Lizard World (8 page)

Beyond
the ruined chimney a door creaked open into oblong darkness. Smoking her cigar, holding her lantern, Hattie led them down the slippery stairs. For such an old girl she looked remarkably spry in her high-topped sneakers. She looked pretty strong for a hundred and seventy-five: it was hard to believe that the Fountain of Youth was only alligator juice, although it was true he had heard stories about peasants in Russia who had reached a supernatural old age through a diet of honey and yogurt. Her cigar smoke made Smedlow cough, but masked the rotting smell that grew with every step. He was conscious of the lump pulsating on his forehead where the one they called Lemuel Lee had hit him: some day he would get that little schmuck. Behind him he could hear Lemuel Lee cursing and the goat bleating as it stumbled. The howling was louder now -- a horrified shriek on the verge of articulate speech.

      
On the first landing a blue iron door secured by a deadbolt and a massive padlock looked ghostly in the lamplight. Aunt Ligeia paused to wheeze: “Hold up, Lem,” she said and did her best to breathe slowly and look calm. Breathin’ real slow like this always made her feel better. Yep, she could damn well master this panic from her emphysema, but this wasn’t nothing compared to the kidney attacks which came on without warning like a knife stab in the back. Last night, for example, when it woke her, she’d begun to sweat and vomit cause her back had hurt so bad. Catching the prisoner here had been a stroke of luck, of course, but if she couldn’t get Earl to overcome his egghead scruples and transplant one damn little kidney, she’d be just one more carcass for the Beauregard stiffyard.

      
She looked like a large yellow toad standing there in her polyester housedress, the folds of her double chin wiggling as she tried to catch her breath. Smedlow thought it might be as good a time as any to crack her in the head with his flashlight. But if he tried to make a break for it, then that vile Lem would chase after him -- and at best he would be lost at night in the swamp. Suddenly behind him he heard something croak, felt something pulling at his coattail: through a barred window in the blue door a filthy hand was reaching out, tugging at him with blistered fingers.
 

      
“Hands off, Darrell!” commanded Lemuel Lee -- and the hand retracted through the bars. “Don’t pay no mind to goddamn Darrell, mister.”

      
The howling was coming from somewhere down below. The atmosphere of dust, mildew and unnamed foulness was now so thick that Smedlow reached for his handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose. Open door after open door exposed the clutter and the shadows of vacant rooms.

      
At last they reached a hallway with another locked door, this one green. Glass bottles and rusted iron cans littered the floor. Lemuel Lee pulled the goat down the last few steps: but instinctively it drew back and released its urine. The howling suddenly stopped. The smell was now almost unbearable.

      
Lemuel Lee looked in through the bars, then removed the padlock, drew the deadbolt. As the goat was shoved in quickly, bleating in vain, Smedlow forced himself to look into the chamber: from the hindquarters of an alligator emerged a chest, arms and head which were still recognizably human. It was scratching itself with unbelievably long fingernails. It must have found something of interest in its hair, for now it brought thumb and forefinger to its mouth and began to chew and slaver. Dung, blood, chicken feathers, stale bread and rotting meat strewed the stone floor on which it slowly waddled closer to the bleating sacrifice.

      
“He’s family, Earl,” said Aunt Ligeia and held her kidney for emphasis: “We gotta take care a family.”

      
“I know it, Ligie. But if he gets loose, the way he done before, well, we’ll be in a heap a trouble.”

      
Smedlow looked away, but heard the shriek, the scuffle, the last gurgling bleats, and then the quieter sound of tearing.

      
“That’s Mosher Poe, mister,” said Aunt Ligiea, “or what’s left a him. The old folks tried, but the splicin’ didn’t take. Back in eighteen and forty-six Uncle Mosher built this here perfume factory along with Hezekiah Frobey and that English fella. That English fella was the first one since Cleopatra, Queen a Egypt, to make perfume outa Crocodiles -- or outa gator juice, which is pretty much the same.”

