the boy. He might have gone farther down.
Listening intently, hoping to hear again the troll-deep voice or another
sound that would guide me, I hung like a spider on an obsessively well
organized web. I had no intention of gobbling up unwary flies and moths,
but the longer I remained suspended in the gloom, the more I felt that I
was not the spider, after all, not the diner but the dinner, and that a
mutant tarantula as big as an elevator cab was ascending from the pit
below, its sharp mandibles silently scissoring.
My dad was a professor of poetry, and throughout my childhood, he read
to me from the entire history of verse, Homer to Dr. Seuss, Donald
Justice to Ogden Nash, which makes him partly responsible for my baroque
imagination. Blame the rest of it on that aforementioned snack of
cheese, onion bread, and jalapefios.
Or blame it on the eerie atmosphere and the realities of Fort Wyvern,
for here even a rational man might have legitimate reasons to entertain
thoughts of giant ravenous spiders. The impossible was once made
possible in this place. If the hideous arachnid in my mind’s eye was the
fault of just my dad and my diet, then my imagination would have
conjured not a simple spider but an image of the grinning Grinch
climbing toward me.
As I hung motionless on the ladder, the grinning Grinch rapidly became
an inexpressibly more terrifying image than any spider could have been,
until another hard crash boomed through the building, shaking me back to
reality. It was identical to the first crash, which had drawn me this
far, a steel door slamming in a steel frame.
The sound had come from one of the two levels below me.
Daring the maw of spider or Grinch, I went down one more story, to the
next opening in the shaft.
Even as I arrived at this second subterranean floor, I heard the
grumbling voice, less distinct and even less comprehensible than it had
been before. Unquestionably, however, it issued from this level rather
than from the final floor, at the base of the pit.
I peered toward the top of the ladder. Orson must be gazing down, as
blinded to the sight of me as I was to the sight of him, sniffing my
reassuring scent. Reassuring and soon ripe, I was sweating, partly from
exertion and partly from anticipation of the pending confrontation.
Clinging to the ladder with one hand, I felt for the shaft opening,
found it, reached around the corner, and discovered a metal handgrip on
the face of the jamb, which facilitated the transition from the ladder
to the threshold. No two-by-six safety barricade had been bolted across
the gap at this level, and I passed easily out of the elevator shaft
into the subbasement.
Out of a distillate of darkness into a reduction of darkness.
Drawing the Glock, I sidled away from the open shaft, keeping my back
against the wall. The concrete felt cold even through the insulating
layers of my coat and cotton pullover.
I was overcome by a prideful little flush of accomplishment, a curious
if short-lived pleasure to have made it this far without detection.
The flush almost at once gave way to a chill as a more rational part of
me demanded to know what the hell I was doing here.
I seemed insanely compelled, driven, to travel into ever darker
impossibly bleak conditions, to the heart of all blackness, where the
darkness was as condensed as matter had been the instant before the Big
Bang spewed forth the universe, and once there, beyond all hope of
light, to be crushed until my shrieking spirit was pressed from my mind
and from my mortal flesh like juice from a grape.
Man, I needed a beer.
Hadn’t brought one. Couldn’t get one.
I tried taking slow deep breaths instead. Through my mouth, to minimize
the noise. Just in case the hateful troll, armed with a chain saw, was
creeping closer, one gnarled finger poised over the starter button.
I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my
fundamental humanity.
The air didn’t taste remotely as good as a cool Corona or a Heineken.