Uncollected Stories 2003 (10 page)

D
exter Stanley was scared. More; he felt as if that central axle that
binds us to the state we call sanity were under a greater strain than it had
ever been under before. As he pulled up beside Henry Northrup's house
on North Campus Avenue that August night, he felt that if he didn't talk
to someone, he really, would go crazy.

There was no one to talk to but Henry Northrup. Dex Stanley was the
head of the zoology department, and once might have been university
president if he had been better at academic politics. His wife had died
twenty years before, and they had been childless. What remained of his
own family was all west of the Rockies. He was not good at making
friends.

Northrup was an exception to that. In some ways, they were two of a
kind; both had been disappointed in the mostly meaningless, but always
vicious, game of university politics. Three years before, Northrup had
made his run at the vacant English department chairmanship. He had
lost, and one of the reasons had undoubtedly been his wife, Wilma, an
abrasive and unpleasant woman. At the few cocktail parties Dex had
attended where English people and zoology people could logically mix,
it seemed he could always recall the harsh mule-bray of her voice,
telling some new faculty wife to "call me Billie, dear everyone does!"

Dex made his way across the lawn to Northrup's door at a stumbling
run. It was Thursday, and Northrup's unpleasant spouse took two classes
on Thursday nights.

Consequently, it was Dex and Henry's chess night. The two men had
been playing chess together for the last eight years.
Dex rang the bell beside the door of his friend's house; leaned on it.
The door opened at last and Northrup was there.
"Dex," he said. I didn't expect you for another – "
Dex pushed in past him. "Wilma," he said. "Is she here?"
"No, she left fifteen minutes ago. I was just making myself some
chow. Dex, you look awful."
They had walked under the hall light, and it illuminated the cheesy
pallor of Dex's face and seemed to outline wrinkles as deep and dark as
fissures in the earth. Dex was sixty-one, but on the hot August night, he
looked more like ninety.
"I ought to." Dex wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Well,
what is it?"
"I'm afraid I'm going crazy, Henry. Or that I've already gone."
"You want something to eat? Wilma left cold ham."
"I'd rather have a drink. A big one."
"All right."
"Two men dead, Henry," Dex said abruptly. "And I could be blamed.
Yes, I can see how I could be blamed. But it wasn't me. It was the crate.
And I don't even know what's in there!" He uttered a wild laugh.
"Dead?" Northrup said. "What is this, Dex?"
"A janitor. I don't know his name. And Gereson. A graduate student.
He just happened to be there. In the way of...whatever it was."
Henry studied Dex's face for a long moment and then said, "I'll get us
both a drink."
He left. Dex wandered into the living room, past the low table where
the chess table had already been set up, and stared out the graceful bow
window. That thing in his mind, that axle or whatever it was, did not
feel so much in danger of snapping now. Thank God for Henry.
Northrup came back with two pony glasses choked with ice. Ice from
the fridge's automatic icemaker, Stanley thought randomly. Wilma "just
call me Billie, everyone does" Northrup insisted on all the modern
conveniences...and when Wilma insisted on a thing, she did so savagely.
Northrup filled both glasses with Cutty Sark. He handed one of them
to Stanley, who slopped Scotch over his fingers, stinging a small cut
he'd gotten in the lab a couple of days before. He hadn't realized until
then that his hands were shaking. He emptied half the glass and the
Scotch boomed in his stomach, first hot, then spreading a steadying
warmth.
"Sit down, man," Northrup said.
Dex sat, and drank again. Now it was a lot better. He looked at
Northrup, who was looking levelly back over the rim of his own glass.
Dex looked away, out at the bloody orb of moon sitting over the rim of
the horizon, over the university, which was supposed to be the seat of
rationality, the forebrain of the body politic. How did that jibe with the
matter of the crate? With the screams? With the blood?
"Men are dead?" Northrup said at last.
"Are you sure they're dead?"
"Yes. The bodies are gone now. At least, I think they are. Even the
bones... the teeth... but the blood... the blood, you know..."
"No, I don't know anything. You've got to start at the beginning."
Stanley took another drink and set his glass down. "Of course I do,"
he said. "Yes. It begins just where it ends. With the crate. The janitor
found the crate..."
Dexter Stanley had come into Amberson Hall, sometimes called the
Old Zoology Building, that afternoon at three o'clock. It was a blaringly
hot day, and the campus looked listless and dead, in spite of the twirling
sprinklers in front of the fraternity houses and the Old Front dorms. The
Old Front went back to the turn of the century, but Amberson Hall was
much older than that. It was one of the oldest buildings on a university
campus that had celebrated its tricentennial two years previous. It was a
tall brick building, shackled with ivy that seemed to spring out of the
earth like green, clutching hands. Its narrow windows were more like
gun slits than real windows, and Amberson seemed to frown at the
newer buildings with their glass walls and curvy, unorthodox shapes.
The new zoology building, Cather Hall, had been completed eight
months before, and the process of transition would probably go on for
another eighteen months. No one was completely sure what would
happen to Amberson then. If the bond issue to build the new gym found
favor with the voters, it would probably be demolished.
He paused a moment to watch two young men throwing a Frisbee
back and forth. A dog ran back and forth between them, glumly chasing
the spinning disc. Abruptly the mutt gave up and flopped in the shade of
a poplar. A VW with a NO NUKES sticker on the back deck trundled
slowly past, heading for the Upper Circle.
Nothing else moved. A week before, the final summer session had
ended and the campus lay still and fallow, dead ore on summer's anvil.
Dex had a number of files to pick up, part of the seemingly endless
process of moving from Amberson to Cather. The old building seemed
