by John Varley
Flimsy, I know, but what else was I going to do?
One thing, I decided in a hot flush of rage, was to make triply sure of Comfort this time. I was not going to let him become my Javert, chasing Jean Valjean down the endless years. I hurried to the bathroom, saw with satisfaction that he'd not moved an inch. I pressed the barrel of his weapon to his forehead and pulled the trigger.
Click.
I frowned, shouted something very nasty but heartfelt, and examined the data panel on the side. Again, all I could understand was ROUNDS REMAINING 10. I aimed down at him again.
Click, click.
Well, shit. Was it the round I ejected? An empty chamber? I looked at the side panel once more and squeezed the trigger.
Ker-THUNK! I jumped three feet in the air. Not because it was very noisy; it wasn't. The ker is an inadequate way of describing the sound the gun made as it fired, but the THUNK is a reasonable approximation of the bullet hitting the wall two feet above the floor, nowhere near Comfort.
God's holy freaking trousers. I thought I saw it now. I aimed and fired again at the dead man. Click. Click click. This gun would not fire at its owner.
My bowels suddenly turned to lime jelly. Comfort had some device on him, or in him, that his weapon sensed. Some type of safety mechanism. And if it wouldn't shoot at Comfort, what about...?
I stumbled into the parlor and aimed at the bloody corpse on the floor.
Click.
I sat right down where I had been standing. I was feeling faint. I had come that close to opening the hotel-room door and attempting to hold this woman at gunpoint—so I could bring her into the room and shoot her in the back, but she wouldn't have known that. What she would have known was that the pistol I was aiming at her was no more use than a pointed finger. She would have broken me in five or six places, and brought me in here for the two of them to clean, dress, and consume at their leisure.
All right, all right. Get a grip. Get up. Go into the bathroom again. Grab Izzy by the back of his coat and drag him through the door.
He wouldn't fit.
Played correctly it might have looked like a comedy of pratfalls, but I wasn't laughing. I pulled at him and tugged at him and fell over him, and slipped in a pool of his blood and nearly plunged into the spa pool. His body was not resisting, not moving in any way, but he seemed all arms and legs, all angles and corners, not limp like a dead body should be but hard and rigid. It was a cinch there was still something going on in that reengineered body, heartbeat or no heartbeat.
I can relate it all dispassionately now, but don't imagine I went about any of this coolly and logically. I was whimpering with fear, shaking with anger, sobbing in frustration. When I was sure I could no longer hold in a scream I dropped him again. I kicked his head one more time to grow on, then another because I felt like it. Then I left him there.
I stood on the chair and put my suitcase up into the ventilation ducts. Then I aimed the pistol at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows—not really windows, but huge slabs of what I hoped was plate glass. The bullet punched a hole the size of my fist and the glass was instantly covered, edge to edge, with a network of cracks.
Her suitcase was certainly tempting. I was sure she had things in there I could use. I never tried to open it. Why? If you ever find my Pantechnicon seemingly abandoned, I'd advise you to leave it alone. It has half a dozen ways of defending itself by delivering various degrees of nastiness including, if you don't get the hint after strike three, lethal force. If I could think up stuff like that, I reasoned, who knew what amusements these two bloody-minded monsters had in store for me.
I picked up the suitcase gingerly and hurled it at the window. The glass flew apart in ten thousand glittering ice cubes. I went to the edge and looked down. As I'd hoped, the stuff was landing on the lobby roof. Nobody was likely to get hurt by it. I dragged her body to the edge and tipped her over. I did not stay around to watch the impact.
Then I was in a big hurry. Someone was knocking at the door already. I hoped it was a guest, that the management had not yet been called to deal with the spilled paint and the holes in the door. But they would be up soon, followed shortly by the police. It was time to check out of the luxurious Hotel Othello. Kiss Desdemona good-bye for me.
I moved the chair back to its original position. Then I scuffed at the dents the chair legs had left in the deep carpet. Somebody would look in the duct eventually, but maybe this would buy me some time.
