The sound of his soft sobs in the corridor held the others back. They stared silently, still hearing that never- spoken echo reverberating down and down and down the corridors of their minds:
Give me some light!
Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.
While inside Room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.
Looked out as he had come, purely and simply.
Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method now was gone.
Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sounds, all the sights, all the life of fear.
Gnomebody
What can I tell you? When I was a kid in Painseville, Ohio, and involved in the intricacies of Jack Armstrong, the Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery, Hop Harrigan and Dick Tracy, anything was possible. Under the side porch of our house, magic lands of adventure and intrigue made themselves known to me in the pages of comic books that chronicled the adventures of the Sandman, Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch, the Boy Commandos, Captain Marvel, Starman, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and (my favorite), Hawkman. My Saturday afternoons of quivering joy were secretively spent in a theater whose name I have sadly forgotten that stood next to the Cleveland Trust, where Kresge’s 5 and 10 now looms. (In fact, one personally autographed letter of gratitude is waiting for whatever correspondent with an “A” or an “O,” and truthfully, it’s one of those bits of memory I’d hate to have slip away forever. Duplicate prizes will be awarded in case of a tie.) And in that tiny movie house I saw my first Dick Tracy serial, starring Ralph Byrd. I saw the Shadow with Victor Jory. I shivered at The Clutching Hand and cheered Don Winslow Of The Navy and hissed as The Crimson Skull doomed the hero to a room whose walls came inexorably together. It was a golden time, before TV, in which the imagination and the need to be young were coupled with a world of wonders. In my world, at the corner of Harmon Drive and Mentor Avenue, was a wonderful dark woods, just like the one in
Did you ever feel your nose running and you wanted to wipe it, but you couldn’t? Most people do, sometime or other, but I’m different. I let it run.
They call me square. They say, “Smitty, you are a square. You are so square, you got corners!” This, they mean, indicates I am an oddball and had better shape up or ship out. So all right, so I’m a goof-off as far as they think. Maybe I do get a little sore at things that don’t matter, but if Underfeld hadn’t’a laid into me that day in the gym at school, nothing would have happened. The trouble is, I get aggravated so easy about little things, like not making the track team, that I’m no good at studies. This makes the teachers not care for me even a little. Besides, I won’t take their guff. But that thing with track. It broke me up really good.
There I was standing in the gym, wearing these dirty white gym shorts with a black stripe down the side.
And old Underfeld, that’s the track coach, he comes up and says, “Whaddaya doin’, Smitty?”
Well, anyone with 20-40 eyesight coulda seen what I was doing. I was doing push-ups. “I’m doing push-ups,” I said. “Whaddaya think I’m doing? Raising artichokes?”
That was most certainly not the time to wise off to old Underfeld. I could see the steam pressure rising in the jerk’s manner, and next thing he blows up allover the joint: “Listen, you little punk! Don’t get so mouthy with me. In fact, I’m gonna tell you now, ‘cause I don’t want ya hangin’ around the gym or track no more: You just ain’t good enough. In a short sprint you got maybe a little guts, but when it comes to a long drag, fifty guys in this school give their right arms to be on the team beat you to the tape. I’m sorry. Get out!”
He is sorry. Like hell!
He is no more sorry than I am as I say, “Ta hell with you, you chowderhead, you got no more brains than these ignorant sprinters that will fall dead before they get to the tape.”
Underfeld looks at me like I had stuck him in the seat of his sweat pants with a fistful of pins and kind of gives a gasp. “What did you say?” he inquires, breathless like.
“I don’t mumble, do I?” I snapped.
“Get out of here! Get outta here! Geddouddahere!”
He was making quite a fuss as I kicked out the door to the dressing rooms.
As I got dressed I gave the whole thing a good think. I was pretty sure that a couple of those stinkin’ teachers I had guffed had put wormhead Underfeld up to it. But what can a guy do? I’m just a kid, so says they. They got the cards stacked six ways from Culbertson, and that’s it.
I was pretty damned sore as I kicked out the front door. I decided to head for The Woods and try to get it off my mind. That I was cutting school did not bother me. My mother, maybe. But me? No. It was The Woods for me for the rest of the afternoon.
Those Woods. Something funny about them. D’ja ever notice, sometimes right in the middle of a big populated section they got a little stand of woods, real deep and shadowy, you can’t see too far into them? You try to figure out why someone hasn’t bought up the plot and put a house on it, or why they haven’t made it into a playground? Well, that’s what my Woods were.
They faced back on a street full of those cracker-box houses constructed by the government, the factory workers shouldn’t sleep on the curbs. On the other side, completely boxing them in, was a highway, running straight through to the big town. It isn’t really big, but it makes the small town seem not so small.
I used to cut school and go there to read. In the center is a place where everything has that sort of filtery light that seeps down between the tree branches, where there’s a big old tree that is strictly one all alone.
What I mean is that tree is great. Big thing, stretches and’s lost in the branches of the other trees, it’s so big.
And the roots look like they were forced up out of the ground under pressure, so all’s you can see are these sweeping arcs of thick roots, all shiny and risen right out, forming a little bowl under the tree.
Reason I like it so much there, is that it’s quieter than anything, and you can feel it. The kind of quiet a library would like to have, but doesn’t. To cap all this, the rift in the branches is just big enough so sunlight streams right through and makes a great reading light. And when the sun moves out of that rift, I know it’s time to run for home. I make it in just enough time so that Mom doesn’t know I was cutting, and thinks I was in school all day.
So last week—I’d been going to The Woods off, on for about two years—I tagged over there, after that creep Underfeld told me I was his last possible choice for the track team. I had a copy of something or other, I don’t remember now, I was going to read.
I settled down with my rump stuck into that bowl in the roots, and my feet propped against some smaller rootlings. With that little scrubby plant growth that springs up around the bases of trees, it was pretty comfortable, so I started reading.
Next, you are not going to believe.
I’m sitting there reading, and suddenly I feel this pressure against the seat of my jeans. Next thing I know, I am tumbled over on my head and a trapdoor is opening up out of the ground. Yeah, a trapdoor disguised as solid earth.