Vagabond
by CHARLES TIMM
Van Young hated crowds—the noise, the having to think of things to say. And, so, entering an almost-empty diner eased that worry. A young couple sat in a booth. Two men shared stools at the counter. The bright light showed the rest of the place was empty tables and neat rows of pushed-in chairs cribbed by dusky windows red with road-sign light.
Van sat down a few stools away from the men—both older, one uniformed and one grimy—hunched in private conversation. Thwarting thieves, he put one leg through a strap on his backpack on the floor. He took a menu from the smiling waitress in aqua-blue and white, who poured him a coffee without asking and took his order for apple pie. And as she walked back to the counter, he let his gaze go over to the two men. Van noticed that the one sitting farther away was a sheriff. There was the official sarcastic body. The nylon of olive green. The polyester of beige. And when the man tilted his head, the prickly gray mustache that said, “Just wait until I find a reason.”
Van felt sympathy for the other man. He wore dark brown and black wool, and looked homeless, almost . . . buggy.
As the minutes passed and Van unwound, he did his best to savor his apple pie and sip his java from what he thought a surprisingly thick, heavy mug. But his ears were always keen, and he couldn’t help but overhear what the sheriff was saying to the homeless man.
“A room and food. And clothes, too, nice clothes.”
The homeless man, bent like a tent over the counter, sleepy or easing his back, grumbled “Yeah”—or something like it.
“You interested?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Suddenly, the waitress had returned. Middle-aged with hair of wavy brown and a name badge reading Sharon, she refilled Van’s mug.
Impulsively, he leaned forward.
“I heard the sheriff—.”
“I’ll tell him,” Sharon interrupted, stopped short in her pouring to step away.
However Sharon put it, it made the sheriff gulp and glare like a careless killer at the young backpacker. The sheriff stood up, rifled bills, slapped a pair of them onto the counter, and patted all around himself for his gun and other gear. With a hitchhiker thumb, he sent the homeless man out front. Then he walked Van’s way.
***
Van Young had wanted to ask the waitress a few questions about what he’d heard. Just 23, he’d already quit so many things—jobs and schools and romances after single dates. And, now, he was already tired of vagabonding. But if he could get one of those charity rooms, it would almost be like he had an apartment. After only a couple of weeks on the road, he could tell that to his folks, and they’d be proud of him.
“What’ve we got?” the sheriff asked.
“He heard you about the rooms,” Sharon told him, still with the same coffee pot.
The sheriff smiled and bit his lip at the same time. With each of his weapons glaring—big, dense, and violent—he sat down heavy and slow, like his time was being wasted. He silently regarded the side of Van’s head, as though, if it came to it, that’s where he’d land one of those weapons.
Finally, he spoke. “I’m Sheriff Cavanaugh.”
Van turned his gaze to Sharon. She crowded him less. Looking at her, he could move and breathe. He liked her hair, romantic even after she almost dropped the coffee pot onto the warmer plate. He liked how she folded her arms and came back to stand across the counter from the two men, to nervously twist in place.
Van had to force his eyes back to the sheriff. “You mentioned rooms to that man,” he said. “I’m interested.”
“They’re for the homeless. Are you homeless?”
“No,” Sharon said.
“I’m vagabonding.”
“Vagabonding.” Sheriff Cavanaugh disapproved.
“Backpacking around. Seeing the country.” Van imagined it that way, even if he had only left home a hundred miles ago.
“Where you from?”
“Crestfall.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Taking the unbeaten path.”
Van could see that Sheriff Cavanaugh needed an explanation of that one.
“Staying away from the usual places. Paying cash. No phone.”
“You got parents?”
“Yes, and they miss him,” Sharon broke in.
“They know you’re here?”
“No. But I call them every few days.”
“Anybody know you’re here?”
“No. And that makes me kind of homeless.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sharon mumbled.
Sheriff Cavanaugh stood up and, with his traffic-stop hand, put an end to Sharon’s protest. He looked at Van, and said, “I’ll drive you over.”
***
The young vagabond felt safer chauffeured in the sheriff's car rather than hitchhiking beside the road. Without a doubt, this was a great idea.
“I feel better now,” he said, from the back seat.
“Uh-huh.”