      
She turned and placed her scuffed black boot on the first step.

      
“It don’t pay to get too nosy, mister,” she said. “That fella Darrell upstairs made that mistake. One day Uncle Mosher here got loose and folks got talkin’ about a swamp thing. Newspapers got real curious. So Darrell Butz came a-snoopin’. That was back in nineteen and sixty-eight. Ever since then, Darrell’s been our guest.” She held her hand to her back, trudged up another five steps, but then stopped again to wheeze: “I used to think Darrell would come in handy. But Darrell, see, he don’t have good kidneys neither.”

Chapter VIII.

In which the Prisoner bares his bum.

Smedlow awoke
to find himself face down on a heap of straw with a feeble stream of daylight falling down upon him from a tiny window. He had no clear sense of how long he had lain there and only the foggiest memory of the goo they had forced him to drink, the sudden spinning nausea and the clicking of the lock. His beard, as he felt it, seemed like two days’ growth -- maybe three. During this time his captors had left, beside his bed, a Coke bottle of water and a clump of Velveeta on which ants and houseflies had begun to congregate. He had no sooner stuffed his face and slaked his thirst, than the dizziness returned -- and if he had not fallen back upon the straw, he would almost certainly have stepped upon the snakes. For he had seen at least a dozen of them coiled in the corner -- in a variety of colors like a rainbow of lifesavers.

      
The sight of them made him draw back farther on his heap of straw -- although, come to think of it, there might be even more of them sleeping here in the straw itself. Gingerly he drew himself into a ball, clutching at his knees. Was there any way out of this horrid place? The little window far above him -- if he could somehow climb up there -- was obviously much too narrow. The door, just opposite him, was iron-plated and crossbolted. But even if it hadn’t been, he would hardly have dared to walk across the floor. In fact, the more he thought about it, the very dimensions of his cell now began to toy with his chronic claustrophobia: for it was excessively small, like a gent’s room in a hellish gas station, which it also seemed to resemble for general foulness -- the filthy porcelain of a nearby washbasin, a cigarette butt floating in a seatless commode.

      
He had read somewhere -- hadn’t he? -- that reptiles are frightened of fire. It was this happy thought which made him now rummage through his jacket for his lighter -- only to discover that his wallet, his pager, his calculator, his keys, even his monogrammed handkerchief -- in fact every vestige of his former identity -- had been carefully removed.

      
At last he reached into his pants’ pocket.
It somehow seemed appropriate that this stupid silver lighter, which beaming Agnes had given him and with which he was supposed to have been absolutely delighted on the very birthday when he had expected her skinflint father to make him a partner in his dental practice, should have turned out to be the only so-called valuable his captors hadn’t taken. He flicked it open, twice thumbed the wheel -- and it leapt into flame. How fitting that its only purpose was to reveal the mildew on his prison walls.

      
But then he looked more closely. For by the flickering of its light he now beheld a myriad of crossed-off lines scratched into the slimy stone of the wall beside him and read the name “Abner Cootes, age 19, 9th Infantry”; the name was written in large block capitals and beneath it, barely legible and in smaller letters, were the words “
water badd,
” “
snaykes got Selby and Powell
” and “
Abigail my Luv.
”

      
Some illiterate yokel, no doubt, had written this. Oh, it was easy enough to imagine the union blue of his uniform, the acned face of troubled youth. Had they been alive at the same time, Smedlow would not have cared to meet him. Nonetheless, so dire was his present sense of isolation, that he could not resist the sentimental impulse to touch this ghostly message from the past.

      
The rock wobbled. A second and more forceful touch slightly dislodged a smaller rock from its position in the wall. He plucked it out, reached his lighter into the cavity, and saw -- not rock -- but pit-black vacancy. Within moments he had shoved his hand back into the hole, grabbed the large rock underneath -- and pulled.

