Hurricane

Chapter 8

A half hour later the water was two feet deep in the first floor of the house and rising rapidly. They had all moved upstairs. It was much darker. And noisier. Only three of the four small bedrooms could be used. The wind had ripped the shutters away from the single window in one bedroom. An instant later, the dusty glass had been exploded into the room. Malden had shut the door to the hall against the thrust of the wind. It creaked and protested, and the latch chattered.

The Dorns, Virginia and Malden were in one tiny room. The Hollis couple were in another. Flagan sat alone in the third.

Jean Dorn listened to the wind. It had changed in character. It was steadier, less intermittent and the sound had moved up the scale another half-octave. Within the constant screaming, she could hear various soft, lost sounds — thumpings and crashings and flappings, as though there was some great sad tethered animal outside which fought dully for release. The tumult of the hurricane had quieted the children. They stayed very close to her. Stevie’s eyes were wide and round, and his body was tense within her encircling arm. Conversation was impossible.

Jean watched Hal. He sat with lowered head, a silhouette against the faint light that came through the window. He had not spoken since they had come upstairs. He waited with a dull patience that was not at all like him. She watched him and was sick at heart.

Malden got up and left the room. Jean guessed that he was going down the stairway to check the water level. Hal did not seem to notice his departure. Jean felt a twinge of exasperation. In that moment Hal’s withdrawal seemed not so much dramatic and understandable as childish. He seemed to her to be sulking. And she found that she resented the unfairness of it. She was left to comfort the children alone, and his strange manner added to the children’s fear and complicated her own task. She felt for the first time that Hal was indulging himself in this passive mood of defeat.

Bunny and Betty Hollis sat closely, side by side in the small bedroom. It was becoming incredibly noisy. A puff of wind inside the house had blown their door shut, and it had not seemed necessary to open it again. The shutters were a better fit in this room, and it was so dark that Betty could barely make out the paler area of his face when she turned inside his arm to look up at him.

Ever since Bunny had come back in from the exploratory hike with Malden, he had acted strangely. Betty could not adjust to his new mood. She could not decide whether she liked it or not. It did not make her more insecure, but it puzzled her. There was a solemnity about him. He did not want to talk. At first she thought her heart would break, because it seemed this was the first step she had anticipated, the first move toward his inevitable denial of her. But he seemed to want to be close to her, to touch her, to hold her hand, to have his arm around her.

The solemnity baffled her. He had never been like this. He had been gay, bantering, never completely serious. Sometimes she had resented his lightness of mood because it seemed to place a lower value on her love. But she had learned to play their game on his terms, and when she needed the indulgence of tears, she turned them away with a joke in his pattern.

The next prolonged push of the wind was so strong that the house seemed to move, to shift slightly and to take on a barely perceptible but ominous tilt. She felt his arm tighten around her and then slowly, cautiously, relax.

He put his lips close to her ear.

“...tell you something.”

“What?”

“...fair not to. And it’s hard to tell you. I don’t know what will happen. Stay close to me. I want to help if things get bad. I... might not be able to.”

“What’s wrong?” she cried. “What’s wrong, darling?”

His lips touched her ear when he spoke. “Never been very good about storms. Scared when I was a kid. Ashamed of it. Used to hide it. Figured I was over it. All over it. Then when I went out with him... Malden... I went all to pieces. Scared out of my wits. He had to cuff me out of it. No damn good to him or anybody. Glad it’s dark here, or I couldn’t even tell you. I want you to think I’m the greatest guy in the world. But I guess I’m not. You married a stinker, honey.” In his last words there was a quavering attempt to regain the tone of banter.

She turned her face up and kissed the corner of his mouth and did not answer him.

“...have to tell you a lot of things. Maybe to start cleaner. It was the money. You know that.”

She nodded, knowing that if he could not see in the gloom, he could feel the motion of her head. She could not trust herself to speak.

“It was the money. Now it isn’t the money. That’s why I’m so scared. Nothing must happen to you.”

Again the breathless nod, trying to tell him that she understood. She felt tremulous, poised on the very edge of happiness. And the great fury of the storm had no meaning to her.

She waited as long as she could and then, as he still tried to talk, to explain, she turned her whole body into his arms, her own arms lifting to hold him, hold him tightly, and she heard the single broken word... love... as she did so. She held him, and the tears ran unchecked, and she knew that in some miraculous way she had been permitted to find her place. At last she was important to one other human being. Important and needed, for herself alone. They were locked together in that embrace and in that awareness when the storm wrenched the roof off.

