I ran into a door with a bar across it like an exit and it flew open under my weight. I staggered out onto a concrete loading-platform at the back of the museum, slammed the door behind me, and jumped to the ground.
The corner of the building was quite near and I turned it as I heard the door spring open. I sprinted across a lawn, keeping in the shadow of bushes and trees, towards the circular building surrounded by cages, where the museum kept its live animals. I put this building between me and the cave-dwellers, but I heard their light feet running towards me on gravel.
I passed a fox curled up asleep behind his wire netting, and I envied him his nice, safe cage. I wanted one of my own. I could have one if I could get into it before the feet came around the animal-house. Across from the fox-cage there was a pit perhaps four feet deep where the snakes and turtles were kept. I vaulted the iron fence around it and landed on my hands and knees on the gravel floor. I scuttled against the concrete wall like a frightened crab and a black snake slithered away from under my hands. I crouched there trying to control my panting, and heard the running feet go by above my head.
When the sound had ceased, I climbed out of the pit like an ambitious turtle and ran back to the museum. The back door was still open and I scrambled up on the loading-platform and went in, leaving the door open behind me. The corridor I had dashed through three minutes before seemed longer on the way back. I found the door at last and went down into the tunnels again. They wouldn’t come back to the museum. Someone must have heard the shots and the police would soon be here.
I flashed my light in the sub-basement and saw a chart on the wall. McKinley Hall, the Little Theatre, the Women’s Building, the Graduate School, the Natural History Museum circled in red. A network of blacklines crisscrossed the chart. It was a map of the steam-tunnels.
The university powerhouse was about as far from the museum as McKinley Hall, but in the opposite direction. I got my bearings and went into the tunnel. As I closed the door behind me, I heard loud feet like policemen’s feet on the floor of the building above me, and a sound of voices. I set out for the powerhouse. Powerhouses have always interested me.
My shirt was still sopping and my coat began to get wet. My heart was beating hard from the sprint and the darkness swelled and contracted around me like black blood in an artery. It slithered like a snake past my sightless eyes. Suddenly, I noticed that I had no gun. I must have left it in the reptile-pit.
As soon as I bumped into a wall and turned a corner, I used my flashlight. There could be no one in front of me now until I reached the powerhouse. I quickened my pace and trotted along on the left side of the green pipes, sweating like a wrestler. My feet clattered on the paved floor and I let them clatter.
I heard feet behind me far down the tunnel and I stopped for an instant and looked back. There was a faint light on the wall where the tunnel turned and shadows like grey fingers reached out towards me. I switched out my light and ran on blindly in the dark with heavy footsteps reverberating behind me.
Something struck me across the chest like a falling tree and I leaned against it gasping for breath. I felt searing heat against my body: it must be the steampipe. I crawled under the pipes where they turned into the wall and ran on with one hand scraping the wall, feeling for the door that must be there.
Flashlights came around the corner on pounding feet a hundred yards behind me. I saw my shadow leaping ahead of me like a frantic mimic of my fear. And I saw a door.
A man’s voice shouted, “There he is,” and a gun went off with a sound like vessels bursting in my brain. The bullet ricocheted from the wall behind me and passed me like a droning bee. I have always hated bees.
I dived for the door and it opened under my hand. I ran out on the floor of a great concrete vault lined on one side with black iron boilers. By the light of the few unshaded bulbs that hung in the furnace-room I could see no one, but the footsteps sounded through the door at my back like pounding fists. To my right were windows and an iron ladder leading up to a door in the wall.
I dropped my flashlight and scrambled up the ladder and got the iron door at the top open. The door from the tunnel sprang open below and I slammed the iron door shut. Two bullets rang flatly against it like the knocking of iron knuckles, and I jumped onto a black hill which loomed outside the door.
I was halfway up the side of the university coal-pile. Anthracite is not good to run in but there was nowhere to hide and nothing to do but run. I leaped and scrambled down the side of the coal-pile towards a railway track which gleamed faintly in the starlight. I heard the iron door open behind me and the sound of another shot but I didn’t look back.
When I reached the track it was easier to run, and there were buildings on each side which helped to shadow me. I heard scrambling and cursing behind me but I ran straight on down the track to the end of the buildings. By now the feet behind were ringing on the ties and I turned to my left and jumped down the embankment.
There was a board fence in front of me and beyond it the clotted darkness of a clump of trees. Before the flashlights behind me reached the end of the buildings, I flung myself over the fence and landed on my side in weeds.
I got to my feet crouching low and ran into the patch of trees. When I reached the other side with my face scratched by low branches, I stopped and listened. There was no sound behind me, but I had to get away from there. I remembered newspaper stories of police cordons thrown around trapped killers. To the police, I was a killer. But I wasn’t trapped yet.
The grove was in a valley, and on the hillside opposite me there was a huge dark building punctured with a few lighted windows. I knew the building – it was the hospital – and it helped me to get my bearings. Helen Madden lived near the hospital. If I could get to her she would help me.
Keeping close to the edge of the trees I ran along the valley, stumbling over hummocks and rubbish. With the lights of the great hospital above me, I felt more than ever like an outlaw, and I felt self-pity that other men should make me run like an unwanted dog among rubbish-heaps. But I felt pleasure, too, in running for my life. My two enemies were running in the same darkness.
I skirted the base of the hill beyond the hospital and climbed through underbrush and saplings to the old house where Helen Madden had an apartment. It had been made over into an apartment house which stood on a spur of hill overlooking the uncleared hillside I was climbing. When I got out of the woods I saw that a light was on, on the ground floor where Helen lived.
She was sitting at a lighted casement window looking out, with a cigarette in her hand. Its smoke rose straight up and she did not move. I tapped on the window and showed my face in the light. Her face changed when she saw me but she did not start. The line of smoke wavered once and was straight again.
She stared at me for a moment and then her eyes contracted and I knew she recognized me. She flung the window open and said, “Bob, what is it?”
I put my finger to my mouth; there were other people in the house.
I whispered, “The police are after me. Schneider has been killed and they think I killed him.”
“Did you?” she said without changing expression.
“No. I was framed. But I have to get away.”
“Who killed him?” Her voice was very light and dry.
I said, “Ruth Esch and Schneider’s son.”
Her whisper hissed, “His son!”
“Yes. I caught them escaping and they tried to kill me.”
Helen said quietly and seriously, “You’re not crazy, are you, Bob? If I let myself go to-night, I’d be crazy.”