Associating one monster with another, I suppose."
"What do you mean?"
"Last year when Badlinger was in England--you remember
Badlinger, don't you?"
Dex nodded. Badlinger was the man who had beaten Henry out for
the English department chair... partly because Badlinger's wife was
bright, vivacious and sociable, while Henry's wife was a shrew.
Had been a shrew.
"He was in England on sabbatical," Henry said. "Had all their
things crated and shipped back. One of them was a giant stuffed
animal. Nessie, they call it. For his kids. That bastard bought it for
his kids. I always wanted children, you know. Wilma didn't. She
said kids get in the way.
"Anyway, it came back in this gigantic wooden crate, and
Badlinger dragged it down to the English department basement
because there was no room in the garage at home, he said, but he
didn't want to throw it out because it might come in handy
someday. Meantime, our janitors were using it as a gigantic sort of
wastebasket. When it was full of trash, they'd dump it into the back
of the truck on trash day and then fill it up again.
"I think it was the crate Badlinger's damned stuffed monster came
back from England in that put the idea in my head. I began to see
how your Tasmanian devil could be gotten rid of. And that started
me thinking about something else I wanted to be rid of. That I
wanted so badly to be rid of.
"I had my keys, of course. I let myself in and went downstairs. The
crate was there. It was a big, unwieldy thing, but the janitors' dolly
was down there as well. I dumped out the little bit of trash that was
in it and got the crate onto the dolly by standing it on end. I pulled
it upstairs and wheeled it straight across the mall and back to
Amberson."
"You didn't take your car?"
"No, I left my car in my space in the English department parking
lot. I couldn't have gotten the crate in there, anyway."
For Dex, new light began to break. Henry would have been driving
his MG, of course--an elderly sportscar that Wilma had always
called Henry's toy. And if Henry had the MG, then Wilma would
have had the Scout--a jeep with a fold-down back seat. Plenty of
storage space, as the ads said.
"I didn't meet anyone," Henry said. "At this time of year--and at no
other--the campus is quite deserted. The whole thing was almost
hellishly perfect. I didn't see so much as a pair of headlights. I got
back to Amberson Hall and took Badlinger's crate downstairs. I left
it sitting on the dolly with the open end facing under the stairs.
Then I went back upstairs to the janitors' closet and got that long
pole they use to open and close the windows. They only have those
poles in the old buildings now. I went back down and got ready to
hook the crate--your Paella crate--out from under the stairs. Then I
had a bad moment. I realized the top of Badlinger's crate was gone,
you see. I'd noticed it before, but now I realized it. In my guts."
"What did you do?"
"Decided to take the chance," Henry said. "I took the window pole
and pulled the crate out. I eased it out, as if it were full of eggs. No
... as if it were full of Mason jars with nitroglycerine in them."
Dex sat up, staring at Henry. "What... what..."
Henry looked back somberly. "It was my first good look at it,
remember. It was horrible." He paused deliberately and then said it
again: "It was horrible, Dex. It was splattered with blood, some of
it seemingly grimed right into tile wood. It made me think of... do
you remember those joke boxes they used to sell? You'd push a
little lever and tile box would grind and shake, and then a pale
green hand would come out of the top and push the lever back and
snap inside again. It made me think of that.
"I pulled it out--oh, so carefully--and I said I wouldn't look down
inside, no matter what. But I did, of course. And I saw..." His voice
dropped helplessly, seeming to lose all strength. "I saw Wilma's
face, Dex. Her face."
"Henry, don't--"
"I saw her eyes, looking up at me from that box. Her glazed eyes. I
saw something else, too. Something white. A bone, I think. And a
black something. Furry. Curled up. Whistling, too. A very low
whistle. I think it was sleeping."
"I hooked it out as far as I could, and then I just stood there
looking at it, realizing that I couldn't drive knowing that thing
could come out at any time... come out and land on the back of my
neck. So I started to look around for something--anything--to cover
the top of Badlinger's crate.
"I went into the animal husbandry room, and there were a couple
of cages big enough to hold the Paella crate, but I couldn't find the
goddamned keys. So I went upstairs and I still couldn't find
anything. I don't know how long I hunted, but there was this
continual feeling of time... slipping away. I was getting a little
crazy. Then I happened to poke into that big lecture room at the far
end of the hall--"
"Room 6?"
"Yes, I think so. They had been painting the walls. There was a big
canvas dropcloth on the floor to catch the splatters. I took it, and
then I went back downstairs, and I pushed the Paella crate into
Badlinger's crate. Carefully!... you wouldn't believe how carefully
I did it, Dex."
When the smaller crate was nested inside the larger, Henry
uncinched the straps on the English department dolly and grabbed
the end of the dropcloth. It rustled stiffly in the stillness of
Amberson Hall's basement. His breathing rustled stiffly as well.
And there was that low whistle. He kept waiting for it to pause, to
change. It didn't. He had sweated his shirt through; it was plastered
to his chest and back.
Moving carefully, refusing to hurry, he wrapped the dropcloth
around Badlinger's crate three times, then four, then five. In the
dim light shining through from the lab, Badlinger's crate now
looked mummified. Holding the seam with one splayed hand, he
wrapped first one strap around it, then the other. He cinched them
tight and then stood back a moment. He glanced at his watch. It
was just past one o'clock. A pulse beat rhythmically at his throat.
Moving forward again, wishing absurdly for a cigarette (he had
given them up sixteen years before), he grabbed the dolly, tilted it
back, and began pulling it slowly up the stairs.
Outside, the moon watched coldly as he lifted the entire load, dolly
and all, into the back of what he had come to think of as Wilma's
Jeep--although Wilma had not earned a dime since the day he had
married her. It was the biggest lift he had done since he had
worked with a moving company in Westbrook as an
undergraduate. At the highest point of the lift, a lance of pain
seemed to dig into his lower back. And still he slipped it into the
back of the Scout as gently as a sleeping baby.
He tried to close the back, but it wouldn't go up; the handle of the
dolly stuck out four inches too far. He drove with the tailgate
down, and at every bump and pothole, his heart seemed to stutter.
His ears felt for the whistle, waiting for it to escalate into a shrill
scream and then descend to a guttural howl of fury waiting for the
hoarse rip of canvas as teeth and claws pulled their way through it.
And overhead the moon, a mystic silver disc, rode the sky.
"I drove out to Ryder's Quarry," Henry went on. "There was a
chain across the head of the road, but I geared the Scout down and
got around. I backed right up to the edge of the water. The moon