The sounds were there when he awoke, a distant rattle of drills. It seemed somehow to have nothing to do with Slade. He felt disappointment, but could not think why, until he remembered having gone to sleep in hope of finding a dream. The dream had not come, or he had forgotten about it. Slade thought the day might come when he woke up to find he could not remember his own name. When that happened he would be lost to himself forever. The notion made him sad. He began to cry, an event so unusual, within Slade’s limited recollection of his own actions, he was shocked. What was happening to him? It seemed the cave-in had brought about some kind of collapse within Slade. He could not understand himself any longer, could not recall why he had killed McCaulay, wanted only to sleep again, sleep for a long time, like a hibernating bear, and when the long sleep was done, he could emerge into sunlight and begin a new life.
Thirsty again, he drank the last of the water from the flask, turned on his lamp and crawled past McCaulay to replace it with the other, now brimming, then crawled back. He drank again, and turned the lamp off. Darkness, being infinite, was preferable to light that did nothing but reveal the tininess of his world. Darkness was a comfort, a blanket of night. Seated with his back against unyielding rock, Slade felt himself become smaller as the darkness became larger, until he was no more than a speck surrounded by blackness beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. He was a drifting mote, nameless and alone, and he was content to be so. It was a dream, he decided, a dream of darkness, maybe the very dream he had longed for. He knew he should expect some kind of surprise within the dream, some startling thing such as he had encountered the last time, but the nature of it was open to question, since all clear recollection of it was gone. Maybe a new thing would reveal itself this time. He would not know the difference anyway. Drifting through a void was a pleasant enough experience to bring him happiness, but he did hope he would not wake up and be returned to himself before his purpose in the void was revealed.
The time that passed was not time that could be measured by clocks. Time in the darkness was fluid, moving along with Slade as he drifted, although he could not be sure anymore that he did drift, since there was nothing against which to compare his position. He was unsure how long he had been in that place; it might have been days, or weeks. Calculation was impossible, given the nature of the dream, and he did not worry himself over it.
Something in the darkness became less dark, some great mass ahead of him—an endless plain of stone, its edges lost in distance. Slade was above the plain, slowly descending toward it, but as he came closer it seemed to him that the plain was not horizontal, nor was it a plain; the thing was a wall, a colossal structure of squared stones, and he was approaching it at right angles. He could not see its top; he could not see its bottom or sides. The wall was infinite, separating completely the region of darkness Slade inhabited from whatever lay behind it. Watching it as he drifted closer, Slade became afraid. No wall such as this had a right to exist; its scale was too vast, it was too massive, and now that he had some object against which to measure himself and his aerial progress, Slade knew fear. He did not understand how he could be suspended in the air like a hummingbird, and he knew no human hands could have built the thing ahead.
He wanted to travel in some other direction, away from the wall, but it drew him onward, and as he came closer Slade saw how very large the stones were, each one perfectly square and smooth, dun gray in color, like granite under moonlight. Hovering inches from the wall, he reached for the stone to touch it, and the block he attempted to touch was suddenly not there anymore. He could see through the wall to the far side, a place equally black and impenetrable. But there was something different, a series of rustlings and whisperings from beyond the hole, unidentifiable sounds that made him more afraid than before. Invisible entities there were beckoning him forward, inviting him to pass through the hole and join them, but Slade would not, and demanded that they show themselves first. There was smothered laughter at his request, and snickering so confident, so disdainful of him that Slade, who had always thought of himself as fearless, accepted without shame the terror he felt. The beings who would not reveal themselves laughed louder and told him he was a coward. Slade’s mood altered abruptly; he knew he could not allow them to call him any such thing, and flung himself through the hole to fight with them.
As his head and shoulders passed into the place beyond the wall, he was grabbed by many invisible hands, cold hands with clawlike nails. He felt the nearness of the things and smelled the fetid breath they blew past his face as they laughed again, exultant to have him among them. He felt many small teeth fasten upon his limbs and bite down hard into his flesh, but no matter how hard he kicked and struggled, more hands took hold of every part of him, and more teeth sank into his flesh, and Slade screamed for release, screamed louder than he had thought possible, and the laughter became different, a mechanical yammering that seemed to come from far away even as the things pressed themselves more tightly against him.
He flexed himself in a paroxysm of loathing, and flung his body across space until his feet tripped on McCaulay and he was brought down, the side of his face grazing against rock as he fell. The screams continued pouring from his mouth, a torrent of sound he could not shut off for fear of allowing the things that had held him to regain their hold. He stopped screaming only long enough to fill his lungs, then screamed again. Their laughter could still be heard, even though he no longer felt their hands upon him, a muffled staccato that turned from laughter to the familiar sound of air drills. He made himself stop. There were no invisible creatures clutching at him, mocking him. He was in the tunnel, and the darkness around him was the safe darkness of rock, the air smelling of his own sweat and the mortifying flesh of McCaulay, who had died during the cave-in and lay rotting beside him now, his body the very breath of decay.
He must have been trapped for days already. His stomach knotted and writhed its empty tubes like mating serpents, and his throat burned for water. He searched for the lamps, his own or McCaulay’s, and could not find them, and knocked over his water flask in the process, then could not find it despite the soft gurglings as it emptied itself. His hand eventually touched moisture, and he righted the flask, still containing a third or so of its contents, and drank it all down. It was not enough, not nearly enough. He had to find the other flask, the one being filled under the seep. He had only two matches left. If he could not find the lamps by their briefly flaring light, he would have to search in darkness. He attempted to light the first match; its tip flew off after a brief sputter. The second match would not ignite at all. Slade took several deep breaths and began his work.
He bumped many parts of himself against rock as he wriggled in search of the filled flask. He screamed and he cried, and when it still could not be found despite his efforts, he came near to blacking out from sheer rage. His frustration was cruel, unjust, against the natural order of things. He was sure he had found the place where the flask stood, had felt the rock around it wet from the overflow, but the flask was gone, and so was the steady dripping that had been there since the cave-in. Someone had taken them away. It was done to torment him, make him suffer more than he had already, and to punish him for being superior to other men. The water thief had probably enjoyed listening to Slade crawl around and shout and cry. It was humiliating. It was unfair.
It had to be McCaulay; there was no one else. But the man was dead, actually dead, his body giving off the aroma of a trash heap in midsummer. Yet the water was gone. If he could just find a lamp and make sure he had been looking in the right place, he could begin asking how it was possible. He began a methodical search for his own lamp or McCaulay’s. Light would solve the problem of his thirst. There was no mystery really, just disorientation. He must have been looking in the wrong place for the seep. No other explanation made sense. Unless it was Shoupe.
Slade stopped to consider this possibility. He was positive he had seen the distant figure of Shoupe fall and be crushed by the desc
ending ceiling of the tunnel, but it was by no means certain that he had been killed. It may have been that from Shoupe’s line of sight Slade appeared to be the one caught beneath the tons of falling rock. It had happened too quickly; there had been too much dust, too little light. Now he could be sure of nothing. Shoupe was alive and lurking in the darkness, listening closely, keeping quiet, and stealing water.
Slade had to smile. Shoupe would not have expected him to work out what was wrong so fast. Slade had only to pretend he still did not understand the situation, and Shoupe would reveal himself in some way. The water had been stolen while Slade was asleep, that much was clear. Reminded of his dream, Slade felt a momentary fear dimple his skin. The dream was gone, and had left no part of itself in Slade’s memory other than the terror that had wakened him. He dismissed the dream, whatever it had been; now he had something else to consider.
Shoupe must have found a way through the rubble to the rock face at the end of the tunnel, a route Slade had overlooked. He would need a lamp to find it, and once he did, he would set a trap for the thief. He felt like a man who has become aware of a large and cunning rat in his cabin. Strategy was called for. Slade didn’t doubt that he could arrive at a plan that would work, because Slade, the planner, was smarter than Shoupe, the rat.
