“Now I’m going to want you to come back Tuesday, after the guests are gone, to place it in the house,” she admonished the driver. Then, to her granddaughter, “No, dear, we do not root about on the dirty floor like small, ill-mannered swine.” And again to the driver, “Tuesday, you understand, because I will not have you underfoot with company here. I’ll need to decide which furniture to shift, as well.”
The driver nodded slowly and, after a pause, said “Yep.” There was a quiet censuriousness to his monosyllabic reply, as if it were an admonition to keep her words and reasons to herself. His assistant, chewing on something—either gum or “chaw,” probably the latter—jaws agape and about as attractive-looking as a cow at its cud, was wielding his pry bar with abandon, splintering the crate’s planks, threatening the absolutely priceless—and irreparable should it be damaged—patina of the wood. Until finally she could not bear to simply watch any longer.
“Hand me that pry,” she snapped, and took it away from the gawking youth. There was a correct way to uncrate furniture; you sought out the joints and deftly, even daintily, applied leverage there, so that the whole thing popped open like a walnut shell under properly applied nutcrackers. Brute force was totally unnecessary. And so she would have shown him, only her arthritis chose that instant to seize up, and her hands became about as useless as clubs, and wouldn’t close all the way around the pry. She made a feeble pass or two at the wood, but it was hopeless—the tool slid in her hand, refusing to obey her. She couldn’t even hold the damnable thing.
She looked up then, and in a timeless instant of glaring horror saw that the driver and his slack-jawed assistant were both staring at her with pity in their eyes. Jennifer, thankfully, was too young to comprehend, and stood looking on with innocent curiosity.
For a moment, she trembled with humiliation, and then, furiously, she flung the pry bar to the floor. Tears flooding her eyes, she gasped, “Oh, you do it!” and fled.
Behind her, the men quietly, red-facedly, settled the dresser into a dry corner. When it was in place, the driver rubbed it down with his pocket bandana to remove any greasy fingerprints, and swiftly pulled each drawer out a half-inch and back in again, to make sure that none had seized up in transit. He was a conscientious man, and always gave his work this extra bit of care and attention. But he wasn’t anxious to linger, and it was entirely understandable that, in his haste, he didn’t fully re-close one drawer.
It was dying.
Hunger had driven it to the sharp edge of starvation. It was already seriously sick, or it would have abandoned the dresser immediately upon regaining the mental equilibrium that served it for consciousness. No matter how comfortably enclosed, how nurturing and psychologically sheltering a niche it was, the drawer had proven unsafe. But the long exposure to first one, then another truck’s electrical systems had weakened and disoriented it, and filled it with anguished glimpses of something that was once, or perhaps ought to be, but was now no more. It trembled shiveringly where it was, until the hunger rose up like a wall and forced it out.
Moving as swiftly—as noiselessly—as shifting shadows, it scavenged the barn, a whirlwind of silent wrath, in search of the fire-of-life all living creatures carried within. Up in the rafters it took a clutch of bats, engulfing them before they could stir from their upside-down perches, and felt better for it, unsatisfied, but no longer so ravenous. Again and again, it scoured the barn, knowing that there should be more prey, and bewildered by its absence.
Frequently it passed by yellow cardboard boxes with grain spilling out from them and of course could not recognize them as bait stations filled with rat poison. But it quickly came to realize that the nourishment it must have would of necessity have to be found outside.
Cautiously, it edged out into the farmyard, slipping easily under the barn door.
And—fire! fear! pain! horror!—found its spatial sense overwhelmed by land that stretched far and away, featureless and with no place to hide, no sheltering masses or deep crannies into which to duck, nothing but rolling, exposed emptiness for hundreds of times its own length. Off to one side was the farmhouse, surrounded by evergreen shrubbery and a few ancient oaks, but it hardly spared that a glimpse in its panicked retreat back into the barn.
Terrified, cold, and hungry, it returned to the half-open drawer to huddle shivering like a wounded animal, its mind looping furiously over and over again and still not easing out the jagged static terror. It waited, because it had to, waited for something to change, for food to come to it, or else for the hunger and need to grow so great that it would be forced out into the openness and emptiness where it currently dared not go.
Mrs. Kingsley was tucking Jennifer into bed when the child’s father came up the drive. She carefully bundled the little girl in, first between a pair of flannel sheets, then under a thin electric blanket, and finally—to top it all off—pulling a double-wedding band quilt over all. The quilt was one her mother had made, in point of fact, and Alma Kingsley hoped to live long enough to pass it on to her granddaughter, when the child came of marrying age.
“It’s snowing outside,” Jennifer said as her grandmother smoothed down the quilt. And then, in that flat, absolutely sincere way children have of presenting their fantasies, she said, “And I saw a Monster from my window.”
It was then, in a kind of ironic counterpoint, that the El Dorado purred up the long drive. Jennifer sat up immediately. “Is that Daddy, Gamma?”
Mrs. Kingsley smoothed the child down on the pillow, then turned to look out the window. A few small, bitter flakes of snow were falling from the black sky. They fell fast, a precursor of more to come. The El Dorado pulled off the drive, which was unnecessary, and onto the house’s front yard, which was worse. It was winter and the grass was dead, but, still, that kind of treatment hurt a lawn.
“Yes, it’s your father,” she said. The car’s front door opened and the man himself spilled drunkenly out. “No, don’t get up. I am certain that your father would rather find you tucked angelically into bed than running about caterwauling like a wild heathen Indian. Parents are peculiar in that respect.”
Jenny giggled appreciatively, if somewhat sleepily. Outside, the El Dorado’s other front door swung open.
Alma Kingsley slipped out of the room, snapping off the light. “I’ll leave the door open a crack,” she said. “Now you just lie there with your eyes closed, so when your father comes in to kiss you goodnight, you can open them and surprise him. Won’t that be fun?”
The child nodded slowly, then twisted a bit to dig her cheek into the pillows.
“Sweet dreams,” Mrs. Kingsley murmured.
She went downstairs to confront the father.
Iago came padding out from the kitchen as she threw a jacket over her thin shoulders against the terrible cold outside. He stood by her side, anxious with doggish worries of his own, as she flung the front door open. Desmond stood on the stoop, one arm flung around his roadhouse floozy’s neck, grappling vaguely for her breasts, and the other digging through his pockets—with equal incompetence—in search of the door key. He gaped up stupidly at her.