Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  I turned and ran back across the deserted floor to the other end where the fiddler was drinking his beer. A small door in the end wall was open and I ran through it and found myself running in air.

  I only fell a few feet but it seemed like a hundred. I landed in a soft pile of manure that squished up around my ankles and my wrists. I got up and crossed the barnyard and ran around the house to the lane. A pale blue neon light was creeping up two sides of the sky and I could see another farmhouse and a barn a quarter of a mile down the road. There was a light in the house, and I ran for it as hard as I could go.

  Before I got there I heard the car behind me on the road and looked back and saw it coming. I ran like a rabbit hypnotized by headlights straight down the centre of the road to the farmhouse. I ran through an open gate into the front yard and saw a light in an outhouse in the yard and somebody moving inside.

  The car drew up at the gate—it was a coupe all right—and I ran for the outhouse. An old woman working over a cream-separator heard me coming and came to the door of the outhouse. She had a hard, bright face with a long nose in the middle of it.

  I ran up to her and said, “Call your men. There’s a murderer after me.”

  She sniffed and said, “You’ve been drinking. Are you one of the friends of that O’Neill man on the next farm? Look at you, you’re all covered with cow-dirt.” She sniffed again in disgust and her long nose pointed at me like the finger of scorn.

  “Call your husband,” I said. “Tell him to bring a gun.” I looked behind me. Peter was walking across the lawn towards us with his right hand in the pocket of his coat.

  “Why should I bother my husband on a drunkard’s say-so?” the woman said. “He’s out in the barn milking. He’s a respectable man. If you got yourself a steady job you wouldn’t be running around early in the morning smelling of liquor and trying to frighten hard-working people. The Devil finds things for idle hands to do.”

  Peter Schneider was at my shoulder. He said very respectfully as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, “I quite agree, madam. I apologize to you for my friend’s drunkenness.” I felt his gun pressed hard against my buttocks.

  “He should apologize,” she said, bridling with justified virtue. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “He was at one time,” Schneider said. “I still feel some duty towards him. I’ve been looking for him all night to take him back to the hospital.”

  “The hospital! Is he sick?”

  “Not exactly. After a week of steady drinking he succumbed to delirium tremens. The poor fellow is out of his head. He even imagines that I want to kill him.”

  “You’re a true Good Samaritan, young man.”

  “He’s a German spy,” I said. “He killed his father tonight and now he’s trying to kill me.”

  He caught the woman’s eye and laughed infectiously. They laughed together.

  “Mercy me, I shouldn’t laugh at him,” the woman said. “Drink is such a horrible tragedy. But I’m so glad you found him before he destroyed himself.”

  “So am I,” Schneider said. “He needs a nurse’s tender ministrations. I’ll take him back to the hospital now.”

  “Before you go,” the woman said, “will you wait a minute? I have something for him. It may help him.”

  “A gun would help me,” I said. “Nothing else would.” She threw up her hands and eyes and bustled off to the house.

  “You are excessively naive,” Schneider said to me. “I have no intention of shooting you. You are much more precious to me alive.”

  “How you cheer me,” I said. I turned and faced him and saw his unlined, complacent face and the bulge in his pocket. “But you’d better kill me quickly. Otherwise I’m going to kill you.”

  His laughed sounded flatly against the roof of his mouth. The woman came back from the house and handed me a little printed pamphlet. In the growing light I could make out the title The Horrors of the Demon Drink.

  “Thank you very much, madam,” I said.

  “We must go now, Freddie,” Schneider said. “The doctor will be worried.”

  I turned to the woman once more, “I’m a murderer,” I said. “The police are looking for me. My name is Robert Branch. Phone the police in Arbana and tell them you saw me escaping. This man’s name is Peter Schneider.”

  “No more wild tales, Freddie,” Schneider said.

  “Good heavens, he’s out of his mind,” the old woman said. “Delirium tremens is a terrible thing.”

  “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,” I said and turned towards the car. Peter Schneider followed close behind me.

