Abruptly, the last slug tore through the wall of the house, and the last casing hit the bottom step on which the Nazi stood, and the room went silent. A sprinkle of plaster-dust made a fine, sifting noise. But it was silent. And dark again.
The rifle shot was a million times louder than anything ever heard in the world before. It had been silent, then the silence had been torn to shreds with a burp-gun’s depredations, then silence again. And now the rifle shot.
The Nazi choked once; there was a watery gurgle as if someone had forgotten to turn a faucet off tightly, and with a metallic clatter of equipment and body, he fell forward, caught the edge of the banister and was whirled sidewise, tumbled the one step to the floor, and fell flat on his stomach.
Arnie suddenly realized he could feel the bucking of the M-1 in his hands, moments after the recoil had faded. He had killed the Nazi. Somehow. Without trying. Instinct, perhaps. Maybe it was someone else entirely. A reflex.
“Jeezus,” he murmured, gently. The body at the foot of the stairs moved softly. Arnie got to his feet and blindly stumbled toward the sound. His right boot met an obstacle, and he reached down into that pit of shadow to touch the body. His hand encountered the face. His fingertip brushed an open eye. It was not moist. Curious. It was dry. Dead, this man was dead.
Click! Just that exactly, a switch of thought was turned off in Arnie Winslow’s mind, and all his mouth-gagging fear came to asphyxiating proportions; the darkness built into a massive wave that swept over him; the wide-eyed shivering he had done as the hundreds of burp-gun slugs thundered just over his head; the death of this stranger; all built into an electrical current that turned off the switch; and the hammer that had been poised in his mind—suddenly struck!
Arnie Winslow fell forward across the body of the dead Nazi, unconscious. Blissfully, thankgod unconscious. His teeth were so tightly clenched, the enamel of one incisor chipped.
When he came up from the depths, breast-stroking with all his strength, he came awake in pieces. First his hands that held the rifle—under him, resting on something soft—and he tried to move them. They were under him. They would not move. But the soft something moved, it gave with the pressure. Then his legs, which bent at the knees, and he slid off the Nazi to the floor. Then his heart and his lungs and his chest, all went pumping back into action. Then his head. But his eyes remained dead. It was still dark all around him. But the fear had become a new creature, with new attributes; it had metamorphosed, and the paralysis was gone. He could move well enough—which he proved by standing up, supporting himself on the rifle and the banister which brushed him, which he grabbed—but he was trembling uncontrollably. He was locked in the hideous embrace of a twitching that threatened to shake his body apart. His head ached terribly. His mouth was dry, and it hurt.
The sound of rifle-fire from outside brought him to sudden awareness that nothing had changed. Truck and the others were still pinned down in that goddam warehouse, and the Krauts were intent on filling the building with corpses.
He knew there was nothing he could do, personally, to take the heat off them. Too many Germans. His only thought was of getting back to the lines, letting the main force know Bain-de-Bretagne was a deathtrap, and trying to send back a larger force to pry the patrol out of their bind. He thought of all this haphazardly, with stops and starts in his processes for the fear that gnawed at him. And all of it was afterthought. His first thought was: It’ll be lighter outside.
Of such stuff are heroes made.
But when he had found his way back to the front door, and stuck his head out, a sense of impending doom had warned him and he had ducked back in just as a burst of automatic fire whined across the doorway. His friend in the bell-tower had taken no coffee breaks. He slammed the door. And was alone in the hole of black. The fear slammed him once more. Visions dark and terrible came and went. He was in the dark. The blind bird, the blind blind bird!
In a gesture he had long since stopped using, his fist went to his mouth. The child habit, back again. The man a child once more. Help me…
He began searching the house for other exits. There were no other doors. It was a town house, backed on three sides by the rear walls of other homes. The windows were bricked up. There was no skylight. The street was a cemetery waiting to receive his bones.
