Halloween and Other Seasons

THE DANCING FOOT

By Al Sarrantonio

The stories had littered the newspapers for days—YOUNG GIRL, PROMISING DANCER, PUSHED UNDER SUBWAY TRAIN—and Lansing had collected them all, reveled in the large type of their headlines, relished his secret infamy. That the girl was dead did not matter to him; it was the fact that he had done something and gotten away with it, that an entire city wanted to get its hands on him but had no idea who he was that made him hug himself in satisfaction.

He sat smoking on his mattress in his apartment, remembering the crowded platform, the crush of the morning crowds piled four deep; then the roar and clatter of the oncoming train, the press of the mob toward the yellow safety line in anticipation; the train almost there; and then his foot, quick and silent, tripping the girl, causing her to fall over the edge of the platform in front of the metal beast, too late to stop; the scream of brakes mingled with the girl’s startled, horrified cry—

Lansing rocked himself and smiled, lingering on the sweet moment of impact, thinking of how he had glided silently away in the confusion after making sure to look down for a glimpse of the crushed body.

The papers had said that if she had fallen a few inches to the right she would have landed on the outside of the tracks and that her foot might still have been severed but that she would have survived. As it was, she landed directly under the train between the tracks, and her right foot had been cut off by the wheels, but her body had been dragged and crushed by the momentum of the front car screeching to a halt.

The papers had quieted down some about it in the past week, moving the stories and wild speculations to the inside pages, and though he had slept undisturbed for the first few days after the deed—working a full day just as he always did—he had begun to have bad dreams. He dreamed about the foot. He dreamed that the foot was following him. And what horrified him most in the dreams was the way it followed him, walking. Like some horrible cartoon appendage—like the way his mother used to walk her hand around him with little doll’s shoes on two fingers when he was small, dancing those two little feet before him like a little soldier after he was bad and then suddenly lashing out when he wasn’t expecting it, smacking him across the face with the flat part of her hand. She was doing it now, hitting him, smacking him—

He awoke, suddenly realizing that he had dozed off into the dream again. He was covered with cold sweat, and the room was dark now. He made a move to get off the bed and turn on the lights.

As he did so he heard a sound. He knew he was wide awake now, and he heard something moving around in the closet. Something walking around, pushing things aside, kicking things aside.

He thought, It has to be rats.

He pulled himself unsteadily from the bed, wiping the sweat from his face with the front of his tee-shirt, and lurched over to the light switch. He clicked it on and the sounds from the closet abruptly stopped. He threw open the closet door and there was nothing there. No rats. Nothing.

He slammed the door roughly shut and went to the bed, settling onto the old, creaking mattress. He took a deep breath. I’ve got to stop this, he thought. He was starting to be afraid to go out, of taking the subway, of doing anything.

This has got to stop.

He thought again of tripping the girl, saw her falling off the platform, and that made him feel better. He looked at the clippings pasted to the wall around the room—YOUNG DANCER CRUSHED—and was even able to smile. I got away with it, he thought. No one knows I did it.

He lay down and slept.

And dreamt, screaming, of the foot again.

~ * ~

The next day he arrived at work late. Walking by a shoe store something made him hesitate; there was a pair of dancer’s shoes, ballet slippers, in the window, and he found himself staring at them. As he looked they suddenly began to move—

He realized with a start of relief that it was just the shop owner, taking the pair of shoes off their hook to show a customer. But the image of the moving shoes lingered in his mind…

He didn’t say hello to Joey, the lobby attendant, like he usually did, but went straight to the locker room and put his maintenance man’s uniform on. Joey mumbled something as he went past, something like “Grouch,” with a laugh, but Lansing let it pass.

Morelli was waiting for him on the 15^th floor, and yelled at him good-naturedly when he came off the elevator, for being late.

“Look at this, kid,” Morelli said suddenly, turning and holding up his right leg. “Look what I did shaving this morning.” There was a stump on the end, no foot—and then Morelli laughed and popped his shoe out of the pulled-down pants cuff.

