The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  They had traversed the length of the tunnel, but not once had he felt the sticky unpleasant touch of a spider’s web, stretched across the dark space. Surely, Francis thought to himself, this was improbable. There had to be spiders in that tunnel.

  Then he understood what it meant. Someone else had traveled that way, clearing them out.

  He raised his head, and stepped forward. He stood at the edge of another dark, shadowy cavernlike storage room. As back at Amherst, a single weak bulb, stuck in a crevasse near a stairway on the far side provided a pathetic aura of light. Around him were the same piles of discarded material, abandoned equipment, and for an instant, Francis wondered whether they had gone anywhere, or whether they had merely turned in some bizarre circle, for the world was the same. He turned and examined the shadows around him, and had the odd sensation that it appeared that all the debris had been moved, creating a pathway ahead. Peter emerged from the tunnel behind him, brandishing the pistol, crouched over in a shooter’s stance, readying himself.

  “Where are we?” Francis asked.

  Peter did not have time to respond, before the room suddenly fell into utter darkness.

  chapter 34

  Peter inhaled sharply, taking a step back, as if he’d been slapped in the face. At the same moment inwardly he screamed furiously to keep his wits about him, which was difficult in the abrupt wave of night that overcame the two of them. To his side, he heard Francis let out a small cry of fear, and he could sense the younger man cowering down.

  “C-Bird!” he commanded, “don’t move.”

  Francis, for his part, found this an easy order to follow. He was nearly frozen by sudden, total panic. To have felt the momentary relief of some light, after descending into the darkness of the tunnel, to defeat that enveloping danger, to emerge, and then, in a flash, to have that little clarity abruptly severed, terrified him beyond any location he had even known before. In his chest, he could feel every heartbeat, but they told him only that he was still alive, and yet, at the same time, every voice within him screamed that he was on the edge of death.

  “Be quiet!” Peter whispered, as he stepped slightly forward, into the room, into the pitch-black, thumbing back the hammer on the pistol as he did so. He held out his left hand, just touching Francis on the shoulder, to register his position in the basement. The gun preparing to fire made a frightening click in the dark. Then Peter, too, held himself steady, trying not to move, or to make any telltale sound.

  Francis could hear his voices screaming Hide! Hide! but he knew enough to realize that there was likely no hiding, not at that moment. He crouched down, trying to make himself as small as possible, his feet rooted to the cement floor, his breathing coming in shallow, nervous gasps, and he wondered with each whether it was the last he would take. He was only peripherally aware of Peter’s presence, as the Fireman, his own nervousness contradicting his training, dangerously took another step in front of the two of them. His foot made a small clapping sound against the cement floor. He could feel Peter slowly pivoting, first to his right, then his left, as the Fireman tried to determine from which direction the threat would come.

  Calculating fiercely, Francis tried to assess what was taking place. There was little doubt in his mind that the Angel had doused the lights, and was waiting somewhere in the black pit they found themselves trapped inside. The only difference was that the Angel was on familiar ground, and moving through intimate territory, while Peter and he had only a second or two’s glimpse of their surroundings before being locked in the darkness. Francis could feel his hands clenching into fists, and then, like a waterfall’s cascade within him, every muscle tensed, stretched to its limit, shrieking at him to move, but he could not. He was as locked into place as if the cement beneath their feet had been wet, and had solidified around their shoes.

  “Be quiet!” Peter whispered. He continued to swing first one direction, then the other, holding the pistol in front of him, ready to fire.

  Francis could feel the space between him and death narrowing with each passing second. The complete darkness of the room felt like a coffin lid had been slammed shut above him, and the only noise he could hear was the sound of clumps of dirt being shoveled on top. A part of him wanted to cry, to whimper, to shrink away and curl up like a child. The voices shouting within him wanted that desperately. They urged him to run. To take flight. To find some corner where he could huddle alone, hiding. But Francis knew that there was no safety anywhere, beyond the place where he stood, and he tried to hold his breath and listen.

