The crate was stained and splashed with blood. The snarling seemed to go on endlessly. The crate rocked back and forth a bit, but it was too well-braced against the instrument mount to go very far. The body of the janitor lolled grotesquely, still grasped firmly by whatever was in there. The small of his back was pressed against the lip of the lab table.
His free hand dangled, sparse hair curling on the fingers between the first and second knuckles. His big key ring glimmered chrome in the light.
And now his body began to rock slowly this way and that. His shoes dragged back and forth, not tap dancing now but waltzing obscenely.
And then they did not drag. They dangled an inch off the floor...then two inches…then half a foot above the floor. Dex realized that the janitor was being dragged into the crate. The nape of his neck came to rest against the board fronting the far side of the hole in the top of the crate. He looked like a man resting in some weird Zen position of contemplation. His dead eyes sparkled. And Dex heard, below the savage growling noises, a smacking, rending sound. And the crunch of a bone.
Dex ran.
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He blundered his way across the lab and out the door and up the stairs.
Halfway up, he fell down, clawed at the risers, got to his feet, and ran again. He gained the first floor hallway and sprinted down it, past the closed doors with their frosted-glass panels, past the bulletin boards. He was chased by his own footfalls. In his ears he could hear that damned whistling.
He ran right into Charlie Gereson's arms and almost knocked him over, and he spilled the milk shake Charlie had been drinking all over both of them.
"Holy hell, what's wrong?" Charlie asked, comic in his extreme surprise. He was short and compact, wearing cotton chinos and a white tee shirt. Thick spectacles sat grimly on his nose, meaning business, proclaiming that they were there for a long haul.
"Charlie," Dex said, panting harshly. "My boy...the janitor...the crate...
it whistles... it whistles when it's hungry and it whistles again when it's full...my boy...we have to...campus security...we....we..."
"Slow down, Professor Stanley," Charlie said. He looked concerned and a little frightened. You don't expect to be seized by the senior professor in your department when you had nothing more aggressive in mind yourself than charting the continued outmigration of sandflies.
"Slow down, I don't know what you're talking about."
Stanley, hardly aware of what he was saying, poured out a garbled version of what had happened to the janitor. Charlie Gereson looked more and more confused and doubtful. As upset as he was, Dex began to realize that Charlie didn't believe a word of it. He thought, with a new kind of horror, that soon Charlie would ask him if he had been working too hard, and that when he did, Stanley would burst into mad cackles of laughter.
But what Charlie said was, "That's pretty far out, Professor Stanley."
"It's true. We've got to get campus security over here. We – "
"No, that's no good. One of them would stick his hand in there, first thing." He saw Dex's stricken look and went on. "If I'm having trouble swallowing this, what are they going to think?"
"I don't know," Dex said. "I...I never thought..."
"They'd think you just came off a helluva toot and were seeing Tasmanian devils instead of pink elephants," Charlie Gereson said cheerfully, and pushed his glasses up on his pug nose. "Besides, from what you say, the responsibility has belonged with zoology all along...
like for a hundred and forty years."
"But..." He swallowed, and there was a click in his throat as he prepared to voice his worst fear. "But it may be out."
"I doubt that," Charlie said, but didn't elaborate. And in that, Dex saw two things: that Charlie didn't believe a word he had said, and that 81
nothing he could say would dissuade Charlie from going back down there.
Henry Northrup glanced at his watch. They had been sitting in the study for a little over an hour; Wilma wouldn't be back for another two.
Plenty of time. Unlike Charlie Gereson, he had passed no judgment at all on the factual basis of Dex's story. But he had known Dex for a longer time than young Gereson had, and he didn't believe his friend exhibited the signs of a man who has suddenly developed a psychosis.
What he exhibited was a kind of bug-eyed fear, no more or less than you'd expect to see a man who has had an extremely close call with...well, just an extremely close call.
"He went down, Dex?"
"Yes. He did."
"You went with him?"
"Yes."
Henry shifted position a little. "I can understand why he didn't want to get campus security until he had checked the situation himself. But Dex, you knew you were telling the flat-out truth, even if he didn't. Why didn't you call?"
"You believe me?" Dex asked. His voice trembled. "You believe me, don't you, Henry?"
Henry considered briefly. The story was mad, no question about that.
The implication that there could be something in that box big enough and lively enough to kill a man after some one hundred and forty years was mad. He didn't believe it. But this was Dex...and he didn't disbelieve it either.
"Yes," he said.
"Thank God for that," Dex said. He groped for his drink. "Thank God for that, Henry."
"It doesn't answer the question, though. Why didn't you call the campus cops?"
"I thought...as much as I did think... that it might not want to come out of the crate, into the bright light. It must have lived in the dark for so long...so very long...and...grotesque as this sounds...I thought it might be pot-bound, or something. I thought...well, he'll see it...he'll see the rate...the janitor's body...he'll see the blood...and then we'd call security.
You see?" Stanley's eyes pleaded with him to see, and Henry did. He thought that, considering the fact that it had been a snap judgment in a pressure situation, that Dex had thought quite clearly. The blood. When the young graduate student saw the blood, he would have been happy to call in the cops.
"But it didn't work out that way."
"No." Dex ran a hand through his thinning hair.
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"Why not?"
"Because when we got down there, the body was gone."
"It was gone?"
"That's right. And the crate was gone, too."
When Charlie Gereson saw the blood, his round and good-natured face went very pale. His eyes, already magnified by his thick spectacles, grew even huger. Blood was puddled on the lab table. It had run down one of the table legs. It was pooled on the floor, and beads of it clung to the light globe and to the white tile wall. Yes, there was plenty of blood.
But no janitor. No crate.
Dex Stanley's jaw dropped. "What the fuck!" Charlie whispered. Dex saw something then, perhaps the only thing that allowed him to keep his sanity. Already he could feel that central axle trying to pull free. He grabbed Charlie's shoulder and said, "Look at the blood on the table!"
"I've seen enough," Charlie said.
His Adam's apple rose and fell like an express elevator as he struggled to keep his lunch down.
"For God's sake, get hold of yourself," Dex said harshly. "You're a zoology major. You've seen blood before."
It was the voice of authority, for that moment anyway. Charlie did get a hold of himself, and they walked a little closer. The random pools of blood on the table were not as random as they had first appeared. Each had been neatly straight-edged on one side.
"The crate sat there," Dex said. He felt a little better. The fact that the crate really had been there steadied him a good deal. "And look there."
He pointed at the floor. Here the blood had been smeared into a wide, thin trail.
It swept toward where the two of them stood, a few paces inside the double doors. It faded and faded, petering out altogether about halfway between the lab table and the doors. It was crystal clear to Dex Stanley, and the nervous sweat on his skin went cold and clammy.