Justin didn’t believe them; he knew then that they’d tricked him about Harley, but it didn’t matter, as far as the plates were concerned. It didn’t matter if he told them what he’d done with the plates, because they couldn’t get them again, and they wouldn’t tell the police. So he told them, quite willingly.
But they didn’t believe him. They said he’d hidden the plates and was lying. They tortured him to make him tell. They beat him, and they cut him with knives, and they held burning matches and lighted cigars to the soles of his feet, and they pushed needles under his fingernails. Then they’d rest and ask him questions and if he could talk, he’d tell them the truth, and after a while they’d start to torture him again.
It went on for days and weeks—Justin doesn’t know how long, but it was a long time. Once they went away for several days and left him tied up with nothing to eat or drink. They came back and started in all over again. And all the time he hoped Harley would come to help him, but Harley didn’t come, not then.
After a while what was happening in the cabin ended, or anyway he didn’t know any more about it. They must have thought he was dead; maybe they were right, or anyway not far from wrong.
The next thing he knows was the swamp. He was lying in shallow water at the edge of deeper water. His face was out of the water; it woke him when he turned a little and his face went under. They must have thought him dead and thrown him into the water, but he had floated into the shallow part before he had drowned, and a last flicker of consciousness had turned him over on his back with his face out.
I don’t remember much about Justin in the swamp; it was a long time, but I just remember flashes of it. I couldn’t move at first; I just lay there in the shallow water with my face out. It got dark and it got cold, I remember, and finally my arms would move a little and I got farther out of the water, lying in the mud with only my feet in the water. I slept or was unconscious again and when I woke up it was getting gray dawn, and that was when Harley came. I think I’d been calling him, and he must have heard.
He stood there, dressed as immaculately and perfectly as ever, right in the swamp, and he was laughing at me for being so weak and lying there like a log, half in the dirty water and half in the mud, and I got up and nothing hurt any more.
We shook hands and he said, “Come on, Justin, let’s get you out of here,” and I was so glad he’d come that I cried a little. He laughed at me for that and said I should lean on him and he’d help me walk, but I wouldn’t do that, because I was coated with mud and filth of the swamp and he was so clean and perfect in a white linen suit, like an ad in a magazine. And all the way out of that swamp, all the days and nights we spent there, he never even got mud on his trouser cuffs, nor his hair mussed.
I told him just to lead the way, and he did, walking just ahead of me, sometimes turning around, laughing and talking to me and cheering me up. Sometimes I’d fall but I wouldn’t let him come back and help me. But he’d wait patiently until I could get up. Sometimes I’d crawl instead when I couldn’t stand up any more. Sometimes I’d have to swim streams that he’d leap lightly across.
And it was day and night and day and night, and sometimes I’d sleep, and things would crawl across me. And some of them I caught and ate, or maybe I dreamed that. I remember other things, in that swamp, like an organ that played a lot of the time, and sometimes angels in the air and devils in the water, but those were delirium, I guess.