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.
That decided him. He looked at the hole in the bench, the dark hole with its evil
aroma drifting out, the dark hole with its one hopeful seam of light. A hope as thin as the light itself. He calculated. First his right arm, then his head. Left arm pressed