Pity Him Afterwards

He didn’t slow down when he reached the trees above, but pulled himself upward through them, grasping at trunks and shrubbery with his left hand, jerking himself forward from hold to hold, the suitcase bumping and dragging along behind him. The ground here was less even, scored with thick roots and pocked with stones, dangerous with mulch-filled craters that gave no footing. But the slope was less steep, and he drove himself forward, stumbling and panting, pursued by Doctor Chax, who skimmed along effortlessly a yard above the ground, his long white coat trailing like a nightgown, his progress unencumbered by a heavy suitcase and the need to crawl on the surface of the earth rather than fly. But though he had the unfair advantages, and though he was just behind, he could never quite catch up.

The madman’s groping left hand closed on barkless wood, above him and across his path. He made a startled noise, feeling the smooth undulant surface beneath his hand, and then grasped it tighter and pulled himself upward, his feet scrabbling at the rocky ground.

A railing. A fence, fence of some sort. It was pitch-black here, under the trees. But ahead of him was grayness, as though there were a level cleared surface beyond the fence.

The fence was made of two crossbars, one about two feet from the ground and the second another two feet higher. The madman pushed the suitcase under the lower bar, then crawled between the two bars and straightened on the other side.

He was standing on gravel. He had come up at the corner of a lookout parking area beside a small blacktop road. There was no traffic on the road and, because it was a Monday night, no cars parked by the lookout. On the weekend lovers and policemen came up here.

He felt the need to keep running, but his breath was ragged and there was a sharp pain in his side. He leaned against the top railing of the fence, doubled over, trying to catch his breath and to make the pain go away, and listened for the sounds of the pursuers. But they were moving more cautiously, searching for him in crannies and behind trees, and he had outdistanced them. He couldn’t even see their flashlights any more.

When the pain lessened and his breathing grew less difficult, he straightened and turned away from the railing. Carrying the suitcase, he walked across the softly crackling gravel to the blacktop road. There was a double white line up the middle of the road, a faint smear in the darkness. He stood on the white line a moment, and considered.

He had been going up. They would expect him to continue going up. So he would fool them. He would follow the road downward.

He no longer felt the same urgency. He had outdistanced them, and outfoxed them. So he walked at a normal pace down the road, keeping in the middle, walking on the double white line. There was no traffic at all.

He walked for twenty minutes and then he came to a house and a garage. There was a light on in the office of the garage — an illuminated clock, that was all — but the garage was closed. The pumps out front were dark and the floodlights at either end of the garage property were dark and the big gasoline emblem sign was dark.

The house was behind the garage, an old two-story clapboard house, with faint lights showing in the downstairs front windows. The people who lived in the house were probably the ones who operated the garage.

The madman crept up past the garage, toward the house. The illuminated clock on the garage office wall read five minutes after twelve. It threw the faintest of light on the madman as he moved past the window, heading toward the house. He was wearing a dark gray suit, old and wrinkled and shapeless, the coat hanging open and the sleeves too short. He wore a battered hat on his head, one he’d found in a dump by the roadside on his flight from the asylum; the hat had obviously been thrown away because it was out of style, with a brim too wide for current fashion. The suitcase he carried, which forced him to walk in a lurching half-crouch, was bulky and black, fastened with leather straps. Suitcase from the driver who had given him a lift, hat from the dump, suit from the janitor’s closet in the basement of the asylum.

The house was up a short slope from the road, with uneven slate steps up the slope to the porch. The slate steps were flanked by rock gardens.

The madman left the suitcase on the ground next to the porch, then climbed noiselessly up the stoop and over the porch to the nearest window. He looked in and saw a barrelchested old man with gray hair asleep in an armchair. The armchair had maroon slipcovers with a design of great white flowers. The old man wore a dark-patterned flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and gray work trousers, and black wool socks but no shoes.

There were two light sources. One was a table lamp on a drum table beside the sleeping old man, shining on the gnarled hands resting in his lap. The other was a television set across the room, showing a commercial.