Joseph Heller - Closing Time

DANGER NO EXPLOSIVES

"That could mean at least two different things, couldn't it?" he said.

McBride nodded grimly. "That's what I thought too." Unexpectedly, he let out a laugh, as though proud of himself. "Now look at that plaque."

"What plaque?"

"In dark letters. It's set into the wall near the doorway and says that a man named Kilroy was here."

Yossarian gave McBride a searching look. "Kilroy? It says that? Kilroy was here?"

"You know Kilroy?"

"I was in the army with Kilroy," said Yossarian.

"Maybe it's not the same Kilroy."

"He's the one."

"Overseas?"

"Everywhere. Shit, I ought to know him by now. Everywhere I was stationed, he was there too. You always saw it written on a wall. When I was arrested and put in the stockade for a week, he'd been locked up there also. In college after the war, when I went into the library stacks, he'd already been there."

"Could you find him for me?"

"I never met him. I never met anyone who saw him."

"I could find him," said McBride. "Through the Freedom of Information Act. Once I get his Social Security number I can nail him cold. Will you come talk to him with me?"

"Is he still alive?"

"Why wouldn't he be alive?" asked McBride, who was only fifty. "I want to know more about this, I want to know what he was doing here. I want to know what the hell this is."

"How far down does all this go?"

"I don't know. It's not on the plans."

"Why does it bother you?"

"I'm still a detective, I guess. Go down a few steps," McBride instructed next. "Try one more."

Yossarian froze when he heard the noise begin. It was an animal, the heaving ire of something live, the ominous burring of some dangerous beast disturbed, a rumble welling in smoldering stages into an elongated snarling. Next came growling, guttural and deadly, and an agitated shudder of awakened power, and the movement of veering limbs striding about underneath where he could not see. Then a second animal joined in; perhaps there were three.

"Go down," whispered McBride, "one more step." Yossarian shook his head. McBride nudged. On tiptoe Yossarian touched his foot down one more step and heard the jangling commence, as though of metal scraping on stone and of metal jingling against metal, and those noises were building swiftly toward a demonic climax of some calamitous sort, and all at once, as though without warning, although the warnings had been cumulative and unremitting, there was the blowout, the explosion, the ferocious and petrifying bedlam of piercing barks and deafening roars and a tumultuous charge of forceful paws pounding forward with unleashed savagery and then mercifully brought to a halt in a quaking crash of chains that made him jump with fright and afterward went reverberating like a substance of great ballistic bulk deep into the contracting gloom at both ends of the underground chamber in which they were standing. The fierce rumpus below turned more savage still with the incensed raging of the beasts at the rugged restraints against which they were now tearing and snapping with all their supernatural might. They growled and they roared and they snarled and they howled. And Yossarian kept straining his ears in a frantic irrational desire to hear more. He knew he would never be able to move again. The instant he could move, he stepped up backward in noiseless motion, hardly breathing, until he stood on the landing alongside McBride, where he took McBride's arm and held on. He was icy and he knew he was sweating. He had the giddy fear his heart was going to convulse and stop, that an artery in his head would split. He knew he could think of eight other ways he might die on the spot, if he did not die before he could list them. The raw fury in the fierce passions below seemed gradually to flag. The untamed monsters understood they had missed him, and he listened with relief to the invisible dangers subsiding and to whatever carnivorous forms that drew breath below receding with chains dragging to the dark lairs from which they had sprung. At last there was silence, the last tinkling noises melting away into a tone as delicate as a chime and dissolving into a fading resonance that seemed incongruously to be the pumped, haunting carnival music of some outlying, solitary carousel, and this receded into silence too.

He thought he knew now how it felt to be torn to pieces. He trembled.

"What do you make of it?" McBride asked, in an undertone. His lips were white. "They're always there; that happens every time you touch that step."

"It's recorded," said Yossarian.

For the moment, McBride was speechless. "Are you sure?"

"No," said Yossarian, surprised himself by the spontaneous insight he had just expressed. "But it's just too perfect. Isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

Yossarian did not want to talk now about Dante, Cerberus, Virgil, or Charon, or the rivers Acheron and Styx. "It might be there just to scare us away."

"It sure scared hell out of that drug addict, I can tell you," said McBride. "He was sure he was hallucinating. I let everyone but Tommy think that he was."

Then they heard the new noise.

"You hear that?" said McBride.

Yossarian heard the wheels turning and looked to the base of the wall opposite. Somewhere beyond it was the muffled rolling of wheels on rails, muted by distance and barriers.

"The subway?"

McBride shook his head. "That's too far. What would you say," he continued speculatively, "to a roller-coaster?"

"Are you crazy?"

"It could be a recording too, couldn't it?" insisted McBride. "Why is that crazy?"

"Because it's not a roller-coaster."

"How do you know?"

"I think I can tell. Stop playing detective."

"When's the last time you rode on one?"

"A million years ago. But it's too steady. There's no acceleration. What more do you want? I'm going to laugh. Let's call it a train," continued Yossarian, as the vehicle came abreast and rolled away to the left. It might have been the Metroliner going down from Boston to Washington, but McBride would know that. And when he considered a roller-coaster, he did start to laugh, for he remembered that he had already lived much longer than he ever thought he would.

He stopped laughing when he saw the catwalk and railing running along the wall about three feet from the bottom and disappearing into the white-misted, golden obscurity of the enclosures on both sides.

"Was that down there all the time?" He was puzzled. "I thought I was hallucinating when I noticed it just now."

"It's been there," said McBride.

"Then I must have been hallucinating when I imagined it wasn't. Let's get the hell out."

"I want to go down there," said McBride.

"I won't go with you," Yossarian told him. He had never liked surprises.

"Aren't you curious?"

"I'm afraid of the dogs."

"You said," said McBride, "it was only a recording."

"That might scare me more. Go with Tom. That's his business."

"It's not on Tommy's beat. I'm not even supposed to be here," McBride admitted. "I'm supposed to enforce these restrictions, not violate them. Notice anything now?" he added, as they turned back up the stairs.

On the inside of the metal door Yossarian now saw two solid locks, one spring loaded, the other dead bolt. And above the locks, under a rectangle of lacquer, he saw a block of white printing on a scarlet background framed in a thin margin of silver, that read: EMERGENCY EXIT NO ADMITTANCE THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED AND BOLTED WHEN IN USE Yossarian scratched his head. "From this side it looks like they want to keep people out, don't they?"

"Or in?"

He would guess, he guessed, as they proceeded outside, that it was an old bomb shelter that was not on the old plans. He could not explain the signs, he admitted, as McBride closed the fire door quietly and conscientiously switched off the electric light to leave everything the same as when they had come. The dogs, the sound of the killer guard dogs? "To scare people out, I guess, like that addict, and you and me. Why did you want me to see it?"