twenty with seven seconds to spare - although when he walked out he was more'n three sails into the wind. So I expect Richie had most of that bad can in his gut before his brain could warn him.
'I'm gonna puke,' Richie say. 'Look out!'
But by the time he got to the head it had passed off, and that was the end of it. The boy said he smelt the can, and it smeltlike something crawled in there and died. There was a little grey dribble around the top, too.
Two days later the boy comes home from school and there's Richie sitting in front of the TV and watching the afternoon tearjerkers with every goddamn shade in the place pulled down.
'What's up?' Timmy asks, for Richie don't hardly ever roll in before nine.
'I'm watchin' the TV,' Richie says. 'I didn't seem to want to go out today.'
Timmy turned on the light over the sink, and Richie yelled at him: 'And turn off that friggin' light!'
So Timmy did, not asking how he's gonna do his homework in the dark. When Richie's in that mood, you don't ask him nothing.
'An' go out an' get me a case,' Richie says. 'Money's on the table.'
When the kid gets back, his dad's still sitting in the dark, only now it's dark outside, too. And the TV's off. The kid starts getting the creeps well, who wouldn't? Nothing but a dark flat and your daddy setting in the corner like a big lump.
So he puts the beer on the table, knowing that Richie don't like it so cold it spikes his forehead, and when he gets close to his old man he starts to notice a kind of rotten smell, like an old cheese someone left standing on the counter over the weekend. He don't say shit or go blind, though, as the old man was never what you'd call a cleanly soul. Instead he goes into his room and shuts the door and does his homework, and after a while he hears the TV start to go and Richie's popping the top in his first of the evening.
And for two weeks or so, that's the way things went. The kid got up in the morning and went to school an' when he got home Richie'd be in front of the television, and beer money on the table.
The flat was smelling ranker and ranker, too. Richie wouldn't have the shades up at all, and about the middle of November he made Timmy stop studying in his room. Said he couldn't abide the light under the door. So Timmy started going down the block to a friend's house after getting his dad the beer.
Then one day when Timmy came home from school - it was four o'clock and pretty near dark already - Richie says, 'Turn on the light.'
The kid turned on the light over the sink, and damn if Richie ain't all wrapped up in a blanket.
'Look,' Richie says, and one hand creeps out from under the blanket. Only it ain't a hand at all.
Well, Timmy Grenadine was scared bad. He says, 'Pop, what's happening to you?'
And Richie says, 'I dunno. But it don't hurt. It feels. . kinda nice.'
So, Timmy says, 'I'm gonna call Dr Westphail.'
And the blanket starts to tremble all over, like something awful was shaking -
By then we were up to the corner of Harlow arid Curve Street, and I was even colder than the temperature had been on Henry's Orange Crush thermometer when we came out. A person doesn't hardly want to believe such things, and yet there's still strange things in the world.
I once knew a fella named George Kelso, who worked for the Bangor Public Works Department. He spent fifteen years fixing water mains and mending electricity cables and all that, an' then one day he just up an' quit, not two years before his retirement. Frankie Haldeman, who knew him, said George went down into a sewer pipe on Essex laughing and joking just like always and came up fifteen minutes later with his hair just as white as snow and his eyes staring like he just looked through a window into hell. He walked straight down to the BPW garage and punched his clock and went down to Wally's Spa and started drinking. It killed him two years later. Frankie said he tried to talk to him about it and George said something one time, and that was when he was pretty well blotto. Turned around on his stool, George did, an' asked Frankie Haldeman if he'd ever seen a spider as big as a good- sized dog setting in a web full of kitties an' such all wrapped up in silk thread. Well, what could he say to that? I'm not saying there's truth in it, but I am saying that there's things in the corners of the world that would drive a man insane to look 'em right in the face.
So we just stood on the corner a minute, in spite of the wind that was whooping up the street.
'What'd he see?' Bertie asked.
'He said he could still see his dad,' Henry answered, 'but he said it was like he was buried in grey jelly. . . and it was all kinda mashed together. He said his clothes were all stickin' in and out of his skin, like they was melted to his body.'
'Holy Jesus,' Bertie said.
'Then he covered right up again and started screaming at the kid to turn off the light.'
'Like he was a fungus,' I said.
'Yes,' Henry said. 'Sorta like that.'
'You keep that pistol handy,' Bertie said.
'Yes, I think I will.' And with that, we started to trundle up Curve Street.
The apartment house where Richie Grenadine had his flat was almost at the top of the hill, one of those big Victorian monsters that were built by the pulp an' paper barons at the turn of the century. They've just about all been turned into apartment houses now. When Bertie got his breath he told us Richie lived on the third floor under that top gable that jutted out like an eyebrow. I took the chance to ask Henry what happened to the kid after that.
