Chapter 33
Two Ways Out
Awakens, huddled on the mattress in a dark stretch of corridor. Barely has the strength to force her gummy eyelids open. Has a confused memory of what seems years of marching down corridors, high-ceilinged corridors, low-ceilinged corridors, stagnant silent corridors, corridors swept by sudden howling gales that buffet her and her sail-like bed-things from wall to wall. All those staircases, too, craning her neck over the end of the rolled-up mattress but sometimes missing a step (or the step itself missing), pitching forward and surrendering to sleep in the unimproved posture of fall.
Despite all those corridors and staircases, though, maybe she’d put no distance between herself and the others, maybe circling back towards her point of departure, because over and over she’d heard, or imagined she’d heard, the terrible fragmented echo of their pursuing voices calling her name.
She struggles to her feet now and rolls up the bed things. When she picks up the pillow, more feathers seep out from the big rent made by a splintered banister at the very beginning of her flight. The pillow is practically empty by now.
Stumbling out of the zone of darkness she observes with relief that the walls are free of the distinctive signs of the Five (Louis’ two linked circles, Margaret’s heart, Seymour’s child face with dot-eyes, Max’s doughnut, her own H). So she’s far from them after all, in an unexplored part of the Prefecture, for there are none of the signs of their suspended predecessors either.
No, not unexplored. On a further wall she makes out the familiar hand-printed admonition, the truth of which she’d long been convinced of: OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS.
The corridor turns. Ahead, she sees two great crossed timbers barring the way. She has a faint memory of this. A dream? Something recounted by somebody long ago? On one of the timbers words in dripping tar warn of danger and forbid access.
Despite (or because of) the warning, she squeezes through into a zone of destruction. The walls are badly cracked. The floor is littered deep with plaster dumped by the ruined sagging ceiling. Doors are askew on a single hinge. Strangely, the wickered bulbs are unaffected by this destruction and illuminate it. Ahead there’s a replica of the first crossed timbers. It comes as no surprise. Picking her way through the rubble, she reaches it and reads the same tarred warning, this one with extra exclamation marks.
Again she’s impelled to go beyond this second, even more imperious, warning, as though to reconstruct the half-forgotten dream or recover all of the long-ago account of this place.
She finds herself standing precariously in the midst of much worse destruction. It’s incredible that the fragile bulbs had survived to shine on what looks like the aftermath of an aerial bombardment: blasted ceiling, gaping cracks in the walls, the debris-littered floor buckled in places like geological strata. She struggles forward and stops at a great chasm with a big lopsided staircase full of rubble. It plunges down and down past the light into darkness. Just looking down at it makes her dizzy.
Her foot displaces a brick. It tumbles into the dark chasm. Five seconds later the faint impact fifty feet below sets off chaos above. The ground trembles. Debris starts raining down. Helen deploys the mattress and hoists it on her head for protection. Her foot slips and starts a minor avalanche. Blinded by the drooping mattress she teeters and falls forward on the first staircase steps.
The mattress cushions the shock, a positive point. But then it slides bumpily down the stairs like a sled. She grips the sides as it gains momentum. The broken steps blur with her acceleration. They vanish as she plunges into the zone of darkness.
The mattress, like a magic carpet, takes off and she sails into the dark void and sinks down, knowing that this is the long-desired exit. She ought to be glad. Instead, she has visions of unrelated things enjoyed in a previous lifetime: yellow tulips, sledding in Québec, making love with Richard in the honeymoon hotel room with pictures of soaring birds on the pale blue walls, the Seine at sunrise, things that of course she’d already lost. But she can’t help reacting to their second, definitive, loss as memories.
Her five-second scream is cut off abruptly by arrival below, not far from the badly fragmented brick.
