The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER X

I TURNED TO SHINY and said, “Have you got a gun?”

“Nope. What would I want with a gun?”

“Don’t tell them I was here,” I said. As I started across the room I heard knocking on the door. I went through the door at the back of the room into the kitchen.

The old man was sitting at a wooden table with a half-gallon can and a glass of colorless liquid in front of him. He had a rubber tube in his hand which seemed to grow out of his shirt-collar.

“More whiskey?” he whispered, and began to get out of his chair. There was a louder knock on the door, and he started.

“Who’s that?” he said.

“The police.”

“So you got me knocked off, you–”

“Don’t be crazy. Don’t let them in. And don’t tell them I was here.”

The two at the door began to shake the knob. I had no time to ask the old man if he had a gun, and I went out the back door. I closed it quietly behind me and jumped off the railless back porch into a yard overgrown with weeds. I waded through the rank growth and stepped over a broken-down wire fence into a field. I could hear voices from the front of the house.

Avoiding the beam from the headlights of Schneider’s car, I ran crouching down the slope of the field into a gulley where a patch of trees hid me from the house. There was a small stream tinkling in the gulley and I followed its course because it was something to follow. It seemed I had been running for days, but the night was still dark.

The stream led me out of the woods into an open field. It was a field of turnips. The turnips stuck out of the ground like human heads in rows and made it very hard to run until I turned away from the stream and followed the turnip-rows.

When I had crossed the turnip field I had to climb another fence, and beyond that the ground started to rise under my feet. I climbed the hillside and stopped to look back.

I could see the dim outlines of the house I had left across the valley, and the headlights of the coupe still shining fixedly. As I watched, the headlights moved and I heard the sound of the distant engine. The headlights went up the lane away from the house and disappeared.

Perhaps Shiny and the old man had convinced them that I hadn’t been there, and they had given up the chase. Perhaps not.

My heart was pumping like a racing engine and I was beginning to sweat again. Moving more slowly, I climbed to the top of the hill. A horse standing on the other side of the hilltop shied away from me and galloped off down the pasture. I had a wild idea of trying to catch him and ride away on his back.

I ran down the hill to the end of the pasture and the horse circled me and ran uphill away from me. I climbed another fence and crossed another field of stubble and went up another hill. From the top I could see lights across the next valley, and the wind brought me the sound of music. I went down the hill and across the fields towards the lights. They were hidden now by a shoulder of hill but as I got nearer the music became louder. It sounded like a violin, and I wondered if shock and terror had affected my mind.

I climbed across another wire fence into a lane which ascended the hill. As I went up, the violin-music came clearer and I recognized the piece. Turkey in the Straw, played on and on and on. I walked up the hill in time to the music and heard the shuffling and stamping of feet.

Then I saw the lights again. A huge barn on the other side of the hill was blazing with light through every window and crack. The wagon-doors at one end were wide open and threw a sheet of white light over the barn hill. The music stopped and there were howls and squeals, and the stamping of feet.

The music started again and a whining insistent voice chanted rhythmically:

There was the sound of feet again, trampling in unison on the wooden floor. The fiddle played on and on like a mechanical fiddle.

Somebody must have built a new barn and the barn-dance celebrating it was still going on. But it must be nearly dawn. I pulled out my watch and looked at it in the light from the barn. The crystal was smashed and the watch had stopped at about 3:45.

It must have been broken when I ran into the steampipe in the tunnel. I thought of the tunnel, and shivered. I had never been a lone wolf or a cat that walks by himself, and my lack of a gun and the weariness of my legs made me feel more gregarious than ever. If Ruth and Peter were going to find me again, I wanted people around me. Any people would do.

Then I thought of the cars the people must have come in. I climbed the fence into the field and circled the barn, keeping outside the rectangle of light thrown through the barn doors. Inside the barn, brilliantly lit by a dozen gasoline lamps hanging from the rafters, I could see shirt-sleeved men and girls in bright dresses going through the figures of a square dance.

There were a dozen cars parked under trees on the other side of the barn and I climbed over the fence and walked towards them. I looked in the front window of the first one to see if the ignition key was there and a bass voice from the back seat growled, “Pull in your neck, buddie, or I’ll twist it for you.”

I glanced into the back seat and saw the glimmer of a girl’s white thighs, and delicately withdrew. The cars were not for me.

I turned around and walked into the barn as if I belonged. Nobody questioned my right to be there. There were a dozen kegs of beer in tubs of icy water standing on trestles along one wall, and I moved through the dancers towards the beer. None of them paid any attention to me, but a large hairy man sitting at the end of the row like a thirteenth keg stood up and stuck out his hand to me.

