; an overwhelming sense of palpable dread, of almost tangible foreboding, which darkened, deepened, as he moved ever forward beneath the very foundations of the Shelbourne Hotel.
Donnelly had now come to where two passages crossed.
Was it to the left or to the right? All of these bloody passages looked so very much the same. On both sides of him, wooden doors provided access to numerous cellars and storerooms. Some of these were obviously long disused, were now nothing more than noisome dark, door less voids. Of those which retained their doors and were still in use, some bore enamel plaques upon them indicating what they contained within: - china, crockery, glassware, and cutlery. Not surprisingly there were a wide variety of foodstuffs stored down here too - teas and coffees, tinned preserves, spices, various fruits, marmalade, jams, sugar, all manner of vegetables, bottles of beer, of stout, of wine, and of spirits. The contents of other storerooms were rather more mundane and were stocked with everyday articles such as brooms, brushes, dusters, mops, tins of polish, bars of soap, and supplies of lamp oil. The list of the contents of the various storerooms was varied, and seemingly endless.
Donnelly really did seem to have lost all sense of direction.
Somewhere ahead of him, scurrying footfalls sounded on the stone steps of a staircase. The footsteps grew louder, were heading down the passageway towards him. With not a second to spare, Donnelly dived into a deep alcove close by where he stood stock still. In front of him in the dimly lit passage, carrying a heavy earthenware pitcher, a kitchen porter - he looked to be no more than about sixteen years old - scurried past Donnelly's hiding place in the recess.
Even in the poor light, he could see that the young dark haired lad was very good looking, and, despite the reason for Donnelly's own presence in the passages beneath the hotel, here in the most improbable of places and in the most unlikely of situations, Donnelly felt the unmistakable flicker of arousal. Craning his head, he followed the young porter's progress until the lad turned a corner and disappeared out of sight.
Somewhere, apparently seemingly just above Donnelly's head, someone was playing the piano. The faint, tinkling strains of Haydn Wood's "The Roses of Picardy", a melody which Donnelly knew very well indeed from his time in France, drifted slowly down to his ears through the arched brick ceiling from above. From his rendition of the piece, the pianist was evidently very gifted. Despite the inherent incongruousness of the situation, Donnelly found himself humming the refrain:-
"Roses are flowering in Picardy, but there's never a rose like you!
And the roses will die with the summertime, and our roads may be far apart,
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy!
'tis the rose that I keep in my heart!"
Almost imperceptibly, gradually, the melody faded away, to be replaced by the faint ripple of muted applause. Somewhere a bell rang, a door creaked, a woman laughed, and Donnelly heard the low murmur of voices. A moment or two later and he thought he heard, no, knew he had heard, and close at hand too, a single, low, guttural chuckle. That in itself was so unnerving. For, apart from the young kitchen porter, he was certain that there was no-one else about down here, apart from himself. Donnelly was sure he was completely alone; there definitely was no-one else down here. So who was it who owned the laugh he had just heard, what was the joke, and at whose expense had it been made?
Something about that chuckle made him shiver.
It put Donnelly in mind of a curious experience which he had heard related by the sole survivor of a party of British sappers, of something that had befallen him and his mates not long before the war finally ended.
As a result of counter tunnelling operations, the sappers had chanced upon a long abandoned German dugout deep below ground, not far from the ruins of Ypres in Belgium. When the British sappers broke through into the dugout, it became clear that the group of German soldiers they found entombed inside it had all been buried alive, the victims of some past enormous bombardment, which had probably occurred in 1914, soon after the war had begun. Some of the German soldiers, all of them now no more than skeletons, were seemingly in the very positions the men had been in at the time of the explosion which had buried them. Several were sitting upright on a bench; two were lying in what had been their beds, while another was at the bottom of a flight of wooden steps, blown there by the force of the blast.
Leading off from one of the subterranean passageways, which was probably what had put Donnelly in mind of the tale, was a small room. Within, the sappers had found themselves looking upon a scene of horror. Seated round a rickety table, still wearing the rags of their uniforms, were the grinning skeletal corpses of what were once three German soldiers. It had been probably nothing more than the rush of air from the outside permeating into the long sealed dugout, but the surviving sapper told Donnelly that just as they entered the chamber he heard what sounded like a low laugh.
Painted in Black Letter script on a piece of wood nailed to the entrance to the low wooden walled room were the words:-
"Willkommen zu Hölle" - "Welcome to Hell" – as the sapper freely translated for Donnelly.
As things turned out, for the German soldiers, the sentence had proved uncannily prophetic. They would also be the very last words that all but one of the British sappers ever saw. One of them, who had advanced further into the room than the rest, saw, hanging on the wooden wall behind the three corpses, a spiked pikelhaube German helmet. The young sapper reached for it to take it back with him as a souvenir. A veteran of several campaigns, he really should have known better. It was so obviously a booby trap wired to explode the soon as the helmet was lifted from off the wall. The resultant explosion killed all but one of the sappers entombing them in the mud and dirt along with the skeletal remains of their erstwhile German foes.
Donnelly was just about to leave his hiding place in the alcove, when suddenly he froze absolutely rigid.
Something furry and light had just run across his boots. A mouse surely. Perhaps more than one. Oh God, please don't let it be a rat, he prayed. Please God, not a rat. Donnelly shuddered. From his days in the trenches over on the Western Front, many spent standing ankle-deep in mud and filthy water, Donnelly had developed a profound aversion and a horror of rats. He had seen what they did to the corpses of the fallen. With their vicious pointed yellowed teeth, a group of hungry rats could strip a face clean of flesh right down to the bone, reducing it to a bloodied grinning sightless mask in less than an hour. So hopefully it was just a mouse which had scuttled across his boots.
Determinedly, Donnelly resumed his ever purposeful walk along the stone flagged passage. He was certain he was now moving in the right direction, for from up above him there now came clearly to his ears the discrete chink of china and cutlery, the murmur of conversation. He was directly below the dining room overlooking the street opposite St. Stephen's Green so the entrance to the long abandoned culvert should be ... Ah, yes there it was.
Up above him, in the Shelbourne's grand kitchen an otherwise minor hiccup in the day's regimented proceedings had arisen. The earthenware pitcher of cream fetched up from the storerooms below by young Billy O'Loughlin was found to be tainted. Told to be more careful in future, receiving a stinging cuff around the ears from the enraged sous chef, Billy was immediately despatched back down to the bowels of the hotel for a fresh supply. And, although no-one would ever know it, a singular chain of events had now been set in train.
For the seemingly unremarkable occurrence in the kitchen involving the tainted cream was to have serious and unforeseen consequences for some, indeed for many individuals, including not only Jerry Donnelly, but also all three daughters of the earl and countess of Grantham, and a rising young journalist with the Irish Independent - by the name of Tom Branson