"What's that got to do with it?"
"I mean, do you ever dream?"
"Of course."
"Ever get hold of any particularly vivid ones? Falling down stairs
like, being tortured, anything like that?"
Ritchie pulled at his drink.
"Sure you have." Kaplan gazed steadily at the clock. Almost midnight.
"Then try to remember. In that kind of dream, isn't it true that the
pleasure--or pain--you feel is almost as real as if you were actually
experiencing it? I remember once I had a nightmare about my old man.
He caught me in the basement with a cigarette--I was eight or nine,
I guess. He took down my pants and started after me with his belt.
Hank--that hurt, bad. It really hurt."
"So what's the point?"
"In my dream I tried to get away from my old man. He chased me all over
that basement. Well, it's the same with the kid--except his dream is a
hundred times more vivid, that's all. He knows he'll feel that electric
chair, feel the jolts frying into him, feel the death boiling up in
his throat just as much as if he were honest-to-God sitting there...."
Kaplan stopped talking. The two men sat quietly watching the clock's
invisible progress. Then Ritchie leaped up and stalked over to the bar
again. "Doggone you, Max," he called. "You're getting _me_ fidgety now."
"Don't kid me," Kaplan said. "You've been fidgety on your own for
quite a while. I don't know how you ever made the grade as a criminal
lawyer--you don't know the first thing about lying."
Ritchie didn't answer. He poured the drink slowly.
"Look at you and Ruth, screaming at each other. And then there was the
other tip-off. The way you defended the kid--brilliantly, masterfully.
You'd never have done that for a common open-and-shut little killer."
"Max," Ritchie said, "you're nuts. Tell you what: at exactly 12:01 I'll
take you out for the biggest, juiciest, rarest steak you ever saw. On
me. Then we'll get loaded and fall all over ourselves laughing--"
Ritchie fought away the sudden picture of steak, rare steak, with the
blood sputtering out, sizzling on an electric stove.
The clock began to strike. Henry Ritchie and Max Kaplan stood very
still.
* * * * *
He uncoiled. The dry pop of hardened joints jabbed wakefulness into him
until finally the twenty-foot long shell lay straight upon the steaming
rocks. He opened his eyes, all of them, one by one.
Across the bubbling pools, far away, past the white stone geysers, he
could see them coming. Many of them, swiftly, giant slithering things
with many arms and many legs.
He tried to move, but rock grew over him and he could not move. By
looking around he could see the cliff's edge, and he remembered the
thousand bottomless pits below. Gradually the rest formed, and he
remembered all.
He turned to the largest creature. "Did you tell them?" He knew this
would be a horrible punishment, worse than the last, the burning, far
worse. Fingers began to unhinge the thick shell, peel it from him,
leaving the viscous white tenderness bare to the heat and pain. "Tell
them, make them understand, this is only a dream I'm having--"
They took the prisoner to the precipice, lingered a moment to give him
a view of the dizziness and the sucking things far below. Then nervous
hands pressed him forward into space.
He did not wake for a long time.