And still, with every step taken, his fears multiplied. He gripped the filthy banister, and forced himself onward and upward. I don’t want to go, the child in him complained. Don’t make me go, please. Easy enough to turn around, easy enough to delay the whole thing. Look! Your feet will do it, just say the word. Go back! She’ll wake eventually; just be patient. Go back!
And if she doesn’t wake? the voice of reason replied. And that made him go on.
As he took another step, something moved on the landing ahead of him. A flea-jump noise, no more; so soft he could barely hear it. A rat, perhaps? Probably. All manner of scavengers would come here, wouldn’t they, in the expectation of a feast. He’d preempted that horror too, and was hardened to the thought.
He reached the landing. No rats scurried away from his footfall, at least he saw none. But there was something here. At the head of the stairs a small brown maggot rolled around on the carpet, twisting upon itself in its enthusiasm to get somewhere. Down the stairs probably: into the dark. He didn’t look at it too closely. Whatever it was, it was harmless. Let it find a niche to grow fat in, and become a fly in time, if that was its ambition.
He crossed the penultimate landing and started up the final flight of stairs. A few steps up, the smell abruptly worsened. The stench of fetid meat assaulted him, and now, despite the Scotch and all the mental preparation, his innards turned over and over; like the maggot on the carpet, twisting and turning.
He stopped two or three steps up the flight, pulled out his whisky, and took two solid throatfuls, swallowing it so quickly it made his eyes water. Then he continued his ascent. Something soft slid beneath his heel. He looked down. Another maggot, the larger brother of the one below, had been arrested in its descent by his foot: it was squashed to a fatty pulp. He glanced at it for only a second before hurrying on, aware that the sole of his shoe was slimy; either that or he was pressing other such grubs underfoot as he went.
The gulps of liquor had made his head sing; he took the last two dozen steps almost at a run, eager to have the worst over with. By the time he’d reached the top of the stairs, he was breathless. He had an absurd image of himself, a drunkard’s fancy, as a messenger coming with news-lost battles, murdered children-to the palace of some fabulous king. Except that the king too was murdered, his battles lost.
He started toward the penthouse; the smell had become so dense it was almost edible. As he had once before, he caught sight of himself in the mirror; he looked down, ashamed, from the frightened face and-God!-the carpet crawled. Not two or three but a dozen or more fat, ragged maggots were laboring, blindly it seemed, to find their way across the carpet, which was stained by their travels. They were like no insect he’d ever seen before, lacking any decipherable anatomy, and all different sizes: some finger-thin, others the size of a baby’s fist, their shapeless forms purple, but streaked with yellow. They left trails of slime and blood like wounded slugs. He stepped around them. They’d got fat on meat he’d once debated with. He didn’t want to examine them too closely.
But as he pushed open the door of the suite, and stepped, cautiously, into the corridor, an appalling possibility crept into his head and sat there, whispering obscenities. The creatures were everywhere in the suite. The more ambitious of them were scaling the pastel walls, gluing the slivers of their bodies to the wallpaper with seeped fluids, edging up like caterpillars, a peristalsis moving through their length. Their direction was arbitrary; some, to judge by their trails, were circling on themselves.
In the dim light of the corridor his worst suspicions merely simmered; but they began to boil when he edged past Whitehead’s sprawled body and stepped into the slaughterhouse room, where the light from the highway made a sodium day. Here the creatures were in yet greater abundance. The whole room swarmed with them, from flea-sized fragments to slabs the size of a man’s heart, throwing out tattered filaments like tentacles to haul themselves about. Worms, fleas, maggots-a whole new entymology congregated at the place of execution.