Strange Highways

had existed while he had lived in the house, the torture master moved past me in a state of high astonishment and curiosity. He went through the door, onto the upper landing.
     "Light switch doesn't work," I said, crowding in behind him, pointing the flashlight down past him. "But we'll see well enough with this."
     "But ... where ... how ... ?"
     "You don't really mean you never noticed the cellar?" I said, forcing a laugh. "Come now. Are you joking with me or what?"
     As if weightless with amazement, he drifted downward from one step to the next.
     I followed close behind.
     Soon, he knew that something was terribly wrong, for the steps went on too far without any sign of the cellar floor. He stopped, began to turn, and said, "This is strange. What's going on here? What on earth are you-"
     "Go on," I said harshly. "Down. Go down, you bastard."
     He tried to push past me toward the open door above.
     I knocked him backward down the stairs. Screaming, he tumbled all the way to the first landing and the flanking archways. When I reached him, I saw that he was dazed and suffering considerable pain. He keened in misery. His lower lip had split; blood trickled down his chin. He'd skinned the palm of his right hand. I think his arm was broken.
     Weeping, cradling his arm, he looked up at me - pain racked, afraid, confused.
     I hated myself for what I was doing.
     But I hated him more.
     "In the camp," I said, "we called you The Snake. I know you. Oh, yes, I know you. You were the torture master."
     "Oh, God," he said.
     He neither asked what I was talking about nor attempted to deny it. He knew who he was, what he was, and he knew what would become of him.
     "Those eyes," I said, shaking with fury now. "That voice. The Snake. A repulsive, belly-crawling snake. Contemptible. But very, very dangerous."
     Briefly we were silent. In my case, at least, I was temporarily speechless, because I stood in awe of the profound machinery of fate which, in its slow-working and laborious fashion, had brought us together at this time and place.
     From down in the darkness, a noise arose: sibilant whispers, a wet oozing sound that made me shudder. Millennial darkness was on the move, surging upward, the embodiment of endless night, cold and deep - and hungry.
     The torture master, reduced to the role of victim, gazed around in fear and bewilderment, through one archway and the other, then down the stairs that continued from the landing on which he sprawled. His anxiety was so great that it drove out his pain; he no longer wept or made the keening noise. "What ... what is this place?"
     "It's where you belong," I said.
     I turned from him and climbed the steps. I did not stop or look back. I left the flashlight with him because I wanted him to see the thing that came for him.
     (Darkness dwells within us all.)
     "Wait!" he called after me.
     I did not pause.
     "What's that sound?" he asked.
     I kept climbing.
     "What's going to happen to me?"
     "I don't know," I told him. "But whatever it is ... it'll be what you deserve."
     Anger finally stirred in him. "You're not my judge!"
     "Oh yes I am."
     At the top, I stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind me. It had no lock. I leaned against it, trembling.
     Apparently Phu saw something ascending from the stairwell below him, for he wailed in terror and clambered up the steps.
     Hearing him approach, I leaned hard against the door.
     He pounded on the other side. "Please. Please, no. Please, for God's sake, no, for God's sake, please!"
     I had heard my army buddies begging with that same desperation when the merciless torture master had forced rusty needles under their fingernails. I dwelt on those images of horror, which once I had thought I'd put behind me, and they gave me the will to resist Phu's pathetic pleas.
     In addition to his voice, I heard the sludge-thick darkness rising behind him, cold lava flowing uphill: wet sounds, and that sinister; whispering.
     The torture master stopped pounding on the door and let out a scream that told me the darkness had seized him.
     A great weight fell against the door for a moment, then was withdrawn.
     The torture master's shrill