Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

My surviving speck of consciousness was as helpless and hurried among them as a grain of sand caught up in the churning of a millwheel. Yet the innumerable millwheels churned an element as intimate as my blood.

Come as close to death as you may, there is no complete cessation of consciousness. The mind’s torment clings to the flesh till the heart has stopped and the brain dies. While I lay straddled by nightmare my mind, lost in the horrible interior of my body’s engines, prodded them into continued effort. My diaphragm wrestled with paralysis and won. I went on breathing.

The dark wheels lost their motion and their shape, extending, like a spattered gout of blood, blood-red fingers which groped among the unknown terrors of my situation. I lay in a jungle of dark weaving tendrils and limp leaves which swayed and bowed like sinuous feathers in a desultory wind. When I opened my eyes this soft inconstant world was resolved into the real world of solid dimensions. But a trace of the movement persisted in a teetering of the whole universe above me. The fulcrum of this motion was the small of my back, which seemed ready to break under the strain.

I was conscious of a dark rectilinear shape, as fearfully palpable as the lid of a tomb, which loomed between me and the night sky. Reflected dimly by this huge and shadowy object, I saw faint lights, some fixed as stars, one or two moving like comets in remote orbits. Like a voice calling across stellar space, I heard a faint “All aboard!” A light moved in an arc near me. I became conscious, in a blinding flash of terror and recognition, that the painful fulcrum on which my back rested was a rail. I was under the train and it was about to move across my body.

Simultaneously I let out a yell which was drowned in the snort of rushing steam, and flung myself forward. I struck my head on a brake rod. Grovelling and scuttling like a lamed crab I dragged myself out from under the wheels and flung myself on the platform beside the rails.

“What the hell!” somebody said.

I turned on my back and sat up, and a brakeman came towards me swinging a lantern.

“Hold the train,” I said in a hoarse voice hard to recognize as my own. “I’m supposed to be on it.”

He moved his lantern in a signal and I lost my feeling that the train was pawing the ground with its steel hooves. “Look here,” he said. “What were you doing under the train?”

Self-pity and the hammering and droning in my head made me bark irritably, “Lying there. For fun.”

He took hold of my arm and dragged me up: “You get up on your feet and give me a straight answer. This train can’t wait all night.”

My legs were still only partly under my control, but I balanced myself on them.

“What’s the matter, you sick?” the brakeman said. “Say, you’re drunk.” He shook me by the shoulder. I struck his hand away.

The conductor came up, biting impatiently at his heavy grey moustache. “What’s the holdup here?”

“I was unconscious,” I said, unnerved into childishness because I had never been unconscious before. “Somebody put me under the train.”

“He’s drunk,” the brakeman said. “You can smell his breath. He says he’s on the train.”

“Well, get the hell back on or I’ll call the Shore Patrol. Wait a minute, let me see your ticket.”

“It’s in my berth. Don’t you know me?”

The brakeman raised his electric lantern to the level of my face and the conductor gave me a narrow-eyed look. “Yeah, I know you. Climb back on and get in your berth. You’re lookin’ bad, boy. And if you make any more trouble this trip, any trouble at all, the S.P. will put you off the train.”

There was no use in arguing and I was uncertain of my grounds anyway. I transported my roaring head and raw throat down the platform to the end of the car, up the iron steps, in the door, down the passageway toward the men’s smoking-room. Before I got there the train had begun to move. Remembering my flashing terror of the wheels, I had a swelling sense of relief, like a man walking on a grave in which his own empty coffin has been buried.

My relief gave way to blank wonder and then to another terror when I saw that the men’s smoking-room was empty, and found by experiment that the door of the men’s room was locked. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked more loudly, until the sound of my knocking echoed in my tender skull like the blows of a metalsmith’s hammer. There was still no answer.

I tried the knob again and rattled the door in its frame. Then it occurred to me with a pang of shame that I was acting like a child. Hatcher, of course, was in some other part of the train, probably in bed by this time.

But the door was locked, and it locked only on the inside. If there was anyone in that little room capable of speech, he would have answered. “Hatcher!” I called through the wooden panels. “Hatcher!”

“What’s the trouble?” someone said behind me. “Gotta go bad?” I turned and saw Teddy Trask wearing a purple silk bathrobe over candy-striped pajamas, and carrying a shaving kit.

“I think there’s a sick man in there. The soldier that got on at Kansas City.”

“My God, you don’t look so good yourself. Where’d you get the dirt all over your uniform? Let me see this door.”

He tried the knob and examined the narrow space between the door and its frame. “We’ll soon find out.” From his shaving kit he took a new safety razor blade, unwrapped it deftly, and applied it to the crack of the door.

When he had been hunched over his work for perhaps a minute I heard him say “There!” and the bolt snapped back in its socket. He turned the knob and opened the door, but it wouldn’t open far.

He forced it a few inches more till the space was wide enough for his head, and looked around the edge of the door.

“My God!” he said. “What’s the name of that Army doctor down the line?”

“Major Wright.”

“I’ll go and get him.”

He hustled away, his slippers lapping the floor in quick syncopated rhythm. I took my look into the little room.

Hatcher was kneeling on the floor in a posture similar to the Moslem attitude of prayer. Most of the weight of his body was supported by his legs, which were bent under him. His head, turned sideways, rested on the edge of the toilet bowl. The wall light two feet above his face allowed me to see that his one visible eye was staring blankly at the blank wall. There was about him a souring sweet smell of sickness and drugs.

I tried to get in to him, pressing my shoulder against the door, and he moved suddenly. He fell sideways into immediate stillness like a loosely filled sack. I felt such pity for his helplessness and indignity, which I myself had so nearly matched a few minutes before, that I cried out.

“Here, here,” Major Wright said behind me, taking hold of my shoulder with one hand. “Let me see what I can do for him.”

While I stood back on unsteady legs and watched, Teddy Trask, who was smaller than I, stepped around the door. He maneuvered Hatcher into a more nearly upright position, embraced his chest from behind, and brought him out into the smoking-room where he gently laid him out on the floor. Hatcher’s face grinned bleakly at the ceiling.

The doctor made a quick examination, attempting to take his pulse, inspecting his chest and mouth for signs of breathing. When he touched a staring eyeball with his finger I winced and turned away, but not before I had noticed the absence of any reflex. Private Hatcher’s eyeballs were as insensate as glass.

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Major Wright said, squinting at me over his shoulder through rimless spectacles. “What made him sick?” There were marks of Hatcher’s sickness on his rumpled uniform.