Free Fall (17 page)

I wiped my face with my hands, I gaped with blindness. The first step was an absence of light, light taken from
the visual artist. He is an artist, they must have said and smiled at each other. If he had been a musician we would have plugged his ears with wool. We will plug his eyes with cotton-wool. That is the first step. Then he will find that the cell is small and that will be the second step. When the discomfort of not being able to stretch out at full length becomes more than he can bear, they said, he will stretch out diagonally and find what we have put there for him; find what he expects to find. He is a timid, a morbid and sensitive creature and he will crush himself against the wall until discomfort drives him into telling us what he knows, or drives him to stretch out on the diagonal——

“I don’t know whether I know anything or not!”

Now more than the generalized dark, the centre of the cell boiled with shapes of conjecture. A well. Do you not feel that the floor of the cell slopes downward? You will begin to roll inward if you move, down to the well and the ant-lion at the bottom. If you are worn out with the fears of conjecture you will fall asleep and roll——

We want information, not corpses.

We want you to feel forward, inch by inch, line by line over the concrete, with one ungloved hand. We want you to find a curious half-moon of hardness, polished, at the edge polished, but in the centre rough. We want you to feel forward over the slope and spread your fingers till you have found the sole of a shoe. Will you go on then, pull gently and find that the sole resists? Will you, under the erected hair in the blindness, deduce without more effort the rigor, the body curled there like a frozen foetus? How long will you wait? Or will you stretch out your fingers and find our surprise curled there not eighteen
inches from your own? It has a moustache of white swan’s feathers. You never touched his sharp nose then. Touch his nose now. All those dark roads of grue were unnecessary. The test is here.

We want you to take the third step. We know you will because we are never wrong. We have beaten the world. We have hung in a row the violated bodies of Abyssinia, Spain, Norway, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, France, Holland, Belgium. Who do you think we are? Our Fuehrer’s photograph hangs on the wall behind us. We are the experts. We do not torture you. We let you torture yourself. You need not take the third step towards the centre; but your nature compels you. We know you will.

The darkness was tumbling and roaring. I lost the door.

Don’t let them know you’ve lost it. Find it again. Ignore those green, roaring seas, ignore the mouth agape, the hair erected, the eyes now streaming with wetness down both cheeks. And then I was back in my corner again after that frantic scramble round the wall, was back in a recognized corner with the wood of the door pressing against me. The patch in the middle was perhaps three feet across or even less. Then the body could not be lying there, must be standing up, balanced on the frozen feet like a statue. They had stood him up to wait for me. If I touched him he would sway forward.

I came out of the storm. I was saying nonsense, nonsense, nonsense to myself without remembering clearly what the nonsense was. I began to talk aloud in a croaking and jerky voice.

“If they stood a body there it could not be our lodger because he died and was buried in England thirty years ago. Thirty years ago. Thirty years ago. He was buried in 
England. The huge car came for him with frosted and chased glass. He was buried there. This could not be his body——”

Then I lifted my face away from the wall and spoke in great anger.

“What is all this about bodies?”

Up there is up and down there is down. There where the concrete is getting harder every moment is down. Don’t forget which is which or you will be seasick.

Whatever else you do don’t take the third step.

They know what they are about. They have you on the fork. One way you take the next step and suffer for it. The other way, you do not take it but suffer on your own rack trying not to think what the next step is. They are past-masters.

A square not three feet each way. No, not so much. Not much room. And, of course, nothing could be standing there. Whatever held the centre must be small. Curled up.

Snake.

I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred thousand years of loathing and fear for things that scuttle or slide or crawl. I gasped a breath and then listened through all the working machinery of my body for the hiss or rattle, for the slow, scaly sound of a slither, except that in the zoo they made no sound but oozed like oil. In the desert they would vanish with hardly a furrow and a trickle of sand. They could move towards me, finding me by the warmth of my body, the sound of the blood in
my neck. Theirs was the wisdom and if one of them had been left at the centre there was no telling where it would be next.

My knees had their automatic fear, too, but my body was weakened by it, lost all sense of gravity, fell clumsily into my corner. I lay there huddled, pulling my hands back to my face. I stared blindly at the place where the thing might be. Of course he would not have a snake or a tarantula on tap and if he had he would not leave it about in a cell as cold as the inside of a coffin. Nothing lived in the cell but me. Whatever lay out there at the third step could not be living and could not be a body because a body could not stand up.

I began to creep round the wall again. I forced myself challengingly into each corner and I kept my eyes shut because that way they did not water so and I could imagine daylight outside them.

Four corners, all empty.

I knelt in my own corner, muttering to myself.

“Well? Well then?”

Let me find out before my mind invents anything worse, anything still unimaginable.

I crept along the wall again, making my eighteen inches into twenty-four. There was a space in the centre no bigger than a big book. Perhaps that was what was there, a book waiting for me to read all the answers.

I let my fingers creep out of my corner. They ate away part of the unknown patch, they went line by line and as they went they chilled and prickled. The space that might be a large book, minutely decreased.

Fingers ate away another line of concrete.

The feeling changed at the tips. They were in some
other
mode, now. Or no. The concrete was changing, was not the same, was smoother.

Smooth. Wet. Liquid.

My hand snatched itself back as though the snake had been coiled there, whipped back without my volition, a hand highly trained by the tragedies of a million years.

My eye stung where a flung-back nail had grazed the ball, one deep physical automatism outsmarted by another.

Be reasonable. Did you weep there in the centre, or did you wipe the tears of strain from your cheeks?

Another hand crept forward, found the liquid, even rubbed a tiny distance backwards and forwards, found the liquid smooth like oil.

Acid?

