The shoe began to slip.
“Please,” he begged it, “don’t fall.” He didn’t want to lose his nice shoe, his pretty shoe. It mustn’t fall. It mustn’t fall.
As he stretched to snatch it, the shoe tipped, heel down, through the grid and fell into the darkness.
He let out a cry of loss that he couldn’t hear.
Oh, if only he could listen to the shoe falling; to count the seconds of its descent. To hear it thud home at the bottom of the shaft. At least then he’d know how far he had to fall to his death.
He couldn’t endure it any longer. He rolled over on to his stomach and thrust both arms through the grid, screaming: “I’ll go too! I’ll go too!”
He couldn’t bear waiting to fall, in the dark, in the whining silence, he just wanted to follow his shoe down, down, down the dark shaft to extinction, and have the whole game finished once and for all.
“I’ll go! I’ll go! I’ll go!” he shrieked. He pleaded with gravity.
Beneath him, the grid moved.
Something had broken. A pin, a chain, a rope that held the grid in position had snapped. He was no longer horizontal; already he was sliding across the bars as they tipped him off into the dark.
With shock he realized his limbs were no longer chained.
He would fall.
The man wanted him to fall. The bad man — what was his name? Quake? Quail? Quarrel Automatically he seized the grid with both hands as it tipped even further over. Maybe he didn’t want to fall after his shoe, after all? Maybe life, a little moment more of life, was worth holding on to —The dark beyond the edge of the grid was so deep; and who could guess what lurked in it?
In his head the noises of his panic multiplied. The thumping of his bloody heart, the stutter of his mucus, the dry rasp of his palate. His palms, slick with sweat, were losing their grip. Gravity wanted him. It demanded its rights of his body’s bulk: demanded that he fall. For a moment, glancing over his shoulder at the mouth that opened under him, he thought he saw monsters stirring below him. Ridiculous, loony things, crudely drawn, dark on dark. Vile graffiti leered up from his childhood and uncurled their claws to snatch at his legs.
“Mama,” he said, as his hands failed him, and he was delivered into dread.
“Mama.”
That was the word. Quaid heard it plainly, in all its banality.
“Mama!”
By the time Steve hit the bottom of the shaft, he was past judging how far he’d fallen. The moment his hands let go of the grid, and he knew the dark would have him, his mind snapped. The animal self survived to relax his body, saving him all but minor injury on impact. The rest of his life, all but the simplest responses, were shattered, the pieces flung into the recesses of his memory.
When the light came, at last, he looked up at the person in the Mickey Mouse mask at the door, and smiled at him. It was a child’s smile, one of thankfulness for his comical rescuer. He let the man take him by the ankles and haul him out of the big round room in which he was lying. His pants were wet, and he knew he’d dirtied himself in his sleep. Still, the Funny Mouse would kiss him better.
His head lolled on his shoulders as he was dragged out of the torture-chamber. On the floor beside his head was a shoe. And seven or eight feet above him was the grid from which he had fallen.
It meant nothing at all.
He let the Mouse sit him down in a bright room. He let the Mouse give him his ears back, though he didn’t really want them. It was funny watching the world without sound, it made him laugh.
He drank some water, and ate some sweet cake.
He was tired. He wanted to sleep. He wanted his Mama. But the Mouse didn’t seem to understand, so he cried, and kicked the table and threw the plates and cups on the floor. Then he ran into the next room, and threw all the papers he could find in the air. It was nice watching them flutter up and flutter down. Some of them fell face down, some face up. Some were covered with writing. Some were pictures. Horrid pictures. Pictures that made him feel very strange.