Margaret is the one who finds Helen, poorly guided to her by the feathers that had leaked out of the rent pillowcase. Pebbles, the classic resort in labyrinths, would have done a better job than feathers. Pebbles are heavy and stay put even in drafty not to say gale-swept corridors. But feathers, not pebbles, are what you find in pillowcases. So Margaret has to make do with feathers.
Finally, days later, on the point of collapse, Margaret follows the last of them. She goes past the hand-printed warning that out is a double-cross and soon sees what Helen had twice seen blocking the way. Like Helen, she ventures past the timbers into growing ruin. She halts at the broken staircase that Helen had seen.
But she sees far below what Helen couldn’t possibly have seen (except as sinister prescience): a pool of light from a naked dangling bulb and in the center of the pool of light, on a vast heap of books, papers and files splattered by the peculiar shade of gray that blood has here, Helen, doll-size seen from that height, splattered with blood too and motionless, slouched forward, her face hidden.
Margaret’s scream is a whisper. She’s lost her voice crying out Helen’s name for days in all those corridors and staircases. Soon she even loses the whispered screams.
Feathers had guided her to Helen’s fall. The same feathers guide her back, half-mad, to the others. Louis immediately dials 000 on the phone reserved for emergencies. A crackling female voice says something unintelligible and the line goes dead. Louis tries again and again, then Seymour, then Max, again and again. Max cries repeatedly: “It’s an emergency, goddam you.” Finally, bawling, he punches the phone all his might, even though such willful destruction of State property can cost him thirty points. The pain distracts him from his grief for a while.
The Four set out with ropes, an improvised stretcher and food too, enough for Five, more as a gesture than out of necessity. Margaret had estimated the fall to have been a hundred feet and ending with gallons and gallons of blood.
The Four too go past the two crossed timbers and see her far below as Margaret had seen her; her back to them, slouched forward motionless, face concealed, on the mattress crowning a great heap of files with dozens of books and with blood on her and on the files and papers but not on the books.
They cry her name but get no response except the terrible echo her name has given them for all of this lifetime.
They accuse themselves of having driven her to this bloody death. They weep and eulogize, evoking her qualities. Seymour chokes up when he remembers that he’d almost fallen in love with her. At least he’d tried to. He wants to console the others and himself by saying that now she’s where she’d always wanted to be but he chokes up on that to.
They can’t leave her there. Louis is about to attach the rope to a broken pillar when they see Helen’s hand rise and push aside a dangling lock of gray hair.
Joyous, they know that she’s alive but ignoring them as punishment.
Guilty, they cry apologies.
Helen, answer us.
Answer us, Helen.
Please, please.
Finally, her head jerks up as if hearing them for the first time. She turns around and looks up. Her face is strangely luminous beneath the blood and the dirt. She gives a little wave and returns to her nearsighted crouch over the book on her lap. They can see it now.
They yell down to her. Are you all right? All that blood. She looks up at them again with, perhaps, an expression of annoyance. In a tiny abstracted voice she says: a long fall but cushioned by the mattress and all these files, so nothing worse than a very bad nose bleed and maybe a sprained ankle. Could they throw down something to eat? Did they bring her reading glasses, maybe? She hadn’t expected to find these marvelous books.
She returns to the book.
The
y toss down elephant balls. One of them lands a few feet from her with a plop on an open book. They hear her little cry of annoyance and see her limp over to the book and carefully clean the soiled pages. Then she devours the flattened elephant ball. She limps over to the other flattened elephant balls and devours them.
She returns to the book she’d been reading.
Louis secures the rope and goes down to her hand under hand. The others above see his eloquent gestures of persuasion. She doesn’t seem anxious to go up to them. They call down to her, coaxing and imploring.
Finally she slings the pouch over her shoulder and fills it with carefully selected books. It takes her a long time to pick and choose. The others hear Louis promise he’ll return for all the other books.
He ties the rope around her waist and climbs up to the others. Weeping and laughing, they all heave her up out of the depths.
