He stormed up onto a manhole almost at once and passed it in his haste. He didn’t go back. There’d be another. But when the next appeared, he sailed past it too, not because he saw it too late, but because he was making awfully good time. Fear had lent him impossible stamina. If he paused to climb out they’d be on him. If they were there. If they weren’t, he’d find himself traveling unknown streets at four in the morning. He’d be taken in minutes. And if he were to hide from passing cars, to dart in and out of bushes, to slow up and pretend to simply be taking an early morning constitutional, he’d never get to Palos Verdes.
They’d leave without him. His life would be through. There would be nothing for it, he realized, but to turn himself in, and that would mean, like as not, a return to the sanitarium and to some inconceivable fate. He’d get to Palos Verdes if he had to run all the way. By God, he’d the in the attempt. Just how he’d the he didn’t know, but they’d find him a rough customer. That much was certain.
He dug into his backpack as he jogged along, yanking out his compass. He was heading south beneath Hawthorne Boulevard, straight as an arrow toward the coast highway. Abruptly the sound of pursuing shoes, of someone running along in his wake, joined the clatter of his own shoes on the concrete. He was sure of it. Stopping would reveal the truth, unless, of course, the pursuer were to stop too. There’d be time enough for stopping later, though. In a few minutes he’d be compelled to stop. But at least then he might be a mile closer to his goal, whatever that was worth. And when he did it wouldn’t be to give up. He determined to launch an attack of his own.
He’d run until he was played out. Then, with the last dregs of energy, he’d spin around and run full on into the face of his surprised attacker. He’d smash his head with the flashlight — break his teeth in. He pulled the backpack over his arms so as to free his left hand. Then he dug his penknife out of his pocket and opened the blade as he ran along. If Frosticos had blood in his veins, William would see the color of it shortly.
He gasped for breath, digging deeply into his lungs each time. In another minute or two he’d simply collapse. His flashlight had burned down to a muddy yellow which brightened momentarily when he shook it. In the dark, heaving for breath, he’d be a useless wreck. It was time. William stopped and tried to spin round, but it was a weary, plodding spin, and he realized right away that he hadn’t the strength left to lunge at anyone. He collapsed over forward, staggered a few feet, and shined the weakened light down the tunnel, his knife open and ready. Darkness stared back at him. He waited, enveloped in dread, but nothing appeared out of the black.
Finally he turned and staggered on. He’d run again, he decided, as soon as he caught his breath. But ten minutes later he was still walking wearily, wishing he’d been able to sleep for the two hours he’d lain awake in his bag. His flashlight wouldn’t last another ten minutes. He shook it and banged it to keep it alive, knowing that at any moment he’d have to stop and shove in the batteries he’d bought earlier on Spring Street. And that would mean a minute of absolute darkness, maybe more. What were the odds that he’d get the batteries in right end forward? What if he dropped one and had to go groping after it? But he had no choice. The light, finally, died, and wouldn’t be thumped back to life.
He pulled off his backpack and groped for the batteries, tearing at the plastic that encased them, cursing himself for not having opened them hours earlier so as to be ready. He stopped and listened, imagining he could hear the faint scrape of footsteps back up the corridor. He fumbled with the batteries, feeling for the little knobs on the end. The spring and bulb tumbled out of the cap onto the concrete, rolling, no doubt, toward the water that ran six inches deep down the pipe. William scrambled for them, reaching and groping in the darkness, gripped by a growing dread and a tense anticipation of the pressure of a hand on his back. He found them, juggled them along with the new batteries in his left hand, and swung the flashlight cylinder in a broad arc with his right, the batteries within sailing out and thudding away down the pipe. He dropped in the fresh batteries, listening for footfalls, but hearing nothing. He twisted on the cap, flicked on the switch, and spun around, flooding the tunnel with light. No one was there. It must have been his imagination. He shouldered his pack and walked on, still clutching his knife and remembering suddenly, five minutes too late, the penlight in his pack. He’d panicked. Lost his mind. He would have to get a grip on himself and think things through.
Every hundred feet or so he passed the mouth of perpendicular tunnels, keeping well away from each even if it meant slogging through water. He shined his light into each methodically, simply for the sake of knowing there was nothing there. And then, when William passed his light across the dark circle of another adjoining pipe, there stood, well up into it, the doctor. He was clearly not a product of William’s imagination. William didn’t have to pinch himself. He hadn’t any time to. He was off like a shot, any plans for a sudden assault on Frosticos, for getting a grip on himself, abandoned.
William was nothing but a toy — a mouse in a maze. They were running him for sport. But knowing that did him no good at all. He’d keep running. It was impossible, though, that they’d let him get to his goal. They’d simply wear him out. How had Frosticos gotten ahead of him? Slipped past in the darkness while he fiddled with the batteries? It was unthinkable. But there he’d been.
William couldn’t run forever. It was a matter of hours before the diving bell would drop into the sunlit sea. So there was no possibility that, as if in a nightmare, he would simply run endlessly through darkness haunted by a reappearing Frosticos. The idea of it was unnatural — impossible. Sooner or later it would come to a confrontation. Frosticos wanted to destroy him. It was simple as that. But he was greedy, and that would be his downfall. Frosticos thought of himself as a sort of artist — that was his problem in a nut — and he wanted sorely to turn this present effort into an epic, the stinking, self-satisfied monster. Let him take a long look in a mirror. He’d find he had the face of an ape.
William lurched along, his breath tearing in his lungs, unable to convince himself to slow down. There was no use shining the light behind him; it wouldn’t tell him anything. Frosticos might be anywhere. He was ubiquitous. He wasn’t fooling anyone. It was a simple matter — once he’d discovered William’s destination from the cab driver — to simply clamber in and out of the sewer, appearing for a moment, then disappearing, taking a car a mile up Hawthorne and waiting for William to pass, then popping off and doing it again. But there would be a time, perhaps when daylight made bouncing in and out of sewers impractical, that he’d act, when William’s fate would be played out in the darkness, and even his screams would go unnoticed or unremarked by the dawning world above.
He staggered to a slow walk, forcing himself along, his flashlight on but pointed groundward. He wheezed and coughed, stopping finally to pull his canteen from his pack and take a long chink. He rummaged around and found the apple. He wondered, suddenly, what would happen if he simply didn’t go on — if he sat down and had lunch, read Pince Nez, let a couple of hours slide by. What would Frosticos do? By now he was more than likely some ways farther along, perhaps a hundred yards, perhaps a mile. Maybe he’d stopped at Winchell’s for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, laughing to himself at the thought of William, terrified, quaking in the sewers below. What if William simply didn’t accommodate him?