Mishap Upon Mishap
It is impossible to say how long I lay there cramped in the gloom. It may have been only minutes, but it seemed hours, while the howls and wailings of the rabble came to my ears through the thin slit of iron that saved me from their fury. "This way! No, that way! No, you fools, the other way!" I heard them shrilling in their confusion, as their feet went scampering in a hundred directions. "Catch him! Catch him! Don't let the villain get away! We'll teach him; we'll teach him! We'll make mincemeat of the devil!" And then, more sinister still, I heard someone exclaiming, "Hey, boys, got the rope?... Knot it tight there!..."
At these words I felt an intense desire to creep farther down into my hiding place, but was unable to do so. My feet were resting on a ledge only a foot or two wide, and beneath me vacancy seemed to yawn. I felt sure that I was on the brink of a precipice, for a pebble or fragment of metal, accidentally dislodged by my foot, rattled for a long while as it descended. Meantime I was in as uncomfortable a position as one could imagine; huddled against the iron most awkwardly while a chilly breath of air continually blew over me. I was not only catching cold, but—much worse—had reason to fear that I might sneeze at any moment, so betraying my hiding-place.
At last, however, the tumult of the multitude subsided, and I could hear the shouting of my pursuers at a distance, and then at a farther distance, and then die out entirely ... so that I knew, to my enormous relief, that they had gone off on the wrong scent.
Even so, it did not seem safe to lift the iron lid as yet—who knew what member of the mob might not be lurking about? And so I remained crouched there in the darkness, waiting, waiting....
But I had delayed too long. After a while, I again heard the sound of voices, of voices lifted in loud excitement. Were my pursuers returning? Not so! As I held my breath and listened, I recognized that these were different voices. "The ventilation! What's happened to the ventilation?" I could hear one of the newcomers crying. "Something must have blocked it! It's not been working right!"
"Been out of gear half an hour, at least!" returned another. "They say the disturbance centers somewhere up this way!"
"Hard to tell where the trouble is!" grumbled a third. "Complaints coming in for miles around!"
"Well, if anything got into one of those pipes," declared the first, "it would stop the air currents over the whole district!"
As I listened to this conversation, a thrill of horror and a sense of guilt shot over me. All too well I understood what was blocking the ventilation!
"Remember that last time!" continued one of the men. "Some big rats got caught in one of the tubes! We had to shoot in some Mulflar, and blow them to cinders!"
By this time the men were almost directly above me, and I was fervently praying for them to pass on without suspecting my presence. But such, alas!—was not to be. Just as the heavy feet of the foremost rattled on the iron lid above my head, I was overwhelmed by the desire to sneeze. The impulse came so suddenly that it was impossible to check; the best I could do was to muffle it, so that it had a stifled sound not at all like a sneeze—though still, unfortunately, all too audible.
I could hear the men pausing just above my head, with surprised exclamations. I knew that they were listening, waiting; I could almost feel their attention focused in my direction.
"What's that?" one of them snapped. "Didn't it sound like a rat?"
"Sure enough!" cried another. "A rat! That's what's stuffed up the ventilation!"
"Most likely a whole colony of rats!" added a fourth. "They grow big down here, you know!"
"And here's the very place!" took up the first. "Right in this air-tube! Well, we'll fix them all right!" And I could hear the man rattling at the iron lid above my head.
Never before had I wished so ardently for the power of invisibility. Never had I had such a desire to compress myself to a thimble's size. Hopelessly I huddled against my iron ledge; then, fearing that I would be seen, I resorted to the desperate expedient of hanging over the brim, holding on to the ledge with both hands, while my body lay along an iron surface sloping at an angle of forty-five degrees.
No sooner had I gained this position than I heard the lid heavily clanging out of place; and a flood of light burst upon me. In the glare above, several chalk-faces were staring down at me!
"There it is! A big rat! A mighty big one! One of the biggest I ever saw!" exclaimed one of the men, in awed tones.
Evidently, because of their inability to see things near at hand, they had mistaken me for a rodent!
"Well, we'll get rid of him fast enough!" a second man declared. "Just one minute there! Let me have that brush! I'll spray him with poison!"
It had never occurred to me, until that moment, to have any sympathy with a trapped rat. But I could feel boundless sympathy as a huge brush, malodorous with some vile-smelling concoction, was thrust through the opening directly at my face.
I do not know whether I cried out in my terror. But I do know that my hands, as I struggled to evade that foul oncoming weapon, lost their precarious grip on the ledge. And, the next instant, I had gone shooting off into the darkness.
To this day, I believe that it is a miracle that I survived. Certainly, the gods of good fortune were with me in the ensuing plunge. I could easily have broken my head or caved in my ribs against the steel projections of the ventilating system. Only sheer lucky chance, and the fact that the ventilating tubes were not perpendicular, saved me from what, in the words of the natives, would have been a sudden and horrible "turnover." Down, down, down, I shot, skimming around curves, banging against unseen bends and corners, tumbling head over heels in a mad dash, wherein it was impossible to regain my balance. Surely, no circus performer ever took so strange, so perilous a dive! Only now and then could I momentarily check my speed, when the tube, for a few feet, became almost horizontal; but always it would dip sharply again, and I would go falling once more through the darkness.
It seemed that I had traveled thus for miles when suddenly, with a terrific bang, I collided with a wall, and came to a halt, stunned, bruised, and bleeding in fifty places. With painful difficulty, I picked myself up, while noting with relief a slit of light through the partition I had just struck. It was, in fact, not a wall at all, but a partly opened door!
Then, as my dazed senses gradually cleared, I became aware of something familiar in my surroundings. Did this not resemble the ventilating duct, which opened on the office where I had worked, and which I had so disliked to clean with a mop?
Still feeling somewhat dizzy, I crept out of the doorway and found myself in a large, well-lighted chamber—not, indeed, my former place of employment, but so similar that I knew it to be another office of the Ventilation Company.
Before I had had time to reflect on my plight, or wonder what next to do, I was startled to see four or five men who, drawn by the noise of my arrival, came rushing out of several adjoining rooms.
Upon seeing me, they stopped short with loud, excited cries, whose import I could not quite gather. I only knew that they were employees of the Ventilation Company; that they were pointing in much agitation to my pitiful self, with my torn clothes and blood-smeared features—and that, in another moment, they would seize me and carry me away to some new punishment.
Had I had the energy, I would have crawled back into the ventilating tube for safety. But so weak had I become that I could only fall sagging to the floor and wait despairingly while the chalk-faces drew near.
"Who in the name of Thuno Flâtum are you? Where did you come from?" demanded the foremost of the strangers, as he regarded my battered form. "You know, it's forbidden to enter the ventilating ducts!"
"Yes, I know!" I moaned. And then—I cannot say by what inspiration—I added, "I am an employee of the Company."
"Oh, an employee of the Company?" The chalk-faces stared at one another significantly, and their manner became more friendly. "Of course, that's different!"
Yet their next words struck me like a deadly shock.
"We had better go and report to the Manager!" they all decided while I sought to dissuade them with my last remaining gasp of energy. Into my mind had flashed visions of the penalty for my various breaches of duty. Well I knew that any Underworld judge would be justified, three times over, in sentencing me to the violet-ray!
But, plead as I might, the ventilating men were inexorable. "No, we must report to the Manager! The rules require it!" they insisted, as one of them set off to perform his dread duty.
This assertion was to me as the last straw. Weakened by the day's torments and by loss of blood, terrified at the thought of the ordeal that awaited me on the Manager's arrival, I could not endure this new shock; a merciful unconsciousness swept over me, numbing my pain and blurring my mind to nothingness.