The next floor ballooned into a wooden cavern, as if the university had gnawed out the insides of the bodegas and ristorantes to create a vast hollow wherein to hoard its atmosphere of dust and disinfectant and ancient wood-polish. Only a bluish glow could penetrate the fog and soot on tall Gothic windows at the end, though it shone enough to make the floor look waterish. He ventured onto it like an inept skater.
The hall was so large that it concealed the doors of the offices it was meant to service, all of them half-glazed with frosted panels. He veered toward the distant side and studied one after another, but none bore the name “West.” None seemed to be lighted within. After he had tried a few and found them locked, it struck him that the numbers on these doors were wrong: four-twelve, four-fifteen.
He screwed up his courage and called, “Hello? Hello!,” but got no response.
Near the windows at the end he found an unglazed door with the faded legend, Gentlemen, and he entered gratefully. It contained a single toilet whose black seat was askew. The bowl was crazed with a thousand tiny cracks, and its monumental stain had leaked into all of them, but it served his purpose. Raising his eyes, he saw something he had only been told about by old people, a coffin-like box with a chain at the side. Pipes ran down to the bowl, which had no usual tank or handle. An image of Mary as a Swinburnian demimondaine constricted by stiff corsets stirred him.
He zipped up hastily, remembering why he was here. His imaginary enrollment in Professor West’s course was a real threat. He was unprepared for the roar of the toilet, the violent scouring of the bowl, when he pulled the chain beside the box.
He thought he heard voices outside the door. He was sure he heard voices.
“By swallowing its tail,” a voice seemed to say, “the worm ouroboros swallows all.”
“ ... Tourmalign,” a second seemed to say.
Redfield tried to pull the door open. He wanted to burst upon them and demand answers. The door refused to budge. The toilet continued to roar, then gurgle, obscuring the conversation. He hammered the door, kicked it, and at last it burst wide. The huge hall was empty, but the persons he had heard would have had more than enough time to disappear by unremarkable means.
* * * *
If he was on the fourth floor of Bard Hall, the second would be in the basement. This was not impossible. Market Street followed the crest of a hill. The main entrance to the building might be on the downward slope of that hill. If he had entered there, he would have entered on the ground floor. That he had come in by a back entrance to the third floor would explain, too, the absence of a valid directory.
He approached the windows and tried to rub them clear with his forearm, but that only dirtied his sleeve. The snow spattered eagerly against the glass shielding his arm, and he jerked it back.
He saw a downward stair to his left, dark and unpromising, but he took it. He reached a narrow landing lit by a caged, naked bulb. Three doors led from it, but none was marked and all were locked. This would be the floor by which he had entered: the third? He must be descending a disused fire-exit, not a main stairway. Serpentine graffiti tangled on walls of bare brick. Snake 312 one of them read, which struck him as a very strange coincidence, but it must have been the work of an anthropology student playing at street-hooligan.
The next flight was brighter, and he took heart from this until he saw why: it ended at a glass door to the outside. It was obviously at ground level, but by his reckoning this should be the second floor.
No interior door led from this cramped entrance, but the stairway continued down. The hill might be irregular in shape, and the true main entrance could be somewhere to his right and another floor farther down. He pushed on the pressure-bar and managed to force the door open a few inches against drifted snow, but he was unable to see much of the building through billowing white clouds when he squeezed his head outside. He retreated and let the wind slam the door, regretting the horrendous clang that echoed and re-echoed through the stairwell.
The downward stairway was very dark, it smelled dank and musty; but the alternative to descending was to go outdoors and slog his way across the drifted hillside in the teeth of a gale, looking for another entrance that might not exist. At very least, he might find a janitor below who could set him on the right track.
The steps under his feet were utilitarian metal now, but the rail didn’t freeze his hand. It seemed to have been coated with a thick, rubbery material that gave in unexpected ways, as if with a life of its own.
