Sleepwalk

by John Saul

  Rita stepped back from the grave, and as if accepting her silent signal, the townspeople began filing past, some of them adding their own small lump of earth to Max’s grave, others pausing only to murmur soft condolences to his widow.

  Finally Paul Kendall appeared, his face grave, his eyes dark with concern. “Rita,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was as if she didn’t hear him, didn’t even see him. Her eyes swept past him as if he didn’t exist, and came to rest on another person, a person who seemed to have been waiting silently for the right moment to approach her.

  “Frank,” Rita said, her voice carrying clearly through the morning as she beckoned him to her side. “Come and stand with me, will you? Help me say goodbye to Max.”

  Paul Kendall’s jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into an angry fist, then relaxed. He moved on, stepping aside so that Frank Arnold could take his place.

  A few minutes later Kendall found Otto Kruger in the crowd.

  “I’ve had it,” he said, drawing Kruger aside. “I’ve had it with both of them. Clear?”

  Kruger nodded, his lips twisting into a cruel smile. “Clear,” he agreed.

  At four o’clock that afternoon Frank Arnold wheeled his pickup truck into the dusty lot in front of the refinery gate and shut off the engine. There weren’t many cars there—all but a handful of men had been laid off yesterday, and today more would go. It was only temporary, according to Kruger, but Frank didn’t believe him any more than he believed Kendall. Why should they start up the refinery again when they could make more money by simply selling off the crude as it was pumped out of the ground?

  An eerie feeling came over him as he moved through the refinery. The usual cacophony of hissing steam and clanging pipes was silent now, and there wasn’t even the usual racket caused by the rattling out of the pipes during a regular shutdown.

  Today the refinery had an atmosphere of death about it, and Frank kept glancing back over his shoulder, as if half expecting to see some strange specter closing in on him. But there was nothing there.

  He came finally to the catalytic cracking plant at the far end of the refinery. When it was built thirty-odd years ago, the plant had been Max Moreland’s pride and joy. It was a semiexperimental installation back then, and Max had been one of the few men in the country who was willing to take a gamble on the new refining process.

  Now, though, it was as obsolete as the rest of the refinery. In the control room, as Frank began scanning the gauges, he wondered if maybe Max hadn’t been right in selling out to UniChem. Now, with the deal done, and his own dream of taking the place over gone forever, he began to realize just what an expense it would take to bring the plant up to date. He sighed, but as the crew began drifting in for the afternoon shift, the sigh gave way to a frown.

  “Where’s Polanski?” he asked Carlos Alvarez.

  Carlos shrugged. “Same place as Phil Garcia. Laid off this morning.” He forced a humorless grin. “Good thing they’re shutting us down, eh, amigo? There’s nobody left to run it anyway.”

  “I’ve got to tell you,” Frank said to Alvarez and the others who had gathered, his voice somber, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the layoffs come today. We should be done by ten or eleven, and if I know Kruger, he’ll be out here with the checks and the pink slips, even if it’s the middle of the night.”

  Alvarez spread his hands philosophically. “So what can we do? It’s not your fault.” Then he brightened. “Anyway, I hear they’re gonna move a lot of people up to the dam. Get it fixed right away, huh? Then we’ll all be back in business.”

  Frank nodded, wishing he could believe it.

  But that night, exactly as he’d predicted, Otto Kruger was waiting for them as he and the rest of the men came out the front gate.

  “Damn it!” he heard Carlos mutter. “Here it comes.”

  Kruger, an appropriately serious expression on his face, handed out the envelopes, then turned to face Frank, his eyes glowing with malice. “I need to talk to you in my office,” he growled.

  Frank’s eyes narrowed angrily as Kruger turned and fairly swaggered away, then he heard Carlos Alvarez’s cautioning voice.

