by Jerry eBooks
The little men were having a wonderful time with his head. There were two of them, zany little guys, about the size of your hand, with cherubic cheeks and bushy beards and they were dressed like wood nymphs in a Disney picture. They were tossing his head back and forth between them, like some huge, air-filled beach ball. Once in a while, for luck, they would give it a kick, or bounce it between them. They were having great fun.
It wasn’t much fun for Dan Munson, though. It hurt his head to be kicked and bounced like that and it made it dizzy and sick to be tossed through the air, He didn’t like it, He wished the funny little men would stop.
It was almost as though they’d read his mind. They did stop and, with gales of squealing laughter, they disappeared into thin air. This happened as his head was floating midway between them and it suddenly dropped and landed on something with a terrible, painful jolt . . .
Dan Munson awakened right after his skull had smacked against the headboard of the bed. He sat up abruptly in the darkness and the pains and sickening dizziness came back to his head. And he realized now, conscious, that the sensations didn’t come from any little dream men kicking his noggin around, but were merely the brutal reality of a colossal hangover.
He groaned and rocked there in the darkness and muttered those famous words over and over: “Never again, Munson. Never again.”
He tried to think, to remember what had brought this on, but the gears seemed jammed in his brain. Nothing happened. No thoughts, no memories. Nothing but pain. He opened his mouth and smacked his lips, hoping some of the dark purple taste would escape, but it didn’t. So he just sat there for awhile.
Somewhere, off in the darkness, Munson became aware of running water. It seemed that there was a lot of it, like a waterfall, almost. He tried to make some sense out of that, but all he got was a terrific, burning thirst, and a torturing picture of himself, sitting under a mountain waterfall, with his mouth open and thousands of gallons of icy cold, wonderful water cascading down his throat.
Slowly, the gears of his mind began to mesh and he reached out and touched the bedclothes, figured that he’d been asleep on a bed. Very good, so far. His hands ran down his body and found out that he was fully clothed. Then they explored the bed next to him, but it was empty.
Assuming that he was home, in his own bed, where was Laura, his wife? “Oh, Lord!” he groaned into the darkness. “She’ll kill me, getting crocked like that!”
He got up off the bed and stumbled through the blackness of the room, fell over a chair. He picked himself up, rubbing bruised shins, and cursed Laura for moving the furniture again. There shouldn’t have been a chair in that particular place. He staggered toward the doorway and the light switch next to it. His fingers traveled up and down the wall but couldn’t find the switch.
“Now, wait a minute,” he said thickly. “Laura couldn’t have moved the light switch. Impossible.”
He went to walk out through the doorway into the hall and slammed his face against the wall, bouncing back with a little moan of surprise and frustration. The doorway was gone, too. No doorway. What was going on, anyhow?
And that sound of rushing, falling water, which he located as somewhere beneath him, now? It was beginning to annoy him. He wondered vaguely if this whole thing was some nightmare, one of those realistic ones. He shook his head vigorously and learned he wasn’t still asleep, not the way it hurt his head and put bells ringing in his ears and made his temples go in and out like a bellows.
Off to his right, there was the sound of a clock ticking. That was wrong, too. They had an electric clock that hummed a little, didn’t tick at all. He moved cautiously through the blackness toward the sound. His hands, outstretched before him, encountered what seemed to be a dresser, fumbled over it until they came to the base of a lamp. They climbed up the lamp and located a button switch, pressed it. Nothing happened. The lamp didn’t light.
His other hand explored the top of the dresser and found a package of cigarettes and what felt like a lighter. With great concentration, he made the lighter break into flame. He stared at himself across the little yellow light in the dresser mirror and winced.
It was the poor light, he figured. He couldn’t really look like that, even very much hung-over. He was thin all right, but the reflection leering back at him was ghastly, with burning, hollowed eyes and drawn mouth. The dark hair that should have been slicked down from a neat part, was a tousled mess. His shirt collar was open and his tie pulled awry.
“You dirty old drunk!” Dan Munson said to the reflection. “You should be ashamed.”
