Along about the third week in November the kid came back one afternoon to find Richie had gone one further than just pulling the shades down. He'd taken and nailed blankets across every window in the place. It was starting to stink worse, too - kind of a mushy stink, the way fruit gets when it goes to ferment with yeast.
A week or so after that, Richie got the kid to start heating his beer on the stove. Can you feature that? The kid all by himself in that apartment with his dad turning into, well, into something . . . an' heating his beer and then having to listen to him - it - drinking it with awful thick slurping sounds, the way an old man eats his chowder: Can you imagine it?
And that's the way things went on until today, when the kid's school let out early because of the storm.
'The boy says he went right home,' Henry told us. 'There's no light in the upstairs hall at all - the boy claims his dad musta snuck out some night and broke it - so he had to sort of creep down to his door.
'Well, he heard somethin' moving around in there, and it suddenly pops into his mind that he don't know what Richie does all day through the week. He ain't seen his dad stir out of that chair for almost a month, and a man's got to sleep and go to the bathroom some time.
'There's a Judas hole in the middle of the door, and it's supposed to have a latch on the inside to fasten it shut, but it's been busted ever since they lived there. So the kid slides up to the door real easy and pushed it open a bit with his thumb and pokes his eye up to it.'
By now we were at the foot of the steps and the house was looming over us like a-high, ugly face, with those windows on the third floor for eyes. I looked up there and sure enough those two windows were just as black as pitch. Like somebody's put blankets over 'em or painted 'em up.
'It took him a minute to get his eye adjusted to the gloom. An' then he seen a great big grey lump, not like a man at all, slitherin' over the floor, leavin' a grey, slimy trail behind it. An' then it sort of snaked out an arm - or something like an arm - and pried a board off'n the wall. And took out a cat.' Henry stopped for a second. Bertie was beating his hands together and it was godawful cold out there on the street, but none of us was ready to go up just yet. 'A dead cat,' Henry recommenced, 'that had putrefacted. The boy said it looked all swole up stiff . . . and there was little white things crawlin' all over it .
'Stop,' Bertie said. 'For Christ's sake.'
'And then his dad ate it., I tried to swallow and something tasted greasy in my throat.
'That's when Timmy closed the peephole.' Henry finished softly. 'And ran.'
'I don't think I can go up there,' Bertie said.
Henry didn't say anything, just looked from Bertie to me and back again.
'I guess we better,' I said. 'We got Richie's beer.'
Bertie didn't say anything to that, so we went up the steps and in through the front hall door. I smelled it right off.
Do you know how a cider house smells in summer? You never get the smell of apples out, but in the fall it's all right because it smells tangy and sharp enough to ream your nose right out. But in the summer, it just smells mean, this smell was like that, but a little bit worse.
There was one light on in the lower hall, a mean yellow thing in a frosted glass that threw a glow as thin as buttermilk. And those stairs that went up into the shadows.
Henry bumped the cart to a stop, and while he was lifting out the case of beer, I thumbed the button at the foot of the stairs that controlled the second-floor-landing bulb. But it was busted, just as the boy said.
Bertie quavered: 'I'll lug the beer. You just take care of that pistol.'
Henry didn't argue. He handed it over and we started up, Henry first, then me, then Bertie with the case in his arms. By the time we had fetched the second-floor landing, the stink was just that much worse. Rotted apples, all fermented, and under that an even uglier stink.
When I lived out in Levant I had a dog one time - Rex, his name was - and he was a good mutt but not very wise about cars. He got hit a lick one afternoon while I was at work and he crawled under the house and died there. My Christ, what a stink. I finally had to go under and haul him out with a pole. That other stench was like that; flyblown and putrid and just as dirty as a borin' cob.
Up till then I 'had kept thinking that maybe it was some sort of joke, but I saw it wasn't. 'Lord, why don't the neighbours kick up, Harry?' I asked.
'What neighbours?' Henry asked, and he was smiling that queer smile again.
I looked around and saw that the hall had a sort of dusty, unused look and the door of all three second-floor apartments was closed and locked up.
'Who's the landlord, I wonder?' Bertie asked, resting the case on the newel post and getting his breath. 'Gaiteau? Surprised he don't kick 'im out.'
'Who'd go up there and evict him?' Henry asked. 'You?'
Bertie didn't say nothing.
Presently we started up the next flight, which was even narrower and steeper than the last. It was getting hotter, too. It sounded like every radiator in the place was clanking and hissing. The smell was awful, and I started to feel like someone was stirring my guts with a stick.
At the top was a short hall, and one door with a little Judas hole in the middle of it.
Bertie made a soft little cry an' whispered out: 'Look what we're walkin' in!'
I looked down and saw all this slimy stuff on the hall floor, in little puddles. It looked like there'd been a carpet once, but the grey stuff had eaten it all away.
Henry walked down to the door, and we went after him. I don't know about Bertie, but I was shaking in my shoes. Henry never hesitated, though; he raised up that gun and -beat on the door with the butt of it.