He reached the bottom and stepped into a puddle on the concrete floor. That and his blindness should have oppressed him, he knew, but for the first time in a long while he was truly warm, and that counted for a lot. The atmosphere of the basement was muggy. He might not have been surprised to hear the cry of an exotic bird or monkey in the humid blackness.
“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone here?”
Listening intently in the silence that followed, he thought he heard a hiss of steam, and a rustling that suggested stiff garments brushing the floor. Swinburne’s street-walkers strutted luminously before him, but he tried hard to replace them with a man erratically plying a broom in the distance. Whatever the sounds meant, someone was down here with him, who might not have heard him over the noise of his own work.
He advanced by tiny steps with hands outstretched, jumping and nearly losing his balance when drops of tepid water dribbled on them. This could be nothing but the basement, the ultimate, subterranean floor of the queer building. He had overlooked some obvious feature of the structure, or he had simply miscalculated. When he found the janitor, he wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that he badly needed guidance.
The musty smell became distressingly sour. He was about to retreat and call this day a total loss when his path grew lighter. Blue, but intenser than snowy daylight, the luminance ahead suggested electricity. A fizzing sound rose as he advanced. He could easily picture a welder repairing a boiler. He saw that he walked in a corridor roofed and walled with a tangle of greasy black cables and sagging ducts that seemed to convulse in the uncertain light as it brightened. Shadows that made no sense jerked and writhed.
He rounded a curve and nearly blundered into the back of a kneeling man whose hunched shoulders cherished the source of the brilliance.
“I beg your pardon....”
The workman sprang to his feet and whirled in one motion. Against the undiminished glare of the welding torch, or whatever it was, his silhouette radiated not just shock but outrage. His alert crouch and outstretched arms threatened immediate attack. Redfield stumbled backward.
“I’m sorry, I’ve lost my way, I was wondering—”
The man shrieked with fury and spattered a volley of sibilants. His bald skull gleamed in the light behind him. Oddly wedge-shaped, it recalled the electrician, and Redfield was willing to accept the improbability that his wayward course had led him to the selfsame man.
“My name is Redfield, I’m a student, I—”
Whether or not the man understood, this only enraged him more. He advanced, spitting and hissing in a language that bore no real resemblance to Spanish or any other tongue on earth. Redfield felt in danger of immediate and violent attack. Screaming, he turned and ran. He fell, scraping his knees and hands, but he could spare no time to rise as he hurled himself forward on all fours over rough concrete, through tepid puddles. Banging his head sickeningly into a wall, he only changed his course without interrupting his abject flight. He sensed that his pursuer hovered behind him, but his own hoarse screams drowned any noise of pursuit.
He clanged into the metal stair and flung himself upward, somehow regaining his feet and clinging to the handrail. It must have been a different stairway, for the rail was plain, cold metal, uncovered by any rubbery substance. He hesitated when he saw a bluish light ahead, but then he realized it was only daylight and sprang toward it. He battered his way through a door with a pressure-bar and fell full-length into deep snow.
The shock restored h
im. Again he must have misinterpreted. He had crept up on a workman and scared the poor fellow out of his wits. He had been angry, yes, but even more frightened than Redfield himself. No one was treading on his heels with the intention of killing him. But he scoured the snow from his eyes and peered back at the door to make absolutely sure this was true as he tried to catch his breath in agonizing whoops.
“Go back and give him a piece of my mind,” he muttered, mocking a favorite phrase of his mother’s to cover his shame. He had already given him a piece of his skull. He touched his forehead, but the blood he saw on his fingers might have come from his scraped hands.
He wrapped his scarf around his head. By now it was completely soaked, but the honest wool could still hold warmth. He burst to his feet and lurched down the slope.
Redfield might have persisted in looking for Professor West, but the wind promised to be at his back all the way home. Even so it pierced his jacket, seemed to pierce his skin and meat and bones. It might have been the cosmic wind of atoms that eternally replaces flesh with dust and dust with flesh, that replaces Redfield with snow and snow with the equestrian statue across the way. That was the meaning of the worm ouroboros, the serpent eternally swallowing its tail.