Steve Malden turned and looked up the stairs as the flashlight beam illuminated him, casting his shadow on the dark water in front of him. He sat halfway up the staircase, the water reaching the stair below where his feet rested, and nearly five feet deep in the downstairs room.

When he saw that it was Virginia, he moved over, and she picked her way down and sat on the stair beside him. In the narrow stairway they were partially sealed away from the storm sound and conversation was easier than in the upstairs rooms.

“How is it now?” she asked.

“Not coming up as fast. It has more land to spread over. But listen to something. Listen for a kind of deep regular beat, like a pulse, under the other sounds.”

“I heard that. What is it?”

“It’s getting stronger. It’s beginning to shake the house. It’s the waves. The wind builds them up in that clear space behind the house, and they are breaking against it.”

“Can they get very big?”

“The wind keeps them flat. But if they get too big, they’re going to nudge this place right off the foundations.”

“You’re such a cheerful man. What then?”

“I don’t know.” He reached over and took her hand. She turned off the flashlight. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “What we want now is the heart of it. The bar cloud. Then we’ll get a wind shift.”

“The bar cloud? That sounds... scary.”

“That’s when we get peak wind velocity.”

“It feels good to have my hand held, Steve. I have had my hand held in a hurricane, and I can assure everyone that it was very comforting. Now I had better get back up there.”

“I’ll come up when either the house starts to shift or the peak winds hit. Well stick to the Dorn family. And get the Hollis couple in there. We’ll do better if we stay close, I think. How is Dorn acting?”

“As if he were doped. I’ve tried to figure him out. Before it got too noisy to talk up there, I found out a few things from Jean Dorn. They moved to Florida because the little boy had asthma. They couldn’t make out. So they have to go back. I guess it took the spirit out of Mr. Dorn. He had a pretty good job in the north.”

“He was okay in the beginning. He seemed like a good one to have around.”

“He acts stunned.”

“Maybe Flagan tagged him harder than it looked.”

She touched him lightly on the shoulder as she went up the stairs. Malden sat in the darkness. Every half minute he turned on his own light and looked at the water level. It seemed to be remaining almost constant. He thought of the drowned cars outside. All would be under water, with just the radio aerials showing, the dark water swirling around them.

He tilted his head and listened. He thought he could hear a distant screaming, hissing, rumbling that was drawing closer. The implication of force froze him for a moment. He got up hurriedly and went up the stairs, to the lesser gloom of the hallway. As he turned toward the room where the Dorns and Virginia were, something exploded against the back of his head, made a great white flash behind his eyes, and plummeted him into darkness.

Johnny Flagan knew that something had gone wrong inside his head. All his life, except during the bursts of crazy rage, there had been a compact machine in there, with oiled bearings, clever gears. He had once seen a picture of an electronic brain, and from that time on he had liked to believe that he had a smaller and more acute version hidden behind the bland façade of his reddened face. It was reliable and lightning-quick, weighing all of the factors involved in any problem and translating them into action so quickly that the decision in each case seemed to be the result of instinct.

The marvelous little machine made him a great deal of money, and he had grown to depend upon it, accepting instinctive judgments as the result of an instantaneous but judicious weighing of all factors.

Yet on this day something had happened to the clever machine. Some cog or gear had slipped out of alignment, and the machine had made bad decisions. He had acted on those decisions and, unlike all the other times, his position had been made worse rather than improved.

Take that business with the car. He ached to be able to go back in time and change his action. Better to have run across the sagging bridge, reached the far shore, plodded back to the highway and found the cop — and then bought a little co-operation from him. That was where the marvelous machine had started to go wrong. That was its first failure.

Then, after his recovery, with the help of the bourbon, from the shock of nearly drowning, and the lesser shock of seeing Charlie crushed to death, the machine had told him it was time to leave. Get out and find something to cling to and float across that water and get to high land.

But that time the decision had been blocked. It couldn’t be blamed on the machine. It was his own temper that had spoiled things, letting the woman get him mad, and then hitting that lean man who had spun him around. The big one had really roughed him up. There were dull aches all over his body where the muscles had been bruised. That wasn’t important. It was important that the big one had taken the money, and thus destroyed the importance of getting out of this storm trap. The big man was going to make a fuss about the money, if they could get out of here. And he had held onto the money until the water became too high to make escape possible.

