He achieved the summit of the stairs and limped toward it.
Though it was totally dark in the cellar, that scarcely concerned the Razor-Eater. It was many weeks since his eyes had worked as well as they’d used to: he’d learned to substitute touch for sight. He stood up and tried to think clearly. Soon the European would come home. There would be punishment for leaving the house unattended and letting this escape take place. Worse than that, he would not see the girl anymore; no longer be able to watch her pass water, that fragrant water he preserved for special occasions. He was desolate.
He heard her moving even now in the hallway above him; she was going up the stairs. The rhythm of her tiny feet was familiar to him, he’d listened long nights and days to her padding back and forth in her cell. In his mind’s eye the ceiling of the cellar became transparent; he looked up between her legs as she climbed the stairs; that lavish slit gaped. It made him angry to be losing it, and her. She was old, of course, not like the pretty at the table, or the others on the streets, but there had been times when her presence had been the one thing keeping him from insanity.
He went back, stumbling in the pitch, in the direction of his little autocannibal, whose dining had been so rudely interrupted. Before he got to her, his foot kicked at one of the carving knives he’d left on the table should she want to help herself. He went down on all fours and patted the ground until he found it, and then he crawled back up the stairs and started to hack at the wood where the light through the door crack showed the bolts to be.
Carys didn’t want to go to the top of the house again. There was so much up there she feared. Innuendo rather than fact, but enough to make her weak. Why Marty had gone up-and that was the only place he could have gone-confounded her. Despite his claim to understanding, there was still so much he had to learn.
“Marty?” she’d called, at the foot of the stairs, hoping he’d appear at the top, smiling, and limp down to her without her having to go up and fetch him. But her inquiry was met with silence, and the night wasn’t getting any younger. The European might come to the door at any moment.
Unwillingly, she started up the stairs.
Marty had never understood until now. He’d been a virgin, living in a world innocent of this deep and exhilarating penetration, not simply of body, of mind too. The air in the room closed around his head as soon as he stepped into it. The plates of his skull seemed to grind against each other; the voice of the room, no longer needing its whispered tones, shouted in his brain. So you came? Of course you came. Welcome to Wonderland. He was dimly aware that it was his own voice that was speaking these words. It had probably been his voice all along. He had been talking to himself like a lunatic. Even though he’d now seen through the trick, the voice came again, lower this time-This is a fine place to find yourself in, don’t you think?
At the question, he looked around. There was nothing to see, not even walls. If there were windows in the room, they were hermetically sealed. Not a chink of the outside world belonged in here.
“I don’t see anything,” he murmured in reply to the room’s boast.
The voice laughed; he laughed with it.
Nothing here to be frightened of, it said. Then, after a smirking pause: Nothing here at all.
And that was right, wasn’t it? Nothing at all. It wasn’t just darkness that kept him sightless, it was the room itself. He glanced giddily over his shoulder: he could no longer see the door behind him, even though he knew he had left it open when he came in. There should have been at least a glimmer of light from downstairs spilling into the room. But that illumination had been eaten up, as was the beam of his flashlight. A smothering gray fog pressed so close to his eyes that even if he lifted his hand up in front of him he could see nothing.