Uncollected Stories 2003 (11 page)

Dex grabbed one end and lifted it. Heavy. As he let it settle back with
a mild thud, something shifted inside – he did not hear it but felt it
through the palms of his hands, as if whatever it was had moved of its
own volition. Stupid, of course. It had been an almost liquid feel, as if
something not quite jelled had moved sluggishly.
Dex felt the excitement of an antiques collector happening upon a
neglected armoire with a twenty-five dollar price tag in the back room
of some hick-town junk shop…an armoire that just might be a
Chippendale. "Help me get it out," he called to the janitor.
Working bent over to keep from slamming their heads on the
underside of the stairway, sliding the crate along, they got it out and
then picked it up by the bottom. Dex had gotten his pants dirty after all,
and there were cobwebs in his hair.
As they carried it into the old-fashioned, train-terminal-sized lab, Dex
felt that sensation of shift inside the crate again, and he could see by the
expression on the janitor's face that he had felt it as well. They set it on
one of the formica-topped lab tables. The next one over was littered
with Charlie Gereson's stuff – notebooks, graph paper, contour maps, a
Texas Instruments calculator.
The janitor stood back, wiping his hands on his double-pocket gray
shirt, breathing hard. "Some heavy mother," he said. "That bastard must
weigh two hunnert pounds. You okay, Perfesser Stanley?"
Dex barely heard him. He was looking at the end of the box, where
there was yet another series of stencils: PAELLA/SANTIAGO/SAN
FRANCISCO/CHICAGO/NEWYORK/HORLICKS
"Perfesser – "
"Paella," Dex muttered, and then said it again, slightly louder. He was
seized with an unbelieving kind of excitement that was held in check
only by the thought that it might be some sort of hoax. "Paella!"
"Paella, Dex?" Henry Northrup asked. The moon had risen in the sky,
turning silver.
"Paella is a very small island south of Tierra del Fuego," Dex said.
"Perhaps the smallest island ever inhabited by the race of man. A
number of Easter Island-type monoliths were found there just after
World War II. Not very interesting compared to their bigger brothers,
but every bit as mysterious. The natives of Paella and Tierra del Fuego
were Stone-Age people. Christian missionaries killed them with
kindness."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's extremely cold down there. Summer temperatures rarely range
above the mid-forties. The missionaries gave them blankets, partly so
they would be warm, mostly to cover their sinful nakedness. The
blankets were crawling with fleas, and the natives of both islands were
wiped out by European diseases for which they had developed no
immunities. Mostly by smallpox."
Dex drank. The Scotch had lent his cheeks some color, but it was
hectic and flaring – double spots of flush that sat above his cheekbones
like rouge.
"But Tierra del Fuego – and this Paella – that's not the Arctic, Dex. It's
the Antarctic."
"It wasn't in 1834," Dex said, setting his glass down, careful in spite of
his distraction to put it on the coaster Henry had provided. If Wilma
found a ring on one of her end tables, his friend would have hell to pay.
"The terms subarctic, Antarctic and Antarctica weren't invented yet. In
those days there was only the north arctic and the south arctic."
"Okay."
"Hell, I made the same kind of mistake. I couldn't figure out why
Frisco was on the itinerary as a port of call. Then I realized I was
figuring on the Panama Canal, which wasn't built for another eighty
years or so.
"An Arctic expedition? In 1834?" Henry asked doubtfully.
"I haven't had a chance to check the records yet," Dex said, picking up
his drink again. "But I know from my history that there were 'Arctic
expeditions' as early as Francis Drake. None of them made it, that was
all. They were convinced they'd find gold, silver, jewels, lost
civilizations, God knows what else. The Smithsonian Institution
outfitted an attempted exploration of the North Pole in, I think it was
1881 or '82. They all died. A bunch of men from the Explorers' Club in
London tried for the South Pole in the 1850's. Their ship was sunk by
icebergs, but three or four of them survived. They stayed alive by
sucking dew out of their clothes and eating the kelp that caught on their
boat, until they were picked up. They lost their teeth. And they claimed
to have seen sea monsters."
"What happened, Dex?" Henry asked softly.
Stanley looked up. "We opened the crate," he said dully. "God help
us, Henry, we opened the crate."
He paused for a long time, it seemed, before beginning to speak again.