Faced with this problem, the clever machine, after the two bad decisions, became absolutely dead, inoperable. Johnny Flagan had moved in dulled obedience when he was told to go upstairs when the water began to come up through the holes in the rotted floor and spread across the downstairs rooms.

He could not face what would happen if the money was not replaced in time. It would be something too big to cover. He wouldn’t be able to buy his way out; this would lead to investigation, disgrace and, almost certainly, a jail term. He could not permit himself to think of a jail term. That could not happen to Johnny Flagan.

The machine had died. It could give him no answers. So he sat alone and tried not to be afraid of the storm sounds and tried to use logic on the situation. He found it hard to keep his mind on the problem. It kept wandering off into faraway memories. He did not feel like himself. His confidence had gone.

Logic led him to the only possible course of action. He had to assume he would survive. And he also had to assume that he would reach some place where he could get a plane that would get him to the place where he had to be by noon tomorrow. Thus any action had to be taken on the basis of those two assumptions. The necessary action was to recover the money and, in so doing, take the big man out of the picture. And he did not quite see how the big man could be stopped this side of death. Murder was a frightening word. Yet if nobody survived, the murder would be meaningless. Even if they all survived, murder might be difficult to prove if murder could be made to look like the result of the storm. And if any small percentage of the group survived, proof would be increasingly more difficult.

He went over it again and again. The first step, the only possible step, was to regain the money that had been taken from him. Stolen from him, if you wanted to look at it that way.

The next problem was a weapon. The big man was too hard to handle without an effective weapon. Flagan began a slow and thoughtful search, and in the end he found a weapon far better than he had expected to find. There was a very tiny closet in the room. It had a clothes bar made of one-inch pipe. The pipe fitted into slots and lifted out easily. It was three feet long, too unwieldy if held at the end, but by holding it near the middle he found he could swing it quickly and powerfully.

After he had the weapon, he thought about the problem of survival. The closet door was sturdy. It looked as if it would float well. It would not, of course, support his weight, but he decided that by clinging to it, he could keep his head above water. His single window was on the south side of the house. He broke the hinge pins loose with the length of pipe and took the door off and put it near the window. He poked the glass out of the window and pried the shutters open just enough so that he could look down and see the surface of the water. It was about a nine-foot drop to the water. The current seemed to be moving very swiftly. He shuddered as he looked at it. He knew that when the moment came, if he hesitated, he would be unable to drop. It would have to be done quickly.

He opened the room door and went in search of Malden, the length of pipe held behind him in concealment, moving cautiously and on tiptoe like a fat greedy child playing an intricate game, oblivious to the storm sounds that would have covered his footsteps even had he walked heavily.

The stairway was directly ahead of him. He stopped as Malden came up out of the stairway, moving quickly. Malden turned in the other direction, not noticing him. Flagan took two quick steps and brought the pipe down on the back of the man’s skull, striking heavily so that the pipe seemed to ring in his hands. Malden took a heavy step forward and pitched onto his face. Flagan knelt and dropped the pipe and worked the folded envelope out of Maiden’s hip pocket. He put it back in his own pocket and stood up, picking up the pipe. This time he grasped it by the end. He straddled the unconscious man. He raised the pipe.

Virginia Sherrel heard the new sound far off, an incredible sound half masked by the tumult of the winds. She had known that the air pressure had dropped. Now she felt the physical change as it dropped even further. She could not breathe deeply enough. The far-off sound grew in strength. It was a noise she could not have imagined. It sounded like a hundred low-flying jet planes, coming toward the house in formation. She could not believe that mere wind could make that sound. She saw Hal Dorn slowly lift his head and the glint of Jean Dorn’s wide eyes in the fading light. She knew that when that horrid noise struck, she had to be with Steve Malden, close to the strength and bulk of him. She hurried to the door and turned toward the stairway. And she saw in the bright beam of her flashlight Malden stretched out on the floor, Flagan standing over him, club lifting to strike again.

Virginia screamed, but in that moment the scream was utterly lost as the violence of the winds of the bar cloud struck the house. The roof was wrenched away as though by an explosion, and in truth it had the characteristics of an explosion. The air inside the house exerted sudden pressure on the roof and the walls as the outside pressure dropped almost to tornado level. The roof was wrenched away, and the winds drove in upon them. Virginia and Flagan were thrown against the hallway wall. Shutters on the west side were blown inward as those on the east were exploded outward. She was forced against the wall, half kneeling, and the wind was a hand that held her there. She felt the house turn and shift, move and tilt dangerously and hold steady.

