At first, it was a cozy feeling, surrounded on all sides in the darkness. A return to the womb, perhaps. And after the moments of extreme stress, it felt good to relax just a little, get rid of the epinephrine, feel the old ticker slowing below three hundred beats. You're not out of the woods yet, Sparky, I told myself. But could that be a clearing up ahead?
That's when I heard him coming after me.
"You're out of your mind," I muttered to myself, but I knew it wasn't so. He was back there, somewhere in the ductworks. Behind me.
I stopped and held as still as I could. I heard distant fans, almost below the threshold of hearing. Nothing else. But he was back there. I started to crawl again.
It was a thump sssh, thump sssh sound. It stopped when I stopped, started up again when I moved. It was beyond the range of hearing of anybody but a man running for his life. Well... crawling. If anything, the crawling made it worse. Everyone has had the running-in-glue dream. This was like that, only you're chopped off at the knees and you can't turn around and look behind you.
But there was something even worse than that, a special torture arranged by a God who's always struck me as a practical-joker, life-of-the-party sort of deity. I'll bet he was slapping his thigh over this one. For eight weeks I had played the Old Man in "His Hideous Eye," the one-man, one-act masterpiece inspired by Poe's "Telltale Heart." ("Yikes!!*****"—Joe Miller's One-Second Reviews). The thump sssh thump sssh (repeat until half-crazy) was the exact sound I had heard for eight shows a week, beginning at the threshold of audibility and growing over the next forty-five minutes until it shook the theater. It was the sound I had to hear with growing terror, until the curtain fell on a gibbering lunatic. Going from a self-assured rationalist to a thoroughly shattered shell of a man in less than an hour is one of the tougher assignments any actor will ever have. I had to learn to fear that sound. By the end of the fiftieth performance it was necessary to throw a bucket of ice water in my face and tie me to a chair for an hour until I had stopped shaking. It was the only time in my life a role got the best of me. One night I simply couldn't go on again. They had to send in my understudy, and finally recast with that canvas-chewer... ah, well, no use defaming the man here. He went on to become synonymous with the role, and to accept the Lexie Award that should have gone to me, while I stumbled off for a week in a padded room, three months of wondering if I could ever tread the boards again, and eventually, through a most circuitous route, to this stinking plastic pipe in a stinking overpriced hotel on a stinking half-finished disaster waiting to happen, with a demented unkillable thing more hideous than any Eye somewhere back there in the darkness.
Like a little song you learned when you were three, these conditioned reflexes never really leave you. Like a spider you discover in your bed, and ninety-six years later the sight of a super-web-spinner makes your skin crawl. I memorized the complete works of Shakespeare by my sixth birthday. To this day, recite any line and I can complete any speech, any scene, any act. And if you drop a sandbag on the floor and then pull it along a few feet—thump sssh, thump sssh—I will turn pale and break out in a sweat. I have no control over it.
My best bet seemed to be to drop down through another grate into an empty room, then simply walk out. I passed over such a grate, looked down at five people of at least four sexes naked on a big bed. I had to look again; I hadn't known you could do that with an umbrella. Best not to join the party, though. It looked painful.
And because the perversity of the universe tends always toward the maximum, that was the last grating I crossed. I made a left ninety-degree turn: nada. Another turn back to the right: zip. Another right and a left. Nothing.
I risked getting my Swiss Army knife from the pocket on the side of my suitcase. If knives in the Swiss Army had ranks, this would not be the Colonel or the general of knives. This was the Oberfeldmarschall, the very Fuhrer of pocketknives. This knife would not only clean fish and pick your teeth and uncork your wine bottles, it was equipped with a tiny light, among many other things. It's the best all-purpose tool I've ever come across in seventy years. Most people, looking at it, would never know what an effective weapon it could be. And I'm not talking about the fish-scaler, either.
I shined the light behind me. The coast was clear, back to the last turn I'd taken.
Perhaps I could have retraced my steps to the last grate, dropped through, joined the orgy, and everybody would have been saved a lot of trouble. Except maybe the orgiasts. But there really was no question of that. If there was even a one percent chance I'd encounter Comfort before I got to the grating, it wasn't worth the risk. And I was sure there was a bigger chance than that. No, when next I encountered Mr. Comfort, it was going to have to be in a situation where I had a lot more than just a slight edge, which was what I figured I had just then, with him injured and probably weaponless, and me with a short-bladed knife. What I had in mind was more like him with his arms and legs cut off, blinded, with his back to me, and me with a nuclear-tipped missile. That seemed to me more acceptable odds. Even then, I wouldn't count Izzy out.
I couldn't hear the sound of his progress. Was he resting, or could he hear me that well, to stop when I stopped? Or could he, please God, have fallen through a grate and been cluster-fucked to a fare-thee-well?
I was feeling so heebie-jeebery (a word from my Sparky days) that I just had to know. The silence was worse than the sound.
"Izzy?" I said, in a normal voice. No sense rousing the whole hotel. "Is that you?"
"Who else would it be, Sparky?" I banged my head on the duct. I wish I could have recorded the sound I made. It would have been useful the next time I had to play a man almost dying of fright. The thing was, it sounded like he was two feet behind me. I knew he wasn't but I had to look or I'd choke on my own vomit. I looked. He wasn't there. It was an acoustical trick of some sort, the effect of being in a long pipe.
"Did I hurt you some?" I hope it sounded brave.
"I'm afraid you did," came the disembodied voice again. "My balance is shot. Keep listing to the right. I can't feel one arm and one leg."
"Right or left?" I asked.
"That would be telling, wouldn't it?" Indeed. And how much of what he had said was true? Hell, it could all be true. I think he was still so contemptuous of me that he didn't care if he threw away a tactical advantage like that.
"You've got to stop this business of assault with a deadly musical instrument," he went on. "What's next? Cymbals? A bassoon?"
"How about a grand piano, dropped from a great height?" I had turned back around and was crawling forward again. Shove the suitcase, crawl two steps, shove the suitcase, crawl again, flick the light on and off quickly to see what was ahead. Nothing encouraging but another turn to the right.
Wait. Left, right, right, left. For a moment I thought I'd turned completely around and might be paralleling the duct he was in; he might be only inches away, off to my right. Or was it left, right, right, right? And now a right again. I was hopelessly confused. And where were all the grates?
I crawled through another right angle, turning left, and after twenty feet I came to something new. I found it by almost dropping my suitcase into a down duct, the same size as the one I was in.
There were four different ways to go here. Pipes branched off to the right and the left, and also straight ahead. The fourth way was down, not a direction I was prepared to take, but which I thought would be an excellent choice for Comfort. If there were only a way to persuade him.