I don't claim to be an acrobat, but I know enough moves to shoot a pretty fair action scene without a stunt double. I jumped up twice to get the measure of the hole in the ceiling. The first time I jumped for real I banged my head hard enough to hear the songs of little birdies for a moment. I took a deep breath and tried it again, and this time I got my palms flat on the bottom of the duct, hung there undecided for several seconds, then with a mighty effort swung my legs up, once, twice, hitching my upper body a few inches forward with each swing, until I could hook my feet over the opposite edge and push myself forward, completely inside the duct.
It was dark inside. I couldn't see very far in any direction. But the cylindrical pipe was just barely big enough for me to turn around, at the risk of permanently turning my spine into a pretzel. I got it done, though, and reached across the opening for the ventilator grille I'd put up there earlier.
I took the toilet paper and the bars of soap and wedged big handfuls of paper and slivers of soap into the ventilator frame. Fingers stuck through the holes of the grating, I carefully lowered the grille down through the hole, then straightened it out and pulled it up against the flange of the ductwork. I tugged hard at it, felt it seat itself a little better, then gingerly let it go. Holding the grille with one hand, I pressed lightly down with the other, then a little harder, and with moderate pressure the grille dropped back out of its frame. Good enough; it wasn't going to be falling on a cop's head like a silent slapstick comedy. I figured if the ruse granted me just an extra ten minutes to get away I'd be happy; half an hour and you'd never find me with a pack of bloodhounds and a herd of process servers.
I backed up so my flailing feet would not dislodge the grating, did the spaghetti shuffle to get myself turned around again, and started my getaway.
In the movie of my life, this getaway would not need a second-unit stunt action team. My progress was nearly as slow as the building itself. I'd shove my suitcase ahead of me an arm's length, then shuffle along on hands and knees until I caught up to it. Then shove it forward again. Repeat step B, repeat step A. Continue until an exit presents itself. But don't take too long, because once they realize you're up here, it's all over with.
At regular intervals I would come to registers like the one I had entered through. I'd look down and see if anyone was below, then gingerly ease myself across it. I didn't know if the gratings would support my weight, and didn't want to find out the answer was no until I was ready to leave.
I wondered at the lack of circulation. Shouldn't there be a howling wind up here? Apparently not. These ducts did not deliver heated or cooled air, since the temperature outside never varied more than fifteen degrees. The purpose of the system was to clean the air, treat it, deodorize it, and keep it fresh as befitted the air in a first-class hotel. Somewhere fans were turning to keep the air in its desultory motion, but I never saw them.
At first, it was a cozy feeling, surrounded on all sides in the darkness. A return to the womb, perhaps. And after the moments of extreme stress, it felt good to relax just a little, get rid of the epinephrine, feel the old ticker slowing below three hundred beats. You're not out of the woods yet, Sparky, I told myself. But could that be a clearing up ahead?
That's when I heard him coming after me.
"You're out of your mind," I muttered to myself, but I knew it wasn't so. He was back there, somewhere in the ductworks. Behind me.
I stopped and held as still as I could. I heard distant fans, almost below the threshold of hearing. Nothing else. But he was back
there. I started to crawl again.
It was a thump sssh, thump sssh sound. It stopped when I stopped, started up again when I moved. It was beyond the range of hearing of anybody but a man running for his life. Well... crawling. If anything, the crawling made it worse. Everyone has had the running-in-glue dream. This was like that, only you're chopped off at the knees and you can't turn around and look behind you.