“Back home, I was about to rent an apartment. I thought my folks would be happy, you know? I pictured my dad slapping down the arms of the armchair as he got up quickly to shake my hand. Mom would cover her mouth as she gushed out a laugh. Instead, they said they thought I was looking for work. Dad stared at the carpet. Mom went to the basement and smoked her first cigarette in two years.” Van looked longingly out of the window. “We had just moved to Crestfall from out of state. Dad’s job was transferred. Then the company folded. My moving out shocked them, I guess.”
“What did you do about the apartment?”
“Let it go.”
“Did you?”
“I went back to hanging out in the library. That's where I found a book about vagabonding. This the place?”
Sheriff Cavanaugh slammed the gear shift into park and kicked open his door.
“Yeah,” he huffed, as he hurried to open Van’s door. “Round back,” he said.
“Okay.”
***
The hotel was three wooden stories, as red as brick. Two matching out-buildings made it a sort of tiny colonial village—horse-and-buggy style.
In the low light, Van couldn't be sure, but it looked like the back of the hotel had been built into a huge rock.
Sheriff Cavanaugh went inside first and let the door shut behind him. When Van opened it, he saw the sheriff looking down at him from a few steps up a narrow stairwell.
“This way,” the sheriff said. Then he went stomping upstairs, as Van followed.
“No parents, huh?”
“Two.”
“But they don’t know where you are?”
“Dangerous, right?”
“Anything can happen.”
“How many living here?”
“One or two.”
“I’d have thought more with homeless.”
“We usually house one a month.”
“Oh. So, I'm imposing. Well, I'm glad I'm here.”
“Me, too.”
Several sharp turns, and they ran out of stairs in a hallway with one door. The three of them, Van discovered; for, another man had followed them up. And, on the landing, he stepped in and looked up at the sheriff.
“Open it,” Cavanaugh told him. Then, smiling at Van, he introduced the man as, “Igor, the caretaker.”
Whether that showed sarcasm or embarrassment, Van couldn't tell, but he supposed it depended on whether or not that was really the man’s name.
Igor had several keys, and, like a monk, three sides of straight black hair around a bald pate. Van thought how, with a hefty pair of black eyeglass frames, the man would make a good high school disciplinarian. But then, he’d have to talk.
Igor unlocked and pushed open the door.
In the darkness of the apartment, Van could make out faint shapes of furniture. In the light, switched on, now, by the sheriff, the pieces looked staged.
With his hands on his hips, Sheriff Cavanaugh took a quick look at the main room, then headed back out into the hallway.
“Do I look around?” Van asked.
“Go ahead.”
“It’s nice,” he called.
“It’ll hold you.”
“It sure will,” Van said, trying to sound grateful, as he stepped for a moment into the doorway.
“Igor will bring the food and the clothes. Stay in tonight,” the sheriff told him, closing the door.
Van had been soloing for weeks, but somehow always with other people around. Suddenly, he felt absolutely alone. And his vulnerability reached him. He could scream, and no one would hear him. Someone could make him disappear. He took a deep breath that did little to strengthen him, then he gave himself a tour.
The ratty sofa and an oval coffee table chipped through to its yellowy wood made chilly companions. A sheetless mattress on the bedroom floor was the only comfort there. Mildew and strands of hair hung on the iron and wood of the bathroom. There were the barest of kitchen utensils and one window, so narrow, the only one in the place.
A knock at the door startled him.
In the hallway stood Igor, holding a small paper sack of clanking cans of food in one arm, musty clothes draped over the other.
As Van took them, Igor suddenly leaned in and pushed out each word through a whisper.
“Don’t stay.”
Then, he was gone.
Alone in what he imagined to be an abandoned residence hotel, Van felt his vulnerability come at him from everywhere. Where were his family, his friends? Was he going crazy? No, he decided that he was not. He had good ideas. He was just always talked out of them. He had to stay with something, and this was it. He would set himself up in this town. Just not tonight. It was too much to plan out tonight. He ate some of his knapsack food and a can of stewed tomatoes. Then he spread his foam pad and sleeping bag on the mattress.
***
Van slept in a series of sweaty, haunted sleeps, the light burning in the bathroom; for, there was none in the bedroom. And when he awoke for the last time, he couldn't be sure whether it was morning, middle night, or a few hours after he lay down.
In the kitchen, the narrow slit of window let in a prisoner’s ration of dry, gray day. And Van brought his face near to the cold pane of glass and took in its view of the tiny colonial village. With a feeling of someone there, he looked down, as close to the building as he could. And, in a moment, he saw Igor walk into view, followed by the homeless man from the diner.
