by Stephen King
A Wint pulled out of the space directly in front of the store and a Ford pulled in, settling to an inch above the pavement as the driver, a crewcut fellow smoking a foot-long cigar, put it in idle. The car dipped slightly as his passenger, a dude in a brown and white hunting jacket, got out and zipped inside.
Richards sighed. Counting cars was a very poor game. Fords were ahead of their nearest contender by a score of 78 to 40. The outcome going to be predictable as the next election.
Someone pounded on the door and Richards stiffened like a bolt.
“Frankie? You in there, Frankie?”
Richards said nothing. Frozen with fear, he played a statue.
“You eat shit, Frankie-baby.” There was a chortle of drunken laughter and the footsteps moved on. Pounding on the next door up. “You in there, Frankie?”
Richards’s heart slipped slowly down from his throat.
The Ford was pulling out, and another Ford took its place. Number 79. Shit.
The day slipped into afternoon, and then it was one o’clock. Richards knew this by the ringing of various chimes in churches far away. Ironically, the man living by the clock had no watch.
He was playing a variation of the car game now. Fords worth two points, Studebakers three, Wints four. First one to five hundred wins.
It was perhaps fifteen minutes later that he noticed the young man in the brown and white hunting jacket leaning against a lamppost beyond the bookstore and reading a concert poster. He was not being moved along; in fact, the police seemed to be ignoring him.
You’re jumping at shadows, maggot. Next you’ll see them in the corners. He counted a Wint with a dented fender. A yellow Ford. An old Studebaker with a wheezing air cylinder, dipping in slight cycles. A VW—no good, they’re out of the running. Another Wint. A Studebaker.
A man smoking a foot-long cigar was standing nonchalantly at the bus stop on the corner. He was the only person there. With good reason. Richards had seen the buses come and go, and knew there wouldn’t be another one along for forty-five minutes.
Richards felt a coolness creep into his testicles.
An old man in a threadbare black overcoat sauntered down the side of the street and leaned casually against the building.
Two fellows in tartan jumpers got out of a taxi, talking animatedly, and began to study the menu in the window of the Stockholm Restaurant.
A cop walked over and conversed with the man at the bus stop. Then the cop walked away again.
Richards noted with a numb, distant terror that a good many of the newspaper bums were idling along much more slowly. Their clothes and styles of walking seemed oddly familiar, as if they had been around a great many times before and Richards was just becoming aware of it—in the tentative, uneasy way you recognize the voices of the dead in dreams.
There were more cops, too.
I’m being bracketed, he thought. The idea brought a helpless, rabbit terror.
No, his mind corrected. You’ve already been bracketed.
…Minus 070 and COUNTING…
Richards walked rapidly to the bathroom, being calm, ignoring his terror the way a man on a high ledge ignores the drop. If he was going to get out of this, it would be by keeping his head. If he panicked, he would die quickly.
Someone was in the shower, singing a popular song in a cracked and pitchless voice. No one was at the urinals or the washstands.
The trick had popped effortlessly into his mind as he had stood by the window, watching them gather in their offhand, sinister way. If it hadn’t occurred to him, he thought he would be there yet, like Aladdin watching smoke from the lamp coalesce into an omnipotent djinn. They had used the trick as boys to steal newspapers from Development basements. Molie bought them; two cents a pound.
He took one of the wire toothbrush holders off the wall with a hard snap of his wrist. It was a little rusted, but that wouldn’t matter. He walked down to the elevator, bending the toothbrush holder out straight.
He pushed the call button, and the cage took a slow eternity to come down from eight. It was empty. Thank Christ it was empty.
He stepped in, looked briefly down the halls, and then turned to the control panel. There was a key slot beside the button marked for the basement. The janitor would have a special card to shove in there. An electric eye scanned the card and then the janitor could push the button and ride down to the basement.
What if it doesn’t work?
Never mind that. Never mind that now.
Grimacing in anticipation of a possible electric shock, Richards jammed the toothbrush wire into the slot and pushed the basement button simultaneously.
There was a noise from inside the control panel that sounded like a brief electronic curse. There was a light, tingling jolt up his arm. For a moment, nothing else. Then the folding brass gate slid across, the doors closed, and the elevator lurched unhappily downward. A small tendril of blue smoke curled out of the slot in the panel.
Richards stood away from the elevator door and watched the numbers flash backwards. When the L lit, the motor high above made a grinding sound, and the car seemed about to stop. Then, after a moment (perhaps after it thought it had scared Richards enough), it descended again. Twenty seconds later the doors slid open and Richards stepped out into the huge dim basement. There was water dripping somewhere, and the scurry of a disturbed rat. But otherwise, the basement was his. For now.
…Minus 069 and COUNTING…
Huge, rusted heating pipes festooned with cobwebs crawled crazily all over the ceiling. When the furnace kicked on suddenly, Richards almost screamed in terror. The surge of adrenaline to his limbs and heart was painful, for a moment almost incapacitating.
There were newspapers here, too, Richards saw. Thousands of them, stacked up and tied with string. The rats had nested in them by the thousands. Whole families stared out at the interloper with ruby distrustful eyes.