She slid down the wall until she lay near Steve. Then she worked her way over to him and half lay across him as if to shield him from the storm. She put her arm around him, and her fingertips touched his throat. She felt, under her fingertips, the slow, strong beat of his pulse.

She turned her head and saw Flagan moving down the hallway on his hands and knees, moving slowly. A part of the west wall was torn away as she watched, and the thick timber slammed into the plaster wall directly above Flagan and wedged there. He continued to crawl slowly, laboriously, back toward the room he had been in, across the hall from the Hollises.

Hal Dorn was on his feet when the roof was torn away. He was lifted by the wind and slammed against the wall two feet from the shuttered window. It blew out, shutters and all, in almost the same moment, and he knew that if he had been standing in a slightly different spot, he would have been carried through the window. He fell to the floor, stunned both by the shock of hitting the wall and by the very violence of the wind. The wind held his eyes shut, and when he opened his mouth, it was as though the wind would force his throat open. He sensed that he would have to reach the shelter of the opposite wall and wormed his way over to Jean. He knew that, no matter how loudly he yelled at her, she could not hear him. He pushed at her, motioning toward the far corner and catching Jan in the curve of his arm. Her mouth was wide open, eyes squeezed shut. She was screaming in terror, but he could not hear her. Slowly, laboriously, in the odd saffron light, they worked their way across the small room to the single sheltering wall, and he tried not to think of what would happen if that wall, now unbraced by the roof, should be blown over. One of the blankets moved straight up, caught by a trick of the wind, made a slow uncanny loop, and then was flung out of sight over the east wall so quickly he could not follow it with his eye.

He pushed at Jean until he saw that she and the two children were in the safest part of the room. He crawled then to the doorway and wormed his way out into the hall. Malden was there, face down, the Sherrel woman shielding him. He pushed at her shoulder, caught hold of Maiden’s thick wrist, motioned to her. With great difficulty they rolled him onto his back. Virginia took one wrist and he took the other and, bit by bit, they tugged him along the five feet of hall to the doorway and through it, and placed him along the wall, his head near Jean and the children. Virginia crawled by Malden, sat near Jean, took Maiden’s head in her lap.

Hal looked at them and saw that he could do no more for them. Nothing could be done while the insane screaming of the peak winds lasted. He went back to the hallway. He realized he was getting very tired. Each movement required great effort. When he rested and looked up, he saw that the air over the house was not empty. Solid objects whirled by, too rapidly for him to make out what they were. At the far end of the hallway the west wall leaned inward, almost touching the east wall, making a sort of crude tent of the hallway. He crawled into the tent and felt the wind’s strength lessen. The door of the Hollises’ room was blown away. He worked his way through. And he saw that it was no longer a room. The roof was gone and the entire east wall of the room had been blown away. From the center of the room the floor sagged toward the drop. He saw the couple. They lay together, arms around each other, in the northwest corner of the room, the same relative place that, in the room Dorn had left, provided the greatest protection. They were huddled back in the corner and Hal could see the grim set of Hollis’s jaw, the bloodless lips, the tautness of his arm around the girl. When Hollis turned his head slightly and saw Hal, his eyes widened. It was impossible to make them hear in the fury of the wind. Hal beckoned to them and pointed down the hall, trying to convey the idea to them that the other room was safer.

Bunny Hollis’ young wife had turned so that Hal could see her face too, her expression. She looked calm, incongruously at peace, almost happy.

Hollis shook his head. The sagging floor looked dangerous. Even as Hall looked at it, it sagged further. The couple could not stay there. Yet Hal felt he did not want the responsibility of trying to help them. He was so wearied by the efforts he had already made that he wanted to close his eyes. And he wanted to go back, to be with Jean and the children.

In the very beginning, he had felt resolute, decisive. The blows from the fists of Flagan had thrown him back into an apathy greater than before. Now, stung into reluctant action by the appalling climax of the hurricane, he had crawled about like some slow disabled insect, thinking only of gathering all the others together so that each of them might have a greater chance. It had not been a calculated decision. It had been almost as instinctive as the way the frenzied ants gather the eggs from the shattered hill.

Yet now there was time to stop and time to think. He moved cautiously, trusting his weight to the sagging floor. He had no desire to move toward the trapped couple, yet he knew he would. He would move toward them, help them, get them out of this room.

