I ran down the steps to the basement as fast as I could in the dark. If Shiny was at the corner, I might get away in his cab before the police arrived. I didn’t know where to.
I ran out the door at the back and around the corner of the building. No cabs in sight. Far down the street, I saw two policemen running towards McKinley Hall.
I thought of the open door leading into the steam-tunnels and ran back into the building. When I got to the door it was closed and the light behind it was out. Could there be a janitor here this early? Maybe Sale closed it and turned out the light.
The door wasn’t locked and I opened it. Nothing but darkness. I still had the flashlight and turned it on and flashed it down the steps. The concrete basement room at the foot of the stairs was bare and the door in the grey wall which led into the tunnel was closed.
I heard a sound of running feet behind and above me on the first floor of the building and put out my light. The bulb which lit the stairs from the first floor into the basement corridor was switched on. I stepped inside the door and closed it except for a crack through which I could watch the lighted stairs. A bareheaded man with a gun in his hand came down the stairs two at a time.
I recognized the wide grey shoulders and the sullen Indian face. He paused at the foot of the stairs and looked up and down the basement corridor, his gun following his glance. Then he turned and ran out the back of the building.
Christ, was Gordon after me already? I thought of following him and throwing myself on his mercy – he was probably more intelligent than the local police – but I dropped the idea as soon as I picked it up. I was in a box that it would be hard to argue myself out of. The only way to get out was by running.
There was a pounding on the double doors at the west end of the corridor, and then the crash of glass. The police. I closed the door quietly and went down the concrete stairs into the steam-tunnel.
CHAPTER IX
THE BASEMENT WAS HOT – perhaps the steam was on: it was just past the equinox and the weather was turning cold. As soon as I opened the second door, I knew the steam was on. It was like opening the door of a moderate hell. The air rushed out to take me like black flames. I closed the second door behind me and switched on the flashlight.
The two huge steampipes, green-painted, hung before me like twin segments of impossible serpents glowing with impossible energy. To my right and left they were lost in darkness in the endless man-made cave. I chose the left at random and started down the tunnel, the flashlight beam dancing before me like a wild hope. Then I remembered the closed door I had left open and the dark light I had left on.
Somebody might be waiting for me at the first turning. I put out the light and, with the unlit flashlight in my left hand and the gun in my right, went on in darkness. The concrete roof nearly brushed my hair as I walked and I felt the whole building above me like a weight on my neck. The sweat ran down in my eyes from the heat and I couldn’t stop to take off my coat.
I went faster as my senses grew used to the darkness. At least I heard no one following. I half-turned my head to listen and walked into a wall. The clang of my flashlight against the concrete sounded like a gong.
I switched it on – it wasn’t broken – and saw that the tunnel jogged to the left. Something on the tunnel floor caught my eye, a shining object. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a small metal cylinder, a lipstick. Women go everywhere nowadays, I thought. I put the lipstick in my pocket in case I should meet a woman, and held my gun cocked for the same reason as I went on.
I turned out the flash and went on in the hot darkness of the forest-floor of the twentieth-century jungle. The forest that bears no fruit, the rivers of steam and brooks of sewage that quench no thirst. I remembered something Alec had said about the carnivores creeping on rubber tires in the urban valleys. The blessings of civilization, I thought.
Not that I couldn’t have done with a small armored motorcycle. Or even my car would do. If I could get to my car, I could get away into the country. But my car was parked on the campus and I didn’t dare try to reach it.
I barely raised my feet and my leather soles hissed along the concrete. I walked with my hands held out to protect my face, like a blind man in an unfamiliar room. I felt as if I had walked a mile; the hot air was palpable and seemed to resist movement like water.
I switched on the flash for a moment and saw a dark open arch in the left wall about fifty feet ahead of me. I walked to it with the light on and the gun ready.
There was a sign stencilled on the wall in black letters at the side of the opening: Natural History Museum. It was nice to know where I was but I hadn’t gone as far as I thought. Hardly more than a quarter-mile. At least the museum wasn’t on the campus, which might now be surrounded by police. It stood in its own grounds across the street from the campus on the north side. It was a chance to get away.
I found the door out of the tunnel and beyond it the stairs leading up into the museum. I mounted them cautiously and opened the door at the head of the stairs. No light and no noise. I stepped out into the hall.
Across and down the hall from where I stood, there was pale light like moonlight falling through a great arched doorway. I tiptoed to the doorless arch and looked in.
Fixed lights from outside, street-lights probably, shone through the high windows into a huge hall that seemed to have no ceiling. Impossible monsters, one of them twenty feet high, watched me from every side. You’ve got the jungle on the brain, I said to myself. Out of one jungle into another.
I recognized the room. The tall monsters were the mounted skeletons of prehistoric saurians. I could see the light shining bleakly through their ancient ribs.
There was a slight rustle on the other side of the room and I stepped out of the doorway and sidled along the wall into dark shadow. I heard no other sound. Probably the noise was a prehistoric mouse no more than five feet tall.
I shifted my position and looked along the opposite wall. In a dark corner, almost facing me, four human figures crouched. I huddled down against the wainscoting like a six-foot mouse. Then I remembered the exhibition in that corner of the room, several life-size dummies painted and dressed like Neanderthal men, holding stone weapons and squatting over a cold fire in an imitation cave.
But I didn’t remember four dummies. I leveled my gun and walked to the roped enclosure where the cavemen sat on their heels. They didn’t move.
I stepped closer and looked down at the bushy papier-mâché heads. The light was weak, but I could see that two of the heads were black and one was lighter and one was almost white. I felt as if I jumped a foot but I didn’t move. My back was to the windows and my face was in shadow.
I lingered a moment, reining the wild horses in my legs, and then moved away. As I moved I saw with the edge of my retina that the caveman at the end was looking at me from under tousled red locks, out of live green eyes. He held a stone hatchet shaped like a gun.
I sauntered back to the other side of the room, feeling I had a fifty-fifty chance of not being shot. Peter and Ruth could have shot me then, but I was their scapegoat for Dr. Schneider’s death. And they didn’t know I’d seen them.
I stepped into the striped shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton, drew a quick bead on the head at the end of the roped enclosure, and fired. I must have missed because two flashes answered my shot simultaneously and two shadows came over the ropes towards me.
I turned and ran through the arch and heard two more shots as I turned the corner. I clattered down the tiled hall and found another corner to turn and then another. The feet behind me were light and quick like cats’ feet.