Dhalgren

bare foot slide backward. 'Okay!' He tugged the rope.

He could see it run across the sill above him, go taut, and slow. The weight lifted from against him. A sneaker dragged across his foot, thumped against the door, and swung away again, and raised, dripping on his cheek. He smeared at his face with the heel of his hand and stepped back.

'Jesus Christ…!' from a girl at the doorway silenced everything but the wind and the reverberating voice:

Bobby, Bobby, please, can you hear me at all?

Another boy said: 'Hey, wow…!'

Then, Denny's nervous laugh: 'Oh, man, that's a mess…!'

Dragon Lady said, 'All right, I'm untying him here— you get that rope down to the kid.'

Standing on the bottom of the shaft, his bare heel wedged against one caked girder that crossed the bumper plates, Kidd stared up. For a moment he thought the elevator car descended at him. But it was a trick of light from the flanking beasts, both of whom swayed and flickered at the edge of sight.

The rope fell at him. He grabbed it with one hand, then the other. Someone pulled it; it rasped his coated palms. 'Hey …!' It went slack again.

Dragon Lady leaned in, the rope wrapped around one fist. 'You got it now?'

'Yeah.' Once more he shrugged it over his head, under his arms. 'Got it.'

They tugged him up.

When his head reached the sill, Denny and somebody else were on their knees, catching him around under the armpits. The sill scraped his chin, his chest.

Smokey simply put her hand over her mouth and stepped back behind Thirteen.

Kidd crawled over, got to his feet, moved a few steps forward. The others fell back.

'God damn!' Dragon Lady shook her head, eyes wide, and rolled the rope against her thigh. 'God…!'

Denny, with a funny smile, stepped back, black-lined nails moving over his chest. 'Wow, you really…' He shook back pale hair, seemed to be considering several things to say. 'You look just about as bad as…' He glanced at the floor.

'Uh…' Thirteen said, 'we got some clothes up at the place. You wanna look through them for something? To change into, well, that's… all right.'

'Oh, yeah…' Kidd looked down at blood, on himself, on the floor. It didn't run. It looked like jellied paste. 'Thanks.' He looked at the thing on the floor too, while wind and the woman's voice made torrents in the shaft. 'I better get… him upstairs.'

Bobby's shirt had ripped across the back. The flesh that wasn't torn was purple.

'You could make a sling, or something,' Thirteen offered. 'Hey, do we got any more of that canvas stuff?'

Someone he didn't recognize said: 'We threw it out.'

Kidd sucked his teeth, stopped, got his arms under Bobby's shoulders, tugged him over. One eye, open, had burst. The face, as though it had been made of clay, was flattened across one quarter.

Thirteen, glancing up the shaft, said: 'Dragon Lady, why you want to go hollering up at her about her kid's dead?'

'Because,' Dragon Lady said, 'if I was his mother, I'd want to know!'

'But suppose he was still—'

'Man,' Dragon Lady said, 'that ain't like gettin' dumped out a two story window. That's seventeen, eighteen flights!'

Kidd wedged his hand under the knees, stood, unsteadily, stepped back.

'Watch it!' Denny grabbed Kidd's shoulder. 'You don't want to go down there again, now, do you?'

Kidd said: 'Make the elevator go!' In his arms, the body was heavy, not so warm, and dripped less.

'Huh?' from Dragon Lady, who was coiling up the rope. 'Oh, yeah!' She swung into the car, did something else to the switches above the buttons.

The door started to close. She stopped it with her forearm. (K-chunk.)

Denny stepped back as Kidd carried Bobby inside.

'Baby, Adam, you go on up with the others,' Dragon Lady said from the back of the car.

But Kidd, turning to face the door as it rolled to, could not tell which of the people standing behind Thirteen and Smokey she addressed: their light shields had been extinguished.

A moment into darkness, he heard Dragon Lady's hand move among her chains; and the car filled with light. 'So you can see what you're doing,' the dragon said. 'Here, I'll push the floor. Which one? Seventeen?'

'Yeah.' He nodded, stepped aside.

The car rose.

The dragon beside him, he realized, was bigger than the elevator. Since it was light, he would have expected walls and ceiling to cut off that side claw, the top of that head. The effect, however, was that those places in the blue, enameled walls and ceiling seemed transparent, and the claw and the head shone through. The apparition was reflected on four sides.

Standing there, shifting the weight in his arms — Kidd had to shift it several times — he noticed the striations, like a muzzy image on some vertical television screen, raced to the left if he swayed right; if he swayed left, they raced right. Kidd said: 'I don't think you should get out with me.'

The dragon said: 'I wasn't planning to.'

He shifted the weight again, looked down at it, and thought: It smells… it has a specific smell. And there was an annoying piece of paper — he glanced down over the knees; was it a match book? — stuck to his bare foot.

Why, Kidd thought, why am I standing here with this armful of heavy, heavy meat, filthy with blood…? Then something raked inside his face; his throat clamped, his eyes teared. Either fear or grief, it extinguished as quickly as the lust that had momentarily raked inside his loins.

He blinked, again shifted his weight to the sandaled foot. The bare one stuck to the floor.

Beside him the swayings and motions that might tell him Dragon Lady's thoughts were hidden in light.

He shifted back the other way. His sandal stuck too.

The car slowed; the door opened.

Mrs Richards' fist rose to strike her chin. The gesture was a stronger version of June's.

Mrs Richards stepped back, and back again.

June caught her mother's arm.

Mrs Richards closed her mouth and her eyes and began to shake. High brittle sobs suddenly crackled the silence.

'You better take your mother upstairs,' Kidd said and stepped, after his grotesque shadow, into the hall.

June's head whipped back and forth between him and her mother, till an edge of shadow swept over his. It was not him she was staring at, but the bright apparition in the closing elevator.

'I'll put him in the old apartment.'

'Bobby's…?' June whispered, and smashed back against the wall to avoid him as he passed.

'Yeah, he's dead.'

Behind him Mrs Richards' crying changed pitch.

The other elevator door, against the rolled carpet, went K-chunk, K-chunk, K-chunk…

He shouldered into seventeen-E. Put the boy in his own…? Kidd walked down the hall, turned into the bare room. One of Bobby's hands (the one with the chain, all stained) struck and struck his shin. All he had to do was look at what he lugged not to be sad.

He tried not to drop it on the floor, lowered it, almost fell; and dropped it. He pulled at the bent leg; it… bent again, at the wrong place. So he stood up.

Christ, the blood! He shook his head, and peeled his shirt from stomach and shoulders. Starting for the door, he unbuckled his pants and, holding them with one hand — they dropped to his thighs — stepped into the hall.