He began to walk away from the elevator, pausing halfway across the cracked cement floor. There was a large fuse box bolted to a supporting post, and behind it, leaning against the other side, a litter of tools. Richards took the crowbar and continued to walk, keeping his eyes on the floor.
Near the far wall he spied the main storm drain, to his left. He walked over and looked at it, wondering in the back of his mind if they knew he was down here yet.
The storm drain was constructed of vented steel. It was about three feet across, and on the far side there was a slot for the crowbar. Richards slipped it in, levered up the cover, and then put one foot on the crowbar to hold it. He got his hands under the lip of the cover and pushed it over. It fell to the cement with a clang that made the rats squeak with dismay.
The pipe beneath slanted down at a forty-five-degree angle, and Richards guessed that its bore could be no more than two and a half feet. It was very dark. Claustrophobia suddenly filled his mouth with flannel. Too small to maneuver in, almost too small to breathe in. But it had to be.
He turned the storm-drain cover back over and edged it toward the pipe entrance just enough so he could grip it from beneath once he was down there. Then he walked over to the fuse box, hammered the padlock off with the crowbar, and shoved it open. He was about to begin pulling fuses when another idea occurred to him.
He walked over to the newspapers which lay in dirty yellow drifts against the whole eastern length of the cellar. Then he ferreted out the folded and dog-eared book of matches he had been lighting his smokes with. There were three left. He yanked out a sheet of paper and formed it into a spill; held it under his arm like a dunce cap and lit a match. The first one guttered out in a draft. The second fell out of his trembling hand and hissed out on the damp concrete.
The third stayed alight. He held it to his paper spill and yellow flame bloomed. A rat, perhaps sensing what was to come, ran across his foot and into the darkness.
A terrible sense of urgency filled him now, and yet he waited until the spill was flaming a foot high. He had no more matches. Carefully,
he tucked it into a fissure in the chest-high paper wall and waited until he saw that the fire was spreading.
The huge oil tank which serviced the Y was built into the adjoining wall. Perhaps it would blow. Richards thought it would.
Trotting now, he went back to the fuse box and began ripping out the long tubular fuses. He got most of them before the basement lights went out. He felt his way across to the storm drain, aided by the growing, flickering light of the burning papers.
He sat down with his feet dangling, and then slowly eased in. When his head was below the level of the floor, he pressed his knees against the sides of the pipe to hold himself steady, and worked his arms up above his head. It was slow work. There was very little room to move. The light of the fire was brilliant yellow now, and the crackling sound of burning filled his ears. Then his groping fingers found the lip of the drain, and he slid them up until they gripped the vented cover. He yanked it forward slowly, supporting more and more of the weight with the muscles of his back and neck. When he judged that the far edge of the cover was on the edge of dropping into place, he gave one last fierce tug.
The cover dropped into place with a clang, bending both wrists back cruelly. Richards let his knees relax, and he slid downward like a boy shooting the chutes. The pipe was coated with slime, and he slid effortlessly about twelve feet to where the pipe elbow bent into a straight line. His feet struck smartly, and he stood there like a drunk leaning against a lamppost.
But he couldn’t get into the horizontal pipe. The elbow bend was too sharp.
The taste of the claustrophobia became huge, gagging. Trapped, his mind babbled. Trapped in here, trapped, trapped—
A steel scream rose in his throat and he choked it down.
Calm down. Sure, it’s very hackneyed, very trite, but we must be very calm down here. Very calm. Because we are at the bottom of this pipe and we can’t get up and we can’t get down and if the fucking oil tank goes boom, we are going to be fricasseed very neatly and—
Slowly he began to wriggle around until his chest was against the pipe instead of his back. The slime coating acted as a lubricant, helping his movement. It was very bright in the pipe now, and getting warmer. The vented cover threw prison-bar shadows on his struggling face.
Once leaning against his chest and belly and groin, with his knees bending the right way, he could slip down further, letting his calves and feet slide into the horizontal pipe until he was in the praying position. Still no good. His buttocks were pushing against the solid ceramic facing above the entrance to the horizontal pipe.
Faintly, it seemed that he could hear shouted commands above the heavy crackle of the fire, but it might have been his imagination, which was now strained and fevered beyond the point of trust.
He began to flex the muscles of his thighs and calves in a tiring seesaw rhythm, and little by little his knees began to slide out from under him. He worked his hands up over his head again to give himself more room, and now his face lay solidly against the slime of the pipe. He was very close to fitting now. He swayed his back as much as he could and began to push with his arms and head, the only things left in any position to give him leverage.
When he had begun to think there was not enough room, that he was going to simply hang here, unable to move either way, his hips and buttocks suddenly popped through the horizontal pipe’s opening like a champagne cork from a tight bottleneck. The small of his back scraped excruciatingly as his knees slid out from under him, and his shirt rucked up to his shoulderblades. Then he was in the horizontal pipe—except for his head and arms, which were bent back at a joint-twisting angle. He wriggled the rest of the way in and then paused there, panting, his face streaked with slime and rat droppings, the skin of his lower back abraded and oozing blood.