He lit a match. It was all the good and warm and fine and golden in the universe. His tongue came out of his mouth in pleasure at the sight of it, flickering there in his hand. He had not thought of it before, why, he didn’t know. But here it was and here he was, and the light was all around him, washing him, laving him, reassuring him, and…he burned his fingers. He dropped the match and it went out.
There were three more in the folder. He wanted to light them all, all at once, and start a bonfire that would drive away the fears and the sharp-fanged things that lived in his fears of the dark. But that was insane. He struck another, brightly, quickly.
(And he suddenly realized he was just a bit mad.) The match burned out…
At which point he saw the metal ring in the floor, attached to the trapdoor. Trapdoor, basement, drainpipe, sewer, river, outlet, freedom, the American lines, freedom, light light light! A Chinese box within a box within a box within a great fog of darkness. He lit another match, and slinging the rifle across his back, he pulled the trapdoor ring. The huge wooden slab came up heavily, and he let it fall back with a crash. The pit opened before him. Darker than the darkness above. Most black of all hells. Infernally devoid of the slightest hint of light. That basement. There could be…anything…down there.
He stumbled back, the fear a great clot in his brain.
Black!
Black!
Oh, God how black! He could never go down there, could never never go down there! Madness waited, the fears of his childhood, damn you damn you, damn you the one I called “she,” damn you!
Trembling!
Stumbling!
Incapable of halting himself, he stepped forward, his foot encountered emptiness and with a shriek he fell into the hole. He hit the stairs five times on his way to the bottom, and brought up short lying tangled, crying like an infant, at the bottom of the flight. He was down there in the pit. He was alone at the bottom. Silence. Darkness. Fearful empty!
He lay there for moments without duration, hours without relation to time, centuries ripped whole from the fabric of forever. He lay there, and knew this was the way it was going to be. There was no other way, so this was the way it would finally be. He listened.
Silence.
But the sound of water. Young fears came to join their elders. Water. The sewers ran under this house, under those streets, under this town, and down in those sewers he could find a way out, a way back. If he could become human enough to try it. But he was not a human, he was something named Arnie Winslow, six years old, maybe seven, and deathly afraid of the horrors that lurked in basements. He was crying. Tears burned his eyes, red burned, and ran down his cheeks, over his lips so he could taste the shame of them, and he was a boy of six, seven once more. He was a boy playing soldier, and as for those men in that warehouse, their names were already engraved on headstones. Because Arnie Winslow was not going down into the sewers. Oh, God, the very thought made his flesh pucker and wilt. The sewers.
The rattle of machine guns came distantly, down the stairwell. He could hear them dying. He could hear their bones decaying, their flesh rotting, the maggots eating their vitals. He could know what it was, and it meant nothing.
Given the choice of heroism and sanity, there is no man so brave that he will willingly plunge into death or madness. Heroes are made on the instant; quick men, who don’t understand that the darkness always waits to swallow them. They are men unlike Arnie Winslow, lying at the bottom of the flight of stairs, dumped in sightlessly where monsters of the mind sit poised ready to spring, to feast on flesh of the soul.
He began scrabbling across the floor, toward the sound of the water. Fear was the Old Man of the Sea, riding
him with hideous cackles and an unbreakable promise of death.
Time…does it crawl, too? Perhaps.
He found the lid of the water drain, and it was large enough to slip down through. It should have been too small, it should have been a tiny hole allowing only cellar water to escape; it should have been bolted shut by a large grille, it should have been a false entrance. It should have been, he wanted it to be. But it was large enough to allow him entrance without discomfort. Bodily discomfort. It should not have been so eager to swallow him. But it smiled and opened its maw, and he went down, and hung there above nothing, the rifle heavy across his shoulders, and fingertips left the edge of stone floor, and he dropped. It was less than two feet, but he fell for an eternity, and when he hit the water he screamed.
The knives slashed at his legs, and the cold steel pierced his tender six-, seven-year-old flesh and he screamed. It was a high, whining wail, carrying in its tone the erosive Doppler Effect of a train whistle whipping away into the night. Into this dreadful night that surrounded him. Waaaaaaaaaaa!