But there was something even worse than that, a special torture arranged by a God who's always struck me as a practical-joker, life-of-the-party sort of deity. I'll bet he was slapping his thigh over this one. For eight weeks I had played the Old Man in "His Hideous Eye," the one-man, one-act masterpiece inspired by Poe's "Telltale Heart." ("Yikes!!*****"—Joe Miller's One-Second Reviews). The thump sssh thump sssh (repeat until half-crazy) was the exact sound I had heard for eight shows a week, beginning at the threshold of audibility and growing over the next forty-five minutes until it shook the theater. It was the sound I had to hear with growing terror, until the curtain fell on a gibbering lunatic. Going from a self-assured rationalist to a thoroughly shattered shell of a man in less than an hour is one of the tougher assignments any actor will ever have. I had to learn to fear that sound. By the end of the fiftieth performance it was necessary to throw a bucket of ice water in my face and tie me to a chair for an hour until I had stopped shaking. It was the only time in my life a role got the best of me. One night I simply couldn't go on again. They had to send in my understudy, and finally recast with that canvas-chewer... ah, well, no use defaming the man here. He went on to become synonymous with the role, and to accept the Lexie Award that should have gone to me, while I stumbled off for a week in a padded room, three months of wondering if I could ever tread the boards again, and eventually, through a most circuitous route, to this stinking plastic pipe in a stinking overpriced hotel on a stinking half-finished disaster waiting to happen, with a demented unkillable thing more hideous than any Eye somewhere back there in the darkness.
Like a little song you learned when you were three, these conditioned reflexes never really leave you. Like a spider you discover in your bed, and ninety-six years later the sight of a super-web-spinner makes your skin crawl. I memorized the complete works of Shakespeare by my sixth birthday. To this day, recite any line and I can complete any speech, any scene, any act. And if you drop a sandbag on the floor and then pull it along a few feet—thump sssh, thump sssh—I will turn pale and break out in a sweat. I have no control over it.
My best bet seemed to be to drop down through another grate into an empty room, then simply walk out. I passed over such a grate, looked down at five people of at least four sexes naked on a big bed. I had to look again; I hadn't known you could do that with an umbrella. Best not to join the party, though. It looked painful.
And because the perversity of the universe tends always toward the maximum, that was the last grating I crossed. I made a left ninety-degree turn: nada. Another turn back to the right: zip. Another right and a left. Nothing.
I risked getting my Swiss Army knife from the pocket on the side of my suitcase. If knives in the Swiss Army had ranks, this would not be the Colonel or the general of knives. This was the Oberfeldmarschall, the very Fuhrer of pocketknives. This knife would not only clean fish and pick your teeth and uncork your wine bottles, it was equipped with a tiny light, among many other things. It's the best all-purpose tool I've ever come across in seventy years. Most people, looking at it, would never know what an effective weapon it could be. And I'm not talking about the fish-scaler, either.
I shined the light behind me. The coast was clear, back to the last turn I'd taken.
Perhaps I could have retraced my steps to the last grate, dropped through, joined the orgy, and everybody would have been saved a lot of trouble. Except maybe the orgiasts. But there really was no question of that. If there was even a one percent chance I'd encounter Comfort before I got to the grating, it wasn't worth the risk. And I was sure there was a bigger chance than that. No, when next I encountered Mr. Comfort, it was going to have to be in a situation where I had a lot more than just a slight edge, which was what I figured I had just then, with him injured and probably weaponless, and me with a short-bladed knife. What I had in mind was more like him with his arms and legs cut off, blinded, with his back to me, and me with a nuclear-tipped missile. That seemed to me more acceptable odds. Even then, I wouldn't count Izzy out.
I couldn't hear the sound of his progress. Was he resting, or could he hear me that well, to stop when I stopped? Or could he, please God, have fallen through a grate and been cluster-fucked to a fare-thee-well?
I was feeling so heebie-jeebery (a word from my Sparky days) that I just had to know. The silence was worse than the sound.
"Izzy?" I said, in a normal voice. No sense rousing the whole hotel. "Is that you?"
"Who else would it be, Sparky?" I banged my head on the duct. I wish I could have recorded the sound I made. It would have been useful the next time I had to play a man almost dying of fright. The thing was, it sounded like he was two feet behind me. I knew he wasn't but I had to look or I'd choke on my own vomit. I looked. He wasn't there. It was an acoustical trick of some sort, the effect of being in a long pipe.
"Did I hurt you some?" I hope it sounded brave.
"I'm afraid you did," came the disembodied voice again. "My balance is shot. Keep listing to the right. I can't feel one arm and one leg."