And then he almost dropped the lighter. He was looking at the clock and it said three A.M. and it was an old-fashioned alarm clock that he’d never seen before. The rest of the paraphernalia on the dresser was strange, too. He backed away from it, horrified. He wasn’t home, at all. He was in a strange house, a strange bedroom.
He turned slowly around, holding the flickering flame of the lighter aloft. What he could see of the rest of the bedroom verified the fact of its strangeness.
He heavy, continuous sound of rushing, pouring water continued and he tried to identify that. Someone was taking a bath, maybe? At three o’clock in the morning, in a darkened house? Besides, it sounded like too much water to be just a faucet running.
He saw the doorway, and there was a light switch next to it. Weaving toward it, he flicked the wall switch up and down with his finger. Still no lights went on. The current must be turned off. What kind of a place was this, anyhow? He went out into the hall and saw the old grandfather’s clock out there and the umbrella stand and a clothes tree, with an old trench-coat on it. Memory came with a rush then, and he knew where he was.
It came clicking back into his mind like a motion picture running backward. When he’d left the office, he’d stopped in at a bar for a quick one with Lew Eshmont, their new insurance salesman. Eshmont was a nice guy in a slick, garrulous, flashy-dressed sort of way.
They’d had a few more on top of that quick one, and it had seemed like a good idea when Eshmont insisted he come home with him for dinner. Especially since he’d been faced with the prospect of eating out that night. Laura had told him that morning that she was going downtown to shop and intended to stay down for a hen-party dinner with girl friends from her old office.
His memory balked then. The rest was vague, hazy. There was blurred remembrance of coming here with Eshmont, to the salesman’s home, a cozy little cottage in the suburbs. There was a not too clear picture of Betty Eshmont, Lew’s wife, a luscious blonde in a slinky black dinner dress. They’d had dinner and it seemed to him there was another man there, Eshmont’s brother, or cousin or somebody. There’d been more drinks after dinner, but that was all he could recall right now.
What had happened after that, Munson wondered. What was he doing still here, so late at night? Why were the lights out and where were the others?
Out in the hall, Munson called out weakly, “Hello, there! Anybody home?” His own voice sounded funny against the silence, hollow, unreal. When nobody answered, he tried again, louder this time, but the result was the same.
Panicky, Munson staggered into the living room, tried the wall light switch there, but without success. The power seemed to be off all over the house. The pale, flickering glow from the lighter he held in his hand spread over most of the small living room. He saw that it was unoccupied so he went out back into the hall and along to the kitchen.
He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked around the small room, illuminated by the wan flame of the cigarette lighter. The room was a wreck. The kitchen table and a couple of chairs were overturned. On the floor was a litter of broken dishes, spilled ash trays, and shattered highball glasses. In the center of the mess was an empty whisky bottle, one side of it stained with ketchup or something.
“Lord!” Munson gasped. “What a wingding we must have thrown! I don’t—”
He broke off. He had suddenly moved the lighter and sent the long shadows leaping t
o another part of the room. Part of the light fell on the other side of the turned-over table and Munson felt his eyes straining almost out of his head. He shut them fast, leaning against the door jamb, his stomach tossing and reaching up toward his throat. He shook his head violently and hardly even noticed the pain of it this time. Then he opened his eyes and looked again.
It wasn’t any trick of the D.T.’s nor any optical illusion brought about by the shadows and dull light. It was there, sure enough, a man sprawled out on the floor, behind the table. The man’s face was turned toward the wall, but Munson didn’t have to see that. He saw the pink silk shirt and the loud, checkered slacks and pointed yellow shoes and the shiny black hair and knew that it was Lew Eshmont lying there.
Only now, part of the back of Eshmont’s head wasn’t shiny black, it was smeared and matted with a sticky, reddish substance. There was a pool of it under his head, too. Munson knew now that the red smear he’d seen on the whisky bottle hadn’t been ketchup, either.