He found this thought even more depressing than any of his real problems.
* * * *
Soaked, he hauled himself up the bannister with numb hands on numb feet and with legs pierced by knives. The last thing he needed, the fat woman with the rosary, blocked his way. He shrank to the side as she said something and exhibited her fist. Her ample thighs billowed against him. He couldn’t believe it, she aroused him.
“Si, si, Santa Maria,” he muttered, smiling and nodding, wanting only to slither past. “Mucho—Christ!—bona.”
“Santa Maria!” she repeated, but with—loathing? And then she dealt him a profounder shock than any he had got today by spitting in his face.
“You cunt!” he shouted after her, scouring the spit from his face with his sleeve, as she tramped heavily downward. “You and your Virgin both!”
God, he was losing his mind! The house was probably crawling with her relatives, one of whom had to speak English. They would tear him in chunks and eat him. He continued on his way at a fast hobble, slammed his door behind him and locked it. His clothes hit the floor in soggy wads. He pulled a blanket from the bed, the first thing that came to hand, and scrubbed his bare body furiously. He wrapped the second blanket around him and coiled into his one upholstered chair with his blue feet jammed under his quaking buttocks.
He breathed deeply, sighed, surveyed his home. No one pounded at the door. He was safe. He got up and pulled a can of beer from the jokey little refrigerator. It was far too early to drink. He would fall asleep in the early evening and wake up in a darkness that would last for hours, but he needed a restorative now. He sipped and stared at the snow against his window, hoping the storm would last a week and cover the earth to a depth of fifty feet.
He forced himself to get up again and retrieve Tourmalign’s letter from his sodden jacket. The envelope bore only illegible smears, the letter was the same. Only the author’s letterhead—without his address—and the sticker could be read: ystery orm. He could call and ask the author what the hell this was all about, but he had no phone. Dressing and going to the pay-phone on the first floor would be a daunting task, especially since he remembered nothing but the state where Tourmalign lived. The phone would be unlisted, he would run out of coins, the beige woman would return to spit on him.
He still had the erection she had improbably provoked. He toyed with it listlessly. Swinburne would have begged her to spit on him—Our Lady of Pain!—and her ample figure might have appealed to his taste. She wasn’t all that bad, merely older than Redfield by ten years or so and unfashionably buxom. Black eyes, rose-beige skin. The heavy white limbs and the cruel red mouth like a venomous flower....
He pictured her fist, so tiny against her huge breasts, her thick lips. He saw it with the rosary entangled—but was it a rosary? When he tried to see her, he saw a smooth, black, shiny thing entwined in her fingers, a greasy black rope. Before he knew it, his seed was spurting into the blanket.
* * * *
He woke up wet and shivering. He blamed what he once would have called his sin, and it seemed sinful, or at least shameful, to masturbate and sit dully while the slime cooled enough to rouse him. But it was dark now. Hours must have passed since then.
He had spilled his can of beer in his lap. He swore and stilted up on cramped legs, flinging the blanket aside. He tripped over something, shouting in fear as he fell forward. The sensation in the arm he had tried to fling out in defense was more like a white bolt of clear light than a pain, but it very soon became a pain. He could recall none worse.
His fall seemed to have shaken the building, and he lay waiting for the neighbors to hammer, but they didn’t. The distinctive zones of human and electronic gibberish that defined his space were silent. He heard only a pervasive rustling that he ascribed to a grittier sort of snow against the dim window. It must be later than he was willing to accept.
He rose to his knees. His right arm wouldn’t bend. He tried to gather it against him with his left, but the pain made him cry out again. He found a table-lamp and pushed the switch, but nothing happened. He had probably tripped over the cord and unplugged it, although his best recollection suggested a more substantial obstacle that had no business cluttering his floor.
“I have a serious problem to deal with,” he muttered, and the words almost pleased him, they were so true, so unlike the usual drift of his life in their precision. The only people within shouting distance disliked him or—as that woman’s behavior suggested—detested him. He had earned a name as a late-night howler and midnight stamper. If he caught their notice, would they do more than hammer for peace? If they came to his door, would they help him, or would they break his other arm and go back to bed?
