the roof. His frantic eyes lighted on a door near him. There was a sliver of
light stabbing out into the darkness that hung in this hall even in the day
time.
The door must be slightly ajar to allow all that light to escape. He
reached for the door knob. If he could throw himself on the mercy of whoever
occupied these rooms...
He slid the door open quietly. He stepped into the room. That was all.
Time came to a halt. It was as though he had stepped from one universe into
nothingness.
CHAPTER II
HE opened his eyes. Lines. Wavy lines that shimmered off into the
distance. His eyes couldn't focus on whatever it was that he was staring at. He
blinked them.
Nothing happened. The same brown dirty lines wavered off out of the range
of his vision. He moved his head. Something was wrong with it. The lines
wavered then came together. He thought suddenly, stupidly, parallel lines
extended into infinity do not meet.
He pressed his hands down. They met resistance. He moved. His hands were
pressed flat on the floor. The reason he had not been able to make out the
lines was that his eyes were too close to the lines.
He was lying full length on the floor. The lines were the demarcations
between splintered boards that made up the floor. He lifted his head which felt
mushy. There was no pain, not yet, but it felt as though his brains had been
cooked over a slow fire. He sat up.
He was in a tenement kitchen. That seemed a little bizarre, but then, so
did everything else. There, not far away, was a stove. It was greasy and grimy.
There was a pot of something on the front burner. He twitched his nostrils.
Whatever was on the stove was burning.
He tilted forward as he got to his knees. Only then did he realize that he
had something in his hand. He looked at it dully. It was a knife. A bread knife
with a serrated edge that looked something like the Malay kriss his father had
hanging on the wall in his study.
He dropped the knife. It made the only sound in the room but that of the
spluttering pot on the stove. By some freak of chance it stuck point first in
the wooden floor. It quivered. The quivering put into motion a red fluid. It
seemed to be the wrong color for blood.
Blood? That set off an alarm bell in the confused brain that was the only
sentient thing in the room. He thought. Blood? Somebody been carving a roast?
He staggered to the stove and turned the gas off. That made the room
completely still. Now all he could hear was his own rasping breath.
His staggering, wobbling progression carried him to a doorway that
separated the kitchen from another room. There was no door, he noted, with an
unused section of his brain. Just a doorway where there must once have been a
door.
Standing in the doorway, he took some deep gulps of breath. He was trying
to get some sanity into his brain. He stood there and looked back at the room.
The stove, the bare floor, the dingy ceiling, the fly specked bulb that
