face, Dex. Her face.'
'Henry, don't--'
'I saw her eyes, looking up at me from that box. Her glazed eyes. I
saw something else, too. Something white. A bone, I think. And a
black something. Furry. Curled up. Whistling, too. A very low
whistle. I think it was sleeping.'
'I hooked it out as far as I could, and then I just stood there
looking at it, realizing that I couldn't drive knowing that thing
could come out at any time... come out and land on the back of my
neck. So I started to look around for something--anything--to cover
the top of Badlinger's crate.
'I went into the animal husbandry room, and there were a couple
of cages big enough to hold the Paella crate, but I couldn't find the
goddamned keys. So I went upstairs and I still couldn't find
anything. I don't know how long I hunted, but there was this
continual feeling of time... slipping away. I was getting a little
crazy. Then I happened to poke into that big lecture room at the far
end of the hall--'
'Room 6?'
'Yes, I think so. They had been painting the walls. There was a big
canvas dropcloth on the floor to catch the splatters. I took it, and
then I went back downstairs, and I pushed the Paella crate into
Badlinger's crate. Carefully!... you wouldn't believe how carefully
I did it, Dex.'
When the smaller crate was nested inside the larger, Henry
uncinched the straps on the English department dolly and grabbed
the end of the dropcloth. It rustled stiffly in the stillness of
Amberson Hall's basement. His breathing rustled stiffly as well.
And there was that low whistle. He kept waiting for it to pause, to
change. It didn't. He had sweated his shirt through; it was plastered
to his chest and back.
Moving carefully, refusing to hurry, he wrapped the dropcloth
around Badlinger's crate three times, then four, then five. In the
dim light shining through from the lab, Badlinger's crate now
looked mummified. Holding the seam with one splayed hand, he
wrapped first one strap around it, then the other. He cinched them
tight and then stood back a moment. He glanced at his watch. It
was just past one o'clock. A pulse beat rhythmically at his throat.
Moving forward again, wishing absurdly for a cigarette (he had
given them up sixteen years before), he grabbed the dolly, tilted it
back, and began pulling it slowly up the stairs.
Outside, the moon watched coldly as he lifted the entire load, dolly
and all, into the back of what he had come to think of as Wilma's
Jeep--although Wilma had not earned a dime since the day he had
married her. It was the biggest lift he had done since he had
worked with a moving company in Westbrook as an
undergraduate. At the highest point of the lift, a lance of pain
seemed to dig into his lower back. And still he slipped it into the
back of the Scout as gently as a sleeping baby.
