Going Under

By

Ramsey Campbell

BLYTHE had shuffled almost to the ticket booth when he knew he should have sent the money. Beyond the line of booths another phalanx of walkers, some of them wearing slogans and some not a great deal else, advanced toward the tunnel under the river. While he’d failed to pocket the envelope, he never left his phone at home, and given the pace at which walkers were being admitted to the tunnel, which was closed to traffic for its anniversary, he should have plenty of time to complete a call before he reached the wide semicircular concrete mouth, rendered whiter by the July sun. As he unfolded the phone and tapped his home number on the keyboard, the men on either side of him began jogging on the spot, an action which the left-hand man accompanied with a series of low hollow panting hoots. The phone rang five times and addressed Blythe in his own voice.

“Valerie Mason and Steve Blythe. Whatever we’re doing, it’s keeping us away from the phone, so please leave your name and number and the date and time, and we’ll tell you what we were up to when we call you back…” Though the message was less than six months old, it and Valerie’s giggle at the end of it sounded worn by too much playback. Once the beep had stuttered four times on the way to uttering its longer tone, he spoke.

“Val? Valerie? It’s me. I’m just about to start the tunnel walk. Sorry we had a bit of a tiff, but I’m glad you didn’t come after all. You were right, I should send her the maintenance and then object. Let them have to explain to the court instead of me. Are you in the darkroom? Come and find out who this is, will you? Don’t just listen if you’re hearing me. Be fair.”

Quite a pack jogged between the booths at that moment, the man to his immediate left taking time to emit a triumphal hoot before announcing to the ticket seller “Aids for AIDS.” Blythe turned his head and the phone to motion the woman behind him to pass, because if he stopped talking for more than a couple of seconds the machine would take him to have rung off, but the official in the booth ahead of him poked out his head, which looked squashed flat by his peaked cap. “Quick as you can. Thousands more behind you.”

The woman began jogging to encourage Blythe, shaking both filled bags of her ample red singlet. “Get a move on, lover. Give your stocks and shares a rest.”

Her companion, who seemed to have donned a dwarf’s T-shirt by mistake, entered the jogging competition, her rampant stomach bobbing up and down more than the rest of her. “Put that back in your trousers or you’ll be having a heart attack.”

At least their voices were keeping the tape activated. “Hold on if you’re there, Val. I hope you’ll say you are,” Blythe said, using two fingers to extract a fiver from the other pocket of his slacks. “I’m just going through the booth.”

The official frowned in disagreement, and Blythe breathed hard into the phone while he selected a charity to favor with his entrance fee. “Are you sure you’re fit?” the official said.

Blythe imagined being banned on the grounds of ill health from the walk when it was by far his quickest route home. “Fitter than you sitting in a booth all day,” he said, not as lightly as he’d meant to, and smoothed the fiver on the counter. “Families in Need will do me.”

The official wrote the amount and the recipient on a clipboard with a slowness which suggested he was still considering whether to let Blythe pass, and Blythe breathed harder. When the official tore most of a ticket off a roll and slapped it on the counter, Blythe felt released, but the man stayed him with a parting shot. “You won’t get far with that, chum.”

The phone had worked wherever Blythe had taken it, just as the salesman had promised. In any case, he was still two hundred yards short of the tunnel entrance, into which officials with megaphones were directing the crowd. “Just had to get my ticket, Val. Listen, you’ve plenty of time to post the check, you’ve almost an hour. Only call me back as soon as you hear this so I know you have, will you? Heard it, I mean. That’s if you don’t pick it up before I ring off, which I hope you will, answer, that’s to say, that’s why I’m droning on. I should tell you the envelope’s inside my blue visiting suit, not the office suit, the one that says here’s your accountant making a special effort so why haven’t you got your accounts together. Can you really not hear it’s me? You haven’t gone out, have you?”

By now his awareness was concentrated in his head, so he didn’t notice that his pace had been influenced by the urgency of his speech until the upper lip of the tunnel swayed to a halt above him. Hot bare arms brushed his in passing as the megaphones began to harangue him. “Keep it moving, please,” one crackled, prompting its mate to declare “No stopping now till the far side.” An elderly couple faltered and conferred before returning to the booths, but Blythe didn’t have that option. “That’s you with the phone,” a third megaphone blared.