"Paella?" the janitor asked. "What's that?"
"An island off the tip of South America," Dex said. "Never mind. Let's
get this open." He opened one of the lab drawers and began to rummage
through it, looking for something to pry with."
"Never mind that stuff," the janitor said. He looked excited himself
now. "I got a hammer and chisel in my closet upstairs. I'll get 'em. Just
hang on."
He left. The crate sat on the table's formica top, squat and mute.
It sits
squat and mute
, Dex thought, and shivered a little. Where had that
thought come from? Some story? The words had a cadenced yet
unpleasant sound. He dismissed them. He was good at dismissing the
extraneous. He was a scientist.
He looked around the lab just to get his eyes off the crate. Except for
Charlie's table, it was unnaturally neat and quiet – like the rest of the
university. White-tiled, subway-station walls gleamed freshly under the
overhead globes; the globes themselves seemed to be double – caught
and submerged in the polished formica surfaces, like eerie lamps
shining from deep quarry water. A huge, old-fashioned slate blackboard
dominated the wall opposite the sinks. And cupboards, cupboards
everywhere. It was easy enough – too easy, perhaps – to see the antique,
sepia-toned ghosts of all those old zoology students, wearing their white
coats with the green cuffs, their hairs marcelled or pomaded, doing their
dissections and writing their reports...
Footfalls clattered on the stairs and Dex shivered, thinking again of
the crate sitting there – yes, squat and mute – under the stairs for so
many years, long after the men who had pushed it under there had died
and gone back to dust.
Paella
, he thought, and then the janitor came back in with a hammer
and chisel.
"Let me do this for you, perfesser?" he asked, and Dex was about to
refuse when he saw the pleading, hopeful look in the man's eyes.
"Of course," he said. After all, it was this man's find.
"Prob'ly nothin in here but a bunch of rocks and plants so old they'll
turn to dust when you touch 'em. But it's funny; I'm pretty hot for it."
Dex smiled noncommittally. He had no idea what was in the crate, but
he doubted if it was just plant and rock specimens. There was that
slightly liquid shifting sensation when they had moved it.
"Here goes," the janitor said, and began to pound the chisel under the
board with swift blows of the hammer. The board hiked up a bit,
revealing a double row of nails that reminded Dex absurdly of teeth.
The janitor levered the handle of his chisel down and the board pulled
loose, the nails shrieking out of the wood. He did the same thing at the
other end, and the board came free, clattering to the floor. Dex set it
aside, noticing that even the nails looked different, somehow – thicker,
squarer at the tip, and without that blue-steel sheen that is the mark of a
sophisticated alloying process.
The janitor was peering into the crate through the long, narrow strip
he had uncovered. "Can't see nothin," he said. "Where'd I leave my
light?"
"Never mind," Dex said. "Go on and open it."
"Okay." He took off a second board, then a third. Six or seven had
been nailed across the top of the box. He began on the fourth, reaching
across the space he had already uncovered to place his chisel under the
board, when the crate began to whistle.
It was a sound very much like the sound a teakettle makes when it has
reached a rolling boil, Dex told Henry Northrup; no cheerful whistle
this, but something like an ugly, hysterical shriek by a tantrumy child.
And this suddenly dropped and thickened into a low, hoarse growling
sound. It was not loud, but it had a primitive, savage sound that stood
Dex Stanley's hair up on the slant. The janitor stared around at him, his
eyes widening... and then his arm was seized.
Dex did not see what grabbed it; his eyes had gone instinctively to the
man's face.
The janitor screamed, and the sound drove a stiletto of panic into
Dex's chest. The thought that came unbidden was:
This is the first time
in my life that I've heard a grown man scream – what a sheltered life
I've led!
The janitor, a fairly big guy who weighed maybe two hundred pounds,
was suddenly yanked powerfully to one side. Toward the crate. "
Help
me!
" He screamed. "
Oh help doc it's got me it's biting m
e
it's biting
meeeee
– "
Dex told himself to run forward and grab the janitor's free arm, but his
feet might as well have been bonded to the floor. The janitor had been
pulled into the crate up to his shoulder. That crazed snarling went on
and on. The crate slid backwards along the table for a foot or so and
then came firmly to rest against a bolted instrument mount. It began to
rock back and forth. The janitor screamed and gave a tremendous lunge
away from the crate. The end of the box came up off the table and then
smacked back down. Part of his arm came out of the crate, and Dex saw
to his horror that the gray sleeve of his shirt was chewed and tattered
and soaked with blood. Smiling crescent bites were punched into what
he could see of the man's skin through the shredded flaps of cloth.