“Nothing has happened to you yet. Be reasonable. All the torments he implied have not yet begun. Though the steps of approach are as real as the steps of a town hall, yet still you need not climb them. Even if they had spilt poison there in the centre I need not lick it up. They want information not corpses. Cannot be acid because fingertips are still smooth and cold, not burning and blistered. Cannot be lye because as with acid, no pain. Only cold, cold as the air, as the concrete where I can hear the stridulation of fabric under my hip. Nothing has happened to you yet. Don’t be tricked into selling cheap.”

Selling what? What was the information that I was so uncertain I really had? What could I have said? What was it, my last bargaining token, last scrap of value, only chock between me and a sliding descent of infinite length and cleverness, torment after torment? He said it was for my own good, for all our goods—so the last of human
faces had said, that delicately adjusted face, so delicate over the delicate, fragile bones.

But now there began to build up in me the conviction that even if I wanted to I could not remember, would
never
remember. I could see a layer of concrete build up in my mind over the forgotten thing, the thing down there that I had meant to say. But when that concrete forms in the mind, no internal road drill can break it up.

“Wait a minute. Let me remember——”

For, of course, you can only remember such a thing by forgetting to remember and then glancing back at it quickly before the concrete has a chance to form; but Halde would use a road drill, he would know of one. Yet no pain will break that concrete; hammer and you leave no mark——

“I tell you I’ve forgotten—I’d remember if I could! You must give me a moment——”

But there would be no moment of mercy. I knew now that I had forgotten and that I should never remember. The ladder of pain would stretch away from this stone pillow to an unknown height, I forced to climb. Let the road drill dance on the nerves savagely, on the flesh, spill the blood. What is your name? Muriel Millicent Mollie? Mary Mabel Margaret? Minnie Marcia Moron?

Oil, acid, lye. None of them.

No.

I could feel my cheekbone against wood; and a voice was talking loudly and hysterically through the cotton-wool.

“I tell you I can’t remember! I would if I could—why don’t you let me alone? If you only gave me a time not to think but a time to lie down under the sky without steps
or pain then the concrete would slip away and the information come blurting out if there is any information and then we could start fair——”

There was that harvest picture yearned for, a harvest under one star and the moon. The light lay heavy on the heads of corn and he was going down through the light, leaning on his stick, a man soon to be harvested, too, creeping towards peace. There was the blue girl leaning back, a quiet river under her shoulder, the meal having crept on towards the shared siesta time.

But I was standing up again, shuffling through my trousers round the wall, facing it with hands feeling. But the wall was still there, right round. I reached up again as high as I could and still there was no ceiling—only darkness weighing heavy, smothering like a feather bed.

Oil. Acid. Lye.

No.

My body slid down and its right hand crept out, touched smoothness. Its fingers slipped on with tiny steps in smoothness that nibbled away the unknown space.

He knew they would nibble, he is the master.

Something, not touched yet or not with the sensitive tips, something touched, lying against the nail of the third finger, the weak one. Something touched my nail about a third of the way from the pared edge, cold as the smoothness. Mercilessly the fingers lifted in the darkness and explored, sending back their messages from the sensitive tips.

The thing was cold. The thing was soft. The thing was slimy. The thing was like an enormous dead slug—dead because where the softness gave way under the searching tips it did not come back again.

I could see everything now except the slug-thing because there was almost no darkness left. There was light falling away in a torrent, there were shouts and screams visible as shapes, long curves that shone and vibrated. But the shape of the thing on the floor was communicated to me through one enslaved finger that would not let go, that rendered the outline phosphorescent in my head, a strange, wandering haphazard shape with here a tail drawn out in slimy thinness and there the cold, wet bulk of a body. But this was no complete body of any animal or man. I knew now why this was the shape of no animal, knew what the wetness was. I knew too much. I should have touched his sharp nose and been armoured. Their cleverness was to shatter all the taboos of humanity, to crash through with an exhibition so brutal, a warning so unequivocal that the third step was like standing on a step of sheer horror above the others. They had laid there this fragment of human flesh, collapsed in its own cold blood. So the lights fell and spun and blood that was pumped out of the heart was visible too, like a sun’s corona, was part noise, part feeling, part light.

A darkness ate everything away.

When I came together again, moaning, sick, huddled there was no intermission of knowledge. As soon as I remembered who I was I knew where I was and what thing lay there in the darkness, flung down from what misused body? And how long, my mind thought busily to itself, how long had that fragment been lying there? But they were not infallible then, for this morgue-like coldness gave me some protection. Yet even so, my nose now noticed in the air, noticed and tried to reject, certain elements other than the fetor of confinement. Or perhaps they were infallible
indeed, when dealing
ex cathedra
with a matter of faith and morals such as this one and even the rate of decomposition was nicely calculated to increase. I recognized and miserably applauded the virtuosity of their torture for torture it was. This third step, they said, is unbearable, becomes unbearable, yet he must continue to bear it because the fourth step is worse. Do you think the cliff of loathing on which you are now huddled is our highest point? It is nothing but a preparatory ledge on our Everest. Base camp. Climb now. Try.

I felt upwards for the ceiling and in that moment the fourth step revealed itself. There was a whirlpool which had once been my mind but which now was slipping round, faster and faster; and a story leapt into the centre of it, a story completely remembered, vividly visualized—story of the small cell and the ceiling that came down slowly with all the weight of the world. I was scrabbling at the high wall, but the ceiling was still out of reach and I could not tell. But I knew that there were crushed things hanging from it that stank as the cold scrap in the centre was stinking; and presently I should hear the sound of its descent as it made unbearably small what was too small already, and came mercilessly down. So I was crouched in my fetid corner, gasping, sweating, talking.

“Why do you torment yourself? Why do you do their work for them? Nothing has touched you physically yet——”