“I know it’s me. I don’t see anybody else with one.” This was meant to amuse Blythe’s new neighbors, none of whom betrayed any such response. Not by any means for the first time, though less often since he’d met Valerie, he wished he’d kept some words to himself. “I’m starting the walk now. Please, I’m serious, ring me back the moment you hear this, all right? I’m ringing off now. If I haven’t heard from you in fifteen minutes I’ll call back,” he said, and was in the tunnel.

Its shadow was a solid chill at which his body was uncertain whether to shiver, considering the heat which was building up in the tunnel. At least he felt cool enough to itemize his surroundings, something he liked to do whenever he was confronted by anywhere unfamiliar, though he’d driven through the tunnel several times a week for most of twenty years. Its two lanes accommodated five people abreast now, more or less comfortably if you discounted their body heat. Six feet above them on either side was a railed-off walkway for the use of workmen, with no steps up to either that Blythe had ever been able to locate. Twenty feet overhead was the peak of the arched roof, inset with yard-long slabs of light. No doubt he could count them if he wanted to calculate how far he’d gone or had still to go, but just now the sight of several hundred heads bobbing very slowly toward the first curve summed up the prospect vividly enough. Apart from the not quite synchronized drumming of a multitude of soles on concrete and their echoes, the tunnel was almost silent except for the squawks of the megaphones beyond the entrance and the occasional audible breath.

The two women who’d addressed Blythe at the booths were ahead of him, bouncing variously. Maybe they’d once been as slim as his wife, Lydia, used to be, he thought, not that there was much left of the man she’d married either, or if there was it was buried under all the layers of the person he’d become. The presence of the women, their abundant sunlamped flesh and determined perfume and their wagging buttocks wrapped in satin, reminded him of too much it would do him no good to remember, and he might have let more walkers overtake him if it hadn’t been for the pressure looming at his back. That drove him to step up his pace, and he’d established a regular rhythm when his trousers began to chirp.

More people than he was prepared for stared at him, and he felt bound to say “Just my phone” twice. So much for the ticket seller’s notion that it wouldn’t work in the tunnel. Blythe drew it from his pocket without breaking his stride and ducked one ear to it as he unfolded it. “Hello, love. Thanks for saving my—”

“Less of the slop, Stephen. It’s a long time since that worked.”

“Ah.” He faltered, and had to think which foot he was next putting forward. “Lydia. Apologies. My mistake. I thought—”

“I had enough of your mistakes when we were together, and your apologies, and what you think.”

“That pretty well covers it, doesn’t it? Were you calling to share anything else with me, or was that it?”

“I wouldn’t take that tone with me, particularly now.”

“Don’t, then,” Blythe said, a form of response he remembered as having once amused her. “If you’ve something to say, spit it out. I’m waiting for a call.”

“Up to your old tricks, are you? Can’t she stand you never going anywhere without that thing either? Where are you, in the pub as usual trying to calm yourself down?”

“I’m perfectly calm. I couldn’t be calmer,” Blythe said as though that might counteract the effect she was having on him. “And I may tell you I’m on the charity walk.”

Was that a chorus of ironic cheers behind him? Surely they weren’t aimed at him, even if they sounded as unimpressed as Lydia, who said, “Never did begin at home for you, did it? Has your fancy woman found that out yet?”

He could have pounced on Lydia’s syntax again, except that there were more important issues. “I take it you’ve just spoken to her.”

“I haven’t and I’ve no wish to. She’s welcome to you and all the joy you bring, but she won’t hear me sympathizing. I didn’t need to speak to her to know where you’d be.”

“Then you were wrong, weren’t you? And as long as we’re discussing Valerie, maybe you and your solicitor friend ought to be aware she makes a lot less than he does now he’s a partner in his firm.”

“Watch it, big boy.”

That was the broader-buttocked of the women. He’d almost trodden on her heels, his aggressiveness having communicated itself to his stride. “Sorry,” he said, and without enough thought, “Not you, Lyd.”

