Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane (18 page)

Groper, during this period, quietly took to drink as well as to lengthy conversations with Sergeant Bemish on the nature of matter. He developed a habit of saying “Fascinating!”, which eventually grated on Bemish, who began sedulously to avoid him; though sometimes Groper, in his cups, would pursue him into the tunnels, muttering cosmological inanities, such as, “Where does space end?” Once, in one of the tunnels, Bemish said, “Groper, get off my back!” and when Groper answered serenely with “E = MC
2
,” Bemish threw dirt into his face. Then Groper muttered “Fascinating!”, and Bemish frankly screamed.

Fell, for the most part, was missing, his room invariably locked and equally impervious to knocking. Once in a while he was seen in the clinic, and on one of these occasions Captain Groper complained of a hangover, whereupon Fell lectured him severely on the evils of “demon rum.” He also refused him aspirin, bawling, “Let this be a lesson, lush!” Groper felt rejected, but mumbled, “Fell, I bear you no malice.” Fell crammed dental floss down his throat.

Kane once again was tormented by doubt; then by nightmares; then by headache. Cutshaw continued his quizzes, and when he seemed lucid, Kane felt hope. Then Cutshaw would lapse once again into lunacy; or its pretense; Kane no longer distinguished. The only apparent result of Kane’s therapy was an evident and increasing madness among the members of his staff. Kane began to crack. He complained to Cutshaw about the tunneling.

“Thirteen tunnels! That’s enough!” he snapped, his night spent sleepless in headache.

Cutshaw drew himself erect. “No, Colonel Streicher! The work must go on!”

“Until when?”

“Until
when?
Until the maze is completed!”

Kane wiped sweat from his forehead. His doubts had grown monstrous, Hydra-headed and hissing.

“Moreover,” continued Cutshaw, “I must protest in the strongest terms a certain flagrant contravention of the Geneva Convention! Conditions in these tunnels are
disgraceful,
Colonel Streicher! I insist upon our rights!”

“Namely what?”

“Namely, proper toilet facilities every fifty feet of tunnel!”

Kane felt an impulse to strike him, an impulse he barely resisted; then an urge to blurt out the truth; to tell Cutshaw he knew that he was pretending. But he merely stared for a moment, then abruptly walked away. En route to his room he was mauled by a dog. Groper, who saw it happen, shook his head and said “Fascinating!” Bemish was not there to hear it; undoubtedly a phenomenon to which Groper owed his life.

Several days later, Cutshaw was shocked when some of the inmates expressed boredom with tunneling. There was a briskness in their mood, an awareness like spring and reawakening. Then when Cutshaw saw Klenk at a window, staring up at the puffy contrails of a B-58 with an expression that might have been longing, Cutshaw grew furious and ordered him down to the tunnels. He also determined that the “Great Escape” must move to another phase. That night he bearded Kane.

*   *   *

“You want to do
what?
” exclaimed Kane.

“Switch sides!” repeated Cutshaw. “Starting this very night, Fritz, you and the staff will be inmates, see, and
we
will be the staff! Psychologists call it role-playing! But then,
you
wouldn’t know.” He tossed a slim yellow folder onto Kane’s desk. “Here, study your script!”

“Script?”

“Tonight’s interrogation, dunce! We’ll find that new tunnel or break every one of you!” Cutshaw leaned across Kane’s desk and quickly flipped to a page in the script. “Notice, incidentally, that you crack on page two. First, you scream horribly, then—”

Fairbanks interrupted in a manner that was hard to ignore. He had zoomed into the office on his “Steve McQueen” cycle, flipping the handlebars acrobatically so that the spinning front wheel wound up resting on Kane’s desk. Cutshaw eyed him serenely. “Shouldn’t you have knocked?”

“The door was open,” said Fairbanks. Then he squeezed the cycle’s horn, which emitted a raucous blast. “Breakthrough,” announced Fairbanks, “in Tunnel Fourteen!”

Cutshaw went down with him into the tunnels, and found that the men had intersected a concrete-lined passageway that ran beneath the mansion. Outside the opening that led into it, Zook and Bemish played gin. Cutshaw poked his head into the passageway briefly, then turned and looked at Fairbanks. “Where does it go?”

“I dunno. Spoor’s checking it out.”

Cutshaw heard a yapping from somewhere in the maze. He turned a frimmled eye on Fairbanks. “Kindly instruct Lieutenant Spoor to keep his dogs out of the tunnels! There’s slippage enough as it is!” Then he turned on Zook and Bemish. “Idiots, up!… No flaking off!”

