Jane said, 'The incinerator." She lost all color. "The fires are so very hot!" Her face was dead white.
Tyl said, "They wouldn't— No! Where is the incinerator? . . . Jane, come on!"
"Wait."
"No."
"Girls, girls, you can't—"
Tyl cried out, "Somebody's got to—" Jane's hand was on her arm, gripping tightly. They were allied. They ran toward the taxi. Gahagen leaped after them.
Chief Blake said, hastily for him, apologetically, "Maybe we better run down there."
Chapter Thirty-two
The taxi driver was delighted to be on official business and go as fast as he could go. Jane and Tyl and Gahagen rocked in the seat, bracing themselves. Jane's hand and Tyl's were welded together. There was no use trying to talk. Now and then, Jane made a little moaning sound. She didn't seem to know she was making a sound at all.
Tyl thought, She must be in love. Her own heart kept sinking all the time, over and over again. It would seem to swell and then fall, and the fear would come in waves. She thought, Naturally, I don't want him to he hurt. I wouldn't want anyone to be hurt so terribly. They rocked around the last corner and raced down a little hill to where the road led over a weighing platform and into the vast wasted-looking spaces around the city incinerator.
Jane said in Tyl's ear, "How was it that Grandy was supposed to be watching?"
Tyl said, "Because when I met him—"
"You told Grandy!"
"Of course. I—"
Jane's hand began to twist and pull. She was taking it away. She drew herself away. Tyl had the feeling that she'd been rejected. She was not included any more. The rest of this she would have to go through alone.
The taxi whizzed across the weighing platform. A man there shouted with surprise, came racing after them. They went up the ramp. The brakes screamed. They had come through the great doors and to a stop within the building. They were in a vast room—not really a room at all. The inside of this brick building was all hollow. It was nothing but a great space, enclosed by the high walls, roofed over and crossed with girders high above them, and with high windows, tilted like factory windows, some of them open, many feet up in the walls. This great space, on three sides, was empty. Echoing. Clean. But in the faintly dusty air there hung a sourish, repulsive odor.
On the fourth side were the pits. Here was where the trucks came to dump the burnable stuff. Here was where they backed up to a wooden curb and shucked off their loads. The refuse fell into huge pits built into the floor. And beyond the pits, on the other side, a
great partition went up to within perhaps twenty feet of the high roof. It crossed the whole side of the building like a high parapet, with the pits like a moat in front of it.
Above it ran a kind of track from which hung a big steel-jawed bucket that was working steadily, with sullen rumblings of sound. It came down, descended into the pit, nibbled and bit at the stuff in the pits and then went up, drooling, carrying its enormous mouthful over the partition, over the wall, to some mysterious fate beyond.
Tyl looked up. Like a demon tender of the fires of hell, a head, a face with a snout, was looking down with great flat eyes, inhuman and horrible.
The human man from the weighing platform came running up behind them. They heard the howling of the siren on the police car. Grandy and Blake and the rest.
Gahagen said, "Which trucks dumped here the last half hour?" He didn't know how to put the question.
The man said, "All the trucks been in and dumped for the last time. All through."
"All of them?"
"Yeah. They get through around now. They all been in. What's wrong?"
"We don't know," Gahagen said.
Grandy and the rest came puffing up. The man who worked here was surrounded suddenly by all these visitors.
Jane, looking sick, had edged toward the pits and was looking down over the rim. Her voice pierced the dusty, rumbling emptiness of the great bare place as if it cut through a fog. "There's a trunk down there!"
“Trunk?"
"What trunk?"
"Where?"
The line of men advanced cautiously, peered over, each with one foot out, one back, with identical bendings of necks, like a line of the chorus.
"Yeah."
"Trunk, all right."
"Well?"
The employee said, "Yeah, I asked about that. Said it was full of stuff hadn't been fumigated. Typhoid. People warned them.”
"When did that come in?"
"Last truck. Number Five."
Above the voices went the rumbling of the crane. Jane looked up in horror. "Stop that thing! You've got to stop it!"
"Wait a minute," said the man who worked there. "Now, listen. What's the idea? What goes on here?"
Chief Blake said, pursuing orderly thought, "Any way of finding out where they picked up that trunk?"
"Sure. Call up the yards. Get hold of the men."
“There isn't time!" cried Jane. She ducked under Chief Blake's elbow and bobbed up in front of him. "You've got to stop that thing! Stop it right now! What are you waiting for?" Her fists beat on his big blue chest "Don't you see, if he's down there—" She was losing
control.
Grandy was peering into the pit distastefully. His face was pained. The big bucket went down again, gnawed at the nauseous heap, nuzzled at it, then slowly it rose toward the top of the wall.
"Listen, they gotta clean up the pits before they can quit," the man said stubbornly. "They don't stop just for anybody's fun, you know. The men down there firing, they wanna get through."
The fires, then, must be somewhere below, somewhere below the floor where they were, and beyond that wall, at the top of which still stood the man in the gas mask. His big glassined eyes were turned down and toward them.
Fire. Very hot fire. Very hot indeed, to burn what was down there in those pits, what went slowly up in the big steel bucket, hunk by hunk, mouthful after steady mouthful.
"What a place!" said Grandy. "What a scene! What a place!" His nostrils trembled. He peered over. His hand was on Mathilda's shoulder. She shrank away from the rim, and yet something drew her irresistibly. To lean closer. To look down. She could see the top of the trunk. It was a big, old-fashioned turtleback, a big box with a humped cover. It was half buried in the debris, tilted, top upward. She tried to imagine Francis, down there in the pit, bound and imprisoned, shut in a dark box, waiting to be destroyed. She knew that was what Jane thought and imagined. But it couldn't be. It couldn't be real. Such a tiling could not happen, could not be happening.
The big, empty, smelly place, the rumbling crane feeding the hidden fires, the efficiency of destruction that was going on here—the whole thing made her want to close her senses against it, not to believe, not to watch; to turn and go; to run away and go to a clean sweet place and bathe and forget.
Jane was sobbing, "Oh, please, please, listen to me! You can't take the chance! You've got to be sure!"
Grandy swayed a little. "Jane," he said, "you think he's down there!" The thought seemed to make him ill. Tyl felt him going.