“Don’t you dare start calling me that again. Who’ve you been talking to about his firm? So that’s why I haven’t had my check this month, is it? Let me tell you this from him. Unless that check is postmarked today, you’ll find yourself in prison for nonpayment, and that’s a promise from both of us.”

“Well, that’s the first—” Her rising fury had already borne her off, leaving him with a drone in his ear and hot plastic stuck to his cheek. He cleared the line as he tramped around more of the prolonged curve, which showed him thousands of heads and shoulders bobbing down a slope to the point almost a mile away from which, packed closer and closer together, they streamed sluggishly upward. On some days that midpoint was hazy with exhaust fumes, but the squashed crowd there looked distinct except for a slight wavering which must be an effect of the heat; he wasn’t really smelling a faint trace of gas through the wake of perfume. He bent a fingernail against the keys on the receiver, and backhanded his forehead as drops of sweat full of a fluorescent glare swelled the numbers on the keypad. His home phone had just rung when a man’s voice said loudly, “They’re all the same, these buggers with their gadgets. Can’t be doing with them, me.”

There was surely no reason for Blythe to feel referred to. “Pick it up, Val,” he muttered. “I said I’d ring you back. It’s been nearly fifteen minutes. You can’t still be doing whatever you were doing. Come out, there’s a love.” But his voice greeted him again and unspooled its message, followed by Valerie’s giggle, which under the circumstances he couldn’t help feeling he’d heard once too often. “Are you really not there? I’ve just had Lydia on, ranting about her maintenance. Says if it isn’t posted today her boyfriend the solicitor, who gives new meaning to the word solicit, will have me locked up. I suppose technically he might be able to, so if you can make absolutely certain you, I know I should have, I know you said, but if you can do that for me, for both of us, nip round the corner and get that bloody envelope in the shit.”

The last word came out loudest, and three ranks in front of him glanced back. Of them, only the woman whose T-shirt ended halfway up her midriff retained any concern once she saw him. “Are you all right, old feller?”

“Yes, I’m… No, I’m… Yes, yes.” He shook his free hand so extravagantly he saw sweat flying off it, his intention being to wave away his confusion more than her solicitude, but she advanced her lips in a fierce grimace before presenting her substantial rear view to him. He hadn’t time to care if she was offended, though she was using the set of her buttocks to convey that she was, exactly as Lydia used to. The ticket seller had been right after all. The tunnel had cut Blythe off, emptying the receiver except for a faint distant moan.

It could be a temporary interruption. He pressed the recall button so hard it felt embedded in his thumb and was attempting to waft people past him when a not unfamiliar voice protested, “Don’t go standing. There’s folk back here who aren’t as spry as some.”

“When you’re my dad’s age, maybe you won’t be so fond of stopping and starting.”

Either might be the disliker of gadgets, though both appeared to have devoted a good deal of time and presumably machinery to the production of muscles, not only beneath shoulder level. Blythe tilted his head vigorously, almost losing the bell, which was repeating its enfeebled note at his ear. “Don’t mind me, just go round me. Just go, will you?”

“Put that bloody thing away and get on with what we’re here for,” the senior bruiser advised him. “We don’t want to be having to carry you. We had his mother conk out on us once through not keeping the pace up.”

“Don’t mind me. Don’t bother about me.”

“We’re bothered about all the folks you’re holding up and putting the strain on.”

“We’ll be your trainers till we all finish,” the expanded youth said.

“Then I ought to stick my feet in you,” Blythe mumbled as those very feet gave in to the compulsion to walk. The phone was still ringing, and now it produced his voice. “Valerie Mason and Steve Blythe,” it said, and at once had had enough of him.

All the heat of the tunnel rushed into him. He felt his head waver before steadying in a dangerously fragile version of itself, raw with a smell which surely wasn’t of exhaust fumes, despite the haze into which the distant walkers were descending. He had to go back beyond the point at which his previous call had lost its hold. He peeled the soggy receiver away from his face and swung around, to be confronted by a mass of flesh as wide and as long as the protracted curve of the tunnel. He could hear more of it being tamped into the unseen mouth by the jabbing of the megaphones. Of the countless heads it was wagging at him, every one that he managed to focus on looked prepared to see him trampled underfoot if he didn’t keep moving. He could no more force his way back through it than through the concrete wall, but there was no need. He would use a walkway as soon as he found some steps up.