And it was broken. The elbow no longer conformed to his deeply-ingrained image of his own elbow, and that rupture with accepted reality was almost worse than the pain itself. The pain, though, was bad enough. When he fondled the break, bones ground audibly, and he fell to his knees with a scream.
When his sobs subsided, he listened hard. He heard nothing but the rustle of incipient sleet, even though he had hit the floor with all his weight. He had screamed very loudly.
He needed light. He got to his feet, noticing how unexpectedly important it was to have two sound arms in order to stand. He went to the door and fumbled beside it for the light switch. His hand rocketed away from something that should not have been there.
The electrician, of course, the electrician: he had been drilling beside the door, and he had ... what had he done? The light-switch was missing. Through the hole he had drilled, a thick cable, thick as Redfield’s arm, had been inserted. Something about its texture made him jerk his hand away.
But there would be a light in the hall. When he tried to verify this by peering through the crack, he saw nothing. He fumbled with the doorknob, turned the catch of the lock, but the door was immovable. He pounded on the door, kicked it, but when he paused, out of breath and strength, he heard nothing but his own wheezing gasps.
He tried to organize his thoughts. The hall was dark, and the electric clock by his bed did not shine. The power in the building must be out. Brilliant! He couldn’t read his cheap watch in the dark. He took it to the window, hoping that a streetlight down the way might help him, but that streetlight was out, too. He saw no light, just a pinkish pallor in the gap where the sky should have been. Unseen snowflakes pattered against the window.
The power-failure was general. His neighbors had abandoned the building. Why? The heat wasn’t electric, it was steam, but he noticed now that he was cold. The boiler must be controlled by electricity. He had been abandoned to freeze in darkness with a broken arm because they hated Anglo-Saxons; or more likely, because they had knocked on his door, hadn’t been answered, and as
sumed he was out, or occupied with those concerns he had never condescended to tell them about. He should have been nicer to them; but they had always scared him, he had to admit.
Turning inward, he found that he could very nearly see in the pervasive pallor, but not quite. He could discern shadowy shapes he knew and some he didn’t know. The floor seemed especially thick with long shadows that he avoided. He heard a thin hissing that suggested the heat would soon return.
He would have liked to have a beer, but the effort to reach his chair, only a few steps away, was the most he could manage. The refrigerator lay in far deeper darkness. He found his blanket, not all wet, and gathered it around his nakedness. He stared at the dim window and tried to tell himself that he was reasonably comfortable, that he could last until morning.
The pain in his arm now throbbed to the rhythm of his heart. It was hard to shake the delusion that he had an enormous, red-glowing arm that was twice the size of his body. Leaning to the right and letting his knuckles rest on the floor seemed to minimize the pain. Capt. Scott—“ ... these rough notes and our dead bodies...”—would never have whined about the mere inconvenience of a broken arm.
But Capt. Scott in his antiseptic Antarctic had had no snakes to deal with, and now the thick shadows on Redfield’s floor were on the move. He gathered his feet into the chair, screaming, but he could not gather in his right arm. He heard the hissing he had thought was snow, the rustling he had dismissed as steam, but the writhing and interwreathing shadows now told him what those sounds meant.
He tried to rise—he would have leaped naked through the window into the snowstorm, if he could have—but his hand was held. A numb constriction spread upward toward the splintered elbow by slow degrees. He was being swallowed.
He plunged his left hand down into the darkness and seized the thick, rubbery sleeve that muffled his right hand and forearm. It was ponderous. He heard a rustling of monstrous coils as the creature that held him set itself to resist. The abomination slipped from his grasp in its sliminess until he dug his fingernails in, and the pain of wrenching his elbow upward was all but fatal: yet these things had to be done. He dragged it within reach of the only weapons he had, his teeth.
Nasty Stories Page 6