He crashed against the wall of the sewer main, and fell away from it as if it were molten. He tried to run, but the water had guillotined his coordination. He bumbled forward, and tried to find the matches in his pocket and got them out and just as simply dropped them. They were gone in an instant.
Now was forever down here.
He tried to walk forward, his hands out before him.
But it was no good. He was incapable of motion that made any sense. He was lost now. Out of the world and out of the light and doomed to rot down here in the filthy water that smelled of brackish remains. Urine, decaying vegetation, muck, sickly sweet smells of marshmallow and jacaranda that made his throat wheeze with the effort to keep the vomit down. The smell beat at him, and intermingled with the cold of the water, the flow of the stream, the darkness the ungodly all-pervasive darkness.
One foot moved out in front, then another slipping movement of the same foot in the mire under the water, then the other foot, and he was going. The tunnel sloped sharply downward, and the water climbed higher up his body. It lapped at his thighs, his groin, his waist, chest, shoulders, and suddenly the slope was too much for him, and he was slipping. The slime covering the bottom of the tunnel was thicker, slipperier, and before he could stop himself, he was moving forward against his own speed, and in an instant he’d lost balance. His arms flailed wildly, and he barely managed to get the M-1 over his head before he went under. He was struggling in a grotesque wet world, with grabless holds on nothing. He hand-over-handed to the surface, soaking the rifle in the process, and went under again. Garbage filled his mouth, and he was sick immediately, the weight of it ripping loose in his chest and thundering up into his mouth, just as he broke the surface. The drain was fouled a bit more by his own refuse, and then he was under again. Water filled his nose, his mouth, and he sputtered, gasped fighting to stay erect. The foul scummy water swirled around him, and he grew hysterical trying to free himself.
Then, in a moment, his feet touched bottom once more, and he came up. His head swam with the pounding ache of having vomited, and the smell that would not quit. He moved forward again, then paused as he thought he heard a sound.
Listening, ear cocked into the darkness…
Rasping little voices. Hundreds of little voices. The ones who lived here. He could hear their chittering metallic voices. They were all around him, up ahead, behind. Then something slick and wet and fast glided past him in the dark, and touched his hand. His mouth flew open and air bellowed up in his throat, and he screamed. So loud his ears popped, so long his throat went raw, so completely that he was left standing there empty of all but terror. The thing had giggled tinnily as it had passed him. Taunting him.
He wanted to flee, but there was no way out, no way to go but on. And then he heard the roar of a vehicle going overhead, and he knew he was under the street, and if he could hear them…could they not hear him?
He knew he could not howl again.
It had to be dammed up inside.
No escape valve.
So he moved forward. Pace after murky pace. His feet weighed half a ton each with the mud and clinging tendrils of nameless slimy things that clung to his barracks boots. But he moved on. He was incapable of thinking why he was moving forward, and the how was an enigma he would never solve.
But he went on, and it was a nightmare without end. It was forever wet and forever cold and forever dark, and he knew for certain that he would be in that stinking chill limbo forever and ever and ever.
And the voices all around him. He could not even see their eyes in the dark, but they were there. And then one of them landed with a heavy plop! on his shoulder.
He froze. Not voluntarily. He was smashed in the face by a numbing chunk of steel, and all movement left him. But he was not limp. He was brick-rigid. He could not move, could not even twitch, his body was frozen solid. The water rat moved idly about his shoulder, its thick, massive body a weight that bent him slightly. Its tail lashed at his shirt as its vile length hung down his back. The bullet-pointed face moved nearer Arnie’s cheek, and he could feel the icy wire of its whiskers. The stench from it was incredible. It smelled like a thousand corpses rotting in a mass grave. The creature came nearer Arnie’s face, and the fur was matted, stinking. Arnie could not have brushed the water rat off if he had had a thousand hands. The beast had its way. It was master of this nice, fine dry island.