      
He had just managed to remove this larger rock, lowering it with difficulty onto the floor and then extending his lighter to illuminate the darkened tunnel he’d exposed, when suddenly he heard noises in the hall outside -- a gathering of phlegm and spitting, a jingling of keys. Hurriedly, he strained to pick up first the larger and then the smaller rock and replace them in the wall, mashing his right thumb painfully in the process, when he heard the door open behind him -- and slam shut.

      
Turning around, he saw her -- the woman they called Ligeia.

      
She had done up her hair in pigtails. She was wearing a red teddy, which was unfortunately diaphonous. For he couldn’t help noticing that nevuses speckled her swollen udders -- and that a bulging midriff with a convex navel slumped above her lilac garter belt. The thought occurred to him that he could knock her down and grab her keys, but a coral snake had slithered toward the doorway and he had a horror of hazarding that close. It seemed to make matters worse that the woman herself was not in the least bit frightened. Instead, her vast thighs shook like puddings as she began to pace his prison on stilletto heels, smacking a black wire brush against the palm of her left hand:

      
“Now bend over, mister,” she said, “and drop yer panties.”

Chapter IX.

In which the Prisoner encounters with the Fly and endeavours to escape.

Several minutes
had passed since his buttocks had endured the last buffet of humiliation. He had heard the door close behind him, the phlegmy cough and spit of his assailant, the screech of the cross-bolt and the snapping of the locks. His backside burning, his boxer shorts and twilled slacks still around his ankles, Smedlow listened as the high-heels click-clacked down the hallway. That bitch. Even now her odor of hair oil and tobacco -- and the dogbreath of her arousal -- lingered in his nostrils.

      
His fingertips began to tingle -- and suddenly it was impossible to fight the growing panic that his cell was unbearably too small: familiar symptoms of the fits that had tormented him since childhood. So he was not in the least bit surprised that now his prison began to spin -- the pus-green of the door, the slithering snakes, the filthy sink and seatless toilet, the slimy walls and heap of hay turning faster like a vile carousel until the first suspicion of nausea grew to a conviction in his throat -- and there was nothing left to do but vomit, gasp for air and wet himself.

      
There, now, wasn’t that better? He found himself lying face-down on the straw, but it was still a few minutes before the spinning would stop and he could calm himself sufficiently to wipe his mouth and legs and pull up his underwear and pants.

      
His very first fit had overtaken him when Mrs. Kravitz had locked him up among the galoshes and jars of school paste in the third-grade cloakroom. She had found him, ages later, in a puddle of disgrace, a discovery that had been greeted by the shrieking jubilation of his classmates.
Unpleasant memories, but sufficient to remind him that he was, in fact, himself, Max Smedlow, a man with a history -
-
and not a head of cattle to be plundered for its steak by a crew of backwoods cretins.

  
   
Something was biting him on the neck. As if by itself, his hand leapt up to smack it, but the instant he felt the stupid sting of his own slap, he saw the insect buzz away -- a meaty horsefly which even now paused on the livid white lip of the seatless crapper.

  
   
For a few moments, as a distraction from his misery, he watched it: its hind legs brushing off its wings, its antennae twitching, its two big eyes agog, its bulbous bristly abdomen all bloated with its meal. Smedlow felt a powerful urge to squish it, but remembering that he was in danger of losing more than blood, decided instead to see if even the smallest and most desperate hope lay waiting in the hidden tunnel.

He
found himself, moments later, gasping for air and scraping his hands and knees in stuffy twilight. There was hardly any space to move. The walls were scratching at his sides. And something definitely smelled bad. Within minutes his gasping had become desperation -- and he tried to reassure himself that he was getting all the air he needed. Since his own hulk blocked out any possibility of light coming from his prison cell behind him, it was reasonable to conclude that the dingy light illuminating the bricks, mud, and upright timbers of his passage must be coming from somewhere in the tunnel up ahead. Why, the very fact that there was any light at all was more than ample reason to be hopeful.