  “Take it easy, Frank. Don’t let him get your goat. Come down to the café afterward, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

  As Alvarez and the rest of the crew climbed into their cars, Frank headed toward the supervisor’s building. Inside, Kruger was lounging in his chair, hands behind his head, legs sprawled across his desk. “Don’t bother to sit down, Arnold,” he said, a satisfied smirk spreading across his face.

  Frank remained where he was, standing next to the door. “You can’t lay me off too, Otto,” he said. “You’re still going to need a mothball crew around here, and I’ll be part of it.”

  Kruger shook his head. “It seems Kendall has something else in mind for you,” he said. “He thinks—and don’t ask me why—that your talents would be wasted around here.”

  Frank shifted his weight uneasily. From Kruger’s smug look a few minutes ago, he’d been certain that he too was going to be laid off, despite the union rule dictating that his seniority would make him the last man to go. But apparently that wasn’t going to happen. “Okay,” he said, when it was obvious that Kruger would wait for him to ask about his new assignment. “What is it?”

  “The dam,” Kruger replied. “It seems Kendall’s been studying the union rules, and given an emergency situation, he can assign you to pretty much anything he wants. At least,” he added, his smirk broadening into a malicious grin, “for as long as the emergency lasts.”

  Frank tipped his head in silent concession. It was true, though it hadn’t occurred to him that Kendall might use the emergency provision like this.

  Kruger’s grin spread even wider. “You don’t know enough about the dam to be a foreman,” he went on, “so you’re going to be on one of the labor crews. Chopping concrete, Frank. Working down there in the shaft, where it’s cold and dirty and cramped. Breaking up old concrete, and building forms to pour new. How do you like that?”

  Frank knew what they wanted him to do. They wanted him to refuse the job and quit entirely.

  And it wasn’t Paul Kendall’s idea at all. It was Otto Kruger’s.

  Once before, Frank had worked in the pipes. He could still remember the day ten years ago—long before he’d become a foreman—when he’d crept into one of the immense pipes during a shutdown, dragging the rattler behind him, intent on knocking the deposits of coke and sludge from the interior of the pipe.

  But he’d panicked, and the pipe had seemed to close in on him, threatening to crush him, strangling his breath until he could barely even scream.

  In the end they’d had to pull him out, so paralyzed with unreasoning terror that he couldn’t move at all.

  Max Moreland had told him to forget about it—that it could happen to anyone.

  Otto Kruger, obviously, had not forgotten about it.

  So now Frank was faced with a choice.

  Accept the new assignment, in compliance with the rules that he himself had helped to formulate, or quit.

  Quit, with no prospect of any other job.

  He forced himself to keep his face impassive, and met Kruger’s eyes. “All right,” he said. “When do I start?”

  Kruger frowned, and Frank knew his answer had thrown the man off balance. Then Kruger appeared to recover.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “And you know what? I think I might just come out and take a look. Should be fun, watching you crawl into those shafts.”

  As Kruger began to laugh, Frank walked out.

  Chapter 15

  “Maybe you should quit,” Judith suggested early the next morning. She’d spent the night with Frank again. He had called shortly before midnight, and though he hadn’t managed to ask her directly to come over, his voice told her how upset he was. Finally, it had been Rita Moreland who convinced her to drive over in the middle of the night.

  “Go,” t
he older woman had said. “I don’t expect to sleep much myself tonight, and I have to get used to being alone in this house.”

  So Judith had driven to the house on Sixth East and they had sat up until almost two, she listening and Frank talking. Eventually they’d gone to bed and made love, but when it was over, Frank had lain beside her, his body still tense. “I don’t know whether I can do it,” he’d said, his voice hollow in the darkness. “Just thinking about those shafts gives me the willies.”

  “You’ll be all right,” she’d reassured him once more, but even as she spoke the words, she knew they were meaningless. The rest of the night had been spent restlessly as Frank tossed and turned.

  Now he said tersely, “I can’t afford to quit.”

  “I know,” Judith sighed. “But if you’re—”

  Her words were cut off by the shrill jangling of the telephone. Frank picked it up. “Hello?” He listened for a moment, then his brows arched and he held the phone toward her. “For you,” he said, puzzled. “A man.”

  “Judith?” It was Peter Langston. “What’s going on? First Mrs. Moreland tells me you’re not home, and then a man answers at the number she gives me. May I assume you’ve thrown me over completely and are now having an affair?”

  “Peter!” Judith exclaimed, ignoring the question. “I was going to call you in a couple of hours. Have you found anything?”

  The timbre of Peter’s voice changed instantly. “I have, and I haven’t,” he said carefully. “I can’t tell you what was in that syringe you sent me, but I can tell you that whatever it is, it’s not a flu vaccine.”

  Judith felt a chill, and the look on Frank’s face told her the blood had drained from her own. “Then what is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Peter went on. “I gave a sample of it to our lab guys, and they were able to determine that it’s not a vaccine for flu, or anything else. In fact, it seems to be a simple saline solution, but with some impurities in it.”

  “Impurities?” Judith repeated, her brows knitting into a deep frown. “What kind?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” Peter replied. “I’m working on it, but it’s going to take a couple of days. Okay?”

  Judith managed a wry smile. “Do I have a choice?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter told her. “This place is all tied up with government work, and I just have to work this thing in when I can.” He paused, but when Judith said nothing, he continued, “Look—I’ll do my best, and get back to you as soon as I know something.”

  Judith nodded automatically. “Thanks,” she said. Then: “Peter? Why would anyone want to inject a saline solution into a bunch of kids?”

  There was a silence, then Peter spoke once more. “That’s the thing that’s got me curious,” he said. “I can’t think of any reason at all. So whatever the reason, it must have something to do with the impurities in the stuff. Is anything happening to the kids up there? Anything at all?”

  “Not that I can see. And believe me, I’ve been watching. But nothing’s happening to the kids at all. In fact, I was starting to think I was wrong about the shots.”

  “Okay,” Peter sighed, his own bafflement clear in his voice. “And who knows? Maybe there isn’t anything to it.”

  But as Judith hung up the phone she knew that Peter hadn’t believed his own last words any more than she did. You didn’t give a whole school full of kids a mass inoculation for no reason at all.

  As she was telling Frank what Peter had told her, Jed came in and slid into his chair at the kitchen table, instantly plunging into the business of eating the plate of pancakes Judith put in front of him. As she finished her recounting of the call, her eyes moved to Jed. “What about it?” she asked. “Have you noticed anything about any of the kids? Anything I might have missed?”

  Jed shrugged. “They’re not dropping dead, or anything like that.” He finished off the last morsel of pancakes, then picked up his book bag and headed for the back door. Abruptly he turned back, his eyes fixing on his father. “Dad?”

  Frank looked up inquiringly. There was an odd look on Jed’s face, and when he spoke again, his voice quavered.

  “Be careful today, Dad. Okay?”

  Frank felt a sudden tightening in his throat. It was the first time in years—perhaps even the first time since Alice had died—that Jed had exposed his feelings so openly. “I—I will, son,” he said, surprised at the gruffness in his own voice. “And you too, right?”

  But Jed shook his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “It’s you I’m worried about. Just be careful.”

  Before either Judith or Frank could say anything else, he turned and disappeared out the back door. At last Frank turned to Judith. “Do you have any idea what might have brought that on?”

  Judith chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip for a moment, her eyes fixed on the back door. “He must have heard us talking last night,” she said. And yet just before Jed had left, she’d seen an odd look in his eyes.

  The same kind of odd look he’d had as he’d told her about his experience up at Kokatí three nights ago, when he’d seen things he couldn’t possibly have seen.

  Had he seen something else last night?

  * * *

  Frank Arnold shivered as he stared into the pipe. He hated the dam, hated the total lack of natural light in the narrow winding passages that honeycombed the massive concrete structure; hated the chill of the place, whose temperature never varied from 54° Fahrenheit; hated, most of all, his unreasoning fear of being trapped within the dam’s confining spaces.