  I passed through the open iron gate outside of which the green coupe was parked with the engine running. The woman was still standing watching us. He couldn’t shoot me in front of a witness. Or could he? I took the chance.

  I slammed the iron gate hard against him as he passed through and he staggered back with a cry.

  “Goodness gracious,” the woman shrieked, “he’s getting away again.”

  I ran towards the road and around the corner of the barn. The road was no good to me; he had a car. Across the road were willow-trees and beyond that an open pasture. I heard running feet behind me. I put the trees between me and Peter, and headed straight across the pasture.

  He came across the pasture fifty feet behind me, but I didn’t look back. I had to get away from him before we were out of sight and earshot of the house, or he would be free to shoot me. There was a deep woods on the other side of the pasture, its half-turned leaves becoming gorgeous in the dawn. I tried to lengthen my stride, but tiredness hung around my thighs like iron hoops.

  A shotgun roared from the woods and a rabbit came running out into the pasture towards me dragging a leg. It saw me and moved floppily aside like an old hat in a wind. Then it fell on its side and kicked once.

  I ran towards it and picked it up and stood holding it by the ears with the blood dripping from it. Peter came up beside me with his chest heaving. “You can’t shoot me here, you bastard,” I said. “The man that shot the rabbit is coming.”

  There were cracklings and rustlings among the trees and two men came out of the woods with shotguns under their arms. They saw me holding the rabbit and broke into a trot. They were young men in bright plaid shirts with smiling faces. One of them held out his hand for the rabbit and I gave it to him.

  “Will one of you fellows lend me his shotgun for one shot?” I said. “Just to shoot at a tree. I haven’t shot a gun for—”

  Peter Schneider broke in, “Don’t give him a gun. This man is an escaped murderer.”

  The young men stood and watched us with blank, smiling faces. One of them took a card out of an inside pocket and handed it to me. It was an old dirty card bearing print which said:

  “John Maldon,

  Speech Institute, Arbana.

  Please excuse me. I am a deaf-mute.”

  I found a pencil in my pocket and wrote on the back of the card: “I’ll give you $40 for your shotgun and some shells. Now.”

  I took two twenties out of my wallet and handed the card and the bills to the young man. He read what I had written and looked at me in smiling surprise. Then he turned to the other hunter and talked to him on his fingers. The other man’s fingers began to talk.

  The first young man smiled more intensely than ever and nodded and handed me his gun. It was a single-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and I broke it to make sure it was loaded. It was. The young man handed me a cardboard box of shells.

  I felt very good. A shotgun can blow a man’s head off at close quarters. Peter had begun to move away. I held the gun at the hip so that it pointed at him and said:

  “Stand still, Schneider.”

  He edged behind the two deaf-mutes and, using them for cover, ran for the woods. I stepped around them, brought the gun to my shoulder, and fired quickly. Too quickly. He plunged into the woods and disappeared, and I heard his receding footsteps crackling in the underbrush.

&nbs
p; The young men stared at me aghast and ran away across the pasture making little bleating noises.

  I broke the gun and reloaded and emptied the shells into my pocket. Then I ran into the woods after Peter. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, but I was very eager to kill him. He had hunted me all night and now I was hunting him.

  It was a maple-woods, probably sugar-maple, and well thinned out. I ran on a thin carpet of fallen leaves, sallow and brown and blond and blood-red, between trunks like black pillars. Afar ahead of me I could hear the running feet, and I caught a glimpse of him between the trees. I lost sight of him again and kept on running. The shotgun hampered me but I ran hard. I was so angry I forgot to be tired.

  I leaped a stream and came to a rail fence with open fields rolling beyond it. The fields were empty. There was a sound along the fence a hundred feet away from me and I turned and fired and reloaded on my knees behind the fence. There was a shot and a bullet spatted into a tree behind my head. He broke from cover and ran across the field in front of me and disappeared behind a little hill.

