Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  I shifted my position and looked along the opposite wall. In a dark corner, almost facing me, four human figures crouched. I huddled down against the wainscoting like a six-foot mouse. Then I remembered the exhibition in that corner of the room, several life-size dummies painted and dressed like Neanderthal men, holding stone weapons and squatting over a cold fire in an imitation cave.

  But I didn’t remember four dummies. I leveled my gun and walked to the roped enclosure where the cavemen sat on their heels. They didn’t move.

  I stepped closer and looked down at the bushy papier-mâché heads. The light was weak, but I could see that two of the heads were black and one was lighter and one was almost white. I felt as if I jumped a foot but I didn’t move. My back was to the windows and my face was in shadow.

  I lingered a moment, reining the wild horses in my legs, and then moved away. As I moved I saw with the edge of my retina that the caveman at the end was looking at me from under tousled red locks, out of live green eyes. He held a stone hatchet shaped like a gun.

  I sauntered back to the other side of the room, feeling I had a fifty-fifty chance of not being shot. Peter and Ruth could have shot me then, but I was their scapegoat for Dr. Schneider’s death. And they didn’t know I’d seen them.

  I stepped into the striped shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton, drew a quick bead on the head at the end of the roped enclosure, and fired. I must have missed because two flashes answered my shot simultaneously and two shadows came over the ropes towards me.

  I turned and ran through the arch and heard two more shots as I turned the corner. I clattered down the tiled hall and found another corner to turn and then another. The feet behind me were light and quick like cats’ feet.

  I ran into a door with a bar across it like an exit and it flew open under my weight. I staggered out onto a concrete loading-platform at the back of the museum, slammed the door behind me, and jumped to the ground.

  The corner of the building was quite near and I turned it as I heard the door spring open. I sprinted across a lawn, keeping in the shadow of bushes and trees, towards the circular building surrounded by cages, where the museum kept its live animals. I put this building between me and the cave-dwellers, but I heard their light feet running towards me on gravel.

  I passed a fox curled up asleep behind his wire netting, and I envied him his nice, safe cage. I wanted one of my own. I could have one if I could get into it before the feet came around the animal-house. Across from the fox-cage there was a pit perhaps four feet deep where the snakes and turtles were kept. I vaulted the iron fence around it and landed on my hands and knees on the gravel floor. I scuttled against the concrete wall like a frightened crab and a black snake slithered away from under my hands. I crouched there trying to control my panting, and heard the running feet go by above my head.

  When the sound had ceased, I climbed out of the pit like an ambitious turtle and ran back to the museum. The back door was still open and I scrambled up on the loading-platform and went in, leaving the door open behind me. The corridor I had dashed through three minutes before seemed longer on the way back. I found the door at last and went down into the tunnels again. They wouldn’t come back to the museum. Someone must have heard the shots and the police would soon be here.

  I flashed my light in the sub-basement and saw a chart on the wall. McKinley Hall, the Little Theatre, the Women’s Building, the Graduate School, the Natural History Museum circled in red. A network of blacklines crisscrossed the chart. It was a map of the steam-tunnels.

  The university powerhouse was about as far from the museum as McKinley Hall, but in the opposite direction. I got my bearings and went into the tunnel. As I closed the door behind me, I heard loud feet like policemen’s feet on the floor of the building above me, and a sound of voices. I set out for the powerhouse. Powerhouses have always interested me.

  My shirt was still sopping and my coat began to get wet. My heart was beating hard from the sprint and the darkness swelled and contracted around me like black blood in an artery. It slithered like a snake past my sightless eyes. Suddenly, I noticed that I had no gun. I must have left it in the reptile-pit.

  As soon as I bumped into a wall and turned a corner, I used my flashlight. There could be no one in front of me now until I reached the powerhouse. I quickened my pace and trotted along on the left side of the green pipes, sweating like a wrestler. My feet clattered on the paved floor and I let them clatter.

  I heard feet behind me far down the tunnel and I stopped for an instant and looked back. There was a faint light on the wall where the tunnel turned and shadows like grey fingers reached out towards me. I switched out my light and ran on blindly in the dark with heavy footsteps reverberating behind me.

  Something struck me across the chest like a falling tree and I leaned against it gasping for breath. I felt searing heat against my body: it must be the steampipe. I crawled under the pipes where they turned into the wall and ran on with one hand scraping the wall, feeling for the door that must be there.

  Flashlights came around the corner on pounding feet a hundred yards behind me. I saw my shadow leaping ahead of me like a frantic mimic of my fear. And I saw a door.

  A man’s voice shouted, “There he is,” and a gun went off with a sound like vessels bursting in my brain. The bullet ricocheted from the wall behind me and passed me like a droning bee. I have always hated bees.

  I dived for the door and it opened under my hand. I ran out on the floor of a great concrete vault lined on one side with black iron boilers. By the light of the few unshaded bulbs that hung in the furnace-room I could see no one, but the footsteps sounded through the door at my back like pounding fists. To my right were windows and an iron ladder leading up to a door in the wall.