“Greetings, stranger,” he said above the sound of the fiddle and the shuffling feet. “Have some beer?”

I said I would and he drew me a foaming mug. “Here you are. Drink it up. Plenty more where that comes from. I buy so much I get a wholesale price on it.”

“You’re lucky,” I said.

“Of course I’m lucky. Always have been lucky, always will be lucky.” He belched voluptuously and wiped his mouth with the back of his thick hand. “Luckiest thing ever happened to me was when my old barn burnt down. Needed a new one for years and now I’ve got it. Gift of the insurance company. Lucky as a rabbit in clover.”

A man and a girl drifted away from the dancers and came over and asked for beer. The lucky man drew it for them and said, “Drink up. Build up your energy. Look at me. Always been energetic, always will be. Why? A gallon of beer a day keeps the doctor away, that’s why.”

The couple laughed and drank up and went back to dance some more. He sat down beside me again and said, “Say, how’d you get here?”

“I walked,” I said. “Ran out of gas and lost my way.”

“Where you from?”

“Arbana.”

“Hell, stay with me and I’ll drive you in, in the morning.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Any rabbits around here?”

“Millions of them. Trillions of them. Swarm all over, eat me out of house and home. Why?”

“I thought now that I’m out here I’d try to do a little hunting before I go back to town. Have you got a gun?”

The big man threw his left leg over his right knee, bent over with a grunt and began to unlace his left boot.

“I said have you got a gun.”

He said, “Ha! Ha!” and pulled off his boot and sock and pointed triumphantly at his bare foot. The big toe was missing.

“I said a gun, not a big toe.”

“That’s correct.” He laughed uproariously. “No big toe, no gun. I used to have guns, dozens of them. A whole arsenal. Then one day, about five years ago, I was out hunting rabbits and crawled through a fence with a shotgun and the damn thing went off and shot off my big toe. After that no more guns for me. If I lost a few more toes or a whole foot, I’d be a damn cripple. Won’t even look at a gun. Stranger, don’t ever come trying to sell me a gun.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Let the damn rabbits eat up everything I’ve got. If you were the President of the United States, I wouldn’t let you give me a gun.” He bent over and put on his sock and boot.

“Have you a telephone?” I asked.

“No sir, no telephone for me. They attract lightning. When I want to talk to the next farm, I just go out on the barn hill and holler. Like this.” He hollered. Nobody paid any attention.

“I see. Have they got a telephone at the next farm?”

“Yeah, I been telling them for ten years they better watch out, the lightning’ll get ’em sure as shooting. But the damn fools haven’t had it torn out yet. They’ll be sorry when the house burns down around their ears and–”

I cut him short. “How do you get to the next farm?”

He waved his arm. “Right down the lane past the house. Just follow the lane. You can’t miss it.”

“I think I’d better go and try to get in touch with a garage to pick up my car,” I said. I got up and thanked him and said good night.

“Good night,” he yelled. “Too bad you can’t stay.”

The music stopped and the dancers headed for the beer. I walked around them along the wall to the open doors and saw a car coming down the lane. The light was very dim but it looked like a coupe.

I turned and ran back across the deserted floor to the other end where the fiddler was drinking his beer. A small door in the end wall was open and I ran through it and found myself running in air.

I only fell a few feet but it seemed like a hundred. I landed in a soft pile of manure that squished up around my ankles and my wrists. I got up and crossed the barnyard and ran around the house to the lane. A pale blue neon light was creeping up two sides of the sky and I could see another farmhouse and a barn a quarter of a mile down the road. There was a light in the house, and I ran for it as hard as I could go.

Before I got there I heard the car behind me on the road and looked back and saw it coming. I ran like a rabbit hypnotized by headlights straight down the centre of the road to the farmhouse. I ran through an open gate into the front yard and saw a light in an outhouse in the yard and somebody moving inside.

The car drew up at the gate – it was a coupe all right – and I ran for the outhouse. An old woman working over a cream-separator heard me coming and came to the door of the outhouse. She had a hard, bright face with a long nose in the middle of it.

I ran up to her and said, “Call your men. There’s a murderer after me.”

She sniffed and said, “You’ve been drinking. Are you one of the friends of that O’Neill man on the next farm? Look at you, you’re all covered with cow-dirt.” She sniffed again in disgust and her long nose pointed at me like the finger of scorn.

“Call your husband,” I said. “Tell him to bring a gun.” I looked behind me. Peter was walking across the lawn towards us with his right hand in the pocket of his coat.