  I climbed the fence and walked up the hill with the gun at my shoulder. From the hilltop I saw him running across dry grass in a shallow valley, dragging a leg like the rabbit. On the next hillside there was a tumbledown barn beside the grass-grown foundations of a house that had probably been razed by fire. He was running uncertainly towards the barn.

  There was a splash of bright new blood on a white boulder halfway down the hill. It went to my head and I felt like laughing out loud. I had winged him.

  He fell once before he reached the old barn, and got up and dragged himself in through the gaping door. A thin, dribbling trail of blood led down the hill from the boulder where the blood-splash glistened, and I followed it across the field.

  I walked towards the barn with the gun at my shoulder, expecting a pistol shot. There was none. There was a low moaning from inside the dark barn, and then silence.

  I tiptoed to the door and looked inside under floating cobwebs. I could see nothing but old chaff on a floor of loose, rotting boards.

  I forgot I wasn’t hunting rabbits and stepped across the rotting doorsill. A noose came over my head from the side and jerked me off my feet. My gun went off with a roar that shook the barn and killed nobody.

  The noose drew tighter and burned my neck and I could feel congested blood swelling my face. I was flat on my face and he had one foot between my shoulder blades. It felt as if he was leaning back on the rope around my neck. I tried to get onto my hands and knees.

  “Don’t struggle, Dr. Branch. It will do no good and will only force me to shoot you.”

  I turned my head sideways and tried to see him but he drew the rope tighter. My eyeballs threatened to burst and the light seemed tinged with red. I heard a click like a box closing or opening and he kneeled on my back holding the rope tight. He pushed up the sleeve on my right arm and I felt a prick near the elbow. I tried to struggle and he drew the rope tighter. Swarming blackness dipped down at my consciousness and I relaxed. He loosened the rope a little and the black cloud receded.

  “What a child you are, Dr. Branch. You Americans know nothing of war. I cut my arm and left a little trail of blood for you, and you followed it as a donkey follows a carrot. You must fancy yourself as a hunter, Dr. Branch.”

  My right arm felt numb and my head began to go around in stately circles, humming like a distant motor.

  “Relax, Dr. Branch.” His voice came from the other end of a dark tunnel. “You’ll go to sleep very shortly. Then I shall have the pleasure of hanging you.”

  The rope was looser now and I tried for the last time to get my knees under me. I couldn’t raise my head. The black cloud had come back and rested on my head and it was as heavy as tons of coal.

  Schneider’s voice droned on like a doctor’s soothing a patient going under ether, “Hanging is a fitting end for a murderer, is it not? Self-slaughter. Homicide and suicide. No one will guess that you did not hang yourself. In fact, you will hang yourself. I shall make that possible for you, Dr. Branch.

  “So fortunate that this rope was here in the barn. Otherwise I might have had to shoot you. So fortunate.”

  With the idiot speck of consciousness I had left, whirling in the midst of blackness, I felt soothed and delighted by the good fortune. How lucky we both were, and how pleasant it was to be going to sleep with a gentle voice droning in my ears.

  The speck of consciousness flickered and went out, and I turned on great black wheels in an infinity of humming wheels.

  CHAPTER XI

  AFTER THE WHEELS HAD completed several 365-day journeys around the sun they stopped rotating, but the universe went on humming like an engine in neutral. I was lying on the rim of a wheel so big that it seemed flat to my back. The university coal-pile was on top of me and pinned me to the wheel so that I could not move my arms or head.

  There was something in my right hand and I squeezed it and discovered that it was my left elbow. The coal-pile pressed down on my upturned face and there was something tight around my neck. I blew out and drew in a deep breath which whistled through my flattened nose. At least I was still breathing.

  I stuck out my tongue and it came against a hard, rough surface that tasted familiar. Wood. Old wood. That was it, it was the lid of a coffin. I was buried alive in a tight coffin that pressed down on my face and folded arms. A wild claustrophobia seized me and I kicked out. My legs were free to kick but the lid of the coffin pressed down painfully on my stomach and groin.

