Part 6 (1/2)

”There was a rat in my room last night.”

”A rat?” He wasn't alarmed. In fact, he smiled the superior sort of smile that professors employed to keep timid graduate student in their place. ”The only rats in this house are the ones I keep in formaldehyde.”

”This one was alive. I heard it scrabbling around in that closet. It woke me up twice.”

Fenner shoved several stamped envelopes into the pocket of his overcoat.

”There are no rats in this house.” he said.

Gail returned to her room to finish drying her hair and dress for the first cla.s.s of her graduate career, but she couldn't help glancing at the closet. In daylight its surprising smallness was no less disturbing than it had been the night before. She took the key from the lock of the hallway door and tried it in the closet door.

It turned, but the door remained securely locked.

Gail's emotions were contrary: she was disappointed that she didn't discover what was behind the door; and was just as pleased that she didn't find out.

When she returned from cla.s.ses that day, Gail brought in a sack of groceries: frozen dinners, cans of expensive soups, and cartons of mixed natural juices to stock her tiny kitchen.

Then, from the bottom of the bag, she took a log of processed cheese and a mousetrap. She tasted the cheese, found it gratifyingly unpalatable, then baited the trap with it. She knelt on the floor before the closet door and gingerly prodded the trap toward it, as if fearful the mouse, the rata”the whatevera”would pounce upon it suddenly.

Nothing pounced. But when she stood, she brushed against the doork.n.o.b of the locked closet. The k.n.o.b turned, and the closet door swung open.

It hadn't been locked, after all.

She swallowed her surprise and peered into the darkness.

The closet was dark and rea.s.suringly empty. A few shelves on either side. A rack for clothes. Some old hangers on the rack and nothing else.

Gail peered along the floorboards, looking for a ragged hole that a mouse or a rat or a squirrel might have gnawed through, but she saw none.

She pushed the baited trap inside the closet and eased the door shut.

The key from the hallway door she had tried that morning was still in the lock. She turned it, experimentally. Then she tried the k.n.o.b.

The door was locked again.

Evidently the key did work.

Or at any rate, if it couldn't unlock the door, it could lock it.

Gail forced herself to be satisfied: the closet was empty; the baited trap was inside the empty closet; the closet door was locked; and whatever might find its way inside there could not get out.

As the sky blackened beyond the dense evergreens outside Gail's window, she heated her frozen dinner in her tiny oven.

She listened for Dr. Fenner, but he did not come home. She went downstairs once, checked to make sure the outside doors were locked, peered out a few windows, and went back upstairs.

She put out her dinner on the little round tea table, making sure the double thickness of a towel protected the cheap veneer, and ate it by the light of her slide projector.

She had her first cla.s.s that morning in Renaissance Painters of Northern Europe and had already decided that her midterm paper would be ”Secular Symbolism in the Low Countries.” She wasn't entirely sure what that was, but it was the sort of t.i.tle that always garnered an A. In preparation for this work, she clicked slide to slide, studying details of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Click. A gaunt old woman in black was hatched from a broken egg.

Click. A naked dwarf was prodded with a pitchfork toward a precipice over broken rocks.

Click. A pair of adulterous lovers, with milky skin and flaxen hair, embraced naked in a cauldron of boiling oil.

Snap. The trap sprung inside the locked closet.

Gail turned off the projector. She pushed away the tray of her congealing defrosted dinner. She turned on the small lamp with the frilled shade that had belonged to Fenner's daughter. She went over and knelt before the closet door.

She turned the key and then tried the k.n.o.b.

It was locked.

She rattled the k.n.o.b, turned the key, rattled the k.n.o.b again, turned the key twice, beat upon the panels.

The door would not open.

She placed her ear to the panels, to hear the whimpering of whatever creature had been caught in the trap. She heard nothing at all. Evidently the thing that had been caught in the trap had died in it.

Gail wanted to wait up for Fenner, but she had a cla.s.s at eight in the morning. When he had not come home by eleven o'clock, she tried the closet door one more time, found it still locked, and went to bed.

At the top of the house, the windows of her room were closed, and she didn't hear the wind in the trees outside. She didn't hear the green boughs sliding along the roof above her head.

She didn't hear Fenner when he quietly opened the door downstairs, slapped on the light in the entryway, and sliced open the mail with the sharp bra.s.s letter opener some student had given him many years before. She didn't hear when Fenner climbed the stairs to the second floor, unlocked his bedroom door, went inside, and then turned the key once more, this time locking the door from within.

She didn't hear when the k.n.o.b of the small closet door in her room turned slowly. Didn't hear when the door swung slowly open and didn't hear when- But she did hear it. Heard it all. Heard the wind in the trees outside the closed locked windows. Heard the branches sighing against the roof.

Heard Fenner enter the house; heard the ripping of enve lopes, one after the other; and the impatient crumpling of stupid letters and advertis.e.m.e.nts. Heard his steps upon the stairs, heard the key turning twice in the lock of his bedroom door.

Heard the creature in the closet as it slowly turned the k.n.o.b and opened the door and hurtled out across the floor.

Hear its quick, shallow breath as it secreted itself nervously behind the chair near the window.

In her dream she heard its padded feet- She sat up in the iron bed fully awake, and instantly whipped out the flashlight she always kept beneath her pillow.

She flicked it on and shone it toward the closet.

The closet door was open.

She slid off the bed, knowing what she had to do and dreading it. She approached the closet and shone the light all around the close walls, the narrow floorboards, the shallow shelving.

It was as empty as it had been that morning. No creature, twisted and stiffened in a little pool of dark congealed blood.

In fact, the trap was gone as wella”the slab of pine with the manufacturer's name in bleeding blue ink, the steel catch and the hook, the foul cheese.

”Where's the trap?” she said aloud, to hear her voice.

She slammed shut the closet door. She returned quickly to her bed, shut off the flashlight, and crammed it beneath the pillow again. She pulled the covers up to her neck. Lying on her side, she stared out through the curtains and the closed windows and through the dense evergreens to a distant street light that wasn't nearly close enough. Fell asleep.

And dreamed.