“Why should I bother my husband on a drunkard’s say-so?” the woman said. “He’s out in the barn milking. He’s a respectable man. If you got yourself a steady job you wouldn’t be running around early in the morning smelling of liquor and trying to frighten hard-working people. The Devil finds things for idle hands to do.”

Peter Schneider was at my shoulder. He said very respectfully as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, “I quite agree, madam. I apologize to you for my friend’s drunkenness.” I felt his gun pressed hard against my buttocks.

“He should apologize,” she said, bridling with justified virtue. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“He was at one time,” Schneider said. “I still feel some duty towards him. I’ve been looking for him all night to take him back to the hospital.”

“The hospital! Is he sick?”

“Not exactly. After a week of steady drinking he succumbed to delirium tremens. The poor fellow is out of his head. He even imagines that I want to kill him.”

“You’re a true Good Samaritan, young man.”

“He’s a German spy,” I said. “He killed his father tonight and now he’s trying to kill me.”

He caught the woman’s eye and laughed infectiously. They laughed together.

“Mercy me, I shouldn’t laugh at him,” the woman said. “Drink is such a horrible tragedy. But I’m so glad you found him before he destroyed himself.”

“So am I,” Schneider said. “He needs a nurse’s tender ministrations. I’ll take him back to the hospital now.”

“Before you go,” the woman said, “will you wait a minute? I have something for him. It may help him.”

“A gun would help me,” I said. “Nothing else would.” She threw up her hands and eyes and bustled off to the house.

“You are excessively naive,” Schneider said to me. “I have no intention of shooting you. You are much more precious to me alive.”

“How you cheer me,” I said. I turned and faced him and saw his unlined, complacent face and the bulge in his pocket. “But you’d better kill me quickly. Otherwise I’m going to kill you.”

His laughed sounded flatly against the roof of his mouth. The woman came back from the house and handed me a little printed pamphlet. In the growing light I could make out the title The Horrors of the Demon Drink.

“Thank you very much, madam,” I said.

“We must go now, Freddie,” Schneider said. “The doctor will be worried.”

I turned to the woman once more, “I’m a murderer,” I said. “The police are looking for me. My name is Robert Branch. Phone the police in Arbana and tell them you saw me escaping. This man’s name is Peter Schneider.”

“No more wild tales, Freddie,” Schneider said.

“Good heavens, he’s out of his mind,” the old woman said. “Delirium tremens is a terrible thing.”

“Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,” I said and turned towards the car. Peter Schneider followed close behind me.

I passed through the open iron gate outside of which the green coupe was parked with the engine running. The woman was still standing watching us. He couldn’t shoot me in front of a witness. Or could he? I took the chance.

I slammed the iron gate hard against him as he passed through and he staggered back with a cry.

“Goodness gracious,” the woman shrieked, “he’s getting away again.”

I ran towards the road and around the corner of the barn. The road was no good to me; he had a car. Across the road were willow-trees and beyond that an open pasture. I heard running feet behind me. I put the trees between me and Peter, and headed straight across the pasture.

He came across the pasture fifty feet behind me, but I didn’t look back. I had to get away from him before we were out of sight and earshot of the house, or he would be free to shoot me. There was a deep woods on the other side of the pasture, its half-turned leaves becoming gorgeous in the dawn. I tried to lengthen my stride, but tiredness hung around my thighs like iron hoops.

A shotgun roared from the woods and a rabbit came running out into the pasture towards me dragging a leg. It saw me and moved floppily aside like an old hat in a wind. Then it fell on its side and kicked once.

I ran towards it and picked it up and stood holding it by the ears with the blood dripping from it. Peter came up beside me with his chest heaving. “You can’t shoot me here, you bastard,” I said. “The man that shot the rabbit is coming.”

There were cracklings and rustlings among the trees and two men came out of the woods with shotguns under their arms. They saw me holding the rabbit and broke into a trot. They were young men in bright plaid shirts with smiling faces. One of them held out his hand for the rabbit and I gave it to him.

“Will one of you fellows lend me his shotgun for one shot?” I said. “Just to shoot at a tree. I haven’t shot a gun for–”

Peter Schneider broke in, “Don’t give him a gun. This man is an escaped murderer.”

The young men stood and watched us with blank, smiling faces. One of them took a card out of an inside pocket and handed it to me. It was an old dirty card bearing print which said:

I found a pencil in my pocket and wrote on the back of the card: “I’ll give you $40 for your shotgun and some shells. Now.”

I took two twenties out of my wallet and handed the card and the bills to the young man. He read what I had written and looked at me in smiling surprise. Then he turned to the other hunter and talked to him on his fingers. The other man’s fingers began to talk.