They kiss and hug her but gently as though she could break like glass. She’s covered with dirt. When she eagerly shows them the books, dirt pours off them. They wonder at it. Oh the dirt, she says. Yes, in all the rooms she’d visited, the books had roughly concealed great heaps of dirt. She starts talking about those books: complete sets of Balzac and Dickens and Victor Hugo and …
They interrupt her. Of course it’s the dirt that interests them, all that pay dirt in all those rooms.
Yes, she says, impatient at the interruption, the tunnel they’d been looking for a long time ago must be somewhere in that corridor, of course it’s …
She breaks off. She can’t bring herself to extinguish their shining faces – Margaret’s above all – with “it’s a trap.” She completes her sentence with a lamely inadequate “… of course it’s very nice.”
She returns to the important thing. So not only the complete works of Balzac and Dickens and Victor Hugo, but also poetry anthologies and, greatest of all, the complete plays of Shakespeare, a scholarly annotated edition.
They (the Four) badly want to explore the depths, but they’re short of food and anyhow they’ll need tools and rope ladders for the job. They rein in their impatience and turn back to the Living Quarters, bearing Helen on the stretcher like an injured queen.
She tries to go on reading Dickens. With the jolts and the dim light she can salvage no more than three or four words at a time. They urge her to rest her eyes. They can’t understand that any moment now the trap – her own particular custom-designed trap – could spring and all those pages go blank, or she would awaken, tortured, out of the marvelous dream.
At one turn of a corridor they see on a wall the familiar words: OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS.
No dour warning now but fabulous promise, what it had taken them a whole second lifetime to comprehend: the coded allusion to one of the rare landmarks in the maze, those two crossed timbers and to the way out located nearby.
Helen gives up trying to read. Anyhow, she’s stored up all those images, more real than the corridors jerking past, more real, even, than what the Common Room window shows. She closes her eyes and sees, as if she were there, the gleaming cobblestones and the fog-wreathed gas lamps of London. She grips the book, her precious private portable way out.
That night, Margaret wakes up and notices a muffled light coming from the corner of the room. She gets up and sees that Helen is reading under the blanket with a flashlight. Approaching, she stumbles and nearly sprawls over the books on the floor. She caresses the outline of Helen’s back.
“Just a minute,” comes Helen’s muffled abstracted voice.
It’s a long minute. Margaret, practically naked, shivers and sneezes. At that, Helen switches off the flashlight and welcomes her, welcomes her very warmly, but the books she’s taken to bed with her get in the way a little.
After, side by side, Margaret is afraid of the consequences.
“We mustn’t ever again, Helen. That was the second time. There mustn’t be a third time, Helen.”
“All right,” says Helen, with no more than a second’s pause.
Margaret feels like weeping. She returns to her cot.
After a few seconds the muffled light comes back on under Helen’s blanket.
The next day the four of them mold elephant balls and leave Helen in bed with her sprained ankle and her books.
With the long rope ladders Louis had spent the night knotting they descend into the depths. They discover rooms filled with great mounds of earth concealed by files and more novels. Grubbing in the dirt they come across blackened Roman coins and fragments of bones, possibly not human.
Finally they encounter dim footprints, maybe decades old, drowning in dust. They lead, one-way, to a door. On both sides a long-ago hand has scratched tiny double crosses, the final coded promise of escape on the other side of the door.
But how do they get to that other side? The door is massive steel, like a bank vault and the treasure it holds guarded by a clearly tamper-proof lock.
They stand there, stymied, until Louis says: “No problem, Stein. The girl who cleans the keys. Your sweetie-pie. Get your sweetie-pie to give us the key
to …”
He steps back and wipes the dust off the number. “The key to Room 147.”
That number sounds vaguely familiar to Seymour. But he can’t pin it down.
He objects that Stupid is no sweetie-pie of his. He hasn’t said a word to her for years. Nobody has, first out of kindness and then out of habit.
“You better start in now,” says Max.
Chapter 34