“Got you that time, kid,” he said, and laughed again. “Go clean up that mess on 18, the workmen’ll be in early tomorrow to start. You okay, kiddo?”

“Uh, yeah, Nick.” Lansing nodded curtly and left.

The eighteenth floor was completely gutted for renovation, and he went there gratefully, happy to be alone. But soon the emptiness of the floor and the strange shadows cast by the boxes and crates lying around began to get to him. He heard noises, and imagined a dancing foot, a legion of dancing feet, kicking things around, marching right up to him—

He swung around as the elevator door suddenly opened. Nobody got off. After a moment the doors closed again, and the arrival light over the opening went out. There was dusty silence for a moment, and then as Lansing turned to get back to work something moved.

He distinctly saw it, a severed foot scooting around a crate by the elevator, and out of sight. He began to shake and his body went numb, as if two giant icy hands had grabbed him. There was a scratching sound, and then the sound of a moving ballet slipper.

Lansing went rigid. The shuffling got louder, and then he saw a foot with a slipper on it appear from behind the crate.

Suddenly the elevator doors opened again, and the foot ran behind a box. Morelli stepped out into the room.

“Hey kid,” he said, and then he saw Lansing standing frozen. “What’s wrong?”

“The foot!” Lansing said.

“What?”

“Don’t you hear the dancing?” He felt as if he would faint.

“Kid, go home early. Right now. Whatever’s wrong, flush it out and come back tomorrow ready to work. I don’t want a sick guy on the job, makes me look like a lousy foreman. Believe me, you don’t look so good.”

“I—” He nodded. “Okay.”

He got in the most crowded subway car on the train and looked straight ahead all the way home. He was afraid that if he looked down he would see the foot in front of him. He thought he heard the rap-shuffle of it walking, but he refused to look. There was a light kick at the cuff of his pants just before his stop, but still he gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead.

He ran to his apartment and bolted the door, stuffing towels underneath the sill. He heard tiny footsteps outside. He slammed the windows shut, and double-locked the window leading to the fire escape, pulling down the shade. He sat on the bed in the corner of the room and pulled up his knees, closing his eyes tight.

There was the squeak-shuffle sound of a ballet slipper dancing.

He went to the window, sweating, and peeked out under the shade. An old man had set his hat on the ground in front of the building, and was doing a soft shoe dance.

Lansing yanked up the window and screamed at the old man, who quickly moved off. He pulled the window back down and went back to the bed.

Shutting his eyes, he tried to think of the girl and the train. But only the image of his mother came to him, dancing her hand in front of him, waiting for his baby smile, then the fist—

Something was kicking around in the closet, and then the closet door opened.

The foot was in the room. Lansing opened his eyes and saw it skitter under the bed. It began to kick things around, moving shoes around, jumping up and kicking at the bottom of the mattress.

He screamed and stood quickly up as the foot leaped onto the bed. It disappeared under the covers; Lansing could see it moving around underneath them.

He pulled frantically at the bolts on the door, missing and then finally unlocking them. He threw open the door. He heard the rumple of bedclothes behind him, as the foot kicked the covers aside to follow him. He ran down into the street and toward the subway. Looking back once over his shoulder, he saw the foot walking leisurely, keeping up with him about a half a block behind.

He heard the soft shoe again. It was the old man; he had set his hat down by the subway entrance, and was dancing. Lansing ran past him, kicking the hat as he did so; the old man stopped his dance and yelled after him.

Desperate, Lansing jumped the turnstile, and turned back to see the foot running underneath it. He began to scream, and the startled crowd moved aside in a swath to let him pass. A transit cop, seeing him, began to follow.

He ran down the stairs two at a time to the lower level, and along the platform of the express track. The foot was behind him. There was a roaring in his ears; he looked back to see the transit cop in the distance, an express train coming in, and the foot a few feet behind him, taking great springing jumps into the air. He tried to duck as the foot leaped onto his back, kicking him over the edge of the platform onto the tracks in front of the train. He landed on his back between the two tracks. Wild with terror, he looked over to see the foot stamping at him, and with a convulsive effort he rolled over the track to his right to safety as the train screeched toward him. But then, he realized with horror, the foot was stepping on his left leg, holding it down over the track, pressing it down as the train passed.

