The Road To Ruin

55

THE FACT IS, almost everybody who uses a power drill releases the trigger just a second too late. You or I, if we drive a long thin galvanized screw through three-quarter inch of plywood into a hardwood window frame, will keep going that tiny bit too long after the job is done, to leave the plywood around the screwhead dimpled, dented, with some few of the fibers of the plywood already torn.

This is what had happened at the window where Monroe Hall, with all the obsessive patience and single-mindedness brought on by total darkness, struggled to lever a corner of plywood away from the window frame. The first part was the hardest, as that first tiny damage to the plywood caused by the power drill was worried and pressed, twisted and stressed. More fibers snapped. Air from the outside world seeped into Hall’s prison room, and then more air.

None of the screws pulled out of the window frame. They were too deeply embedded in solid wood for that. Instead, slowly, relentlessly, they were pulled through the plywood, leaving not quite an inch of sharp-edged screw jutting from the frame, plus a small Etna of splinters that exploded inward from the plywood.

The first to come loose was at the lower-left corner of the window, and then the one a foot above that, and then the one a foot to the right along the windowsill, and then back to the next-higher screw on the side. When the fifth one popped, along the windowsill, he could force one end of his bar into the corner and push the other end up along the complaining face of the plywood until the bar was perpendicular to the building and the plywood was arched backward like a dog-eared page in a book.

Was this enough? Every time he reached over the sill, it seemed, his hands hit either the cutting edges of the exposed screws or the nasty points of the shredded plywood fibers. Also, the tapered opening was still mostly too narrow to permit him to slide through.

So, no; he had to do more. His fingers were bleeding from the work, and the backs of his hands were bleeding from the plywood shreds, but fortunately in the darkness he couldn’t see any of that, though he could certainly feel it. After a very brief pause to breathe in the fresh air, he pulled his lever back in and went on to finish the job of freeing the plywood all across the bottom sill. And when he wedged the lever in to make the dog-ear this time, there was much more room to maneuver.

He remembered there’d been an armchair in the room. Stumbling around, cautious but hitting into anonymous things anyway, he found the chair at last and dragged it over to the window. Standing on it, he confronted an opening he really still couldn’t see, though there was by now the faintest hint of light from the outside world, and he decided the way to go out was feet first.

It was very awkward, holding on to the window frame, the window, the chairback, the sill, while he maneuvered himself around, but finally there he was, seated on the sill, legs outside the house, nose against the window glass. He had no idea what was outside or how far away the ground might be, but did that matter? No, it did not.

Where were those jutting screws? He felt under his thighs, and there they were, too close together to avoid completely. He’d just have to slide out above them somehow.

Grasping the bottom of the open window with both hands, he leaned far backward into the darkness of the room, then began to hunch himself forward, first on left buttock, then on right, while pulling with the strength of his forearms, upturned hands gripping the window bottom. Outside, his feet kicked in the night air, until he pressed his heels against the side of the house and used that leverage, too.

He was moving. The curl of plywood pressed against his right hip, but he was moving, inexorably moving, and all at once the plywood let him through.

Gravity took over. It took over too soon, before he was ready, before he was clear of the building. Two screws laid tracks of sharp awful pain upward along his torso, and he couldn’t twist away. His flailing left hand hit the wedged bar and grabbed it, pulling it loose, and the plywood snapped back down onto him like a mousetrap, scraping the entire upper half of his body as it squeezed him like toothpaste out of the building.

Eleven feet below this window was the ground, dark thin mountainous soil full of boulders and rocks. Most of Hall’s parts hit rocks when he landed, most significantly the head-sized rock he hit with the back of his own head.

He was unconscious then, but didn’t know it. On automatic pilot, he struggled to his feet, straightened, and marched into the wall of the house. Correcting, he spun himself about, lost his balance, found his balance, and headed off downhill, reeling forward, still clutching the metal bar in his left hand, only staying upright because his feet still knew their job was to stay, if possible, directly beneath his head.

Plunging in this way, his head hurtling down the mountain while his feet scrambled to keep up, he legged it some distance from the house, and might even have gone on like that all the way to the valley if his head had only been alert enough to tell his feet to avoid that tree.

Concussed for the second time, Hall dropped onto his back like a delivery of curtain rods. His extremities twitched, then lay still. A frown gradually faded from his brow as, off to his left, the sun at last put in an appearance.