Then, its head came up sharply, and it sniffed at Arnie’s face. And it poised itself, as though to strike at something, but the whine wail shriek moan stopped it. The huge rat listened for a moment, as the shriek grew in intensity, and as it mounted to fill the cavern, the rat leaped high and arched out, disappearing in terror, into the water, and gone.
Arnie had no idea what the sound had been, but he was eternally grateful for its having come at that precise moment of absolute terror. But he never knew what it had been.
He hurried on down the tunnel, leaving his sound of fear where it had saved him.
There was more. Much more. Through miles of drainage sewer, among the floating schools of rats whose voices mingled so high he was deafened. Slipping and drinking the scum-clouded water. And always in darkness, always pounded by his fear that had grown to such proportions an entire section of his brain was closed off, numbed by the constant electrical level of horror and nausea.
Then he came to a tunnel-end, and he could hear the water rush to plunge over a precipice. It was a brief drop, but it was sufficient to tell him he’d found an outlet. When he came to the end of the passage, he found a huge metal grille, partially rusted, and in a frenzy of desperation he slammed it again and again with his hip, his shoulders, his back, till it broke away and dropped out.
He fell, gasping, into the murky stream, went under, came up and struck off spastically for the opposite side. When his feet could touch bottom, he dragged himself erect and hauled one foot after another, till he bumped against the far bank, and hauling himself like a sack of soaked meal, he fell face forward onto the thankgod ground. It was moist and cool, and he blessed it, blessed it, kissed the earth with his garbage-tainted lips.
There was more. Much more.
A sprint through a forest, crashing into trees, falling a hundred times, running full tilt into a thick limb that caught him full in the mouth and knocked him unconscious. When he came back to consciousness, his mouth was full of blood and two teeth had been shattered. His face felt like a pound of dogmeat. He stumbled erect, walked into the limb a second time, felt his head reverberate like a church bell and managed somehow to go on.
There was more. Much more. A crawl across a shelled no-man’s-land littered with dead trucks and dead weapons and softer things that were attached to nothing at all. And once, yes, he was sure of it, once he heard a voice calling out to him in the darkness, “Help me…help me…I’m…where are m-my arms…help me…” but the voice was too much like no other voice he’d ever heard (he told himse
lf) and he crawled on.
More. Into a mine field. He knew it was a mine field because the entrance to it was guarded by what had been a man. The left half of his face had been pushed in as though it were a paper cup, and in his outstretched hand, still clenched in the manner prescribed by the manual, was his bayonet, that he had been using to probe the ground for antipersonnel mines. It had probed too deeply, and now the hand would seek no more. The body with the pushed-in face was not too far from the hand for Arnie to know this was a mine field.
So he slid forward cautiously on his belly, probing with his own bayonet as the pushed-face Cerberus guarding the field had done. Somehow, he slid through. Darkness. All around.
And then, without his even realizing he had done it, he saw a body looming up out of the darkness, and he was crying again, letting it all out, holding nothing back, crying like the child inside all men. It was a sentry, and so pathetic were MSgt. Arnott T.
Winslow’s sobs that he never bothered to challenge him. He merely went forward and helped him to his feet. There could be no danger in an enemy who sounded like that.
He was in a company area, he didn’t know which one, and someone said, “Hey, fellah, can you open your eyes?” and he realized he had crawled all the way from that sewer with his eyes so tightly closed they throbbed with pain. His eyes came unstuck slowly, and he was insane with delight to see a soft pink haze opening the sky like a brilliant blossom. It was daylight. It was rebirth. It was the world once more.
There was a lister bag hanging from a tripod, and he stumbled forward, managed to slump to his knees before it, and drank thirstily from the tap. They watched him, wondering what horrors had turned this man into little more than an animal. He could never tell them, they could never know, for perhaps their devils were spiders or snakes or hypodermic needles or some more nameless subliminal terror they would never have to face, if they were very very lucky. As lucky as Arnie Winslow had been unlucky.