“We’re tired. Tired of the whole damn bit,” said Zook.

“Up, you laggards, up!” roared Cutshaw. “Switch uniforms with the staff!” The men leaped up, for in Cutshaw’s voice was a surprisingly genuine anger. Fairbanks looked at him oddly, and saw in his eyes a desperation that almost caused him to gasp in shock. He followed the others out of the tunnel.

*   *   *

Leslie Spoor was padding cautiously along the passageway with a flashlight, flicking its beam over bas-relief horror masks that were inset in the walls. He was not happy with his surroundings. And he felt terribly alone, Rip Torn having demurred from joining him in a manner hardly calculated to shore up his master’s spirits: he had poked his snout into the passage, then scrambled backward in a frenzy, tucking his tail between his legs, and thereupon ululating horribly. Spoor had then said “Shit!”, but he had drawn the low card.

Spoor suddenly halted. The beam of his flashlight had picked up the outlines of something that looked like a door in the wall. He moved in closer, but could find no doorknob; no handle; no lever. Only a frieze of Bela Slovik in the center of the door. Spoor delicately probed with his fingers, gouging its eyes, picking its ears. When he pressed the head’s nose, it depressed like a doorbell. Spoor jumped back. The door was opening, silently sliding into the wall. Flickering light snaked across Spoor’s face. Then he slowly stepped into the room. And gaped in awe and amazement.

Set high on the walls, burning bright, were flaming torches that cast their light on a scene from Poe at his most intimidating. Toothy bats were strung from the ceiling, hanging by wires that were almost invisible and hovering low over lifelike wax effigies that were clearly unrelated to pop art: a hooded executioner holding his ax upraised over a kneeling, terrified victim; a severed head sitting in a bird cage, its mouth gaping in scream; a half-naked girl manacled to a zombie. Plastered all over the walls were lurid posters hawking films that Bela Slovik had once made famous. And in the center of the room, surrounded by votive candles and flowers, resting on an inclined ramp, lay a heavy, open coffin containing a lifelike effigy of Slovik.

Spoor’s showmanship quelled his fears. He moved closer to the coffin, looked down at the flowers, gently plucked one and sniffed. “Fresh!” he marveled softly. “And who lit the candles?” He stared at the Slovik effigy. “
You,
little pussycat?”

The Slovik effigy sat up, opened its eyes and leered fiendishly. And in a rasping, horrible voice, it said: “I love you!”

Spoor shrieked.

*   *   *

Kane was lacing his sneakers. He’d just traded uniforms with Cutshaw at the astronaut’s insistence. Now he knotted the laces and looked in the mirror. The sleeves of the sweater were inches too short. Same with the trousers. Too short. What am I doing? Kane wondered abruptly. What’s happening? What? Spasmodically, he clutched at his head, tried to smother the fire that licked at his brain. Then once more he caught his reflection. And suddenly he giggled; then began to laugh hysterically, doubling over onto the couch. Abruptly he sobered, left the office. Fell would have something strong—stronger than aspirin—for the pain. En route to the clinic, he walked past Groper, who was sitting rather despondently on the back of one of the sofas, moody head resting on a fist. He was still in Nazi uniform.

“You’re out of uniform,” said Kane as he passed him.

“No one would trade with me,” Groper sulked.

The clinic was locked. Fell wasn’t there. Kane stared at the door for several moments, felt paint splattering onto his head. He craned his neck at Corfu, who had almost completed his painting: destroyers and carriers cutting through waters, beneath them a massive multicolored slogan reading:
“U.S. Navy! Our first line of defense!”

A pack of dogs, running through the hall, almost knocked Kane off his feet. Pain again, deep. He felt at a temple, throbbing, throbbing; then found himself staring at one of the canvases set up in the middle of the hall: the one of the finger pierced by a needle, dripping blood, red, red.… Kane took the painting from its easel and carried it upstairs.

*   *   *

Fell lay sprawled in bed wearing gaily striped pajamas. He was examining his reflection in a gilded, ornate hand-mirror. On his head was a stiff white “fright wig.” “Say something in Doctor Zorba,” he mumbled, as his door lock suddenly clicked home. Fell looked up at the Lady in Black. She pulled back her veil and uttered “Norman!”

“Consuelo!” husked Fell.

*   *   *

Consuelo Endicott took a flying leap at the bed, crying, “I can only stay a minute!”

They did not answer Kane’s urgent knocking.

