“Help yourself,” Stoles answered indifferently, as he stood up to go, “but try not to leave any permanent marks.”
“Fine!” Phipps smiled, and hit Randall a backhanded swipe that loosened his teeth. “We’ll be careful!”
He remained conscious through a considerable portion of it, though, naturally, he had no way of judging what proportion. He passed out once or twice, only to come to again under the stimulus of still greater pain. It was the novel way Phipps found of holding a man down without marking him which caused him to pass out for the last time.
He was in a small room, every side of which was a mirror — four walls, floor, and ceiling. Endlessly he was repeated in every direction and every image was himself — selves that hated him but from which there was no escape. “Hit him again!” they yelled — he yelled — and struck himself in the teeth with his closed fist. They — he — cackled.
They were closing in on him and he could not run fast enough. His muscles would not obey him, no matter how urgently he tried. It was because he was handcuffed — handcuffed to the treadmill they had put him on. He was blindfolded, too, and the handcuffs kept him from reaching his eyes. But he had to keep on — Cynthia was at the top of the climb; he had to reach her.
Only, of course, there is no top when you are on a treadmill.
He was terribly tired, but every time he slowed down the least little bit they hit him again. And he was required to count the steps, too, else he got no credit for it — ten thousand ninety-one, ten thousand ninety-two, ten thousand ninety-three, up and down, up and down — if he could only see where he was going.
He stumbled; they clipped him from behind and he fell forward on his face.
When he woke his face was pressed up against something hard and lumpy and cold. He shifted away from it and found that his whole body was stiff. His feet did not work as they should — he investigated by the uncertain light from the window and found that he had dragged the sheet half off the bed and had it tangled around his ankles.
The hard cold object was the steam radiator; he had been huddled in a heap against it. He was beginning to regain his orientation; he was in his own familiar bedroom. He must have walked in his sleep — he hadn’t pulled that stunt since he was a kid! Walked in his sleep, tripped, and smashed his head into the radiator. Must ‘a’ knocked him silly, colder’n a coot — damn lucky he hadn’t killed himself.
He was beginning to pull himself together, and to crawl painfully to his feet, when he noticed the one unfamiliar thing in the room — the new big mirror. It brought the rest of his dream back with a rush; he leaped toward the bed. “Cynthia!”
But she was there where she belonged, safe and unharmed. She had not awakened at his outcry, of which he was glad; he did not want to frighten her. He tiptoed away from the bed and let himself quietly into the bathroom, closing the door behind him before he turned on the light.
A pretty sight! he mused. His nose had been bloodied; it had long since stopped bleeding and the blood had congealed. It made a gory mess of the front of his pajama jacket. Beside that, he had apparently lain with the right side of his face in the stuff — it had dried on, messily, making him appear much more damaged than he was, as he discovered when he bathed his face.
Actually, he did not seem to be much damaged, except that — Wow! — the whole right side of his body was stiff and sore — probably banged it and wrenched it when he fell, then caught cold in it. He wondered how long he had been out.
He took off the jacket, decided that it would be too much effort to try to wash it out then, rolled it into a ball and chucked it behind the toilet seat. He didn’t want Cyn to see it until he had had a chance to explain to her what had happened. “Why, Teddy, what in the world have you done to yourself?” “Nothing, kid, nothing at all — just ran into a radiator!”