Uncollected Stories 2003

His grip on the back of Charlie's shirt loosened momentarily.

A moment was all it took. Charlie Gereson's body was snapped under the stairs with grotesque, cartoonish speed. Silence for a moment. Then the growling, smacking sounds began again.

Charlie screamed once more, a long sound of terror and pain that was abruptly cut off...as if something had been clapped over his mouth.

Or stuffed into it.

Dex fell silent. The moon was high in the sky. Half of his third drink –

an almost unheard-of phenomenon – was gone, and he felt the reaction setting in as sleepiness and extreme lassitude.

'What did you do then?' Henry asked. What he hadn't done, he knew, was to go to campus security; they wouldn't have listened to such a story and then released him so he could go and tell it again to his friend Henry.

'I just walked around, in utter shock, I suppose. I ran up the stairs again, just as I had after...after it took the janitor, only this time there was no Charlie Gereson to run into. I walked...miles, I suppose. I think I was mad. I kept thinking about Ryder's Quarry. You know that place?'

'Yes,' Henry said.

'I kept thinking that would be deep enough. If...if there would be a way to get that crate out there. I kept...kept thinking...' He put his hands to his face. 'I don't know. I don't know anymore. I think I'm going crazy.'

'If the story you just told is true, I can understand that,' Henry said quietly.

He stood up suddenly. 'Come on. I'm taking you home.'

'Home?' Dex looked at this friend vacantly. 'But – '

'I'll leave a note for Wilma telling her where we've gone and then we'll call...who do you suggest, Dex? Campus security or the state police?'

'You believe me, don't you? You believe me? Just say you do.'

'Yes, I believe you,' Henry said, and it was the truth. 'I don't know what that thing could be or where it came from, but I believe you.' Dex Stanley began to weep.

'Finish your drink while I write my wife,' Henry said, apparently not noticing the tears. He even grinned a little. 'And for Christ's sake, let's get out of here before she gets back.'

Dex clutched at Henry's sleeve. 'But we won't go anywhere near Amberson Hall, will we? Promise me, Henry! We'll stay away from there, won't we?'

'Does a bear shit in the woods?' Henry Northrup asked. It was a three-mile drive to Dex's house on the outskirts of town, and before they 85

got there, he was half-asleep in the passenger seat.

'The state cops, I think,' Henry said. His words seemed to come from a great distance. 'I think Charlie Gereson's assessment of the campus cops was pretty accurate. The first one there would happily stick his arm into that box.'

'Yes. All right.' Through the drifting, lassitudinous aftermath of shock, Dex felt a dim but great gratitude that his friend had taken over with such efficiency. Yet a deeper part of him believed that Henry could not have done it if he had seen the things he had seen. 'Just...the importance of caution ...'

'I'll see to that,' Henry said grimly, and that was when Dex fell asleep.

He awoke the next morning with August sunshine making crisp patterns on the sheets of his bed. Just a dream, he thought with indescribable relief. All some crazy dream.

But there was a taste of Scotch in his mouth--Scotch and something else. He sat up, and a lance of pain bolted through his head. Not the sort of pain you got from a hangover, though; not even if you were the type to get a hangover from three Scotches, and he wasn't.

He sat up, and there was Henry, sitting across the room. His first thought was that Henry needed a shave. His second was that there was something in Henry's eyes that he had never seen before – something like chips of ice. A ridiculous thought came to Dex; it passed through his mind and was gone. Sniper's eyes.

Henry Northrup, whose specialty is the earlier English poets, has got sniper's eyes.

'How are you feeling, Dex?'

'A slight headache,' Dex said. 'Henry...the police...what happened?'

'The police aren't coming,' Northrup said calmly. 'As for your head, I'm very sorry. I put one of Wilma's sleeping powders in your third drink. Be assured that it will pass.'

'Henry, what are you saying?'

Henry took a sheet of notepaper from his breast pocket. 'This is the note I left my wife. It will explain a lot, I think. I got it back after everything was over. I took a chance that she'd leave it on the table, and I got away with it.'

'I don't know what you're – '

He took the note from Henry's fingers and read it, eyes widening.

Dear Billie,

I've just had a call from Dex Stanley. He's hysterical. Seems to have