Shuffling like a drunk, arms laden with laundry and a small paper sack, the man was letting the arm of one tan shirt dangle down before him like a third leg, until the garment fell, to be walked across blankly by him, as the two men turned in toward the hotel and passed out of sight.
Van felt their disappearance like the loss of some precious human connection that, though one brief moment, he wouldn't let go. Leaping into his pants, he tore down the hallway, bare feet slapping, Igor’s words, “ . . . laundry room . . . in the basement,” traveling the walls to his ears. Bounding down the stairs and outside, he picked up the shirt, then made his way back inside and, this time, down a flight.
He needed company. It was no good being so alone. But as he descended into moldy smells, he slowed his fast sneak. Drops of dried paint—or was it blood?—decorated the stairs. His hand against the well-scuffed wall brought powdery paint clinging to his palm and fingers like a poisonous dust. And when the stairs ran out, he found a small fluorescent space beyond which stood a piece of iron fence, ancient in thickness and size, that bordered a vast darkness.
As his eyes adjusted, the nearer dark gave up more and more of the fence, which seemed to run for miles in both directions. Before him stood its massive gate. And swinging it shut, in sharp screeches, were the guiding hands of Igor.
Looking, for a moment, far beyond the caretaker, Van thought he saw a pair of laundry machines, an absurd silent gray in what light bled back between the bars before thinning into a darkness from which came sounds like gnawing and cracking of bones.
As cheerful as he was by nature, Van could only think the horrible thought that some gruesome end had found the homeless man. And stumbled by this thought, he crunched the ground.
Igor nearly turned his head from his body and stared out in confusion past the glistening sweat on his face. As he realized what he saw, he breathed heavily, but in a voice barely louder than before, he said, “What are you doing here?”
“He dropped it,” Van said, holding up the shirt.
“Give it to me,” said Igor, snatching it away.
“Is he washing his clothes?” Van said, sensing it untrue, but hoping.
Igor stepped in as close to Van as he could be, and looked up at him with a sweaty, stoic patience.
“Never come down here again.” Then his arm went out, pointing past Van. “Go.”
As Van climbed the stairs, he twice looked back behind himself, listening for more groaning, each time seeing the wary head of Igor bending around the edge of a stairwell wall. He quickly reached his apartment, where all that he could do was pace, room to room.
They’re doing something good for me, he told himself, again and again. But he still wondered what was going on in the basement. And, in a while, realizing that some time had passed, he opened the door and bent his own listening head out into the hallway.
***
By now, Van decided, Igor must have left. And he walked downstairs confident of this—and of what he'd thought of to say if discovered in the basement again. He wanted to show his gratitude by washing and wearing the donated clothes. He was looking for any laundry machines that might be around. He held these words ready, even as he reached the gate alone and peered between the bars at the narrow shadows angled through the cast fluorescence to the golden-candlelight glow of the ceiling’s few far-flung incandescent bulbs beyond. Gone were the awful sounds of gnawing and groaning. All was basement hum and hiss.
Relieved, Van thoughtlessly let his hand thrust out at the latch, and the gate swung slightly open. He swung it in the rest of the way, certain that he was alone once the piercing iron creak brought no one.
A part of him said run—the part that he so often heeded. But he reminded himself that he was determined, now, to stay with something for once. And he walked in among the few rusty iron pipes and the ancient wooden beams holding the building eight feet above a hard-packed dirt floor.
Outside the gate, the basement had seemed lifeless. But two dozen feet in, Van felt it crawling near. Ghosts and vermin and gases unseen surely lived here. Down one wall and across the floor, an imagined extravagant insect scurried its clicking pincers his way, coming too fast for him to think.
He tried to focus on what was really there. Those miles of cellar, the iron columns and wooden beams and long, clammy pipes. But when the gate stood in miniature far behind him and the bare bulbs ran out, leaving darkness to go on into the sounds of hum and hiss, something in that darkness moved, a blackness within the blackness, like a swaying, walking part of it that seemed, once, to come at him like a slothful swipe of hand.
“Who’s there?” he called, swallowing at his careless loudness, as he stepped back and back, until a healthy span of dim, golden light lit up the space between him and that darkness, and he banged, heel and buttocks, into something behind him.
He spun around to find those two machines, the clothes washer and dryer, crouched against a wall, two innocent lovers shivering side by side in a dungeon of hopelessness. He felt their smooth, cold, white steel tops and sides. Unplugged. Strange.
They had each other and the mentor-like wooden box hanging creakily on the wall behind them. Van found the box to contain a maelstrom of telephone wires.
And at that, an idea nearly rose within him, when another sound in the basement caught his attention. Not a clank or hiss, but something in the blackness breathing.
Closing the box, hurrying to the gate, Van walked with polite urgency until, halfway up the stairwell to his apartment door, he felt the comforting feeling of being safely back in the world of the living, and he climbed the rest of the way, two healthy steps at a time, as though he’d not just let himself be terrified of a harmless basement.
In his apartment again, Van’s idea that began with the wires reliably rose in his mind. He would ask for a telephone. He had looked into the process when he was apartment hunting, and he knew that he wanted a real telephone hanging on the kitchen wall. An old jack was already there. Maybe the town had funds for such a thing. He would find out before doing anything else.
***
Van crossed the street and stepped up onto the sidewalk at one end of the block. The downtown was quaint and quiet and a little lost in time. The signage included the familiar brands, but the logos were old ones, two or more designs into the past. Older cars and small trucks parked at angles almost facing the curbs.
A few vehicles drove slowly, up or down the street, every pair of passing eyes within them—single drivers, couples, families—noticing the young man standing there. That was okay with Van—until a voice reached him on the air.
“It’s in the basement.”
Van looked in three or four different directions for the source of the sound. He found it, emerging from beside the end of a small strip of stores in a brick building set back a few dozen feet from the sidewalk. A young Oriental man in a black leather jacket sporting buckles and heavy zippers came out striding as though to be a cool American thug. He seemed to believe in his chicness, even wearing heavy, black-plastic eyeglass frames that were of a years-past fashion.
Van wrinkled his brow, wondering how the guy could know that what he wanted had to do with those phone wires. Maybe that’s what people ask about after moving into the hotel.
The Oriental came near, stopped, and watched him. Van thought he’d better start by saying the obvious thing.
“I want to get a phone installed.”
Just like that, the Oriental man pointed—at the young blonde woman stopped short in her walking nearby and brought to a smile by being singled out.
“He wants a phone,” the Oriental man called.
“10 a.m. tomorrow?” the blonde woman asked.
“Sure,” Van said.
The woman grew her smile even more, then went on her way.
“Does she know where?” Van asked.
“The homeless are in the hotel.”
The Oriental man’s expression showed nothing but, perhaps, curiosity. “Stay out of the basement,” he said.
“Why?”
“That’s where it lives.”
“What? Nothing lives there,” Van insisted, though he, somehow, felt as though he were lying.
Suddenly, a scolding voice cut the morning’s peace. “Josh!”
The Oriental turned and strode obediently away, while, from the other direction, up walked a middle-aged man in slacks and a bellied sweater. Out snapped his plump, short hand for shaking.
“Mayor Sullivan,” the man said. “Settled in?”
“Yes,” Van stammered. “Just . . . I’d like to have a phone.”
“The homeless don’t use phones,” stated the mayor.
“I would only call my parents. To let them know where I am.”
A slight shadow of concern crossed the mayor’s face. “You’re . . . not an orphan?”
“No.”
Hearing this, Mayor Sullivan frowned as he slowly tilted back his confused head. Then, he lowered it and turned to look over his shoulder until he faced Sheriff Cavanaugh, standing nearby and appearing concerned about what he couldn’t hear.
“There’s a jack in the kitchen,” Van pleaded. How simple it would be to meet the request. “And the wires in the basement look okay.”
Whatever Mayor Sullivan’s face showed to Sheriff Cavanaugh made the sheriff swallow a little embarrassment. But they got back together in glaring at Van—Mayor Sullivan, the insincere politician, and Sheriff Cavanaugh, who looked as though he had never ever smiled.
“That girl,” Van said, motioning in the direction of where the blonde had gone, “said she’d be by tomorrow. Does she install the phones?”
“Oh. Yes.” Mayor Sullivan assured him. “She’s new here, but, uh, very capable. Well,” he concluded, with a glance to Sheriff Cavanaugh, “welcome to our town.”
“Thank you,” Van said.
As he watched the two men walking away, heads bowed in whispered conversation, Van felt left alone on the street. He was getting a phone—and that was good. Yes, that’s what he felt, leaving to return to his apartment, eager for the morning.
***
The technician was on time within a minute. She told Van that the basement box of wires came first. He gladly showed her the way.
