Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

A wooden toolbox or carryall of some sort settles down noisily on the floor outside the door. I can tell it’s wooden, not by its floor impact but by the “settling” sound that accompanies it, as if a considerable number of loose and rolling objects in it are chinking against its insides. Nails and bolts and awls and screwdrivers and the like. That tells me that it’s a kit commonly used by carpenters and locksmiths and their kind.

They’re going to take the lock off bodily from the outside.

A cold surge goes through me that I can’t describe. It isn’t blood. It’s too numbing and heavy and cold for that. And it breaks through the skin surface, which blood doesn’t ordinarily do without a wound, and emerges into innumerable sting pin pricks all over me. An ice-sweat.

I can see him (not literally, but just as surely as if I could), down on one knee, and scared, probably as scared as I am myself, pressing as far back to the side out of the direct line of the door as he can, while the others, bunched together farther back, stand ready to cover him, to pile on me and bring me down if I should suddenly break out and rush him.

And the radio tells me sarcastically to “Light up, you’ve got a good thing going.”

I start backing away, with a sleepwalker’s fixity, staring at the door as I retreat, or staring at where I last saw it, for I can’t see it in the dark. What good would it do to stay close to it, for I can’t hold it back, I can’t stop it from opening. And as I go back step after step, my tongue keeps tracking the outside outline of my lips, as if I wondered what they were and what they were there for.

A very small sound begins. I don’t know how to put it. Like someone twisting a small metal cap to open a small medicine bottle, but continuously, without ever getting it off. He’s started already. He’s started coming in.

It’s terrible to hear that little thing move. As if it were animate, had a life of its own. Terrible to hear it move and to know that a hostile agency, a hostile presence, just a few feet away from me, is what is making it move. Such a little thing, there is almost nothing smaller, only the size of a pinhead perhaps, and yet to create such terror and to be capable of bringing about such a shattering end-result: entry, capture, final loss of reason, and the darkness that is worse than death. All from a little thing like that, turning slowly, secretively, but avidly, in the lockplate on the door, on the door into my room.

I have to get out of here. Out. I have to push these walls apart, these foursquare tightly seamed walls, and make space wide enough to run in, and keep running through it, running and running through it, running and running through it, and never stopping. Until I drop. And then still running on and on, inside my head. Like a watch with its case smashed open and lying on the ground, but with the works still going inside it. Or like a cockroach when you knock it over on its back so that it can’t ambulate anymore, but its legs still go spiraling around in the air.

The window. They’re at the door, but the window — that way out is still open. I remember when I checked in here the small hours of Wednesday, I didn’t ask to be given a room on the second floor, they just happened to give me one. Then when I saw it later that day in the light, I realized the drop to the ground from one of the little semicircular stone ledges outside the windows wouldn’t be dangerous, especially if you held a pillow in front of you, and remembered to keep your chin tilted upward as you went over. Just a sprawling shake-up fall maybe, that’s all.

I pull at the blind cords with both hands, and it spasms upward with a sound like a lot of little twigs being stepped on and broken. I push up the window sash and assume a sitting position on the sill, then swing my legs across and I’m out in the clear, out in the open night.

The little stone apron has this spiked iron rail guard around it, with no space left on the outer side of it to plant your feet before you go over. You have to straddle it, which makes for tricky going. Still, necessity can make you dexterous, terror can make you agile. I won’t go back inside for the pillow, there isn’t time. I’ll take the leap neat.

The two cars that brought them here are below, and for a moment, only for a moment, they look empty, dark and still and empty, standing bumper to bumper against the curb. Someone gives a warning whistle — a lip whistle, I mean, not a metal one. I don’t know who, I don’t know where, somewhere around. Then an angry, ugly, smoldering, car-bound orange moon starts up, lightens to yellow, then brightens to the dazzling white of a laundry-detergent commercial. The operator guiding it slants it too high at first, and it lands over my head. Like a halo. Some halo and some time for a halo. Then he brings it down and it hits me as if someone had belted me full across the face with a talcum-powder puff. You can’t see through it, you can’t see around it.

Shoe leather comes padding from around the corner — maybe the guy that warded off Johnny — and stops directly under me. I sense somehow he’s afraid, just as I am. That won’t keep him from doing what he has to do, because he’s got the backing on his side. But he doesn’t like this. I shield my eyes from the light on one side, and I can see his anxious face peering up at me. All guys are scared of each other, didn’t you know that? I’m not the only one. We’re all born afraid.

I can’t shake the light off. It’s like ghostly flypaper. It’s like slapstick-thrown yoghurt. It clings to me whichever way I turn.

I hear his voice talking to me from below. Very near and clear. As if we were off together by ourselves somewhere, just chatting, the two of us.

“Go back into your room. We don’t want you to get hurt.” And then a second time: “Go back in. You’ll only get hurt if you stand out here like this.”

I’m thinking, detached, as in a dream: I didn’t know they were this considerate. Are they always this considerate? When I was a kid back in the forties, I used to go to those tough-guy movies a lot. Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney. And when they had a guy penned in, they used to be tough about it, snarling: “Come on out of there, yuh rat, we’ve got yuh covered!” I wonder what has changed them? Maybe it’s just that time has moved on. This is the sixties now.

What’s the good of jumping now? Where is there to run to now? And the light teases my eyes. I see all sorts of interlocked and colored soap bubbles that aren’t there.

It’s more awkward getting back inside than it was getting out. And with the light on me, and them watching me, there’s a self-consciousness that was missing in my uninhibited outward surge. I have to straighten out one leg first and dip it into the room toes forward, the way you test the water in a pool before you jump in. Then the other leg, and then I’m in. The roundness of the light beam is broken into long thin tatters as the blind rolls down over it, but it still stays on out there.

There are only two points of light in the whole room — I mean, in addition to the indirect reflection through the blind. Which gives off a sort of phosphorescent haziness — two points so small that if you didn’t know they were there and looked for them, you wouldn’t see them. And small as both are, one is even smaller than the other. One is the tiny light in the radio, which, because the lens shielding the dial is convex, glows like a miniature orange scimitar. I go over to it to turn it off. It can’t keep the darkness away anymore; the darkness is here.

“Here’s to the losers,” the radio is saying. “Here’s to them all—”

The other point of light is over by the door. It’s in the door itself. I go over there close to it, peering with my head bowed, as if I were mourning inconsolably. And I am. One of the four tiny screwheads set into the corners of the oblong plate that holds the lock is gone, is out now, and if you squint at an acute angle you can see a speck of orange light shining through it from the hall. Then, while I’m standing there, something falls soundlessly, glances off the top of my shoe with no more weight than a grain of gravel, and there’s a second speck of orange light at the opposite upper corner of the plate. Two more to go now. Two and a half minutes of deft work left, maybe not even that much.