  I dropped my flashlight and scrambled up the ladder and got the iron door at the top open. The door from the tunnel sprang open below and I slammed the iron door shut. Two bullets rang flatly against it like the knocking of iron knuckles, and I jumped onto a black hill which loomed outside the door.

  I was halfway up the side of the university coal-pile. Anthracite is not good to run in but there was nowhere to hide and nothing to do but run. I leaped and scrambled down the side of the coal-pile towards a railway track which gleamed faintly in the starlight. I heard the iron door open behind me and the sound of another shot but I didn’t look back.

  When I reached the track it was easier to run, and there were buildings on each side which helped to shadow me. I heard scrambling and cursing behind me but I ran straight on down the track to the end of the buildings. By now the feet behind were ringing on the ties and I turned to my left and jumped down the embankment.

  There was a board fence in front of me and beyond it the clotted darkness of a clump of trees. Before the flashlights behind me reached the end of the buildings, I flung myself over the fence and landed on my side in weeds.

  I got to my feet crouching low and ran into the patch of trees. When I reached the other side with my face scratched by low branches, I stopped and listened. There was no sound behind me, but I had to get away from there. I remembered newspaper stories of police cordons thrown around trapped killers. To the police, I was a killer. But I wasn’t trapped yet.

  The grove was in a valley, and on the hillside opposite me there was a huge dark building punctured with a few lighted windows. I knew the building—it was the hospital—and it helped me to get my bearings. Helen Madden lived near the hospital. If I could get to her she would help me.

  Keeping close to the edge of the trees I ran along the valley, stumbling over hummocks and rubbish. With the lights of the great hospital above me, I felt more than ever like an outlaw, and I felt self-pity that other men should make me run like an unwanted dog among rubbish-heaps. But I felt pleasure, too, in running for my life. My two enemies were running in the same darkness.

  I skirted the base of the hill beyond the hospital and climbed through underbrush and saplings to the old house where Helen Mad
den had an apartment. It had been made over into an apartment house which stood on a spur of hill overlooking the uncleared hillside I was climbing. When I got out of the woods I saw that a light was on, on the ground floor where Helen lived.

  She was sitting at a lighted casement window looking out, with a cigarette in her hand. Its smoke rose straight up and she did not move. I tapped on the window and showed my face in the light. Her face changed when she saw me but she did not start. The line of smoke wavered once and was straight again.

  She stared at me for a moment and then her eyes contracted and I knew she recognized me. She flung the window open and said, “Bob, what is it?”

  I put my finger to my mouth; there were other people in the house.

  I whispered, “The police are after me. Schneider has been killed and they think I killed him.”

  “Did you?” she said without changing expression.

  “No. I was framed. But I have to get away.”

  “Who killed him?” Her voice was very light and dry.

  I said, “Ruth Esch and Schneider’s son.”

  Her whisper hissed, “His son!”

  “Yes. I caught them escaping and they tried to kill me.”

  Helen said quietly and seriously, “You’re not crazy, are you, Bob? If I let myself go to-night, I’d be crazy.”

  I said, “I’m not crazy. Will you help me?”

  “How?”

  “Go and get my car and bring it to me.”

  “Go to the police, Bob. Tell them the truth and stick by it. They can’t convict an innocent man.”

  “They seem to have orders to shoot me on sight,” I said.

  “Let me call them on the phone. This is fantastic.”

  “It’s fantastic, yes. But they have evidence of murder against me.”

  “Bob, did you kill him?”

  “I almost wish I had. But I didn’t.”

  For a quarter of a minute she said nothing. Then she said, “Have you your car-keys?”

  I gave them to her.

  “Where is the car?”

  “Parked in front of the main entrance of the Law School. You can’t miss it.”

  “Shall I bring it here?”

  “No, not here. I’ve got to get away from here. Bring it to the Slipper.” The Slipper was a roadhouse a mile or so out of town where we had danced together.

  “Can you get there?”

  “Look, drive past the Slipper about two hundred yards, straight down the road, and park. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  “I wish you’d let me call the police,” she said.

  “I’ll let you when I get Alec’s murderers,” I said, but I had very little hope of that.

  “I’ll be there,” she said.

  She closed the window and moved away into the room and I started down the hill on the other side of the house. From the streets beyond the hospital, I heard a police siren rising like the terror behind my eyes.

  There was a scattering of houses along the crest of the hill, on the side of Helen’s house away from the hospital. None of the houses was lighted but I went down into the lightly wooded ravine behind them and headed for the open country. I avoided the roads, which might already be patrolled, and ran in the fields. This meant uneven footing and barbed wire fences to crawl through, but the cows and horses I saw carried no guns.

  Most of the fields were of stubble or dying grass. I saw no people or lights. I could have been the last man, running from nowhere to nowhere across the dry skin of a played-out world.

  I came to a railway embankment paralleled on both sides by board fences. I climbed the fence and the embankment and crouched by the track, trying to see and hear any sounds of pursuit. There were none. Behind me I could see the lights of the city, and far beyond them to the north, the reddish reflection of the lights of Detroit hung in the sky like the glow of a giant fire.

  I crossed the tracks and descended the embankment and ran along beside the board fence on the other side. I was very tired, so tired I was no longer sweating, and I went more slowly now that I was away from the city. It would take Helen some time to get my car and drive out to the Slipper.