Somebody had conked Lew Eshmont over the head with that bottle. They’d done a real job of it. From the way Eshmont lay, with one leg doubled under him, the stillness of him, Munson knew he was dead.
Some more of the blur cleared from Munson’s mind and he remembered other things that had happened this evening. He remembered the eyes of Lew Eshmont’s wife, Betty, green and long and slightly slanting-provocative, flirting eyes. He remembered the deep, ripe red of her mouth and the way it had smiled at him. He’d tried to pay no attention to the open way she had flirted with him all through dinner. He’d tried to tell himself that she was just being friendly, nice, to one of her husband’s friends. But it hadn’t turned out that way.
Several times, he remembered, after dinner, she’d insisted on dancing with him. At least she had called it that. He’d been plenty embarrassed, too, with Eshmont sitting right there watching them. Eshmont had pretended not to mind, had made joking remarks about it. But there had been an undercurrent in his tone and something in his eyes that made Munson know that Eshmont was not taking it all so lightly.
Several times Munson had told them he was leaving. He wanted to get away before there was any trouble. But each time somebody had insisted on one more drink. The last time he recalled, Betty Eshmont had insisted on going out into the kitchen and making the drink herself and she had pulled Munson out there with her. But as soon as she got into the kitchen, Betty hadn’t bothered making any drink. She had flung herself into his arms.
He could remember now, with little guilty thrusts of conscience, the clinging softness of her, the warmth of her round arms around his neck and the heat of her mouth, pressed against his.
He’d been too dumbfounded, taken by surprise, to do anything for a moment. Then when he started to break away, it was too late. He heard a great roar of rage and looking over Betty’s shoulder he saw Lew Eshmont standing there, his face purple with anger, his fists clenched.
The other man—Magraw, his name was, Munson remembered, Eshmont’s cousin, who lived with them—was with Lew. He’d tried to grab Lew, hold him back. But Lew Eshmont had broken free from Magraw’s grasp and thrown himself at Dan Munson. They had crashed over backward across a chair to the floor. That was all Dan Munson remembered.
As that terrible scene flooded back into his memory, Munson wondered why he didn’t recall any of the rest of it? Had he hit his head against the floor, been knocked out? Or was it just that his mind had blacked out over that part of it? Maybe in the drunken fight that had followed, he’d killed Eshmont. In self-defense, maybe, but even so—
His thoughts cut off that track as his stomach turned even at the idea.
“But what about the rest of it?” he asked himself. “Where are Betty and Magraw? What’s happened to the lights? How—”
And then he listened to the roaring sound of pouring water, much louder, here in the kitchen, and his eyes darted toward the door that led down to the cellar. The noise was coming from down there. Completely sobered now, he knew what that sound was, too.
Showing him over the house, when he’d first got there, Eshmont had taken him down into the cellar. The cellar had been full of half-dried puddles and there was a watermark around the walls, a couple of inches from the floor. Eshmont had pointed out the main water pipe that had burst a few days ago. That section had been replaced with new pipe, but Eshmont had told him the whole thing was rotten and he had to get it all replaced soon. The plumber had told him some other part might spring a leak or burst at any time.
Munson knew now that was what had happened. The water pipe had burst again and the basement was being flooded. The power wires had become inundated and blown all the lights.
Suddenly, through the noise of the pouring, rushing water down below him, there was another, faintly discernible sound. Munson stood frozen, listening, and caught the sound again. This time there was no mistaking it. It was a woman’s voice, crying out for help. He ran across the kitchen to the basement door, flung it open. Cautiously, holding the flickering flame of the lighter out before him, he started down the steps.
Halfway down his foot sank into water up over the ankle. He felt it filling his shoe, icy cold and uncomfortable. Quickly, he withdrew the foot, shaking it furiously, cursing. Down here close at hand, the sound of the escaping water was a great roar. Munson squatted, holding the tiny cigarette lighter flame far out before him. The reddish glow of it fell palely over slickly undulating dirty water, as far across the cellar as he could see. The place was flooded almost to the ceiling.