This pipe was narrower still; his shoulders scraped lightly on both sides each time his chest rose in respiration.
Thank God I’m underfed.
Panting, he began to back into the unknown darkness of the pipe.
…Minus 068 and COUNTING…
He made slow, molelike progress for about fifty yards through the horizontal pipe, backing up blindly. Then the oil tank in the Y’s basement suddenly blew with a roar that set up enough sympathetic vibrations in the pipes to nearly rupture his eardrums. There was a yellow-white flash, as if a pile of phosphorus had ignited. It faded to a rosy, shifting glow. A few moments later a blast of thermal air struck him in the face, making him grin painfully.
The tape camera in his jacket pocket swung and bounced as he tried to back up faster. The pipe was picking up heat from the fierce explosion and fire that was raging somewhere above him, the way the handle of a skillet picks up heat from a gas-ring. Richards had no urge to be baked down here like a potato in a Dutch oven.
Sweat rolled down his face, mixing with the black streaks of ordure already there, making him look, in the waxing and waning glow of the reflected fire, like an Indian painted for war. The sides of the pipe were hot to the touch now.
Lobsterlike, Richards humped backwards on his knees and forearms, his buttocks rising to smack the top of the pipe at every movement. His breath came in sharp, doglike gasps. The air was hot, full of the slick taste of oil, uncomfortable to breathe. A headache surfaced within his skull and began to push daggers into the backs of his eyes.
I’m going to fry in here. I’m going to fry.
Then his feet were suddenly dangling in the air. Richards tried to peer through his legs and see what was there, but it was too dark behind and his eyes were too dazzled by the light in front. He would have to take his chance. He backed up until his knees were on the edge of the pipe’s ending, and then slid them cautiously over.
His shoes were suddenly in water, cold and shocking after the heat of the pipe.
The new pipe ran at right angles to the one Richards had just come through, and it was much larger—big enough to stand in bent over. The thick, slowly moving water came up over his ankles. He paused for just a moment to stare back into the tiny pipe with its soft circle of reflected fire-glow. The fact that he could see any glow at all from this distance meant that it must have been a very big bang indeed.
Richards reluctantly forced himself to know it would be their job to assume him alive rather than dead in the inferno of the Y.M.C.A. basement, but perhaps they would not discover the way he had taken until the fire was under control. That seemed a safe assumption. But it had seemed safe to assume that they could not trace him to Boston, too.
Maybe they didn’t. After all, what did you really see?
No. It had been them. He knew it. The Hunters. They had even carried the odor of evil. It had wafted up to his fifth floor room on invisible psychic thermals.
A rat dog-paddled past him, pausing to look up briefly with glittering eyes.
Richards splashed clumsily off after it, in the direction the water was flowing.
…Minus 067 and COUNTING…
Richards stood by the ladder, looking up, dumb-founded by the light. No regular traffic, which was something, but light—
The light was surprising because it had seemed that he had been walking in the sewers for hours piled upon hours. In the darkness, with no visual input and no sound but the gurgle of water, the occasional soft splash of a rat, and the ghostly thumpings in other pipes (what happens if someone flushes a john over my head, Richards wondered morbidly), his time sense had been utterly destroyed.
Now, looking up at the manhole cover some fifteen feet above him, he saw that the light had not yet faded out of the day. There were several circular breather holes in the cover, and pencil-sized rays of light pressed coins of sun on his chest and shoulders.
No air-cars had passed over the cover since he had gotten here; only an occasional heavy ground-vehicle and a fleet of Hondacycles. It made him suspect that, more by good luck and the law of averages than by inner sense of direction, he had managed to find his way to the core of the city—to his own people.
Still, he di
dn’t dare go up until dark. To pass the time, he took out the tape camera, popped in a clip, and began recording his chest. He knew the tapes were “fast-light,” able to take advantage of the least available light, and he did not want to give away too much of his surroundings. He did no talking or capering this time. He was too tired.
When the tape was done, he put it with the other exposed clip. He wished he could rid himself of the nagging suspicion—almost a certainty—that the tapes were pinpointing him. There had to be a way to beat that. Had to.
He sat down stolidly on the third rung of the ladder to wait for dark. He had been running for nearly thirty hours.
…Minus 066 and COUNTING…
The boy, seven years old, black, smoking a cigarette, leaned closer to the mouth of the alley, watching the street.
There had been a sudden, slight movement in the street where there had been none before. Shadows moved, rested, moved again. The manhole cover was rising. It paused and something—eyes?—glimmered. The cover suddenly slid aside with a clang.
Someone (or something, the boy thought with a trace of fear) was moving out there. Maybe the devil was coming out of hell to get Cassie, he thought. Ma said Cassie was going to heaven to be with Dicky and the other angels. The boy thought that was bullshit. Everybody went to hell when they died, and the devil jabbed them in the ass with a pitchfork. He had seen a picture of the devil in the books Bradley had snuck out of the Boston Public Library. Heaven was for Push freaks. The devil was the Man.