  A scratching sound came from his right. He turned that way. It could have been a rat. It could have been the Angel. Uncertainty was everywhere.

  The darkness made everything equal. Bare hands, a knife, a gun. If the balance of weaponry had belonged to Peter carrying Lucy’s pistol, then it had shifted in more than one way to the man silently stalking them in the basement room. Francis was thinking hard, trying to push reason past the reef of panic that threatened to overtake him. He thought to himself: So much of my life has been spent in darkness, I should be safe.

  The same, he understood, might be true for the Angel.

  Then he thought to himself, what did you see before the darkness came?

  In his imagination, he reconstructed the few seconds of sight that he’d had. And what he understood was this: The Angel had sensed the pursuit, or else had heard the sounds of men trailing after him. He had then made a choice not to flee, but to turn and wait in hiding. He had left the light on just long enough to ascertain who was chasing after him, and then he had brought on the darkness. Francis strained to picture the room. The Angel would come for them down the route that he’d cleared and that he’d traveled before, on more than one occasion. He would not need the light, as long as he could feel his way close enough to deliver death. Francis built the room in his head. He tried to recall exactly where he stood. He craned forward, listening, thinking that his own breathing was like a bass drum; it was so loud that it threatened to obscure any other sound.

  Peter, too, knew they were under attack. Every fiber within him shouted for him to take charge, to do something, to maneuver, prepare, seize the momentum. But he was unable. For a second, he thought the darkness a disadvantage to everyone, but then, he understood it wasn’t. All it did was underscore his vulnerability.

  He, too, knew the Angel had a knife. So it was only a matter of closing the space between them. In the world that trapped him, the gun in his hand seemed far less an advantage than he had thought it would prove.

  He turned right and left. The nearing of panic, mingling with tension, blinded him just as surely as the pitch-black. Reasonable men, faced with reasonable problems can see their way through to reasonable solutions, he knew, but there was nothing reasonable about their circumstances. They were as unable to retreat as they were to charge forward. They could no more move than they could remain rooted in position. Dark like a box contained them.

  Francis thought that the night accentuated sounds, but then, he abruptly understood, it obscured them and distorted them. He told himself the only way to see is to hear and so, in that second, he actually closed his eyes and lifted his head, turning it slightly. He concentrated hard, trying to reach past the Fireman’s form, and gauge where the Angel was.

  To their right, a few feet away, there was a thud.

  They both heard it, and turned that way. Peter lifted his weapon, found all the tension in his body roaring into the pressure of his finger upon the trigger, and he fired wildly once in that direction.

  The explosion of the gun deafened both of them. The flash of the muzzle was like a shock of electricity. The bullet screamed through the darkness, ricocheting into the cavernous room with deadly purpose and no effect.

  Francis could smell gunpowder, almost as if the echo of the shot carried the smell. He could hear Peter’s heavy, excited breathing, and listened to the Fireman curse softly. And then he had a single, terrible thought: Peter had just displayed where the
y were.

  But before he could say anything, or peer back through the darkness in the other direction, he heard a small, alien sound nearly beside him, almost at his feet, and the next thing he knew, some iron form had burst past him, seeming to fly, as if not connected to the floor or the earth, but traveling through the air, smashing into Peter. Knocked aside, Francis fell back hard, stumbling against something, losing his balance, and then tumbling to the ground, hitting his head, all connection with where he was and what was happening disappearing in one disorienting second.

  He struggled, fighting off a wave of dizzying pain and unconsciousness—and then realized that somewhere a few feet away, but beyond his sight, Peter and the Angel were suddenly locked together, their bodies entwined, rolling in the dust and dirt of decades, amid the litter and debris of the basement. Francis reached out with his arm, but the two men had pitched themselves away from him, and for a single, terrifying instant he was totally alone, save for the animal sounds of a desperate struggle taking place somewhere within reach, or perhaps miles away.