Then something that must have been incredibly strong yanked him
back down. The thing in the crate began to snarl and gobble. Every now
and then there would be a breathless whistling sound in between.
At last Dex broke free of his paraiysis and lunged creakily forward.
He grabbed the janitor's free arm. He yanked...with no result at all. It
was like trying to pull a man who has been handcuffed to the bumper of
a trailer truck.
The janitor screamed again – a long, ululating sound that rolled back
and forth between the lab's sparkling, white-tiled walls. Dex could see
the gold glimmer of the fillings at the back of the man's mouth. He
could see the yellow ghost of nicotine on his tongue.
The janitor's head slammed down against the edge of the board he had
been about to remove when the thing had grabbed him. And this time
Dex did see something, although it happened with such mortal, savage
speed that later he was unable to describe it adequately to Henry.
Something as dry and brown and scaly as a desert reptile came out of
the crate – something with huge claws. It tore at the janitor's straining,
knotted throat and severed his jugular vein. Blood began to pump across
the table, pooling on the formica and jetting onto the white-tiled floor.
For a moment, a mist of blood seemed to hang in the air. Dex dropped
the janitor's arm and blundered backward, hands clapped flat to his
cheeks, eyes bulging.
The janitor's eyes rolled wildly at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open
and then snapped closed. The click of his teeth was audible even below
that hungry growling. His feet, clad in heavy black work shoes, did a
short and jittery tap dance on the floor.
Then he seemed to lose interest. His eyes grew almost benign as they
looked raptly at the overhead light globe, which was also
bloodspattered. His feet splayed out in a loose V. His shirt pulled out
of his pants, displaying his white and bulging belly.
"He's dead," Dex whispered. "Oh, Jesus."
The pump of the janitor's heart faltered and lost its rhythm. Now the
blood that flowed from the deep, irregular gash in his neck lost its
urgency and merely flowed down at the command of indifferent gravity.
The crate was stained and splashed with blood. The snarling seemed to
go on endlessly. The crate rocked back and forth a bit, but it was too
well-braced against the instrument mount to go very far. The body of
the janitor lolled grotesquely, still grasped firmly by whatever was in
there. The small of his back was pressed against the lip of the lab table.
His free hand dangled, sparse hair curling on the fingers between the
first and second knuckles. His big key ring glimmered chrome in the
light.
And now his body began to rock slowly this way and that. His shoes
dragged back and forth, not tap dancing now but waltzing obscenely.
And then they did not drag. They dangled an inch off the floor...then
two inches…then half a foot above the floor. Dex realized that the
janitor was being dragged into the crate. The nape of his neck came to
rest against the board fronting the far side of the hole in the top of the
crate. He looked like a man resting in some weird Zen position of
contemplation. His dead eyes sparkled. And Dex heard, below the
savage growling noises, a smacking, rending sound. And the crunch of a
bone.
Dex ran.
He blundered his way across the lab and out the door and up the stairs.
Halfway up, he fell down, clawed at the risers, got to his feet, and ran
again. He gained the first floor hallway and sprinted down it, past the
closed doors with their frosted-glass panels, past the bulletin boards. He
was chased by his own footfalls. In his ears he could hear that damned
whistling.
He ran right into Charlie Gereson's arms and almost knocked him
over, and he spilled the milk shake Charlie had been drinking all over
both of them.
"Holy hell, what's wrong?" Charlie asked, comic in his extreme
surprise. He was short and compact, wearing cotton chinos and a white
tee shirt. Thick spectacles sat grimly on his nose, meaning business,
proclaiming that they were there for a long haul.
"Charlie," Dex said, panting harshly. "My boy...the janitor...the crate...
it whistles... it whistles when it's hungry and it whistles again when it's
full...my boy...we have to...campus security...we....we..."
"Slow down, Professor Stanley," Charlie said. He looked concerned
and a little frightened. You don't expect to be seized by the senior
professor in your department when you had nothing more aggressive in
mind yourself than charting the continued outmigration of sandflies.
"Slow down, I don't know what you're talking about."