Another wave of heat, which felt like the threat of being overwhelmed by the tide of flesh, found him, sending him after the rhythmically quivering women. As far ahead as he could see there were no steps onto the walkways, but his never having noticed them while driving needn’t mean steps didn’t exist; surely a trick of perspective was hiding them from him. He narrowed his eyes until he felt the lids twitch against the eyeballs and his head ache more than his feet were aching. He poked the recall button and lifted the receiver above his head in case that might allow him to hook a call, but the phone at home hadn’t even doubled its first ring when his handful of technology went dead as though suffocated by the heat or drowned in the sweat of his fist. As he let it sink past his face, a phone shrilled farther down the tunnel.

“They’re bloody breeding,” the old man growled behind him, but Blythe didn’t care what he said. About three hundred yards ahead he saw an aerial extend itself above a woman’s scalp as blond as Lydia’s. Whatever had been interfering with his calls, it apparently wasn’t present in that stretch of the tunnel. He saw the aerial wag a little with her conversation as she walked at least a hundred yards. As he tramped toward the point where she’d started talking, he counted the slabs of light overhead, some of which appeared to be growing unstable with the heat. He had only half as far to go now, however much the saturated heat might weigh him down. It must be his eyes which were flickering: not as many of the lights as seemed to be. He needn’t wait until he arrived at the exact point in the tunnel. He only wanted reassurance that Valerie had picked up his message. He thumbed the button and flattened his ear with the receiver. The tone had barely invited him to dial when it was cut off.

He mustn’t panic. He hadn’t reached where phones worked, that was all. On, trying to ignore the sluggishly retreating haze of body heat which smelled increasingly like exhaust fumes, reminding himself to match the pace of the crowd, though the pair of walkers on each side of him made him feel plagued by double vision. Now he was where the woman’s phone had rung, beneath two dead fluorescents separated by one which looked as though it had stolen its glare from both. All three were bumped backward by their fellows as he jabbed the button, bruised his ear with the earpiece, snatched the receiver away and cleared it, supported it with his other hand before it could slide out of his sweaty grip, split a fingernail against the button, bruised his ear again… Nothing he did raised the dialing tone for longer than it took to mock him.

It couldn’t be the phone itself. The woman’s had worked, and his was the latest model. He could only think the obstruction was moving, which meant it had to be the crowd that was preventing him from acting. If Lydia’s replacement for him took him to court, he would lose business because of it, probably the confidence of many of his clients too because they wouldn’t understand he took more care with their affairs than he did with his own, and if he went to prison… He’d closed both fists around the phone, because the plastic and his hands were aggravating one another’s slippiness, and tried not to imagine battering his way through the crowd. There were still the walkways, and by the time he found the entrance to one it might make sense to head for the far end of the tunnel. He was trudging forward, each step a dull ache which bypassed his hot swollen body wrapped in far too much sodden material and searched for a sympathetic ache in his hollowed-out head, when the phone rang.

It was so muffled by his grip that he thought for a moment it wasn’t his. Ignoring the groans of the muscled duo, he nailed the button and jammed the wet plastic against his cheek. “Steve Blythe. Can you make it quick? I don’t know how long this will work.”

“It’s all right, Steve. I only called to see how you were surviving. Sounds as if you’re deep in it. So long as you’re giving your brain a few hours off for once. You can tell me all about it when you come home.”

“Val. Val, wait. Val, are you there?” Blythe felt a mass of heat which was nearly flesh lurch at him from behind as he missed a step. “Speak to me, Val.”

“Calm down, Steve. I’ll still be here when you get back. Save your energy. You sound as though you need it.”

“I’ll be fine. Just tell me you got the message.”

“Which message?”

The heat came for him again—he couldn’t tell from which direction, or how fast he was stumbling. “Mine. The one I left while you were doing whatever you were doing.”

“I had to go out for some black and white. The machine can’t be working properly. There weren’t any messages on the tape when I came in just now.”