"Right or left?" I asked.
"That would be telling, wouldn't it?" Indeed. And how much of what he had said was true? Hell, it could all be true. I think he was still so contemptuous of me that he didn't care if he threw away a tactical advantage like that.
"You've got to stop this business of assault with a deadly musical instrument," he went on. "What's next? Cymbals? A bassoon?"
"How about a grand piano, dropped from a great height?" I had turned back around and was crawling forward again. Shove the suitcase, crawl two steps, shove the suitcase, crawl again, flick the light on and off quickly to see what was ahead. Nothing encouraging but another turn to the right.
Wait. Left, right, right, left. For a moment I thought I'd turned completely around and might be paralleling the duct he was in; he might be only inches away, off to my right. Or was it left, right, right, right? And now a right again. I was hopelessly confused. And where were all the grates?
I crawled through another right angle, turning left, and after twenty feet I came to something new. I found it by almost dropping my suitcase into a down duct, the same size as the one I was in.
There were four different ways to go here. Pipes branched off to the right and the left, and also straight ahead. The fourth way was down, not a direction I was prepared to take, but which I thought would be an excellent choice for Comfort. If there were only a way to persuade him.
"Is that what you shoved through the window back there?" he asked.
"What's that?"
"A piano. It looked like something big went through it."
"You didn't look down."
"Too dizzy. Afraid I'd fall out. I didn't think you had left that way."
I had put my suitcase on the far side of the down duct, and now I eased myself carefully over it. I moved down about five feet, and snapped on the penlight.
"And you knew I hadn't gone out the front door," I said. Somehow, keeping him talking made me feel better. When he talked, he was just another human being. When he was silent he was Death.
"You left a little strip of toilet paper sticking out of the grate."
"I was in a hurry."
"I saw some puzzling things. Holes in the door. The missing window."
"Your friend is what went out the window," I said.
"I thought so. Sparky, you're full of surprises."
"But you keep coming back to life," I said. "Cats get nine lives. How many do rats get?"
"At least one more. The first time I underestimated you. The second time you were lucky. And now Isobel is gone. The thi
rd time, I will get you."
"Is this still the second time, or are we talking third time right now?"
He didn't say anything. I flashed the light around frantically, left, right, down, behind me. If he stopped talking I was afraid he was setting some trap, or sneaking up from an unexpected direction. As long as he talked, I knew he was still in the pipe with me.
"This Isobel," I ventured. "A friend of yours?"
"She was my sister."
Oh, terrific. But he said it like I might have said, "You want some fries with that?" I tried to think of a reply, but what do you say to a man whose sister you just defenestrated? Sorry didn't quite cover it, and it wasn't true, anyway. I was not sorry, even a little bit. So I had my reply.
"She didn't die quickly," I said. "She seemed to be in a great deal of pain. I'm pretty sure she was alive when I pushed her out."
"Good," he said. Well, what did I expect?
"You didn't like her?"
"I worshiped her."
"Could you explain that to me?"
"Not now. Later, if you're still alive."
I figured he figured he was almost on me. Okay, I was almost ready for him.
During our talk I'd pulled out the one implement among fifty or sixty I'd bought the pocketknife for. This was a little item known as a chain knife. You've probably heard of them but it's unlikely you've seen one, as most planets banned their manufacture years ago. It's true they were useful for several things, but what they were best at was butchery.
This one was a five-inch snub-nosed blade. If you looked at it closely, you'd see all around the edge almost a thousand tiny razors set in a stainless-steel chain. The razors were shaped like shark's teeth. When you pressed the power button, that chain began moving so fast it looked to be part of the blade. It made a high-pitched whine, not unlike a dental drill in old movies. Believe me, you'd rather face a thousand dental drills with no ether than go up against a chain knife. It was based on something called a chain saw, which was used on Old Earth to cut down towering redwoods. I could just sort of wave it at your throat; you'd feel nothing until the blood started to spurt as your severed head fell from your shoulders. Bone, gristle, sinew, muscle. It was all the same to the chain knife. Like butter.