spectrally empty. His footfalls echoed back dreamily as he walked past
closed doors with frosted glass panels, past bulletin boards with their
yellowing notices and toward his office at the end of the first-floor
corridor. The cloying smell of fresh paint hung in the air.
He was almost to his door, and jingling his keys in his pocket, when
the janitor popped out of Room 6, the big lecture hall, startling him.
He grunted, then smiled a little shamefacedly, the way people will
when they've gotten a mild zap. "You got me that time," he told the
janitor.
The janitor smiled and twiddled the gigantic key ring clipped to his
belt.
"Sorry, Perfesser Stanley," he said. "I was hopin' it was you. Charlie
said you'd be in this afternoon."
"Charlie Gereson is still here?" Dex frowned. Gereson was a grad
student who was doing an involved – and possibly very important –
paper on negative environmental factors in long-term animal migration.
It was a subject that could have a strong impact on area farming
practices and pest control. But Gereson was pulling almost fifty hours a
week in the gigantic (and antiquated) basement lab. The new lab
complex in Cather would have been exponentially better suited to his
purposes, but the new labs would not be fully equipped for another two
to four months...if then.
"Think he went over the Union for a burger," the janitor said. "I told
him myself to quit a while and go get something to eat. He's been here
since nine this morning. Told him myself. Said he ought to get some
food. A man don't live on love alone."
The janitor smiled, a little tentatively, and Dex smiled back. The
janitor was right; Gereson was embarked upon a labor of love. Dex had
seen too many squadrons of students just grunting along and making
grades not to appreciate that...and not to worry about Charlie Gereson's
health and well-being from time to time.
"I would have told him, if he hadn't been so busy," the janitor said,
and offered his tentative little smile again. "Also, I kinda wanted to
show you myself."
"What's that?" Dex asked. He felt a little impatient. It was chess night
with Henry; he wanted to get this taken care of and still have time for a
leisurely meal at the Hancock House.
"Well, maybe it's nothin," the janitor said. "But... well, this buildin is
some old, and we keep turnin things up, don't we?"
Dex knew. It was like moving out of a house that has been lived in for
generations. Halley, the bright young assistant professor who had been
here for three years now, had found half a dozen antique clips with
small brass balls on the ends. She'd had no idea what the clips, which
looked a little bit like spring-loaded wishbones, could be. Dex had been
able to tell her. Not so many years after the Civil War, those clips had
been used to hold the heads of white mice, who were then operated on
without anesthetic. Young Halley, with her Berkeley education and her
bright spill of Farrah Fawcett-Majors golden hair, had looked quite
revolted. "No anti-vivisectionists in those days," Dex had told her
jovially. "At least not around here." And Halley had responded with a
blank look that probably disguised disgust or maybe even loathing. Dex
had put his foot in it again. He had a positive talent for that, it seemed.
They had found sixty boxes of The American Zoologist in a
crawlspace, and the attic had been a maze of old equipment and
mouldering reports. Some of the impedimenta no one – not even Dexter
Stanley – could identify. In the closet of the old animal pens at the back
of the building, Professor Viney had found a complicated gerbil-run
with exquisite glass panels. It had been accepted for display at the
Museum of Natural Science in Washington. But the finds had been
tapering off this summer, and Dex thought Amberson Hall had given up
the last of its secrets.
"What have you found?" he asked the janitor.
"A crate. I found it tucked right under the basement stairs. I didn't
open it. It's been nailed shut, anyway."
Stanley couldn't believe that anything very interesting could have
escaped notice for long, just by being tucked under the stairs. Tens of
thousands of people went up and down them every week during the
academic year. Most likely the janitor's crate was full of department
records dating back twenty-five years. Or even more prosaic, a box of
National Geographics
.
"I hardly think – "
"It's a real crate," the janitor broke in earnestly. "I mean, my father
was a carpenter, and this crate is built tile way he was buildin 'em back
in the twenties. And he learned from his father."
"I really doubt if – "
"Also, it's got about four inches of dust on it. I wiped some off and
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 actually 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
mummified, 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 dry,
woolly taste, like an old mitten. He thought of the generations of
students trooping up and down these stairs, all male until 1888, then in
coeducational platoons, carrying their books and papers and anatomical
drawings, their bright faces and clear eyes, each of them convinced that
a useful and exciting future lay ahead...and here, below their feet, the
spider spun his eternal snare for the fly and the trundling beetle, and
here this crate sat impassively, gathering dust, waiting...
A tendril of spidersilk brushed across his forehead and he swept it
away with a small cry of loathing and an uncharacteristic inner cringe.
"Not very nice under there, is it?" the janitor asked sympathetically,
holding his light centered on the crate. "God, I hate tight places."
Dex didn't reply. He had reached the crate. He looked at the letters
that were stenciled there and then brushed the dust away from them. It
rose in a cloud, intensifying that mitten taste, making him cough dryly.
The dust hung in the beam of the janitor's light like old magic, and Dex
Stanley read what some long-dead chief of lading had stenciled on this
crate.
SHIP TO HORLICKS UNIVERSITY, the top line read. VIA JULIA
CARPENTER, read the middle line. The third line read simply: ARCTIC
EXPEDITION.
Below that, someone had written in heavy black charcoal strokes:
JUNE 19, 1834.
That was the one line the janitor's hand-swipe had completely cleared.
ARCTIC EXPEDITION, Dex read again. His heart began to thump. "So
what do you think?" the janitor's voice floated in.