That halted Blythe as if the phone had reached the end of an invisible cord. The vista of walkers wavered into a single flat mass, then steadied and regained some of its perspective. “Never mind. Plenty of time,” he said rapidly. “All I wanted—”

A shoulder much more solid than a human body had any right to be rammed his protruding elbow. The impact jerked his arm up, and the shooting pain opened his fist. He saw the phone describe a graceful arc before it clanged against the railing of the right-hand walkway and flew into the crowd some thirty yards ahead. Arms flailed at it as though it was an insect, then it disappeared. “What was that for?” he screamed into the old man’s face as it bobbed alongside his. “What are you trying to do to me?”

The son’s face crowded Blythe’s from the other side, so forcefully it sprayed Blythe’s cheek with sweat. “Don’t you yell at him, he’s got a bad ear. Lucky you weren’t knocked down, stopping like that. Better believe you will be if you mix it with my dad.”

“Can someone pick up my phone, please?” Blythe called at the top of his voice.

The women directly in front of him added winces to their quivering and covered their ears, but nobody else acknowledged him. “My phone,” he pleaded. “Don’t step on it. Who can see it? Look for it, can you all? Please pass it back.”

“I said about my dad’s ear,” the man to his left rumbled, lifting a hammer of a fist which for the present he used only to mop his forehead. Blythe fell silent, having seen a hand raised some yards ahead of him to point a finger downward where the phone must be. At least it was in the middle of the road, in Blythe’s immediate path. A few raw steps brought him a glimpse of the aerial, miraculously intact, between the thighs of the singleted woman. He stooped without breaking his stride, and his scalp brushed her left buttock. His finger and thumb closed on the aerial and drew it toward him—only the aerial. He was staggering forward in his crouch when he saw most of the keypad being kicked away to his left, and several other plastic fragments skittering ahead.

As he straightened up, a grasp as hot and soft as flesh yet rough as concrete seemed to close around his skull. The singleted woman had turned on him. “Whose bum do you think you’re biting?”

Any number of hysterical replies occurred to him, but he managed to restrain himself. “I’m not after any of that, I’m after this.” The words sounded less than ideally chosen once they were out, especially since the aerial in his hand was rising between her legs as though magnetized by her crotch. He whipped it back, the grip on his skull threatening to blind him, and heard himself shouting. “Look at it. Who did this? Who smashed my phone? Where are your brains?”

“Don’t look at us,” said the woman with the increasingly bare and moist midriff, while the son leaned his dripping face into Blythe’s. “Keep the row up if you’re after an ear like my dad’s.” All at once they were irrelevant, and he let the aerial slip from his hand. There was at least one working phone in the tunnel.

As soon as he attempted to edge forward, the crowd swung its nearest heads toward him, its eyes blinking away sweat, its mouths panting hotly at him, and started to mutter and grumble. “What’s the panic? Wait your turn. We all want to get there. Keep your distance. There’s people here, you know,” it warned him in several voices, and raised one behind him. “Now where’s he scuttling off to? Must be afraid I’ll report him for going for my bum.”

The obstruction to his calls was about to turn physical if he couldn’t find a way to fend it off. “Emergency,” he murmured urgently in the nearest unmatched pair of ears, which after hesitating for a second parted their bodies to let him through. “Excuse me. Emergency. Excuse,” he repeated, stepping up the intensity, and was able to overtake enough people that he must be close to the phone. Which of the clump of blond heads belonged to it? Only one looked real. “Excuse me,” he said, and realizing that sounded as if he wanted to get by, took hold of its unexpectedly thin and angular shoulder. “You had the phone just now, didn’t you? I mean, you have—”

“Let go.”

“Yes. What I’m saying is, you’ve got—”

“Let go.”

“There. I have. Excuse me. My hand’s in my pocket, look. What I’m trying to say—”

The woman turned away as much of her sharp face as she’d bothered to incline toward him. “Not me.”

“I’m sure it was. Not my phone, not the one that was trodden on, but weren’t you talking on the phone before? If it wasn’t yours—”

She was surrounded by female heads, he saw, all of them preserving a defiant blankness. Without warning she snapped her head around, her hair lashing his right eye. “Who let you out? Which madhouse have they closed down now?”