Moving about in the dark, his hand encountered what was unmistakably a lamp. Slade hugged it, then reminded himself he had no matches with which to light it. This thought was followed by a realization that McCaulay must have matches in his pants, since he was the one responsible for lighting the fuses at the end of each shift. Slade searched until he located McCaulay’s body, then rummaged in the pockets until he found a small tin box which, when shaken, gave out a comforting rattle of matches.
Slade lit the lamp and began a thorough inspection of the collapsed section of the tunnel. Somewhere among the shadowy recesses there was a passageway to Shoupe’s lair. Slade looked for a long time without finding the entrance, and his lamp began to grow dim. He returned to the rock face, found the other lamp, lit it and continued his search. Every possible route of access back into the jumbled rock and rubble was probed, but nothing that would accommodate the body of a man was found. Slade’s thirst was by then a constant torment. His throat had dried so much it hurt him to breathe, and his head was filled with pain from dehydration. Eventually the second lamp began to wane. Slade felt he must have spent the best part of a day, or a night, searching for Shoupe’s secret hole. His time, and the carbide lamps, had been wasted.
He stumbled back toward the rock face, his spirits and physical strength considerably depleted, and saw beneath his feet a patch of dampness. Shining his enfeebled beam on it, he saw that the moisture extended to the hidden place where the water flask had been placed for refilling before Shoupe had stolen it. Reaching behind, Slade found the flask had been returned. It was overflowing, creating the dampness. But he had looked there, and found nothing but a little moisture. Or had he looked somewhere else, and placed his hand on ground wetted by his own piss? He could not remember pissing, but assumed that he must have. Now he understood. The first search had been conducted in darkness, and after finding the lamps, he had not bothered to examine the flask’s logical location again, until now. His discovery suggested to Slade that Shoupe was not alive after all. The entire search had been a fool’s mission. He had simply been looking for the flask where it was not, and had never been, and his explanation for its absence had prompted him to waste both lamps in looking for a dead man’s doorway. Shoupe was dead, buried by rock thirty or forty yards back into the tunnel, as dead as McCaulay. Slade’s body slumped. He drank from the flask like a man celebrating his own stupidity. Even the welcome coolness of water flooding through him could not soothe his shame.
He felt defeated, truly beaten for the first time since the cave-in occurred. Slade dragged himself to the rock face. He set his flask down, found the empty flask and took it to the seep for refilling, then went back to the rock face and turned his guttering lamp out. The sound of the drills was louder now, he thought, or maybe it was not. He simply could not care for the moment. His misery was complete. Sleep began to invade his body. Slade did not want to sleep, recalling the way he had awoken from his nightmare that time, but he had made himself tired by his fool’s search.
It was a shame McCaulay had died so early; if his death had been more recent, Slade could have eaten his flesh to satisfy the serpents of hunger coiling and uncoiling inside him. He did not know how long it had been since McCaulay died, but the man’s meat had certainly gone bad in the heat. Or maybe it hadn’t. Now Slade found himself unable to stop thinking of McCaulay as a food source. He was weak with hunger; if nothing could be fed to the serpents soon, he might die. The stink surrounding him might be from his own filthy body, his own deposits of excrement further down the tunnel, and the badness that came with air that could not circulate properly. McCaulay might not be as rotten as Slade had assumed. He put the thought from him, but it kept returning.
Slade stirred himself and moved toward the place where he knew the body lay. Finding it, he touched its flesh. When searching for McCaulay’s matches he had touched nothing but cloth. The body was neither hot nor cold. Slade assumed the sensible thing to do was take a chunk from the fleshiest part. He unbuckled McCaulay’s belt and pulled down the greasy pants. Examining the buttocks, he found that the body had emptied its bowels. That would account for much of the stench. He passed on down the left leg to the calf, and pinched the meat there. Slade took out his clasp knife.