Then it came again, the cry he’d heard up in the kitchen, more audible this time. “Help! Get me out of here. I—don’t want to drown. I don’t want to die!”
Looking toward the sound of the voice, Munson saw a dimly shadowed object on the other side of the flooded cellar, near where the furnace should have been. It was clinging to some kind of pipe and thrashing the water wildly.
“Betty?” he yelled. “Hold on. Stay with it. I’ll run and get help!”
“No!” she screamed back. “There isn’t—time. I—I can’t hold on much longer. I—”
The voice faded into a sickening gurgling sound and the shadowed object over there in the water disappeared. The splashing ceased.
Swiftly, Munson yanked off his shoes. Holding the lighter high over his head, he bent forward and let himself down into the icy grip of the water. He held the tiny flame above his head and worked with a one-arm sidestroke toward the spot where Betty Eshmont had gone down. He was a few feet away from the spot, shivering and gasping for breath, when her head broke through the surface again, close to him.
No longer was Betty the slinky, blond siren type. Her yellow hair was plastered tight to her head, strands of it clinging in snaky wet tendrils to her cheeks and forehead. The mascara of her eyes had smeared and run, mixed with her other makeup. Her lips were shriveled and blue with cold. Her eyes were walled back in her head.
Just then a draft whisked across the flood waters in the cellar and the cigarette lighter flame puffed out. The darkness seemed to smother Munson like a great shroud. Frantically, he fumbled to set the lighter aflame again and it escaped from his wet, slippery fingers, fell into the water. There would be no more light to guide him.
The next few moments were nightmarish, horrible. He reached out with one hand, swinging it beneath the surface of the water, and his fingers finally tangled into the loose floating strands of Betty’s hair. He got a tight grip and pulled her head above the surface. Next he got his arm around her, under the shoulders. He treaded water for an instant, reached as high as possible with his free hand. It found a steampipe and .his fingers clamped onto it.
Inch by inch he worked along the length of the pipe pulling Betty, limp and unconscious, with him, toward a gray splotch on the far wall, which he figured to be one of the high cellar windows. Halfway there, the girl regained consciousness, stiffened in his embrace, began to thrash about in wild desperation, sobbing hysterically. Munson almost lost his grip on the pipe. Bu
t then he got one hand up on her throat and cut off her wind.
“Stop it!” he yelled. “Calm down or you’ll drown us both. We’ll be all right, if you’ll stop thrashing’ around.”
In a few moments she subsided and Munson took his hand from her throat. She gasped, “I’ll be okay, now. Who—who are you?”
He told her, then asked, “What happened, anyhow? How did you get caught down here like this?”
He felt her shudder. In a dull monotone, she said, “I—I guess I fell down the stairs. I was knocked out. When I came to, I was lying in several inches of water and the cellar was filling fast. I tried to make it back up the stairs, but there was something the matter with one of my legs and I was too weak and dizzy. I couldn’t make it, kept falling back.
“The water got deeper and deeper. I—I finally crawled to a table, then pulled myself up and lay across it. When the water rose, the table floated. It held me up and I got to the top of the furnace. I—”
She broke off, her body jerking convulsively against his arm. “It—it was horrible,” she said. “Get us out of here! Please!”
He was almost to the window now and in a few more moments he turned loose from the overhead pipe and splashed a few strokes to the gray patch of light. Somehow he reached up and undid the latch, got the window open. It was narrow, with barely room to squeeze through, but he made it finally. He got them both out of the cellar.
For several minutes they sprawled there, wet and shivering, on the soft earth in a clump of lilac bushes planted against the side of the house. He reached over and touched Betty Eshmont’s shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get over to the house next door and get warmed up and call the police. I—”
He stopped. Betty wasn’t listening. She’d passed out again. He lifted her limp figure in his arms, walked across a lawn and a driveway, through a privet hedge gap and into the next yard. The neighboring house was a little larger than the Eshmonts’. There were no lights on, but Munson clumped up onto the front porch and kicked at the door with his foot.