Native Son - Richard Wright [74]
Because he could go now, run off if he wanted to and leave it all behind, he felt a certain sense of power, a power born of a latent capacity to live. He was conscious of this quiet, warm, clean, rich house, this room with this bed so soft, the wealthy white people moving in luxury to all sides of him, whites living in a smugness, a security, a certainty that he had never known. The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score.
The more the sense of Britten seeped into him the more did he feel the need to face him once again and let him try to get something from him. Next time he would do better; he had let Britten trap him on that Communist business. He should have been on the lookout for that; but the lucky thing was that he knew that Britten had done all his tricks at once, had shot his bolt, had played all his cards. Now that the thing was out in the open, he would know how to act. And furthermore, Britten might want him as a witness against Jan. He smiled while he lay in the darkness. If that happened, he would be safe in sending the ransom note. He could send it just when they thought they had pinned the disappearance of Mary upon Jan. That would throw everything into confusion and would make them want to reply and give the money at once and save the girl.
The warm room lulled his blood and a deepening sense of fatigue drugged him with sleep. He stretched out more fully on the bed, sighed, turned on his back, swallowed, and closed his eyes. Out of the surrounding silence and darkness came the quiet ringing of a distant church bell, thin, faint, but clear. It tolled, soft, then loud, then still louder, so loud that he wondered where it was. It sounded suddenly directly above his head and when he looked it was not there but went on tolling and with each passing moment he felt an urgent need to run and hide as though the bell were sounding a warning and he stood on a street corner in a red glare of light like that which came from the furnace and he had a big package in his arms so wet and slippery and heavy that he could scarcely hold onto it and he wanted to know what was in the package and he stopped near an alley corner and unwrapped it and the paper fell away and he saw—it was his own head—his own head lying with black face and half-closed eyes and lips parted with white teeth showing and hair wet with blood and the red glare grew brighter like light shining down from a red moon and red stars on a hot summer night and he was sweating and breathless from running and the bell clanged so loud that he could hear the iron tongue clapping against the metal sides each time it swung to and fro and he was running over a street paved with black coal and his shoes kicked tiny lumps rattling against tin cans and he knew that very soon he had to find some place to hide but there was no place and in front of him white people were coming to ask about the head from which the newspapers had fallen and which was now slippery with blood in his naked hands and he gave up and stood in the middle of the street in the red darkness and cursed the booming bell and the white people and felt that he did not give a damn what happened to him and when the people closed in he hurled the bloody head squarely into their faces dongdongdong….
He opened his eyes and looked about him in the darkened room, hearing a bell ring. He sat up. The bell sounded again. How long had it been ringing? He got to his feet, swaying from stiffness, trying to shake off sleep and that awful dream.
“Yessum,” he mumbled.
The bell rang again, insistently. He fumbled in the dark for the light chain and pulled it. Excitement quickened within him. Had something happened? Was this the police?
“Bigger!” a muffled voice called.
“Yessuh.”
He braced himself for whatever was coming and stepped to the door. As he opened it he felt it being pushed in by someone who seemed determined to get in in a hurry. Bigger backed away, blinking his eyes.