  I had to cross a main highway to reach the side road where the roadhouse stood, and I travelled in the shadow of the railway embankment until I saw the highway. A car went by and I saw its headlights shine on the concrete. Down the road they scudded out of sight and there was no other car coming from either direction.

  I crossed the highway on the railroad tracks and took to the fields again. So long as it was dark I felt safe from the police in the open country. So long as they were alive I couldn’t feel safe from Peter Schneider and Ruth Esch, but they had no way of tracing me here. If they didn’t have dogs’ noses.

  Dog and bitch. A mad dog and a ravening bitch. I didn’t like to think about Ruth. The moral insanity of a friend is worse than a friend’s death.

  I crossed more fields and reached the road I was looking for. Walking on the edge of the fields near the road, I headed for the Slipper.

  I heard a car coming behind me and lay down behind the wire fence in the grass. Headlights came down the road between the trees like controlled lightning. I saw the car approaching—it wasn’t going very fast—and the orange light above the windshield. It was a taxi.

  As the taxi went by, I saw a hooked nose and black eye above the steering wheel—Shiny! I had no time to hail him and it was just as well because there was somebody in the back seat. A head with a man’s hat on it was outlined in the rear window for a second before the car went out of sight.

  I got up and walked on a quarter of a mile to the driveway which led into the Slipper. I could see the long, low building dimly through the trees, with no lights showing. Still no sign of Helen.

  I heard another car coming and flopped to the grass again. As it came nearer I could see the lights sliding along the gravel road, and recognized the sound of my engine. So she had done it, and done it quickly! I began to plan a back-road route out of the county, but I lay where I was. Maybe the police were trailing her.

  My sedan came in sight, going very slowly, and suddenly stopped. But I had said the other side of the Slipper! Then I understood. Two men got out of the car and climbed into the back seat. I couldn’t see who they were in the reflection of the headlights, but one wore a policeman’s cap and they both carried guns.

  I lay still where I was, feeling angry and betrayed. The car started again and went slowly past me. I saw Helen’s white face behind the wheel, but nobody was visible in the back seat. She was helping the police to catch me. She thought I was either crazy or wrong. Christ!—the thought numbed my throat—perhaps she thought I was a murderer, too.

  I had to get away from the Slipper. I couldn’t go back towards the highway because there would be more policemen waiting there. When I didn’t appear for my appointment with Helen, they would start searching the country around the Slipper.

  I had to keep on going. I got up and ran away from the road until I came to the fence on the other side of the field. It was a rail fence and I climbed it and moved along behind it in a half-crouch. Two hundred yards across the field I could see my car parked on the road with its headlights shining steadily. Nobody moved in it or around it. Keeping well away from the road, I headed in the direction Shiny had taken.

  There was a chance that I might find him and get him to drive me somewhere or let me use his taxi. Perhaps he had been driving a late partygoer to his house in the country, and would drive back on the same road with an empty cab. In that case I’d better get back to the road so I could hail him if he passed.

  When the headlights of my car were out of sight behind the trees, I went back to the road and walked along beside it in the ditch. A car’s headlights and engine would warn me in advance and give me a chance to hide if it came from behind me. If it came from the other direction, it might be Shiny.

  I walked nearly a mile—to my tired legs it seemed farther—but no car came from either directio
n. The night was still very dark.

  At last I came to a lane leading down a slope under dark arched trees. At the end of the lane there was a red light glowing. Maybe the tail-light of Shiny’s taxi. But any car would do if the keys were in it.

  I turned down the lane walking as silently as I could in the fallen leaves. When I got closer to the red light, I saw that it wasn’t the tail-light of a car. It was a small red bulb hanging in the front window of a house. All the blinds in the windows were drawn but there was light shining around the edges and through the cracks.

  I passed an old barn on a hillock beside the lane. It hung sideways against the darkness like a tired old man leaning on a wall. Half its boarding had fallen off and I could see the stars through it.

  When I had walked past the old barn, I could see the lower front of the house. There was a patch of bare ground in front of it and two cars were parked there with their red tail-lights burning. Before I reached the cars, I saw that one was Shiny’s taxi.

  The dashboard lights were on and I looked for the ignition key. It wasn’t there. None in the other car, either.

  There was a burst of music from the house, shrill clarinets and drooling saxophones. Sugar Blues. I looked at the red bulb in the front window, hanging between the pane and the drawn blind. The music had stopped pretending to have a tune and was pumping rhythmically at a single theme.

  I moved around to the side of the house. The dingy white paint was peeling off it and the windowsills were rotting. The blinds were drawn in the side windows, too, but I stood on tiptoe at the window where the music seemed to be and looked past a torn corner of the blind.

  There were several people at tables in the room, three men I didn’t know and Shiny. He was sitting at a round table by himself with a glass of beer in front of him. Two young men sat at another table with whiskey-glasses, and an old man in shirtsleeves was in the far corner beside a record-player, tapping his knee with a finger in time to the music.

  I heard the high giggle of a woman from an upstairs room. The music went on pumping. Finally, it went out with a whine and the old man got up with difficulty and turned the record.