The Throat

I said I was fine. He pointed the revolver down into the darkness underneath the tavern. 'You have a lighter, or matches, or anything?'

I shook my head.

He clicked off the safety on the revolver, bent over and put a foot on the second rung. With one hand flat on the floor, he got his other foot on the first rung, and then almost toppled into the basement. He let go of the pistol and used both hands to steady himself as he took another couple of steps down the ladder. When his shoulders were more or less at the level of the opening, he snatched up the pistol, glared at me, and went the rest of the way down the ladder. I heard him swear as he bumped against something at the bottom.

The ripe odor of blood swarmed out at me again. I asked him if he saw anything.

'To hell with you,' he said.

I looked at his thinning hair swept backward over pink, vulnerable-looking scalp. Below that his right hand ineffectually held out the pistol at the level of his spreading belly. Beside one of his feet was a bar stool with a green plastic seat. He had stepped on it when he came down off the ladder. 'Way over at the side are a couple of windows. There's an old coal chute and a bunch of other shit. Hold on.' He moved away from the opening.

I bent over, put my hand on the floor, and sat down and swung my legs into the abyss.

John's voice reached me from a hundred miles away. 'They kept the boxes down here for a while, anyway. I can see some kind of crap…' He kicked something that made a hollow, gonging sound, like a barrel. Then: 'Tim.'

I did not want to put my feet on the rungs of the ladder. My feet put themselves on the ladder. I swung the rest of myself around and let them lead me down.

'Get the hell down here.'

As soon as my head passed beneath the level of the floor, I smelled blood again.

My foot came down on the same bar stool over which Ransom had almost fallen, and I kicked it aside before I stepped down onto the packed earth. John was standing with his back to me about thirty feet away in the darkest part of the basement. The dusty oblong of a window at the side let in a beam of light that fell onto the old coal chute. Beside it, a big wooden keg lay beached on its side. A few feet away was a mess of shredded cardboard and crumpled papers. Half of the distance between myself and John, a druidical ring of bricks marked the site where the tavern's furnace had stood. The smell of blood was much stronger.

John looked over his shoulder to make sure I had come down the ladder.

I came toward him, and he stepped aside.

An old armchair drenched in black paint stood like a battered throne on the packed earth. Black paint darkened the ground in front of it. I held my breath. The paint glistened in the feeble light. I came up beside John, and he pointed the Colt's barrel at three lengths of thick, bloodstained rope. Each had been cut in half.

'Somebody got shot here,' Ransom said. The whites of his eyes flared at me.

'Nobody got shot,' I said. The eerie rationality of my voice surprised me. 'Whoever he was, he was probably killed with the same knife they used to cut the ropes.' This came to me, word by word, as I was saying it.

He swallowed. 'April was stabbed with a knife. Grant Hoffman was killed with a knife.'

And so were Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell and Monty Leland and Heinz Stenmitz.

'I don't think we'd better tell the police about this, do you? We'd have to explain why we broke in.'

'We can wait until the body turns up,' I said.

'It already did. The guy in the car at the airport.'

'A guard found him because blood was dripping out of the trunk,' I said. 'Whoever killed him put him in the trunk alive.'

'So this is someone else?'

I nodded.

'What the hell is going on around here?'

'I'm not sure I want to know anymore,' I said, and turned my back on the bloody throne.

'Christ, they might come back,' John said. 'Why are we standing around like chumps?' He moved toward the ladder, shooting wild glances at me over his shoulder. 'What are you doing?'

I was walking toward the rubble of cardboard and crumpled paper near the side of the basement.

'Are you crazy? They might come back.'

'You have a gun, don't you?' Again, the words that came out of my mouth seemed to have no connection to what I was actually feeling.

Ransom stared at me incredulously and then went the rest of the way to the ladder and began going up. He gained the top of the ladder about the time I reached the mess of chewed paper. John sat down on the edge of the opening and raised his legs. I heard him scramble to his feet. His footsteps thudded toward the kitchen.

The impressions of two boxes, partially obscured by bits of ragged cardboard, were stamped like footprints into the basement floor. The rats searching for food or insulation had left largely untouched whatever had been inside the boxes, but a few scraps of paper lay among the bits of tattered cardboard.

I squatted to poke through the mess. Here and there a fragment of handwriting, no more than two or three letters, was visible on some of the scraps. I flattened out one of these. Part of what looked like the letter a was connected to an unmistakable letter r. ar. Harp? Scarf? Arabesque? I tried another, vu. Ovum? Ovulate? A slightly larger fragment lay a few feet away, and I stretched to reach it. John thudded toward the rear of the building. The quality of his impatience, a sweaty anxious anger, permeated the sound of his footsteps.

I flattened out the section of paper. Compared to the other scraps, it was as good as a book. I stood up and tried to make out the writing as I went toward the ladder.

At the top of the paper, in capitals, was Alle (gap) to (gap) n. I had the feeling, like the sense of the uncanny, that it meant something to me. After another missing section appeared the numerals 5,77. Beneath this legend had been written: 5-10, 120. 26. Jane Wright. Near tears, brave smile in par (gap) tight jeans, cowboy boots, black tank top. Appealing white trash trying val (gap) to move up. No kids, husband (here the paper ended).

I folded the paper in half and slid it into my shirt pocket. Afraid that John might really have driven away, I went straight up the ladder without touching its sides and jumped off the final rung onto the floor.

Outside, he was walking around in circles on the cement, banging the car keys against his leg and gripping the Colt with his free hand. He tossed me the keys, too forcefully. 'Do you know how close you came?' he said, and picked up the broken lock and the jack handle. He meant: how close to being left behind. A few blocks east of us, the crowd bellowed and chanted. John clipped the lock's shackle through the metal loop.

In spite of his panic, I felt no urgency at all. Everything that was going to happen would happen. It already had. Things would turn out, all right, but whether or not they turned out well had nothing to do with John Ransom and me.

When I got into the car, John was drumming on the dashboard in frustration. I pulled around the corner of the tavern. John tried to look two or three directions at once, as if a dozen men carrying guns were sneaking up on us. 'Will you get us out of here?'

'Do you want me to drop you at home?' I asked.

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'I want to go to Elm Hill to find the Sunchanas.'

He groaned, extravagantly. 'What's the point?'

I said he knew what the point was.

'No, I don't,' he said. 'That old stuff is a waste of time.'

'I'll drop you at Ely Place.'

He collapsed back into the seat. I made the light onto Horatio Street and turned onto the bridge. John was shaking his head, but he said, 'Okay, fine. Waste my gas.'

I stopped at a gas station and filled the tank before I got back on the east-west expressway.

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