There was the shriek of steel on steel and then blackness.

~ * ~

He awoke in the hospital to the sound of Morelli’s voice. The foreman was hovering over him.

“Thank God, he’s coming around,” Morelli said. “Hey kid, how you feel?”

“I…okay, I guess,” he replied. He tried to push himself up to a sitting position and discovered that there was nothing to push with on his left leg but a stump.

Morelli moved quickly to help him sit up. “Hey kid,” he said, obvious concern in his voice, “I’m really sorry about what happened. I keep thinking about fooling you that day with my pants leg pulled down over my shoe and it makes me shiver. That didn’t freak you out, did it?”

“No. No, I’ll be all right,” he said. “You were just kidding around. That had nothing to do with it.”

Morelli looked relieved. “That’s great. I was really worried about it. You know, you were really lucky, kid. There was a cop right there when it happened, he said if you hadn’t moved at the last second you’d have been cut in half or mashed to a pulp. In fact, they might have been able to do something with your foot if…”

Lansing immediately became alert with fear. “What happened to my foot?”

“They…well, they couldn’t find it. It’s really weird.”

Lansing said nothing; and then suddenly the vision of his apartment left open, with the clippings of the girl, sprang to his mind. “What happened to my apartment? I left it open—”

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I locked it up for you. It was dark when I went over so I just shut the door. And don’t worry about your job, either, I’ll see you get it back when you get rehabilitated. There’s no reason why you can’t come back to work with…the way you are.”

Lansing’s mind was racing. “Thanks, Nick. I mean it. I…think I’d better rest now.”

“Sure, kid,” said Morelli. “I’ll come back to see you tomorrow.”

In the quiet of his room a sudden peace came over Lansing. It was incredible how it all fit so neatly together. He almost shivered with pleasure. He had killed the girl, and she had gotten her revenge; she was dead and he was alive. She had taken his foot, but he could live without it; he would learn to work and do everything else with it. And he would always have that secret knowledge of what he had done and that he had survived it. He began to smile to himself and drew his knees up, resting gently on the stump of his left leg, rocking slowly. I’ve beaten them, he thought, and even the image of his mother’s fingers dancing before him didn’t bother him now.

And then he heard the shuffling.

It was very faint at first, very far away, as if it were way down the corridor or outside his window on the street below, but it began to grow in volume. A cold shiver went through him, but then he suddenly remembered the dancing old man outside the subway station, only a few blocks away. He gradually relaxed. It must be someone like that—maybe even the same old man—shuffling up and down the halls of the hospital serenading the patients. He thought of how foolish he’d been before, letting it all get to him. It was not bad sounding, although it needed a little work on coordination. It got louder; obviously the dancer was working his way down the corridor and would reach his door in turn. He settled back against the pillows and thought of looking through his trouser pockets for loose change so that he could give it to the old man. He began to get a little drowsy.

The sound was very loud now; the dancer had reached his closed door and was tapping a beautiful, slow waltz. A smile came to Lansing’s lips.

“Come in, old man,” he called as the door inched open; he would now be able to see who was dancing so he could compliment him. The door opened all the way as the waltz ended.

There was no one there.

There was a squeak-shuffle and Lansing began to scream hysterically as two severed feet came into the room. They stopped before his bed and began to dance again, a fast-paced tap dance this time. Lansing screamed and screamed but no one came to help him. One foot, a graceful, feminine one, was covered with a ballet slipper and was doing most of the work, while the other, the foot of a man in a workman’s boot, seemed to be getting better as it followed the other’s example.

The dance ended, and after a short interlude for applause, another began.

Lansing, screaming and screaming, knew that the dance, the beautiful unending dance, would always be for him.