There wasn’t any use struggling any more. He’d found that out long ago. He couldn’t anyway, even if he’d wanted to. Flames seemed to be licking lazily around his wrists and ankles.
He’d found a sort of palliative now, the only way there was left. He’d keep his eyes down and pretend the hands were moving slower than they were, it was better than watching them constantly, it blunted a little of the terror at least. The ticking he couldn’t hide from.
Of course every once in awhile when he couldn’t resist looking up and verifying his own calculations, there’d be a renewed burst of anguish, but in-between-times it made it more bearable to say, “It’s only gained a half-minute since the last time I looked.” Then he’d hold out as long as he could with his eyes down. But when he couldn’t stand it any more and would have to raise them to see if he was right, it had gained two minutes. Then he’d have a bad fit of hysteria, in which he called on God, and even on his long-dead mother, to help him, and couldn’t see straight through the tears.
Then he’d pull himself together again, in a measure, and start the self-deception over again. “It’s only about thirty seconds now since I last looked... Now it’s about a minute...” (But was it? But was it?) And so on, mounting slowly to another climax of terror and abysmal collapse.
Then suddenly the outside world intruded again, that world that he was so cut off from that it already seemed as far away, as unreal, as if he were already dead. The doorbell rang out.
He took no hope from the summons at first. Maybe some peddler — no, that had been too aggressive to be a peddler’s ring. It was the sort of ring that claimed admission as its right, not as a favor. It came again. Whoever was ringing was truculently impatient at being kept waiting.
A third ring was given the bell, this time a veritable blast that kept on for nearly half-a-minute. The party must have kept his finger pressed to the bell-button the whole time. Then as the peal finally stopped, a voice called out forcefully: “Anybody home in there? Gas Company.”
And suddenly Stapp was quivering all over, almost whinnying in his anxiety.
This was the one call, the one incident in all the day’s domestic routine, from earliest morning until latest night, that could have possibly brought anyone down into the basement. The meter was up there on the wall, beside the stairs, staring him in the face. And her brother had had to take her out of the house at just this particular time so there was no one to let the man in.
There was the impatient shuffle of a pair of feet on the cement walk. The man must come down off the porch to gain perspective with which to look inquiringly up at the second-floor windows. And for a fleeting moment, as he chafed and shifted about out there before the house, on the walk and off, Stapp actually glimpsed the blurred shanks of his legs standing before the grimy transom that let light into the basement at ground-level. All the potential savior had to do was crouch down and peer in through it, and he’d see him tied up down there. And the rest would be so easy!
Why didn’t he, why didn’t he? But evidently he didn’t expect anyone to be in the basement of a house in which his triple ring went unanswered. The tantalizing trouser-legs shifted out of range again, the transom became blank.
A little saliva filtered through the mass of rag in Stapp’s distended mouth, trickled across his silently vibrating lower lip.
The gas inspector gave the bell one more try, as if venting his disappointment at being balked rather than in any expectation of being admitted this late in the proceedings. He gave it innumerable short jabs, like a telegraph-key. Bip-bip-bip-bip-bip.
Then he called out disgustedly, evidently for the benefit of some unseen assistant waiting in a truck out at the curb, “They’re never in when you want ’em to be.” There was a single quick tread on the cement, away from the house. Then the slur of a light truck being driven off.
Stapp died a little. Not metaphorically, literally. His arms and legs got cold up to the elbows and knees, his heart seemed to beat slower, and he had trouble getting a full breath; more saliva escaped and ran down his chin, and his head drooped forward and lay on his chest for awhile, inert.
Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick. It brought him to after awhile, as though it were something beneficent, smelling salts or ammonia, instead of being the malevolent thing it was.
He noticed that his mind was starting to wander. Not much, as yet, but every once in awhile he’d get strange fancies. One time he thought that his face was the clock-dial, and that thing he kept staring at over there was his face. The pivot in the middle that held the two hands became his nose, and the 10 and the 2, up near the top, became his eyes, and he had a red-tin beard and head of hair and a little round bell on the exact top of his crown for a hat.
“Gee, I look funny,” he sobbed drowsily. And he caught himself twitching the muscles of his face, as if trying to stop those two hands that were clasped on it before they progressed any further and killed that man over there, who was breathing so metallically tick, tock, tick, tock.
Then he drove the weird notion away and he saw that it had been just another escape-mechanism. Since he couldn’t control the clock over there, he had attempted to change it into something else.
Another vagary was that this ordeal had been brought on him as punishment for what he had intended doing to Fran, that he was being held fast there not by the inanimate ropes but by some active, punitive agency, and that if he exhibited remorse, pledged contrition to a proper degree, he could automatically effect his release at its hands.
Thus over and over he whined in the silence of his throttled throat, “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Just let me go this one time. I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll never do it again.”
And on that the outer world returned again.
This time it was the phone. It must be Fran and her brother, trying to find out if he’d come here in their absence. They’d found the shop closed, must have waited outside of it for awhile, and then when he still didn’t come, didn’t know what to make of it. Now they were calling the house from a booth down there, to see if he had been taken ill, had returned here in the meantime. When no one answered, that would tell them, surely, that something was wrong. Wouldn’t they come back now to find out what had happened to him?
But why should they think he was here in the house if he didn’t answer the phone? How could they dream he was in the basement the whole time? They’d hang around outside the shop some more waiting for him, until as time went on, and Fran became real worried, maybe they’d go to the police. (But that would be hours from now, what good would it do?) They’d look everywhere but here for him. When a man is reported missing the last place they’d look for him would be in his own home.
The phone stopped ringing finally and its last vibration seemed to hang tenuously on the lifeless air long after it had ceased, humming outward in a spreading circle like a pebble dropped into a stagnant pool. Mmmmmmmmm, until it was gone, and silence came rolling back in its wake.
She would be outside the pay-booth or wherever it was she had called from, by this time. Rejoining her brother, where he had waited. Reporting, “He’s not out at the house either.” Adding the mild, still unworried comment. “Isn’t that strange? Where on earth can he have gone?” Then they’d go back and wait outside the locked shop, at ease, secure, unendangered. She’d tap her foot occasionally in slight impatience, look up and down the street while they chatted.