Hollis made frantic motions for him to stay back, but Dorn ignored him. And as he moved so carefully, he felt within himself the rebirth of pride. Perhaps it was both trite and egocentric to think of it as manhood. Yet now he was doing a difficult and dangerous thing with no feeling of gratification of self. And it pleased him. It showed him that even defeat had its limitations. It could not destroy a man utterly.

By stretching as far as he could, and keeping his left hand on the door frame, he was able to reach the girl’s ankle with his right hand. He tugged hard. Hollis resisted for a moment, and then began to help him. The girl turned carefully. They stopped as the floor sagged another foot.

She held his arm, and he worked his way back until she could reach the relative safety of the hallway. Dorn wormed his way back into the room to help Hollis. Still holding the door frame, he reached his right hand out. Hollis caught it. Just as Hal Dorn began to believe that they had made it, the floor sagged suddenly. It sagged to the level of the black moving water. Hollis slid down the incline, still holding Hal’s hand and wrist in his two hands. The full strain came on Hal and he felt the creak of shoulder muscles, felt the strain in his left hand. He could see Hollis’ strained face, see the flavor of panic in the man’s eyes.

Hollis would not let go. He would take both of them. Then, as Hal’s fingers began to slip, he felt the girl take his left wrist with surprising strength and he knew, without looking back, that she had somehow braced herself in the hallway. It gave Hollis enough time to get his toes against the slant of the wet flooring. With some of the strain taken off, and with Hollis helping as much as he could, they slowly brought him up to the doorway.

The three of them crawled back down the hallway. In the open space the wind buffeted them. The situation in the first room was unchanged. The children were all right. Malden was still unconscious. Virginia Sherrel seemed unaware of anyone else, unaware of the storm, aware only of the unconscious man. The Hollis couple sat side by side near Jean Dorn. Hal, sitting near Maiden’s legs looked at the small group and thought of how, under this direct and almost unbelievable onslaught of the elements, mankind reacted with something of the patient passiveness of cattle in a windswept field — finding what meager shelter there was and enduring as best they could.

It was at that moment that Hal remembered Flagan. He had not seemed to be a part of the group at any time. Yet Hal could not understand how he could have gone down that hallway after the Hollises and forgotten that Flagan was alone in the small room across from theirs.

Hal knew that, should he stay where he was and wait out the peak winds, no one would blame him. He could not be accused of anything. Yet there was a debt to be paid. The debt had been incurred when he had not got up from the floor as quickly as he was able, when he had felt the fear of more punishment from Flagan’s heavy fists.

If this was to be rebirth, it could not be partial. If this was to be a reaffirmation of self, there could be no half-measures, no self-deceit. The responsibility could not be passed on to Malden. He moved quickly while the urge was fresh, and once again he fought against the dangerous strength of the wind until he reached the place where the half-collapsed wall gave partial protection. His progress was slower than before because he was nearing the limit of his physical endurance.

The door of Flagan’s room was in the slanted section of hallway wall. He could not force it open until he lay on his back and braced his feet against the door and pushed with all the strength of his legs. The door broke free suddenly, was caught by the wind, vibrated, and then was torn from the hinges and whirled away, like a leaf torn from a tree. He turned and looked into the ceilingless room, his eyes squinted against the hammering of the big winds. He looked and saw Flagan, just inside the door and slightly to his left. He could have reached out and touched Flagan’s hand. He looked until he was certain, and then he turned away and began the laborious, torturous crawl back to the others. When the house moved slightly, he paused, as though listening. He tried not to think about Flagan. The two-by-four could have come from this house, but more probably it had come from afar, from some shack much nearer the water, much nearer the unimpeded sweep of the winds. It had been moving fast. It would have had to be traveling at high speed to drive the splintered end entirely through a man so heavy.

He crawled on. And as he crawled he tried to think of the next thing to do. Should the house go over, it would break up. If it broke up there would be pieces, maybe whole walls. Those would float. With enough strength, enough determination, he might make certain that his family stayed together, that his family survived.

He knew he was near the end of his strength, yet he was miraculously certain that, if more strength, if more endurance should be required, he would find some reserve. He would be able to do what had to be done.

His life in the past year had made him feel limited, inadequate, unable to compete. His life in the past forty minutes had taught him that there was more left than he had ever believed. In a crisis he could survive. In a crisis he could do more than survive. He hoped that there would be some way he could tell Jean of this so-important thing he had learned.