  In the Amherst Building, Mister Evans was infuriated, busy trying to organize the patients and return them to their bunk room, but Napoleon, energized by all that had happened, was being difficult, obstinately insisting that they had their orders from C-Bird and the Fireman, and until Miss Jones was transported safely by ambulance, and C-Bird and the Fireman had returned from wherever they had disappeared to, no one was moving. This bit of bravado on the part of the small man was not altogether true, because while he was standing in the center of the corridor facing up to Mister Evil, Newsman at his side for support, many of the other patients had begun to wander about in the space behind them. Down the hall the women still locked in their dormitory were crying out in unison any number of shouted fears—“Murder! Fire! Rape! Help!”—more or less whatever occurred to them in the absence of any understanding of what was going on. The din they created made it hard to concentrate.

  Doctor Gulptilil was hovering over Lucy’s bleeding form, as two paramedics worked over her feverishly. One finally managed to get the bleeding in her leg stifled with a tourniquet, while another worked a plasma drip into her arm. She was pale, hovering on the edge of consciousness, trying to speak, but unable to find words that would work past her dry lips and beyond the pain. She finally gave up and allowed herself to drift in and out of reality, only peripherally aware that people were trying to help her. With Big Black’s assistance, the two paramedics maneuvered her onto a stretcher, and lifted it. Two gray-suited security guards stood to the side, uncertain what to do, awaiting some instructions.

  As Lucy was wheeled out, Gulp-a-pill turned to the Moses brothers. His first instinct was to loudly insist on an explanation, but then, he decided to bide his time. Instead, he merely asked: “Where?”

  Big Black stepped forward. His white attendant’s jacket was streaked with blood from trying to staunch Lucy’s wounds. Little Black was similarly marked.

  “Down the basement,” Big Black said. “C-Bird and the Fireman went after him.”

  Gulptilil shook his head. “Goodness,” he said, under his breath, but thinking that in truth the situation demanded obscenities far worse. “Show me,” he demanded.

  The Moses brothers led the medical director to the basement door. “They went into the tunnel?” Gulptilil asked, already knowing the answer. Big Black nodded. “Do we know where it comes out?”

  Little Black shook his head.

  Doctor Gulptilil had no intention of following anyone through the dark pit of the heating tunnel. He took a deep breath. He was reasonably confident that Lucy Jones would survive her wounds, despite the savagery with which they had been delivered, unless loss of blood and shock conspired to steal her life. That was possible, he thought, with professional detachment. At the moment, though, he didn’t care much what happened to her. But it was abundantly clear to the medical director that someone else was likely to die that night, and he was already trying to anticipate the trouble that was likely to cause him. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “we can speculate that it either emerges in Williams, because that is the closest building, or else travels back to the power plant, so those locations are where we should look.” Of course, what he did not say out loud was that those destinations assumed that Francis and Peter successfully emerged from the tunnel, an assumption that he was not completely willing to make.

  In the darkness, Peter fought hard.

  He knew he was injured severely, but how badly was just beyond his understanding. It was as if each piece of the battle he was fighting was separate, distinct, and he tried to concentrate on each individually, to see if he could put together a defense that was whole. He could feel blood throbbing from a wound in his arm, and he knew that the weight of the Angel was bearing down on him. The pistol that he’d gripped so tightly had disappeared, easily knocked by the force of the Angel’s assault into some black corner, gone from his touch, so that now what he had remaining to fight with was solely a desire to live.

  He punched out hard, finding flesh, and he heard the Angel grunt, then followed it up with another blow, only to feel the knife slash at his arm, digging in sharply, furrowing his own skin. Peter shouted out some sound that wasn’t a part of any language other than that of survival, and kicked as hard as he could with his feet. He battled against shadow, against the idea of death, as much as he did against the killer who was pressing him.

