It was also a long way up.
The sides of the well were dotted with faces of my brother. His lips were curled back like an animal's, baring froth-specked teeth. There were large red holes where his eyes should have been. His hands were studded with hundreds of snakelike fingers, and I wept helplessly as they reached for me, curling around my throat, tearing at my eyes.
I floated up and out of the hole and down onto what felt like a hardwood floor. Finally conscious, my body was a raft cast adrift on a vast, eerie sea of total darkness.
I was still crying, not as a man cries when touched by some deep emotion, but as a child cries in the grip of some nameless nighttime terror. I sobbed and wailed, my hiccuping moans swallowed up by the dark. In one part of me I was profoundly embarrassed; in another part of me, weeping seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to be doing.
Gradually I muffled my cries and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. At the same time my muscles seemed to go rigid. I couldn't move or, rather, I dared not move. In the surrounding night I could hear the dry rustle of snakes, large snakes moving toward me, large snakes of the variety that lie in wait along the banks of tropical rivers to crush and eat things that are small and warm.
There were other things out there too, and they all crushed and squeezed and bit and hurt. I began to cry again, and pray to the God I had known as a child.
Another part of my mind, a tiny area where the fear had not yet penetrated, began to stir. I listened to it whisper of snakes and other things that crush, big things, a world of giants that laughed and mocked; things that would hurt a dwarf, things that would eat a dwarf.
It suddenly occurred to me that these fears were somehow familiar, like a scarred rocking horse uncovered in a dusty corner of some attic, an attic of the mind. In this case they were old monsters from the mental storage bin of childhood.
Then I understood. I remembered Garth and Mueller and Boise, and I knew what they had done. The terrors were from childhood; all those special horrors that had plagued me when I had first learned I was small, so different from other children, had come back to visit. Something had dredged them all up from my subconscious and scattered them in the darkness around me. .
Something like a drug, something like phobetarsin; that was what the fear-producing drug had been called in the research papers I had read.
At least the drug Mueller had given me had a name.
The terrible dread was still there, but now I knew its source. That made all the difference in the world; I had labeled the fear-or at least its cause-and that made it, if no less real, at least easier to deal with it. I was sure I had been given a drug, probably phobetarsin. The question remained as to why they had bothered. Perhaps it was an attempt to make me more manageable, or perhaps it was merely gratuitous sadism. Whatever the reason, I knew I needed some defense.
I closed my eyes against the fear and slowly moved out across the room, crawling inch by inch on my belly. I finally bumped up against a wall and paused, cradling my head in my arms. My clothes were drenched with sweat and, once again, I was crying.
Still, I had my single psychological weapon; I knew what had unleashed the demons around me. Garth had had no such advantage. Whatever they had given him had somehow had the effect of stripping the scabs off his psyche, simultaneously releasing the thousand and one irritations and frustrations that plague a man every day, bringing them all up in one lump to fester in his conscious mind until a flash point was reached.
Somewhere in every man's mind are the fetid odors of rotted dreams, mercifully flushed into the sewers of the subconscious. Mueller had discovered chemicals that somehow interfered with the mechanism of suppression. He'd been playing games with my brother's sanity, not to mention my own. I owed him.
I curled my legs up close to my body and waited in the dark.
Several eternities later the lights came on, harsh and white-hot on the dilated pupils of my eyes. Now I could see the door, lined with rubber flaps to exclude any light, on the other side of the bare room, to my right. It opened. Immediately I cringed, curling my body up into a tight ball. I covered my face with my hands, leaving just enough space between my fingers to see through.
Boise's gun was the first thing into the room, followed by Boise himself, then Mueller. Boise stopped inside the door, nudged Mueller and pointed at me. He was grinning.
"Boo!" Boise said. That was almost funny enough to make me forget the other, real fears that were still buzzing around inside my head.
I moaned and shrunk even closer to the wall. At the same time I dropped my right forearm and planted it in the angle between the wall and the floor. I would get only one shot at Boise and I wanted all the leverage I could get.
"Hey, dwarf!" Boise barked, still grinning. "You want to die, dwarf?" He was enjoying himself, and that was a mistake.
My sick terror was rapidly being displaced by red-cheeked, eminently healthy anger. I moaned a little bit, prompting Mueller to enter the conversation.
"Boise, I don't see why you have to needle him like that."
"You were the one who suggested doping him up."
"Just to make him easier to handle, Boise. I don't see how we can just-"
"I've already figured out what to do with him," Boise said, coming closer and looking for my eyes. His gun was still steady on me.
"Please let me go home," I said in my best whine, at the same time trying not to ham it up too much. "I promise I won't bother you anymore. Please don't hurt me." I considered my next words, then figured, what the hell. The coup de grace : "Please let me call my mother."
That broke Boise up-mentally. The room echoed with his loud, hoarse laughter. He reached out with the toe of his shoe to nudge me in the ribs, and that was what I had been waiting for. I broke him up again-physically.
Shifting all my weight onto my right arm, I tensed and kicked out with my instep at the exposed side of his left knee. It popped with a metallic sound of breaking joints and tearing ligaments. Boise dropped like a felled tree, his gaping mouth wrapped around a long, meandering scream. The gun clattered to the floor and bounced in Mueller's direction. Mueller belatedly reached down for it and got me instead. I slapped him across the bridge of the nose. He sat down hard. I stood and placed the end of the gun in his ear. I pulled the hammer back, and Mueller made a retching sound.
"Get up, Mueller, don't throw up," I said evenly. "You do and I'll kill you. Think about that."
Mueller put his hand over his mouth and struggled to his feet. I glanced at Boise, who lay on his side holding his shattered knee. His eyes had the dull sheen of cheap pottery. I turned back to Mueller.
"The drugs," I said. "I want samples of whatever it was you put into Garth and me."
Mueller's head bounced up and down like a wooden block on a string. He led me out of the room, down a narrow corridor, and into a smaller office. He reached up onto a shelf and took down two small vials.
"Which is which?"
"This is what we gave you," he said, pointing to the vial on the left. I took the other vial and dropped it into my pocket; I felt as if I were pocketing Garth's mind, his sanity.
There was something huge creeping up behind me. It was a green, multilegged insect that ate dwarfs. I resisted the impulse to turn and look for it. I knew there would be many such things waiting for me in the void of time ahead, at least until the contents of the other vial could be analyzed and a way found to neutralize its effects. Or perhaps the creatures would go away by themselves. In any case, I decided I wanted company.