Escape
By PAUL ERNST
A brief weird tale about the escape of a madman
He had the craziest form of craziness I've ever seen.
Of course, I hasten to add, I hadn't seen much. I'd been through an asylum once before, as now, to get a story for my paper on treatment and conditions of State inmates, and that was all. On that former trip I'd witnessed nothing like this; nor had I, till now, on this trip.
The man didn't look crazy. So often they don't. He was a medium-sized chap with gray in his hair and a look of sadness on his thin, mild face. A look of sadness—and determination. Neatly dressed, precise of movement, he was very busy in his cell. He paid no attention for a while as the guard and I stood at the barred door and watched him.
He was building something. He would pick up a tool, adjust it carefully, work with all the delicacy of a watchmaker for a moment. Then he would lay the tool down and pick up a gage and check his work. All very accurate and careful.
The only thing was that you couldn't see what he was building. And you couldn't see any tools, nor gages nor work-bench. There was nothing in the cell but the man, and a bolted-down cot and chair.
Nevertheless, the fellow was extraordinarily industrious. He would seize a nonexistent tool, examine it with a frown, and then use it on thin air, after which would come the inevitable measuring movements.
"It certainly looks," I said in a low tone to the attendant, "as though there should be something there."
The attendant grinned and nodded. And I continued to watch, fascinated.
You could follow the man through his whole box of tools, from his rational movements. Now he was boring a hole, obviously a very small hole, with a tiny metal-drill equipped with an egg-beater handle. Now he was just touching a surface with a file. Now he was sawing something else, after which he took the sawed part from an imaginary work-bench and tried it in its place—whatever and wherever that was.
I got still another glimpse of unity of effort as I watched him. Each little period of accurate workmanship ended with a trip four steps to his left, to a corner of his cell which was bright with sunlight. There, his motions said, was the thing he was working on. There was the object, slowly growing bit by accurate bit, which he was making and assembling.
It was uncanny. There simply ought to have been something there—a cabinet, chair, whatnot—and there wasn't.
The man slowly screwed an imaginary part to an imaginary whole, then laid down his imaginary screw-driver and walked to the door, for the first time acknowledging our presence there.
"Hello, Nick," he said to the attendant. His voice was as mild and as sad and as oddly determined as the rest of him.
"Hello," said the attendant affably. His good-natured, broad face turned from the man in the cell toward me.
"Meet Mr. Freer, Mr. Gannet. Mr. Freer's with a newspaper."
