steel instruments wrapped in chamois. On top of them were the dental masks, each in its own sealed plastic bag.
'You really think these are necessary?' Sandy asked.
Curt shrugged. 'Better safe than sorry. Not that those things are worth much. We should probably be wearing respirators.'
'I sort of wish we had Bibi Roth here,' Tony said.
Curt made no verbal reply to that, but the flash of his eyes suggested that was the last thing in the world he wanted. The Buick belonged to the Troop. And anything that came out of it belonged to the Troop.
Curt opened the door of the storage closet and went in, pulling the chain that turned on the little room's green-shaded hanging lamp. Tony followed. There was a table not much bigger than a grade-schooler's desk under the light. Small as the closet was, there was barely room for two, let alone three. That was fine with Sandy; he never stepped over the threshold at all that night.
Shelves heaped with old files crowded in on three sides. Curt put his microscope on the little desk and plugged its light-source into the closet's one outlet. Sandy, meanwhile, was setting up Huddie Royer's videocam on its sticks. In the video of that peculiar postmortem, one can sometimes see a hand reach into the picture, holding out whatever instrument Curt has called for. It's Sandy Dearborn's hand. And one can hear the sound of vomiting at the end of the tape, loud and clear.
That is also Sandy Dearborn.
'Let's see the leaves first,' Curt said, snapping on a pair of the surgical gloves.
Tony had a bunch of them in a small evidence bag. He handed it over. Curt opened it and took out the remains of the leaves with a small pair of tongs. There was no way to get just one; by now they were all semi-transparent and stuck together like clumps of Saran Wrap. They were seeping little trickles of fluid, and the men could smell their aroma - that uneasy mix of cabbage and peppermint - immediately. It was not nice, but it was a long way from unbearable. Unbearable was at that point still ten minutes in the future.
Sandy used the zoom in order to get a good image of Curt separating a fragment of the mass from the whole, using the pincers deftly. He'd treated himself to a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and here was the payoff.
He transferred the fragment directly to the stage of the microscope, not attempting to make a slide. Phil Candleton's leaves were just the Coming Attractions reel. Curtis wanted to get to the feature presentation as soon as possible.
He bent over the twin eyepieces for a good long time nevertheless, then beckoned Tony for a look.
'What're the black things that look like threads?' Tony asked after several seconds of study.
His voice was slightly muffled by his pink mask.
'I don't know,' Curt said. 'Sandy, give me that gadget that looks like a Viewmaster. It has a couple of cords wrapped around it and PROPERTY H.U. BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT Dymotaped on the side.'
Sandy passed it to him over the top of the videocam, which was pretty much blocking the doorway. Curt plugged one of the cords into the wall and the other into the base of the microscope. He checked something, nodded, and pushed a button on the side of the Viewmaster thing three times, presumably taking pictures of the leaf fragments on the microscope's stage.
'Those black things aren't moving,' Tony said. He was still peering into the microscope.
'No.'
Tony finally raised his head. His eyes had a dazed, slightly awed look. 'Is it ... could it be like, I don't know, DNA?'
Curt's mask bobbed slightly on his face as he smiled. This is a great scope, Sarge, but we couldn't see DNA with it. Now, if you wanted to go up to Horlicks with me after midnight and pull a bag-job, they've got this really beautiful electron microscope in the Evelyn Silver Physics Building, never been driven except by a little old lady on her way to church and her weekly - '
'What's the white stuff?' Tony asked. The stuff the black threads are floating in?'
'Nutrient, maybe.'
'But you don't know.'
'Of course I don't know.'
'The black threads, the white goo, why the leaves are melting, what that smell is. We don't know dick about any of those things.'
'No.'
Tony gave him a level look. 'We're crazy to be fucking with this, aren't we?'
'No,' Curt said. 'Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction made him fat. You want to come in and take a peek, Sandy?'
'You took photos, right?'
'I did if this thing worked the way it's s'posed to.'
'Then I'll take a pass.'
'Okay, let's move on to the main event,' Curt said. 'Maybe we'll actually find something.'
The gobbet of leaves went back into the evidence bag and the evidence bag went back into a file cabinet in the corner. That battered green cabinet would become quite the repository of the weird and strange over the next two decades.
In another corner of the closet was an orange Eskimo cooler. Inside, under two of those blue chemical ice