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to…” That covered more than he had time to put into words, not least the inadvertent winks which his right eye must appear to be sharing with her. “It’s an emergency, you see. If it wasn’t you, you must have seen who it was with the phone. She was somewhere round here.”

All the heads in her clump jeered practically in unison, then used her head to speak. “It’s an emergency, all right, an emergency that you need locking up. Just you wait till we get out of here and talk to someone.”

That made Blythe peer at his watch. Sweat or a tear from his stinging eye bloated the digits, and he had to shake his wrist twice before he was able to distinguish that he would never reach the tunnel exit in time to find a phone outside. The crowd had beaten him—or perhaps not yet, unless he’d failed to notice it sending a message ahead that he was to be stopped. “Emergency. Emergency,” he said in a voice whose edge the heat seemed determined to blunt, and when he thought he’d sidled far enough away from the woman who wanted to persuade him he was going mad, he let his desperation grow louder. “Emergency. Need to phone. Has anyone a phone? Emergency.” A shake or a wave of the heat passed through bunch after bunch of heads, and each time it did so his right eye blinked and smarted. He was trying to sound more official and peremptory when his voice trailed off. At the limit of his vision the packed flesh beneath the unsteady lights had come to a complete stop.

He could only watch the stasis creeping toward him, wavering into place in layer after layer of flesh. It was his worst possible future racing to meet him, and the crowd had been on its side all along. As he heard a murmur advancing down the tunnel from the direction of the unseen exit, he strained his ears to hear what it was saying about him. He was feeling almost calm—for how long, he couldn’t predict—when words in an assortment of voices grew distinct. The message was past him before he succeeded in piecing it together. “Someone’s collapsed in the middle of the tunnel. They’re clearing the way for an ambulance.”

“Bastard,” Blythe snarled, not knowing if he meant the casualty or the crowd or the ambulance—and instantly knew he should mean none of them, because he was saved from the future he’d almost wished on himself. He began to shoulder his way forward. “Emergency. Make way, please. Make way,” he was able to say more officiously, and when that failed to clear his route fast enough, “Let me through. I’m a doctor.”

He mustn’t let himself feel guilty. The ambulance was coming—he could see the far end of the tunnel beginning to turn blue and shiver—and so he was hardly putting the patient at risk. The ambulance was his only hope. Once he was close enough he would be injured, he would be however disabled he needed to seem in order to persuade the crew to take him out of the crowd. “I’m a doctor,” he said louder, wishing he was and unmarried too, except that his life was controllable again, everything was under control. “I’m the doctor,” he said, better yet, strong enough to part the flesh before him and to blot out the voices that were discussing him. Were they trying to confuse him by dodging ahead of him? They had to be echoes, because he identified the voice of the woman who’d pretended she had no phone. “What’s he babbling about now?”

“He’s telling everyone he’s a doctor.”

“I knew it. That’s what they do when they’re mad.”

He needn’t let her bother him; nobody around him seemed to hear her—maybe she was fishing for him with her voice. “I’m the doctor,” he shouted, seeing the ambulance crawling toward him at the end of the visible stretch of tunnel. For a moment he thought it was crushing bruised people, exhaust fumes turning their pulse blue, against the walls, but of course they were edging out alongside it, making way. His shout had dislodged several voices from beneath the bleary sweat-stained lights. “What did she say he’s saying, he’s a doctor?”

“Maybe he wanted to examine your bum.”

“I know the kind of consultation I’d like to have with him. It was a quack made my dad’s ear worse.”

Could the crowd around Blythe really not hear them, or was it pretending ignorance until it had him where it wanted him? Wasn’t it parting for him more slowly than it should, and weren’t its heads only just concealing its contempt for his imposture? The mocking voices settled toward him, thickening the heat which was putting on flesh all around him. He had to use one of the walkways. Now that he had to reach the ambulance as speedily as possible, he was entitled to use them. “I’m the doctor,” he repeated fiercely, daring anyone to challenge him, and felt his left shoulder cleaving the saturated air. He’d almost reached the left-hand walkway when a leotarded woman whose muscles struck him as no more likely than her deep voice moved into his path. “Where are you trying to get to, dear?”

“Up behind you. Give me a hand, would you?” Even if she was a psychiatric nurse or warder, he had seniority. “I’m needed. I’m the doctor.”