      
He crawled forward, twisting around corners -- but before long found himself lowering his head, bending at his elbows and leaning forward from his knees in order to accommodate himself to the apparent lowering of the ceiling. With some difficulty he reached backward into his left pants-pocket, pulled out the lighter, flicked it open, thumbed the wheel -- and saw the upturned carcass of a rat. Beyond the rat there was no doubt whatsoever that the tunnel became significantly lower.

      
Smedlow now attempted to crawl backward and found, unfortunately, that he could not: although eyesight had told him where to twist and how to duck and squeeze, he did not have this benefit in reverse. An atrocious panic gripped him, which -- after a period of frantic and quite futile wriggling -- he tried to quell by measured breathing and by reminding himself that this was, after all, a tunnel which some poor dead bastard had managed to travel through.

      
Lowering his head, flattening his belly to the floor, he wormed his way forward. But despite his best effort, crushing his rump against the opposite wall, he still couldn’t avoid touching the rat -- the tickle of its claw, the odor of its death, its eyes like tiny raisins.

      
It was only after another eternity of muffled screams and squeezing suffocation that he emerged -- not into a room exactly -- but onto a tiny floor of wooden planks bridging what seemed to be the narrow vertical shaft of a brick chimney. Daylight streamed down from a distant oblong overhead: but no, scaling the sheer surface of those walls was obvious insanity. And yet the horrors of the tunnel, which resumed across the small expanse of floor, were equally unthinkable.

      
Someone, with whom Smedlow now began to feel a disagreeable intimacy, had been stranded here before him: a pair of ancient underwear huddled in the dust. A laceless shoe was sticking out its tongue. He also saw a clogged comb, a chewed-off slice of beef jerky, several empty bottles, an old hammer -- and a heap of fallen bricks. But where, exactly, had they fallen from? Looking up, then behind and above him, he saw, half covered with vines, the darkness of a jagged opening.

      
Jumping up, he repeatedly failed, but finally managed to grab this broken wall: hanging by his hands, his flimsy arms straining to lift the dead-weight of his ass, he now somehow pulled himself up -- and into the dusty darkness of a wider tunnel. He had no sooner relit his lighter, forced himself to ignore a particularly nasty spider, and resumed his crawl than a muffled howling, followed by the piercing shriek of something fighting for its life -- vile sounds which he hadn’t heard for days -- came floating up from somewhere in the prison far below.

      
After several more minutes of crawling, he found himself suddenly tumbling through pitch-blackness, a horrifying freefall broken by the pain of the floor upon his back and the pleasure of seeing a fresco of naked nymphs and rampant satyrs on the ceiling. His next uneasy glance took in a gilded sedan chair festooned with cobwebs, a rusted mantrap and an ornately carved oak privy stool. Someone, as if just risen from the can, had left an open volume on its arm. Nearby, a mildewed harpsichord slouched beneath a heap of bric-a-brac -- including a dusty periwig, a set of moldy dentures, a flintlock pistol, an ivoried snuff-mill and several bottles of brackish liquid containing what appeared to be human fingers. All this was disturbing enough, but even more arresting were the relics of a more recent date: a daguerrotype of a wonderfully buxom maiden in chains and a disintegrating newspaper -- dated August 17th, 1804 -- on which the words “MISSING,” “MANHUNT,” and “EATEN” were still distinctly legible.

      
He turned his head back and forth, looking for an exit. But then it struck him suddenly, miserably, like a bully’s punch in the soft flab of his belly -- that the doorway had been all walled up with bricks. A shaft of sunlight fell down from an impossibly small window, holding a swarm of mosquitoes in its beam and splashing a golden disk on the green stone of the floor. “Some day,” he thought, “they will find my bones in here.” Grimacing with pain, struggling to his feet, Smedlow only now for the first time noticed the desk -- with an ink-bottle, a goose’s quill and pile of yellowed papers. It was a manuscript: