William shoved against the wall, scrambling to get his feet set. With a sideways swing he slammed the flashlight squarely into the back and side of the man’s head, knocking him senseless, chin-down into his box. William pulled himself free, crawling across the back of the unconscious handyman. His flashlight was ruined, the broken lens of the thing chinking down onto the tiles. He pitched it into the closet, shoved the cardboard box as far back in as he could, and crammed the limp body into it, grabbing another flashlight off the shelf and shoving the door closed.
Then, thinking a bit, he reopened the door, pulled up the face of the unconscious attendant, and pried open his mouth, dumping in the remains of the two nembutal capsules. One drooled out immediately onto the floor and the other glued itself to the man’s tongue. William cursed. Ten minutes had passed and he wasn’t twenty feet from the door of his room. The escape was going fearsomely slowly. He’d managed to do nothing but bash in the head of some poor, half-wit handyman who in all likelihood was about to revive and begin to shout. William pulled a rag off the shelf, thinking to shove it into the man’s mouth as a gag. He’d tape the mouth shut with masking tape. But that meant he’d have to tie him up too, which would require pulling him into the hallway. What would he do for rope, tape the man’s hands together? The handyman twitched. William raised his flashlight, but the thought of hitting him again was sickening, as if he were lost in some nightmare and had spent an eternity in that hallway, clubbing an innocent man while sweating for fear of discovery. Speed was his only hope.
He shut the door once again and fled, ducking into the pantry and through a door that led into an enormous kitchen. He pulled a laminated cardboard pocket calendar from his coat pocket, slid it in between the striker plate and the latch and swung open the door that led out onto a loading dock and into the night. Beyond a strip of asphalt were a lawn and trees, and beyond that the curved road that led out through a wrought-iron gate to freedom.
Pale beams from a canted crescent moon played down upon the lawn so faintly that the occasional bushes were indistinguishable from the dark grass. The sky was startlingly clear and thick with stars. An enormous Venus, big as a grapefruit, sailed toward the lower tip of the moon, close enough to throw a stone from one to the other. A rabbit darted from the shadow of a bush into the weak moonlight, racing away toward the road, quickly lost again in the night. William followed it, hunching and running, waving his flashlight out to the side, waiting in fear for lights to click on in the dark wards behind him, for the battered handyman to come to and bang his way out of the closet, for the cry to go round that a dangerous inmate was loose on the grounds, hammering people into pudding. But nothing stirred.
A hedge of hibiscus fronted the road. William ran along beside it, bent almost double, safe in the shadows, his tweed coat and trousers blending with the dark wall of shrubbery. He knew exactly where he was going. Farther along, some thirty yards from the black gate, a round iron manhole cover lay exactly in the center of the road, big as a truck tire. If it was too heavy to move, William would go for the gate. He’d scaled it once before and could do it again in a pinch, if the guard was asleep.
If he weren’t, William would have to bash him. He determined, as he jolted along beside the hedge, to send a letter of apology and explanation to the poor handyman at first opportunity. Such things were required of a gentleman.
He paused beside a gap in the boxwood, peered up over the hedge toward the distant guardhouse, and could make out, just above the sill of a little window, the back of the guard’s head. He was reading a book. William crept through the hole, stumbling out onto the road, then dropping to all fours back against the darkness of the hedge. He wrenched at his coat, producing a small black prybar, pilfered from the groundskeeper’s toolbox. He crept out onto the road, scuttling like a crab, and without hesitation slipped the bent end of the prybar into the quarter-sized hole in the iron disc and gave it a pull.
Nothing happened. He might as well have been yanking on the street itself. He pulled out the prybar and slid the straight end in between the cover and the steel perimeter, levering the heavy disc free from its seat and raising it a half inch or more. He slipped his fingers in under it, then wisely slipped them out again. He eased the lid back down, jerking out the prybar just before the lid trapped it.
There was a silence-shattering clank from the lid that seemed to echo beneath the street. William dashed for the cover of the hedge, creeping into the hole and crouching there. He peeped out, to see the gate guard standing outside his little shack, playing his own flashlight along the road. The guard stood so for a full minute, watching, before giving up and going back in to his book. William crept out. He wondered how long he’d been on the loose. Twenty minutes? He was sure that in the east, low on the horizon, the orange-gray glow of dawn paled the stars.
He crept back onto the road, set his feet, shoved his prybar into the hole and heaved. He held his breath. A sharp pain raced across his shoulder and up his neck. The lid raised slowly, almost out of its hole, then dropped back in, settling there maddeningly. William rested, realizing that he was sweating. He’d wait just a moment, then give it another heave-ho. He watched the back of the guard’s head for some sign of movement, then bent to it once again, just as an eternity of lights blinked on behind him. Shouting erupted from the direction of the kitchen. A window slammed open, and an air-driven siren blasted out three staccato spurts. Raucous laughter sounded from X-Ward, and the guard, his flashlight on, crouched out of his shack and doubled around the hedge toward the shouting. William grabbed his prybar and tore at the manhole cover, ripping skin from the palms of his hands against the hexagonal shaft of the steel bar, knowing that he should have taken advantage of the guard’s running off and headed for the gate. But it was too late for that now. More shouts sang out. “There he is!” cried a voice. “Stop!” “Get the net on him!”
“The bastards!” cried William aloud, and with one great sobbing heave, he yanked the cover free and half off the hole, dragging it back a few more inches, grabbing his flashlight and pouring light into the shaft. He dropped in, grasping iron rungs and disappearing into the hole, laughing wildly, shouting foolish obscenities at his pursuers, who stormed up, still yelling idiotically for him to halt. A white-trousered leg dangled in above him. William whacked the foot on the end of it with his flashlight, shouting, “I’m armed!” in such wild and perilous tones that the leg was abruptly withdrawn.
William cried out a parting curse and ran east down the sewer, planting each foot on either side of the little rivulet of water that lapped along the trough of the concrete pipe. Fifty yards down he cut abruptly right, then right again almost immediately into a pipe of about half the diameter of the first. He was forced to slide along at a crouch, kicking through the water, scraping his back against the hard surface of the pipe with each step. It opened out shortly into a cavernous cylindrical tunnel, and William was racing along, wheezing for heavy lungfuls of air, shining his flashlight ahead of him. He’d lose them easily now, thanks to Captain H. Frank Pince Nez and his sewer charts.
A quick glance over his shoulder betrayed no following light. They’d given up on him, the wimps. William chuckled and slowed up. He was a fairly desperate lad — overpowering a burly handyman, yanking the impossible lid off a manhole that spanned half the street. “I’m the terrible Toad!” he shouted, feeling a giddy affinity to his favorite literary hero. The concrete walls shouted it back at him in triplicate, a deep and sonorous chorus of assent.