Stephen King - Just After Sunset

I’ll be all right as long as my teeth don’t chatter , he thought. I can’t bear to hear my teeth chatter .

At eleven o’clock, Grunwald went to bed. He lay there in his pajamas under the revolving fan, looking up into the dark and smiling. He felt better than he had felt for months. He was gratified but not surprised. “Goodnight, neighbor,” he said, and closed his eyes. He slept through the night without waking for the first time in six months.

At midnight, not far away from Curtis’s makeshift cell, some animal — probably just a wild dog, but to Curtis it sounded like a hyena — let out a long, screaming howl. His teeth began to chatter. The sound was every bit as awful as he had feared.

Some unimaginable time later, he slept.

When he woke up, he was shivering all over. Even his feet were jerking, tapdancing like the feet of a junkie in withdrawal. I’m getting sick, I’ll have to go to the damn doctor, I ache all over , he thought. Then he opened his eyes, saw where he was, remembered where he was, and gave a loud, desolate cry: “Ohhhh…no! NO!”

But it was oh yes. At least the Port-O-San wasn’t entirely dark anymore. Light was coming through the circular holes: the pale rose glow of morning. It would soon strengthen as the day brightened and heated up. Before long he would be steam-cooking again.

Grunwald will come back. He’s had a night to think it over, he’ll realize how insane this is, and he’ll come back. He’ll let me out.

Curtis did not believe this. He wanted to, but didn’t.

He needed to take a leak in the worst way, but he was damned if he was going to piss in the corner, even though there was crap and used toilet paper everywhere from yesterday’s overturning. He felt somehow that if he did that — a nasty thing like that — it would be the same as announcing to himself that he had given up hope.

I have given up hope.

But he hadn’t. Not completely. As tired and achey as he was, as frightened and dispirited, part of him still hadn’t given up hope. And there was a bright side: he felt no urge to gag himself, and he hadn’t spent even a single minute of the night just gone by, nearly eternal though it had been, scourging his scalp with his comb.

There was no need to piss in the corner, anyway. He would just raise the toilet seat lid with one hand, aim with the other, and let fly. Of course, given the Port-O-San’s new configuration, that would mean pissing horizontally instead of at a downward-pointing angle. The current throb in his bladder suggested that would be absolutely no problem. Of course the final squirt or two would probably go on the floor, but —

“But thems are the fortunes of war,” he said, and surprised himself with a croaky laugh. “And as far as the toilet seat goes…fuck holding it up. I can do better than that.”

He was no Mr. Hercules, but both the half-ajar toilet seat and the flanges holding it to the bench were plastic — the seat and ring black, the flanges white. This whole goddam box was really just a cheap plastic prefab job, you didn’t have to be a big-time construction contractor to see that, and unlike the walls and the door, there was no cladding on the seat and its fastenings. He thought he could tear it off pretty easily, and if he could he would — if only to vent some of his anger and terror.

Curtis seized the seat and lifted it, meaning to grip the ring just beneath and pull sideways. Instead he paused, looking through the circular hole and into the tank beneath, trying to make sense of what he saw.

It looked like a thin seam of daylight.

He looked at this with perplexity into which hope came stealing slowly — not dawning, exactly, but seeming to rise through his sweaty, ordure-streaked skin. At first he thought it was either a swatch of fluorescent paint or an out-and-out optical illusion. This latter idea was reinforced when the line of light began to fade away. Little…less…least…

But then, just before it could disappear completely, it began to brighten again, a line of light so brilliant he could see it floating behind his lids when he closed his eyes.

That’s sunlight. The bottom of the toilet — what was the bottom before Grunwald tipped it over — is facing east, where the sun just rose .

And when it faded?

“Sun went behind a cloud,” he said, and shoved his sweat-clumped hair back from his forehead with the hand not holding the toilet seat. “Now it’s out again.”

He examined this idea for the deadly pollution of wishful thinking and found none. The evidence was before his eyes: sunlight shining through a thin crack in the bottom of the Port-O-San’s holding tank. Or perhaps it was a split. If he could get in there and widen that split, that glowing aperture into the outside world —

Don’t count on it.

And to get to it, he would have to —

Impossible , he thought. If you’re thinking of wriggling into the holding tank through the toilet seat — like Alice into some shit-splattered Wonderland — think again. Maybe if you were the skinny kid you used to be, but that kid was thirty-five years ago .

That was true. But he was still slim — he supposed his daily bicycle rides were mostly responsible for that — and the thing was, he thought he could wriggle in through the hole under the toilet seat’s ring. It might not even be that tough.

What about getting back out?

Well…if he could do something about that seam of light, maybe he wouldn’t have to leave the same way he went in.

“Assuming I can even get in,” he said. His empty stomach was suddenly full of butterflies, and for the first time since arriving here at scenic Durkin Grove Village, he felt an urge to gag himself. He would be able to think more clearly about this if he just stuck his fingers down his throat and —

“No,” he said curtly, and yanked the toilet seat and ring sideways with his left hand. The flanges creaked but didn’t let go. He applied his other hand to the task. His hair fell back down on his forehead, and he gave an impatient snap of his head to flop it aside. He yanked again. The seat and ring held a moment longer, then tore free. One of the two white plastic dowels fell into the waste tank. The other, cracked down the middle, spun across the door Curtis was kneeling on.

He tossed the seat and ring aside and peered into the tank, hands braced on the bench. The first whiff of the poisoned atmosphere down there caused him to recoil, wincing. He thought he’d gotten used to the smell (or numbed to it), but that wasn’t the case, at least not this close to the source. He wondered again when the damned thing had last been pumped.

Look on the bright side; it’s been a long time since it was used, too.

Maybe, probably , but Curtis wasn’t sure that made things any better. There was still a lot of stuff down there — a lot of crap down there, floating in whatever remained of the disinfected water. Dim as the light was, there was enough to be sure of that. Then there was the matter of getting back out again. He could probably do it — if he could go one way, he could almost certainly go the other — but it was all too easy to imagine how he’d look, a stinking creature being born from the ooze, not a mud-man but a shit-man.

The question was, did he have another choice?

Well, yes. He could sit here, trying to persuade himself that rescue probably would come after all. The cavalry, like in the last reel of an old western. Only he thought it was more likely that The Motherfucker would come back, wanting to make sure he was still…what had he said? Snug in his little housie. Something like that.