  He’d stood above the dam that morning, looking down at it from the canyon’s rim, telling himself it was perfectly safe, that there was no reason to fear it.

  But even then his emotions had threatened to betray him, as he began to think about going down into it—not for a brief tour of inspection like last week’s, but to spend the next eight hours crawling through its maze of passages.

  Brown Eagle had suddenly appeared beside him that morning, seeming to come out of nowhere.

  “It is a bad place,” he’d said, as if reading Frank’s mind. Frank had looked up, startled. He nodded grimly, then managed a grin. “Oh, I don’t know. Not really much different from a kiva, I suppose. Dark, and closed in. Seems to me you’d like it.”

  Brown Eagle eyed Frank solemnly. “The kiva honors nature,” he said. “The dam destroys it.”

  Frank had heard it all before, heard Brown Eagle ramble on for hours sometimes, talking about the patience of the Kokatí, and his faith that in the end the land would be restored to them. Then everything would be as it had been before the white men ever came. But the white men had been around for centuries now, and the dam for more than half of one, and Frank sometimes wondered if the Kokatí ever noticed that their spirits never seemed to do much about the situation. His eyes had drifted back to the dam for a moment. When he’d turned to speak to Brown Eagle again, the Indian was gone, having disappeared back into the desert as silently as he’d come.

  Now, as he prepared himself to creep through the access hatch into the pipe that would take him to the main power shaft, opening into it just above the turbine itself, he heard Brown Eagle’s words once more and decided he agreed with him. The dam was, indeed, a thoroughly bad place, and right now—if he weren’t inside it—he might almost wish that the spirits, whatever they were, would destroy it.

  He took a deep breath, hunched his shoulders, and snapped on the miner’s light attached to his hard hat. Then he pushed his way through the hatch into the pipe itself.

  Instantly, the space seemed to shrink around him, and he felt an almost irresistible urge to draw his knees up, push his back against the tight curve of concrete above him, and try to rise to his feet.

  But he couldn’t stand up, couldn’t even get to his knees. The pipe, barely two feet in diameter, forced him to creep along, using only his fingers and toes to find slippery holds in the algae-covered concrete.

  He felt bands of panic ti
ghten around his chest, and stopped moving, concentrating his entire being on fighting the overwhelming urge to thrash himself free from the constrictions of the pipe.

  He heard a sound, a crunching noise, and wanted to scream out as he imagined himself trapped inside the pipe as parts of the dam gave way.

  No, he told himself. It’s not breaking up, and the pipe’s not getting smaller, and I’m not trapped.

  He began talking to himself, whispering silently, giving himself a steady stream of encouragement.

  It helped to keep the panic slightly at bay, and after a moment he began creeping forward again, down the pipe’s slope.

  He had moved no more than a few yards when the light on his helmet went out and he was plunged into total darkness. Instinctively he clamped his eyes shut, as if by doing that he could convince himself the suffocating blackness wasn’t real.

  Clumsily he pulled the hat off his head and fumbled with the switch on the miner’s lamp. The light came on for a second, then went out again.

  Panic was creeping up on him inexorably now. Before, he’d at least been able to see the pipe stretching away in front of him.

  Now there was nothing but blackness around him, and everywhere he moved, the unforgiving hardness of cold concrete.

  Terror loomed up inside him, and he tried to rear up to face it head-on.

  The pipe let him move only an inch, then stopped him.

  The terror grew, and he felt his mind beginning to give way.

  He was going to die here. He knew it. The pipe was going to crush him, close around him, snuff out his life the way it had snuffed out the dim light of the lantern.

  He felt as though he were going to explode. Finally he gave way to the panic, thrashing himself against the walls of the pipe, as if to break loose from the clutches of the concrete.

  He knew now what it would feel like to be buried alive, knew the hopelessness of it.

  He clawed at the concrete, his fingernails tearing and breaking as he scratched away the algae and gouged at the stone and cement beneath.