The first young man smiled more intensely than ever and nodded and handed me his gun. It was a single-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and I broke it to make sure it was loaded. It was. The young man handed me a cardboard box of shells.

I felt very good. A shotgun can blow a man’s head off at close quarters. Peter had begun to move away. I held the gun at the hip so that it pointed at him and said:

“Stand still, Schneider.”

He edged behind the two deaf-mutes and, using them for cover, ran for the woods. I stepped around them, brought the gun to my shoulder, and fired quickly. Too quickly. He plunged into the woods and disappeared, and I heard his receding footsteps crackling in the underbrush.

The young men stared at me aghast and ran away across the pasture making little bleating noises.

I broke the gun and reloaded and emptied the shells into my pocket. Then I ran into the woods after Peter. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, but I was very eager to kill him. He had hunted me all night and now I was hunting him.

It was a maple-woods, probably sugar-maple, and well thinned out. I ran on a thin carpet of fallen leaves, sallow and brown and blond and blood-red, between trunks like black pillars. Afar ahead of me I could hear the running feet, and I caught a glimpse of him between the trees. I lost sight of him again and kept on running. The shotgun hampered me but I ran hard. I was so angry I forgot to be tired.

I leaped a stream and came to a rail fence with open fields rolling beyond it. The fields were empty. There was a sound along the fence a hundred feet away from me and I turned and fired and reloaded on my knees behind the fence. There was a shot and a bullet spatted into a tree behind my head. He broke from cover and ran across the field in front of me and disappeared behind a little hill.

I climbed the fence and walked up the hill with the gun at my shoulder. From the hilltop I saw him running across dry grass in a shallow valley, dragging a leg like the rabbit. On the next hillside there was a tumbledown barn beside the grass-grown foundations of a house that had probably been razed by fire. He was running uncertainly towards the barn.

There was a splash of bright new blood on a white boulder halfway down the hill. It went to my head and I felt like laughing out loud. I had winged him.

He fell once before he reached the old barn, and got up and dragged himself in through the gaping door. A thin, dribbling trail of blood led down the hill from the boulder where the blood-splash glistened, and I followed it across the field.

I walked towards the barn with the gun at my shoulder, expecting a pistol shot. There was none. There was a low moaning from inside the dark barn, and then silence.

I tiptoed to the door and looked inside under floating cobwebs. I could see nothing but old chaff on a floor of loose, rotting boards.

I forgot I wasn’t hunting rabbits and stepped across the rotting doorsill. A noose came over my head from the side and jerked me off my feet. My gun went off with a roar that shook the barn and killed nobody.

The noose drew tighter and burned my neck and I could feel congested blood swelling my face. I was flat on my face and he had one foot between my shoulder blades. It felt as if he was leaning back on the rope around my neck. I tried to get onto my hands and knees.

“Don’t struggle, Dr. Branch. It will do no good and will only force me to shoot you.”

I turned my head sideways and tried to see him but he drew the rope tighter. My eyeballs threatened to burst and the light seemed tinged with red. I heard a click like a box closing or opening and he kneeled on my back holding the rope tight. He pushed up the sleeve on my right arm and I felt a prick near the elbow. I tried to struggle and he drew the rope tighter. Swarming blackness dipped down at my consciousness and I relaxed. He loosened the rope a little and the black cloud receded.

“What a child you are, Dr. Branch. You Americans know nothing of war. I cut my arm and left a little trail of blood for you, and you followed it as a donkey follows a carrot. You must fancy yourself as a hunter, Dr. Branch.”

My right arm felt numb and my head began to go around in stately circles, humming like a distant motor.

“Relax, Dr. Branch.” His voice came from the other end of a dark tunnel. “You’ll go to sleep very shortly. Then I shall have the pleasure of hanging you.”

The rope was looser now and I tried for the last time to get my knees under me. I couldn’t raise my head. The black cloud had come back and rested on my head and it was as heavy as tons of coal.

Schneider’s voice droned on like a doctor’s soothing a patient going under ether, “Hanging is a fitting end for a murderer, is it not? Self-slaughter. Homicide and suicide. No one will guess that you did not hang yourself. In fact, you will hang yourself. I shall make that possible for you, Dr. Branch.

“So fortunate that this rope was here in the barn. Otherwise I might have had to shoot you. So fortunate.”

With the idiot speck of consciousness I had left, whirling in the midst of blackness, I felt soothed and delighted by the good fortune. How lucky we both were, and how pleasant it was to be going to sleep with a gentle voice droning in my ears.

The speck of consciousness flickered and went out, and I turned on great black wheels in an infinity of humming wheels.