there's a date. Eighteen thirty-four.'
That changed things. Stanley looked at his watch and decided he
could spare half all hour.
In spite of the humid August heat outside, the smooth tile-faced
throat of the stairway was almost cold. Above them, yellow frosted
globes cast a dim and thoughtful light. The stair levels had once
been red, but in the centers they shaded to a dead black where the
feet of years had worn away layer after layer of resurfacing. The
silence was smooth and nearly perfect.
The janitor reached the bottom first and pointed under the
staircase. 'Under here,' he said.
Dex joined him in staring into a shadowy, triangular cavity under
the wide staircase. He felt a small tremor of disgust as he saw
where the janitor had brushed away a gossamer veil of cobwebs.
He supposed it was possible that the man had found something a
little older than postwar records under there, now that he acutally
looked at the space. But 1834?
'Just a second,' the janitor said, and left momentarily. Left alone,
Dex hunkered down and peered in. He could make out nothing but
a deeper patch of shadow in there. Then the janitor returned with a
hefty four-cell flashlight. 'This'll show it up.'
'What were you doing under there anyway?' Dex asked.
The janitor grinned. 'I was only standin here tryin to decide if I
should buff that second-floor hallway first or wash the lab
windows. I couldn't make up my mind, so I flipped a quarter. Only
I dropped it and it rolled under there.' He pointed to the shadowy,
triangular cave. 'I prob'ly would have let it go, except that was my
only quarter for the Coke machine. So I got my flash and knocked
down the cobwebs, and when I crawled under to get it, I saw that
crate. Here, have a look.'
The janitor shone his light into the hole. Motes of disturbed dust
preened and swayed lazily in the beam. The light struck the far
wall in a spotlight circle, rose to the zigzag undersides of the stairs
briefly, picking out an ancient cobweb in which long-dead bugs
hung mumified, and then the light dropped and centered on a crate
about five feet long and two-and-a-half wide. It was perhaps three
feet deep. As the janitor had said, it was no knocked-together affair
made out of scrap-boards. It was neatly constructed of a smooth,
dark heavy wood. A coffin, Dexter thought uneasily. It looks like a
child's coffin.
The dark color of the wood showed only a fan-shaped swipe on the
side. The rest of the crate was the uniform dull gray of dust.
Something was written on the side-stenciled there.
Dex squinted but couldn't read it. He fumbled his glasses out of his
breast pocket and still couldn't. Part of what had been stenciled on
was obscured by the dust--not four inches of it, by any means, but
an extraordinarily thick coating, all the same.
Not wanting to crawl and dirty his pants, Dex duck-walked under
the stairway, stifling a sudden and amazingly strong feeling of
claustrophobia. The spit dried in his mouth and was replaced by a