  Locked together, blind and lost, the two men tried to find a way of killing the other. It was an unfair fight, for time and again the Angel was able to plunge the knife down, discovering purchase in Peter’s body, and the Fireman thought he was going to be sliced to pieces slowly by the repeated blows. He lifted his arms, warding off strike after strike, kicking, trying to find some vulnerable spot in the utter black of the moment.

  He could feel the Angel’s breath, feel the man’s strength and thought he would be no match for the deadly combination of the knife and obsession. Still, Peter fought hard, scratching, clawing, hoping for the Angel’s eyes, or perhaps his groin, something that might give him a momentary respite from the knife that chopped at him. He thrust out his left hand, and it grazed against the Angel’s chin, and in a burst of comprehension, knew that the killer’s throat would be close by, so wildly he reached and suddenly felt skin and he closed his hand, choking the man who was trying to kill him. But, in the same instant, he felt the knife suddenly penetrate into his side, digging past flesh and muscle, searching for his stomach, hoping then to turn and rise upward and destroy his heart. Pain sheeted over his eyes, and Peter half gasped, half sobbed at the thought that he was going to die right there, right at that moment, in the darkness. He could feel the knife searching out death, and he grabbed at the Angel’s hand, trying to slow what seemed like an inevitable march.

  And then suddenly, like an explosion, an immense force seemed to slam into the two men.

  The Angel groaned, knocked sideways, his grip on Peter suddenly halved, and the killer spat wordlessly in rage.

  Peter did not know how Francis had managed to assault the Angel from behind, but he had, and now the young man clung to the killer’s back, furiously trying hard to wrap his own hands around the Angel’s throat.

  Francis was shouting some great war cry, high-pitched, terrifying, one that combined all his fears and all his doubts into a single immense song. All his life, he had never fought back, never battled for something more important, never taken a true chance, never understood that this moment was either to be his best or his last, until this very second. And so he threw every ounce of hope into his fight, slamming his fists into the Angel’s back and head, then grappling with the killer, trying to pull him back, off of Peter. He used every ounce of madness to buttress what muscle he had, letting every fear and rejection that he’d ever experienced fuel his battle. He gripped the Angel with a tenacity born of desperation, unwilling to let either nightmare or killer steal from him the only friend he thought he would ever have.


  The Angel twisted and shook, struggling terribly. He was trapped between the two men, the one wounded, the other crazed with fear certainly, but more driven by something larger, and he hesitated, unsure which to fight, uncertain whether to try to finish the first battle and then turn to the second, which seemed increasingly impossible beneath the rain of blows Francis threw. Then he was stymied, when Francis suddenly grabbed hold of the Angel’s arm, and twisted him backward. This abrupt change loosened the pressure that the Angel was putting on the knife in Peter’s side, and with a reserve of strength that seemed to well up from some hidden spot within him, the Fireman seized hold of the Angel’s hand with both of his own, neutralizing the pressure on the knife blade, arresting its drive toward his own death.

  Francis did not know how long his own strength would last him. He knew the Angel was stronger in many ways, and if he was to have a chance, it would have to be right at that moment, right at the start, before the Angel could direct all his attention to him. He pulled as hard as he could, investing every bit of power he had in the desire to free Peter from beneath the Angel’s figure. And, to his astonishment, he succeeded, at least in part. The Angel twisted back, off-balance, then slammed back farther, so that now Francis was caught beneath his body, under his back. Francis tried to wrap his legs around the killer, and he hung on with deadly determination, like a mongoose biting down on a cobra, as the Angel tried to find a way to beat off Francis’s grip.

  And in that second of confusion, the three bodies tangled together, Peter found that the knife in his side was free, and he wrapped his own hand around the handle and, screaming with red pain, he pulled it loose from his body, feeling his life chasing after it with every pulse of his heart. Summoning every bit of remaining strength, Peter grasped the knife, and thrust it forward, hoping that it wasn’t Francis that he killed, searching for the man who he thought very likely had killed him. And when the point of the blade bit flesh, Peter threw all his weight behind it, because, he knew, this was the only chance he had, and all he could hope for was some luck.