And now they would be two of those casuals who would stop short and say to one another at three o’clock: “What was that?” And Fran might add, “It sounded as though it came from out our way.” That would be the sum-total of their comment on his passing.
Tick, tock, tick, took, tick, tock. Nine minutes to three. Oh what a lovely number was nine. Let it be nine forever — not eight or seven — nine for all eternity. Make time stand still, that he might breathe though all the world around him stagnated, rotted away. But no, it was already eight. The hand had bridged the white gap between the two black notches. Oh what a precious number was eight, so rounded, so symmetrical. Let it be eight forever—
VI
A woman’s voice called out in sharp reprimand, somewhere outside in the open: “Be careful what you’re doing, Bobby, you’ll break a window.” She was some distance away, but the ringing dictatorial tones carried clearly.
Stapp saw the blurred shape of a ball strike the basement transom, he was looking up at it for her voice had come in to him through there. It must have been just a tennis ball, but for an instant it was outlined black against the soiled pane, like a small cannonball; it seemed to hang there suspended, to adhere to the glass, then it dropped back to the ground. If it had been ordinary glass it might have broken, but the wire-mesh had prevented that.
The child came close up against the transom to get its ball back. It was such a small child that Stapp could see its entire body within the heighth of the pane, only the head was cut off. It bent over to pick up the ball, and then its head came into range too. It had short golden ringlets all over it. Its profile was turned toward him, looking down at the ball. It was the first human face he’d seen since he’d been left where he was. It looked like an angel. But an inattentive, unconcerned angel.
It saw something else while it was still bent forward close to the ground, a stone or something that attracted it, and picked that up too and looked at it, still crouched over, then finally threw it recklessly away over its shoulder, whatever it was.
The woman’s voice was nearer at hand now, she must be strolling along the sidewalk directly in front of the house. “Bobby, stop throwing things like that, you’ll hit somebody.”
If it would only turn its head over this way, it could look right in, it could see him. The glass wasn’t too smeary for that. He started to weave his head violently from side to side, hoping the flurry of motion would attract it, catch its eye. It may have, or its own natural curiosity may have prompted it to look in without that.
Suddenly it had turned its head and was looking directly in through the transom. Blankly at first, he could tell by the vacant expression of its eyes.
Faster and faster he swivelled his head. It raised the heel of one chubby, fumbling hand and scoured a little clear spot to squint through. Now it could see him, now surely! It still didn’t for a second. It must be much darker in here than outside, and the light was behind it.
The woman’s voice came in sharp reproof. “Bobby, what are you doing there?”
And then it saw him. The pupils of its eyes shifted over a little, came to rest directly on him. Interest replaced blankness. Nothing is strange to children — not a man tied up in a cellar any more than anything else — yet everything is. Everything creates wonder, calls for comment, demands explanation. Wouldn’t it say anything to her? Couldn’t it talk? It must be old enough to; she, its mother, was talking to it incessantly. “Bobby, come away from there.”
“Mommy, look,” it said gleefully.
Stapp couldn’t see it clearly any more, he was shaking his head so fast. He was dizzy, like you are when you’ve just gotten off a carrousel; the transom and the child it framed kept swinging about him in a half-circle, first too far over on one side, then too far over on the other.
But wouldn’t it understand, wouldn’t it understand that weaving of the head meant he wanted to be free? Even if ropes about the wrists and ankles had no meaning to it, if it couldn’t tell what a bandage around the mouth was, it must know that when anyone writhed like that they wanted to be let loose. Oh God, if it had only been two years older, three at the most. A child of eight, these days, would have understood and given warning.
“Bobby, are you coming? I’m waiting!”
If he could only hold its attention, keep it rooted there long enough in disobedience to her, surely she’d come over and get it, see him herself as she irritably sought to ascertain the reason for its fascination.
He rolled his eyes at it in desperate comicality, winked them, blinked them, crossed them. An elfin grin peered out on its face at this last; already it found humor in a physical defect.
An adult hand suddenly darted downward from the upper right-hand corner of the transom, caught its wrist, bore its arm upward out of sight. “Mommy, look,” it said again, and pointed with its other hand. “Funny man, tied up.”
The adult voice, reasonable, logical, dispassionate — inattentive to a child’s fibs and fancies — answered: “Why, that wouldn’t look nice. Mommy can’t peep into other people’s houses like you can.”
The child was tugged erect at the end of its arm, its head disappeared above the transom. Its body was pivoted around, away from him; he could see the hollows at the back of its knees for an instant longer, then its outline on the glass blurred in withdrawal, it was gone. Only the little clear spot it had scoured remained to mock him in his crucifixion.
The will to live is an unconquerable thing. He was more dead than alive by now, yet presently he started to crawl back again out of the depths of his despair, a slower longer crawl each time, like that of some indefatigable insect buried repeatedly in sand, that each time manages to burrow its way out.
He rolled his head away from the window back toward the clock finally. He hadn’t been able to spare a look at it during the whole time the child was in sight. And now to his horror it stood at three to three. There was a fresh, a final blotting-out of the burrowing insect that was his hopes, as if by a cruel idler lounging on a sandpile on a beach.
He couldn’t feel any more, terror or hope or anything else. A sort of numbness had set in, with a core of gleaming awareness remaining that was his mind. That would be all that the detonation would be able to blot out by the time it came. It was like having a tooth extracted with the aid of novocain. There remained of him now only this single pulsing nerve of premonition; all the tissue around it was frozen.
Now it would be too late even to attempt to free him first, before stopping the thing.
Something deep within him, what it was he had no leisure nor skill to recognize, seemed to retreat down long dim corridors away from the doom that impended. He hadn’t known he had those convenient corridors of evasion in him, with their protective turns and angles by which to put distance between himself and menace. Oh clever architect of the mind, oh merciful blueprints that made such emergency exits available. Toward them this something, that was he and yet not he, rushed; toward sanctuary, security, toward waiting brightness, sunshine, laughter.
The hand on the dial stayed there, upright, perpendicular, a perfect right-angle to its corollary, while the swift seconds that were all there were left of existence ticked by and were gone. It wasn’t so straight now any more, but he didn’t know it, he was in a state of death already. White reappeared between it and the twelve-notch, behind it now. It was one minute after three. He was shaking all over from head to foot — not with fear, with laughter...