Kane went to his quarters, set down the painting, then went in to the bathroom and washed his hands. He washed them for twenty minutes.

*   *   *

Cutshaw was leaning against a tree, deep in the wood that surrounded the mansion, when Spoor at last found him. He’d been there an hour, brooding on Kane; on himself; on his motives. He needed Kane, he knew that. That was his reason for sending in Spoor: to entice the Colonel into staying. He’d thought all along that he was sane, his problem wholly unrelated to that of the other inmates; he thought he’d been telling Kane obliquely how to help them; how to cure them. But what of himself? Where lay truth? He did not know. He merely suspected.

A clap of thunder turned Cutshaw’s gaze upward. Rain clouds were sweeping in angrily off the sea. He turned up the black leather collar of the SS uniform, feeling a chill; yet there was no breeze. He noticed the birds had ceased their twittering. Abruptly he smiled at a random thought. Once he had been an altar boy. What would Kane ever think of that? It began to rain.

Spoor leaped out from behind a bush. “He’s alive!”

“Who?”

“Slovik! Bela Slovik! He’s alive!”

“Let go my arm,” said the moody Cutshaw.

“He’s
alive,
I tell you! I
saw
him!”

“You’re crazy!”

“But he spoke!”

“Spoke
what?
What did he
say?
”

“He said, ‘I love you!’” said Leslie Spoor.

Cutshaw shrieked and lifted an arm as though to strike a savage blow. Spoor scuttled backward, tripped on a rock, fell to his knees, recovered and ran. Cutshaw moved deeper into the wood, into the light but steady rain; deeper into himself.

*   *   *

Spoor pounced severally on the inmates, insisting that “Slovik is alive!” He tried to draw them into the tunnels, and from thence into the passageway, but his efforts were rudely resisted. One of the men roundly cuffed him. At last, he shouted his claims to Corfu, who listened attentively, politely, then spilled green paint into Spoor’s raving mouth.

“Medic!” bawled Spoor, then realized the ultimate futility of ever finding Fell. He cried out, “Kane! Colonel Kane!” He raced to Kane’s office, and not finding him there, rushed up the staircase and burst into his room. Kane was examining the painting of the impaled index finger. Something had been added—from the end of the needle dangled a skeleton, a rope around its neck.

“Colonel Pussycat, you’ve been had!” blurted Spoor, his cheeks turned red with anger.

“What?”

“
Had!
You’ve been
had!
All that foop about Hamlet’s madness, sir! Cutshaw put me up to it! And only to get you in
trouble!
See? Merely to keep you
around!
”

“I have known for some time,” said Kane. “The theory is nonetheless true.”

“Nuts! We’re all still crazy as bedbugs! Yes! Crazier than
before!
And I demand that Cutshaw be punished! Punished
severely,
you understand? He is a toad and not at all nice! Not at all—!” Spoor abruptly noticed the painting. “Hey, that’s
mine!
That’s my
painting!
Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it—!” He craned his neck at the painting. “Hey, somebody
ruined
it! Who did the skeleton? What lackey destroyed my work of art?”

Kane’s eyes were vague, his voice low and dim. “Are you mad? Truly mad?”

“Yes! Except Tuesdays! Tuesdays I’m not sure!”

“And Cutshaw?”

“Out of his
mind!
Nonetheless he needs punishment! Are you going to punish him?”

Kane stared down at the painting and said, “Yes—I am going to punish him.”

“Grand! May I be so bold as to suggest the means? Let’s do
Titus Andronicus
and bake him in pie!”

Kane’s telephone rang. “Please leave,” he said to Spoor. When Spoor had gone, Kane answered the phone. It was Syntax, calling to advise that General Lastrade and Senator Hesburgh would be visiting them early the following day. Syntax asked for reassurance that the men were “all right.”

“They’re all right,” said Kane numbly. “I guarantee—they’re all right.” He hung up and murmured, “They
will
be.”

Kane walked to the door of his room, opened it wide and looked down the hall—at the pack of yapping dogs; at Corfu on his scaffold; at Krebs in Nazi uniform; at the myriad mounds of dirt heaped beside entrances to tunnels; then at himself, in Cutshaw’s clothing. He saw Fairbanks zoom out of the dormitory, trick-riding his motorcycle, and noisily hurdling a sofa. Kane summoned Krebs and informed him of the coming inspection, asked him to summon Captain Groper. Krebs reported Groper missing. He was last seen entering the tunnels and had yet to emerge.