  I pressed put with my bent arms and the lid shifted slightly but the thing around my neck began to choke me. I felt like crying at the unfairness of being buried alive with something around my neck to choke me.

  To choke me. I remembered Schneider and his promise to hang me. Was this how it felt to be hanged? Anger surged through me and I pushed frantically at the heavy lid of the coffin. It rose slightly and I saw light, but the rope was unbearably tight now and I moved my head sideways to ease the pressure.

  I freed my right hand and got hold of the coffin-lid at the edge and pushed and it rose higher. But the rope had pulled my head over the edge of whatever I was lying on. I was going to give the lid a final desperate shove when I heard running feet somewhere below me.

  A man’s voice, a voice I remembered from somewhere, shouted, “Branch, don’t move, and don’t let go of that beam.”

  I tried to speak but there was no hole in my throat to speak through and the blood swelled in my head. As the black cloud bellied down at me again, the heavy lid lurched sideways but I held on with my right hand. Quick footsteps came up from somewhere and the weight was taken off my hand and arm. The pressure on my neck was released and the black cloud swooped up and away from me like an escaped balloon.

  A hand raised my head where it dangled in space and I lay panting on a hard, narrow surface with somebody’s arm around my shoulders. As my vision cleared, I saw a face above me, a sullen Indian face that I remembered.

  Wild ideas rushed through my mind like leering mimics of truth. He’s no F.B.I. man, he’s another spy. The president is a spy. And the old woman with the hard, bright face.

  I struggled against the arm around me and tried to get up. The dark face said, “Take it easy, old boy. You’ll be all right in a minute. I’m Gordon, remember?”

  I lay back and took it easy and my mind came back a piece at a time and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, with cracks in it. My neck was sore and my Adam’s apple felt as if Eve had taken a bite out of it. My arms were stiff, and my head and groin throbbed like a toothache. In five minutes I wasn’t all right, but I was fairly sane.

  Gordon didn’t look particularly friendly, but he didn’t look like a spy either. Spies put ropes around your neck. I was still wearing a thick noose, with its end severed, around my neck like a necktie. Gordon had loosened it and I worked it over my head and took it off.

  “A highly ingenious arrangement,” he was saying. “And so simple. Truly Attic in its simplici
ty.”

  “What?” I said. “The Parthenon?” My voice scraped my throat like sandpaper and sounded like a crow cawing.

  “Feeling better, Branch?”

  “Yes, thanks. But my neck is somewhat chapped. Bring me my honey and almond cream. Also my bow of burning gold. I’m on a hunting trip.”

  “You were, but you’re not,” Gordon said. “You’re going to be too busy explaining to play hare and hounds for a while. Can you get up now?”

  “With excruciating ease,” I said and sat up. My head seemed to linger where it was and then got up by itself and jumped onto my shoulders with a jolt. In a minute it stopped vibrating and I could use it again for elementary purposes.

  I was sitting astride a two-foot beam running along the top of a wooden wall twelve or fifteen feet above the floor of the old barn. The wall divided the wagon-floor, where Schneider had snared me, from the haymow, which still had some old grey-green hay in the corners. Gordon was sitting beside me on the beam supporting me with one arm, his feet on the top rung of a ladder which ran down to the wagon-floor.

  The beam that had pinned my face and arms and that I had mistaken for the lid of a coffin lay on the beam in front of me. One end of it was between my legs, and I could see a rope knotted around its middle. The rope passed over a rafter above my head and hung above the floor of the barn a few feet out of my reach.

  “Do you see it?” Gordon said. “Study it as an object-lesson in the inadvisability of going on extra-legal spy hunts. Delayed-action murder fixed to look like suicide.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “I’m feeling dull this morning. It’s still morning, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not seven yet. But you appear to be rather dull in the evening, too, if last night was typical. Dull is putting it mildly.”

  “Go to hell,” I barked, but my throat regretted it. “A man was killed, and somebody had to do something.”

  “Such as kill another man?”

  “Nonsense. What happened to you after Galloway’s hothouse-liberal fiasco?”