In the basement, she knelt knowingly beside her toolbox. But opening it, she raised her head and threw a smile of nervous courage at everything she saw, the white of her teeth dawning on the place like a new idea.
“I don’t like basements,” she admitted.
In her tan workboots and tool belt, and navy-blue jacket embroidered with Shirley in sewing-machine script, she looked a skilled laborer. But everywhere else, she was a young, cheerful blonde-and-blue. And Van wanted to protect her.
“Want me to stay with you?”
“No, I think I’ll be alright.”
“It’s just an old building,” he said.
“Yeah,” she agreed, softly, nodding to her tools. “Except for the beast.”
“Huh?”
“There were always campfire stories about this place. Settlers, a cave beast . . . feedings.”
Van’s brow wrinkled.
“First, they fed it their own. Then, hunters and gypsies who happened along. Now, the homeless.” Shirley dug out a screwdriver. “Just superstition.”
“Yeah,” Van said, as he glanced around. “Well . . . I’ll see you upstairs?”
“Okay.”
***
Sitting in the sheriff’s office, Van related the strange tale to Sheriff Cavanaugh’s forehead, as the sheriff took forever to read a document on his otherwise-empty desk. “I waited for her for an hour. Wondering if I was allowed to make us both lunch? When I went down to check on her, only her toolbox and tools were there on the floor.”
Nothing but the entrance of Mayor Sullivan got the sheriff to look anywhere but at that document.
“Could I see you a moment?” the mayor asked.
“I’ll be right back,” the sheriff said to the document.
But he wasn’t. Van was too much trouble.
As he walked along the sidewalk, Van felt like a suspect, noticed, again, by every pair of passing eyes. Looking a few stores ahead, he saw Josh staring at moving cars. And Van quickened his pace, feeling that boost of confidence that comes from discovering a friend in public.
“The telephone technician came to my apartment. Shirley, remember? Now she’s missing. Why won’t the sheriff believe me?”
“He does,” Josh said. “He figures the beast ate her.”
Van gave him a stare. He brought his fingers to his mouth. He forgot about the eyes watching him. Not even Josh’s rowdy threads, which now included a red bandanna around his neck, could keep Van’s attention away from his own fear.
“It started a hundred years ago,” Josh explained, his eyes following the cars as though he were watching tennis. “The settlers were feeding it, when they got the idea to let a wealthy builder build a hotel across the mouth of its cave. But the beast broke in and ate him.”
The strange facts were at least something to hold onto, and Van was able to think again.
“So, they built those bars?”
“It could break them easy,” Josh said. “But they feed it once a month. And free food is free food.”
“Free?”
“Gypsies, tramps . . .”
“No one tells?”
“Later arrivals kept quiet. It’s nice here. The rumors keep out tourists. The homeless aren’t missed.”
“Shirley will be missed.”
“There’s no body. It even eats the bones.”
Van leaned back, waiting for Josh to laugh at having kidded him. But no change at all came over him.
***
Van hurried back to his apartment and packed his gear. He’d had enough and was running away to find another adventure. Anything. He took no time for a last look around. Only a glance out the window, to see if the coast was clear. Igor and another man were turning in toward the building.
Van slung his knapsack over his shoulder, then tiptoed downstairs all of the way. He found Igor watching something through the gate, watching the sounds of beastly feeding leaving the darkness. Shirley’s toolbox was by his feet.
“Where’s Shirley, and where’s that man?” Van demanded to know.
Igor spun around and used both hands to grab Van by the arms, shaking him back and forth. “You wouldn’t listen. Why wouldn’t you listen?”
Van’s knapsack slid down to his forearm.
Igor grabbed it and pulled.
Van let it go, turned, and fled back up the stairs, Igor’s shouts for help chasing him. Van had no idea, except to get away. He flung open the building door to find the townsfolk waiting. Mayor Sullivan, Sheriff Cavanaugh, Sharon, and others—even Josh—all stared at him, the one who knew their secret.
“Get him!” someone shouted.
Van bounded recklessly back to the basement, knocking down Igor along the way. He pushed open the gate, stepped in, and closed it behind himself, running quickly to the darkness and into it a step or two—until the sound of low, growled breathing and the feel of hot puffs of breath backed him up. The scratching and heavy dragging of the beast, slower for having eaten, came nearer.
The townsfolk trickled down the stairway and swirled to a standstill outside the gate.