Only her mouth moved, and not much of that. “Nobody’s allowed up there unless they work for the tunnel.”

He had to climb up before the heat turned into sweaty voices again and trapped him. “I do. I am. There’s been a collapse, the tunnel’s made them collapse, and they need me.”

He’d seen ventriloquists open their mouths wider. Her eyes weren’t moving at all, though a drop of sweat was growing on her right eyelashes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s all right, nurse. You aren’t required to. Just give me a hand. Give me a leg up,” Blythe said, and saw the drop swelling on her untroubled eyelid, swelling until he could see nothing else. If she was real she would blink, she wouldn’t stare at him like that. The mass of flesh had made her out of itself to block his plan, but it had miscalculated. He flung himself at her, dug his fingers into her bristly scalp, and heaved himself up with all the force his arms could muster.

His heels almost caught her shoulders. They scraped down to her breasts, which gave them enough leverage for him to vault over her. His hands grabbed at the railing, caught it, held on. His feet found the edge of the walkway, and he hauled one leg over the railing, then the other. Below him the nurse was clutching her breasts and emitting a sound which, if it was intended as a cry of pain, failed to impress him. Perhaps it was a signal, because he’d taken only a few steps along the way to freedom when hands commenced trying to seize him.

At first he thought they meant to injure him so that the ambulance would take him, and then he saw how wrong he was. He had an unobstructed view of the ambulance as it rammed its way through the crowd, its blue light pounding like his head, the white arch flaring blue above it as he felt the inside of his skull flaring. There was no sign of anyone collapsed ahead. The ambulance had been sent for Blythe, of course; the message had been passed along that they’d succeeded in driving him crazy. But they couldn’t conceal their opinion of him, hot oppressive breathless waves of which rose toward him and would have felt like shame if he hadn’t realized how they’d given themselves away: they couldn’t hold him in such contempt unless they knew more about him than they feigned to know. He kicked at the grasping fingers and glared about in search of a last hope. It was behind him. The woman with Lydia’s hair had abandoned her pretense of having no phone, and he had only to grab the aerial.

He dashed back along the walkway, hanging onto the rail and kicking out at anyone within reach, though his feet so seldom made contact that he couldn’t tell how many of the hands and heads were real. The woman who was still trying to convince him he’d injured her breasts flinched, which gratified him. She and the rest of the mob could move when they wanted to, they just hadn’t done so for him. The beckoning aerial led his gaze to the face dangling from it. She was staring at him and talking so hard her mouth shaped every syllable. “Here he comes now,” she mouthed.

She must be talking to the ambulance. Of course, she’d used the phone before to summon it, because she was another of the nurses. She’d better hand over the phone if she didn’t want worse than he was supposed to have done to her colleague. “Here I come, all right,” he yelled, and heard what sounded like the entire crowd, though perhaps only the tunnel that was his head, echoing him. As he ran the tunnel widened, carrying her farther from the walkway, too far for him to grab the aerial over the crowd. They thought they’d beaten him, but they were going to help him again. He vaulted the railing and ran across the mass of flesh.

It wasn’t quite as solid as he had assumed, but it would do. The heat of its contempt streamed up at him, rebounding from the dank concrete of his skull. Was it contemptuous of what he was doing or of his failure to act when he could have? He had a sudden notion, so terrible it almost caused him to lose his footing, that when he raised the phone to his ear he would discover the woman had been talking to Valerie. It wasn’t true, and only the heat was making him think it. Stepping-stones turned up to him and gave way underfoot—there went some teeth and there, to judge by its yielding, an eye—but he could still trample his way to the phone, however many hands snatched at him.

Then the aerial whipped out of his reach like a rod that had caught a fish. The hands were pulling him down into their contempt, but they weren’t entitled to condemn him: he hadn’t done anything they weren’t about to do. “I’m you,” he screamed, and felt the shoulders on which he’d perched move apart farther than his legs could stretch. He whirled his arms, but this wasn’t a dream in which he could fly away from everything he was. Too late he saw why the woman had called the ambulance for him. He might have screamed his thanks to her, but he could make no words out of the sounds which countless hands were dragging from his mouth.

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