hung from a snake-like wire from the ceiling. The smells, claustrophobic lack
of height to the room. The walls that seemed to press in like a torture device.
He gasped again.
How could people live this way? Suddenly, and for the first time in his
life, he could understand a bit, the mechanisms that drive poverty stricken
people to crime.
He knuckled his eyes. He shook his head. Not even a door to separate the
odorous kitchen from the next room. In the center of the tiny room, the knife
sticking up at right angles from the floor, was a magnet that kept pulling his
eyes back, no matter how he tried to avoid it.
What had happened since he opened the outside door expecting, hoping,
praying, to find an exit? Violence, certainly. He turned away from the kitchen
toward the other room. The answer seemed to be in there... the answer to be,
too, that there was no exit.
He started toward the doorway without a door twice, before he finally
managed to make his muscles answer the commands his brain sent to them.
He saw his fate when he got into the other room. On the only chair in the
room sat a man. He was so dead that it seemed unlikely that he had ever been
alive.
His clenched hands were pressed into his stomach. His fingers had not been
enough to dam up that which welled between his fingers. The chair with its
burden, an unmade bed with soiled bed clothes, a picture of September Morn that
hung aslant on the wall, a jacket, worn and torn, hanging from a nail that had
shattered the plaster around it, a worn and greasy looking felt hat... was
there anything else?
A bag of tobacco and some crumpled pieces of cigarette paper lay on the
floor in front of the chair. The living man went closer to the dead man. The
dead man's hands suddenly dropped from his stomach. Something hard and round
dropped from the red gloved hands.
The man who could still breathe stopped breathing as he bent over and
looked closely at the thing that lay on the floor. It looked like a marble.
He looked from the marble up at the dead man's face and then wished that
he hadn't. The man in life had worn a glass eye. Minus the eye, the gaping
wound was obscene.
Not really knowing what he was doing, the live man picked up the glass eye
and dropped it into his pocket. He whirled. There had been a sound behind him.
The sound was made by the door opening. Only then did the young man in any
way come out of the fog that surrounded him. He felt his head. There was a small
lump over his ear. He had been slugged... that was clear.
In the short time it took the door to open all the way, he saw that he was
a goner. Here he was the only human in a room with a corpse. On the floor
outside was the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it.
In the other room was that which would send him to his death. It was too
much. He began to giggle.
The door was all the way open now. A tall man with a gaunt strong face
came into the room. His profile was hatchet shaped. It was the man who had been
trailing him, the giggling man saw.
His giggles got so loud now that they drowned all sounds out. He did not
even hear what his trailer said. The hunter had caught the hunted.
The older man slapped the younger's face. The sound was like that of a