Walking in a crouch, Van hid himself behind the laundry machines and listened.
“I don’t hear anything,” said Igor. “It’s already eaten.”
“Suppose we find Van,” said Sharon. “What then?”
“Leave him in there.” said Mayor Sullivan. “It’ll feed again.”
“He’s a kid,” said Sharon.
“What’s that?” said Sheriff Cavanaugh.
“Where?” said the mayor.
“There on the floor.”
“His knapsack,” Mayor Sullivan said, opening up the gate. “Get it,” he instructed, pushing at the shoulder of Igor. “And find him. He mustn’t get away.”
“He can’t get away,” said Sheriff Cavanaugh. “We have him trapped.”
“We have to make certain,” said the mayor. “We should see him die.”
“No!” shouted Sharon.
“We’ve all watched before,” said the mayor. “Let’s go in.”
Van heard it all. Now, he watched them spreading out, scanning for him, hunting for him.
“Van?” Mayor Sullivan called, with a doctorly tenderness.
“Kid!” hollered Sheriff Cavanaugh. “You’re surrounded.”
“Come out, Van,” said Sharon.
A familiar old thought wanted him to surrender. It was long his habit to give in to the wishes of others. But something older still raised its light up through him now, asking him to live for himself once again.
Then, Van saw it. The deep dark dank let out a growl, and a massive girth to the height and imponderable weight of a beast of nightmare and jungle, the filth and anger of a merciless creature as able to care less for others as Van was able to care about everyone but himself, came sliding, black and brown. Two hungry eyes, as red as revenge, flashed in the giant furred visage.
And Van saw the others waiting, too, till the beast turned toward them. First up on its muscular, shaggy legs, it crouched back a slow, heavy moment, then leaped forward, banging its massive weight on the trembling earth. As beams broke and fell and columns cracked, one wide sweep of its right arm swept in the first scattering of the others toward its broad chest and under its chin, its leathery brown lips peeling back from what were massive jaws of saliva-dripping teeth.
From the townsfolk, there arose all manner of terror. Some froze. Some prayed. Some banged into others as they clambered up the steep appendage of their captivity, fell against the gate closing it, or pressed against a wall that it might absorb them. None survived.
Having considered the corralled, the beast, with its left paw’s choosy fingers, picked them up one by agonizing one and inserted the selected into its mouth before dragging them out again, stripped of a limb or more by those primitive connoisseur lips.
For a moment, Van tried to stop the sickening sounds. He covered his ears and looked about at a harmless, familiar basement. But he could still hear the beast dining and the wails and moans of its fresh dinner tearing and cracking. He would have to pass by that carnage if he were going to escape.
Focusing on the gate, he stood up and walked, walked without yielding to his morbid curiosity, until a flicker of something pulled at his heed.
Sheriff Cavanaugh, brows raised at the lonely prospect of being food, went feet first, his gruff baritone “Ahh!!!” canyoning off the walls, his own blood coating his teeth and mustache.
Then Sharon, still pretty in her aqua-blue and white, her bones each snapping like thin pretzel. How that uniform had tried to keep that bosom courteous. Now, both were as gone as yesterday’s basement hums and hisses.
Suddenly, the ground shook again to the adjustments of the beast. The building swayed, the columns, like saplings, were splitting halfway. Chunks of wall fell in cracking thuds to the floor. And through it, all through the groaning and the piling up of bones for crunching, and the silence that was taking over, now that so many had died, the beast went on eating.
In that moment, Van saw that he stood still. He noticed his knapsack almost calling to him to be rescued from there on the floor near the beast. To escape completely, he stepped toward it and picked it up.
The massive creature noticed and paused, looking down at Van with all of its blood-soaked and bone-speckled face. It knew—as Van did—that it had him if it wanted him. But it didn’t, Van could tell. And its message came from more than mere satiated weakness. It recognized that Van was not one of its captors. He was not like them and could go.
Sliding his knapsack snug over his shoulder, Van walked a tense line toward the gate, opening it, and stepping through. Only the sight of the stairs and that he was now out of sight of the beast let him break into a climb, leaping over steps, to emerge from the falling hotel.
He ran and ran—out the center of the main street, past its crumbling of buildings and ruptures of roadbed, past the diner, ending in rubble and ashes and flames, till he stopped to look back for one gasping moment, to confirm his escape. Then he walked, for quite a while unsteadily, toward home.