clicking on the tile floor. He scrambled under food preparation tables, rolled and leaped and abruptly changed directions again and again to elude grasping hands, exhibiting all the agility of an eel, panting and grinning and apparently having a good time.
However, it wasn’t entirely fun and doggy games. At the same time, he was urgently searching for something, following an elusive scent, sniffing at the floor and at the air. He appeared to be disinterested in the ovens filled with baking sweetrolls from which flowed a virtual flood of mouth-watering aromas, and he didn’t leap up toward any of the counters on which food was exposed. Something else interested him, whatever he had first detected on the young blond nurse named Angelina.
“Bad dog,” Janet kept repeating as she joined the chase, “bad dog, bad dog!”
Woofer cast a couple of hurt looks her way but didn’t settle down.
A nurse’s aide, unaware of what was happening in the kitchen, pushed through a pair of swinging doors with a cart of supplies, and the dog instantly took advantage of the opening. He shot past the aide, through the doors, into another part of the care home.
Bad dog. Not true. Good dog. Good.
The food place is full of so many tasty odors, he can’t track the other scent, the strange scent, quick as he wants to. But on the other side of the swinging doors is a long, long narrow place with other places opening off both sides. Here the hungry-making smells aren’t as heavy.
Lots of other smells, though, mostly people smells, mostly not wonderful. Sharp odors, salty odors, sick- making sweet odors, sour.
Pine. A bucket of pine in the long, long narrow place. He real quick sticks his nose in the bucket of pine, wondering how the whole tree got in there, but it isn’t a tree, only water, dirty-looking water that smells like a whole pine tree, a bunch of them, all in a bucket. Interesting.
Hurry on.
Pee. He can smell pee. People pee. Different kinds of people pee. Interesting. Ten, twenty, thirty different pee smells, none of them real strong but
He smells shoe leather, floor wax, wood polish, starch, roses, daisies, tulips, carnations, lemons, ten- twenty-lots of kinds of sweat, chocolate good, poop bad, dust, damp earth from a plant pot, soap, hair spray, peppermint, pepper, salt, onions, the sneeze-making bitterness of termites in one wall, coffee, hot brass, rubber, paper, pencil shavings, butterscotch, more pine trees in a bucket, another dog. Interesting. Another dog. Somebody has a dog and brings its scent in on their shoes, interesting dog, female, and they track the scent around the long narrow place. Interesting. There are countless other odors — his world is odors more than anything — including that strange scent, strange and bad, bare-your-teeth bad, enemy, hateful thing, smelled before, policeman smell, wolf smell, policeman-wolf-thing smell, there, got it again, this way, this way, follow.
People are chasing him because he doesn’t belong here. All sorts of places people think you don’t belong, though you never smell as bad as most people, even the clean ones, and though you aren’t as big or crashing around with so much noise and taking up so much space as people do.
Bad dog, the woman says, and that hurts him because he likes the woman, the boy, is doing this for them, finding out about the bad policeman-wolf-thing with the strange smell.
Bad dog. Not true. Good dog. Good.
Woman in white, coming through a door, looking surprised, smelling surprised, trying to stop him. Quick snarl. She jumps back. So easy to scare, people. So easy to fool.
The long narrow place meets another long narrow place. More doors, more odors, ammonia and sulphur and more kinds of sick smells, more kinds of pee. People live here but also pee here. So strange. Interesting. Dogs don’t pee where they live.
Woman in the narrow place, carrying something, looks surprised, smells surprised, says,
Give her a wag of the tail. Why not? But keep going.
That scent. Strange. Hateful. Strong, getting stronger.
An open door, soft light, a space with a sick woman lying on a bed. He goes in, suddenly wary, looking left and right, because this place reeks of the strange odor, the bad thing, the floor, the walls, and especially a chair, where the bad thing sat. It was here for a long time, more than once, lots of times.
The woman says,
She stinks. Faint sour sweat. Sickness but more than that. Sadness. Deep, low, terrible unhappiness. And fear. More than anything else, the sharp, lightning-storm, iron smell of fear.
Running feet in the long narrow space outside, people coming.
Fear so heavy that the strange-bad odor is almost blotted out by the fear, fear, fear, fear.
The bad scent, thing scent, is all around the bed, up on the bed. The thing stood here and talked to the woman, not long ago, today, touching her, touching the white cloth draped over her, its vile residue there, up there in the bed, rich and ripe up there in the bed with the woman, and interesting, oh-so-very interesting.
He races back to the door, turns, runs at the bed, leaps, sails, one paw catching the railing but otherwise clearing all obstacles, up with the sick and fear-soaked woman, plop.
A woman screamed.
Janet had never been afraid that Woofer would bite anyone. He was a gentle and friendly dog, and seemed incapable of harming a soul except, perhaps, the thing that had confronted them in the alleyway earlier in the day.
But when she burst into the softly lighted hospital room behind Angelina, and saw the dog on the patient’s bed, for an instant Janet thought it was attacking the woman. She pulled Danny against her to shield him from the savage sight, before she realized Woofer was only straddling the patient and sniffing her,
“No,” the invalid cried, “no, no,” as if not merely a dog but something out of the deeper pits of Hell had leapt upon her.
Janet was ashamed of the commotion, felt responsible, and was afraid of the consequence. She doubted that she and Danny would be welcome to take meals in the Pacific View kitchen any longer.
The woman in the bed was thin — beyond thin, wasted — and so pale, as softly radiant as a ghost in the lamplight. Her hair was white and lusterless. She seemed ancient, a shriveled crone, but some indefinable aspect of her made Janet think the poor soul might be much younger than she appeared.
Obviously weak, she was struggling to rise slightly from her pillows and ward off the dog with her right arm. When she became aware of the arrival of those pursuing Woofer, she turned her head toward the door. Her gaunt face might once have been beautiful but was now cadaverous and, in one respect at least, nightmarish.
Her eyes.
She had none.
Janet shuddered involuntarily — and was glad she had shielded Danny, after all.
“Get it off me!” the woman shrieked in terror out of proportion to any threat that Woofer posed. “Get it off me!”
At first, glimpsed in the gray and purple shadows, the invalid’s eyelids merely appeared to be closed. But as the lamplight fell more directly across her drawn face, the true horror of her condition became apparent. Her lids were sewn shut like those of a corpse. The surgical thread had no doubt long ago dissolved, but upper and lower lids had grown together. Nothing existed immediately beneath the flaps of skin to support them, so they sagged inward, leaving shallow concavities.
Janet felt sure the woman had not been born without eyes. Some terrible experience, not nature, had stolen her vision. How severe must the injuries have been, if physicians had concluded it wasn’t possible to install glass eyes even for cosmetic reasons? Dire intuition told Janet that this blind and shriveled patient had encountered