Before he could bring himself to cut into McCaulay’s leg, Slade made himself pause to form a plan. He knew he was justified in using the dead man this way, but others might not agree. If he did not use McCaulay to sustain his strength now, before the flesh became inedible, he would have wasted the opportunity to keep himself alive. Slade was not about to die because of what other men might think, but he was not so foolish as to take another’s flesh into his stomach without first pausing to consider ways in which he might avoid the consequences when his act was found out.
Deception seemed the best tactic. He would hide the body before his rescuers broke through, and deny that McCaulay was ever with him when the tunnel collapsed. He would suggest that they search for him back where Shoupe was crushed. That was what he would do. He took a fold of the calf and sliced beneath it. They would believe him. The knife was sharp, and cut easily. It was not his fault McCaulay had died. The strip came free. There were many small rocks to conceal the body. He placed one end of the strip in his mouth, gagged, then chewed. They would believe him, because he was Slade.
He dreamed often of the universal wall, always approaching it in the same way, feeling himself compelled to touch it, passing through the hole that always appeared, in answer to taunting from the invisible demons populating the other side. He would awaken with their fingers and teeth upon him, and when he was able to calm himself, Slade used his own fingers and teeth to keep himself alive. He ate only as much as his stomach required to appease the serpents. Much of the flesh had been stripped from the legs and back of McCaulay. Slade drank from his flasks and replaced them beneath the water seep, finding his way easily in the darkness by sheer habit, the repetition of his simple routine. The drills came nearer, their chattering punctuated now and then by single-stick explosions of dynamite as the more massive chunks of rock were broken down.
He reminded himself often, knowing his memory was plagued by holes, to be sure and cover the remains of his larder before the final breakthrough came. Slade was less confident now of convincing anyone of anything. He could not concentrate on any particular thought for more than a moment before it flew away into the dark and left him wondering what it was that had lately been on his mind. He could not recall with any accuracy his bunk in the unmarried miners’ dormitory, or the face of the woman who sold him his meals. Shoupe and McCaulay were the same bearded, grimy face partially hidden by a hatbrim. He had never heard them talk often enough to retain an impress
ion of their voices, or anyone else’s voice. Sometimes he spoke with himself to be reminded of his own voice, but these one-sided conversations were forgotten immediately. Slade was aware that other miners tacked small photographs or tintypes to the wall beside their bunk, pictures of wives or sweethearts far away, or else they ripped from magazines portraits of plump actresses and illustrations of young women advertising girdles and corsets. Slade’s wall had always been empty, as empty as the wall he visited now in dreams. If he had ever had a picture to gaze at in former times, he could not remember. It was an injustice that the simple passage of time—sometimes mere minutes were enough—should rob him of another tiny piece of himself.
He was fast becoming a stranger inside his own skin, and he knew it was the darkness that accelerated his condition. In darkness a man might turn inward to review his life, summon images from the past and relive moments of happiness, but if a man had little or no memory of himself, the darkness mocked him, reflecting with its boundless emptiness the hollow space inside the man. Slade cried a great deal as the drills and dynamite ate their way toward him. There was almost nothing left of him to be found. As the body of McCaulay was stripped of flesh, so the mind of Slade was flayed of recollection, layer by layer, until there remained only his name, and the instruction to himself concerning the man he ate.
Then the drills were accompanied by voices, and Slade was more scared by the muffled words seeping through to him than he was by the shapeless creatures tormenting him in dreams. Soon they would be there, where he huddled in filth and stench and darkness, with their lights and faces and words. He was terrified over the coming confrontation. He must not let them see his fear, and he must not let them see the dead man. With the last of his matches, Slade coaxed a feeble glow from the carbide lamps and scuttled hastily about, collecting rocks suitable for stacking atop a corpse. He buried his clasp knife also, and used the last of his strength to tip over a large rock, shielding the makeshift grave from view. The lamps gave off their last light and expired, and he waited then in the darkness that now was less friendly, shattered and shaken as it was by the din of sledgehammers and shouting.
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