Demon's Door (21 page)

‘OK, OK,' said Jim. ‘Here's the rhyme. You may think it sounds old-fashioned. You may think that it sounds like a rhyme for nursery-age kids. But believe me, I know dozens of adults who aren't too sure about nouns and verbs, and that includes some teachers, too.

Jim walked up and down the classroom, handing out copies of the rhyme to every student. When he reached Teddy's desk, Teddy raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Why are you giving
me
one?' But Jim leaned close to his ear and said, ‘Go on, Teddy, take it anyhow. It won't do you any harm, and if the rest of the class think that
you
need it, too – well, it won't make them feel quite so dumb.'

Teddy nodded, and took it. Jim had learned one thing about his students over the years. Most of them may have been borderline illiterate, but very few of them were stupid or insensitive. Behind all of their bravado, and in spite of their apparent indifference, they were all deeply aware that every one of them was fighting the same desperate fight.

‘What I want you to do now is open your copies of
To Kill A Mockingbird
to page one hundred nine. I want you to read the whole page very carefully, and make a list of every noun you come across, and every adjective, and every verb, and every adverb. And any interjections, if you can find them.'

He glanced up at the clock. ‘OK, you have a half-hour. I have to leave the classroom for a while, but I don't want any more messing around, and by the time I come back I expect you to be pretty much finished. Janice – you can be the class snitch. Anybody does anything stupid or disruptive, I want to know about it.'

Jim left the classroom and walked along the empty corridor. Outside, the wind had died down, the clouds had frittered away, and it was hot and sunny. Off to his right, one of the groundskeepers was mowing the wide grassy bank between the main college building and the swimming pool, with a tractor and a front-mounted cutter. The grass cuttings glittered in the sunlight.

He crossed the parking lot and opened the trunk of his car. He wondered if he ought to open the cardboard box and take a last look at Tibbles, just to make absolutely sure that he was dead, but the smell was enough to convince him that he must be. He lifted out the box and carried it around the side of the main building. He went down the concrete steps that led to the basement and pushed his way inside. It was hot and noisy down there, and he could hear the incinerator rumbling.

Halfway along the corridor, to the left, he turned into the boiler room. Dunstan the janitor was in there, in his brown dungarees, breaking up cardboard boxes and tossing them into the open door of the furnace.

‘Hi there, Mr Rook!' he greeted him. ‘You aint s'posed to be down here, sir. Health and safety regulations. Don't want you getting scorchified or nothing.'

‘That's OK, Dunstan. I was wondering if you could burn this box for me, that's all.'

‘Sure thing, if you want me to. But you could've just dropped it in the dumpster out back.'

‘As a matter of fact, Dunstan, there's something inside it. My cat, Tibbles. He died, and I wanted to have him cremated.'

‘Your
cat
? This isn't no pet crematorium, Mr Rook. Not so sure I'm allowed to incinerate animals. Health and safety regulations.'

‘Oh, come on, Dunstan. Do me a favor here. I didn't want to bury him in my back yard. Too many goddamned gophers. Give them five minutes and they'd dig him back up again.'

Dunstan took the box, sniffed it, and wrinkled up his nose. ‘Smells pretty far gone to me, Mr Rook. How long's the poor little critter been dead?'

‘I'm not entirely sure, to tell you the truth. Couple of days, maybe. I seem to have been losing track of time lately.'

Dunstan set the box down on the floor and used a long black poker to open the door of the incinerator even wider. The wave of heat was so intense that Jim had to step back a few paces.

‘Losin' track of time – that's been happenin' to me, too,' said Dunstan. ‘I kept thinkin' it was Wednesday but it was Tuesday. I called up my daughter yesterday evening to wish her a happy birthday but she told me that I'd made a mistake and her birthday was tomorrow, which is today. It feels to me like things are happenin' before they're happenin', if you can understand what I mean, but then they haven't happened after all. Not yet, anyhow.'

He gave the incinerator a few sharp pokes, so that the fire roared even hotter, and then he dropped the poker with a clang and bent down to pick up Jim's cardboard box. He was just about to hurl it into the flames, however, when he stopped himself, and held it up high, close to his ear, and shook it.

‘What's the matter?' Jim asked him. ‘He's in there, all right. You smelled him yourself.'

Dunstan lowered the box on to the floor again. ‘Are you absolutely sure he's passed away, Mr Rook? Because I could swear I felt him move.'

‘Dunstan, he's as dead as a doornail. His body was lying on my balcony and the crows were pecking at it. He must have slid across the bottom of the box, that's all.'

Dunstan knelt down and bent his head forward, listening intently. ‘I'm sure I can hear scratching. There's
something
alive inside of this here box, even if it ain't your cat. Maybe one of your gophers got in there, too.'

‘Dunstan, please! Just burn the goddamned box, will you?'

Dunstan pulled off his thick gray work glove and opened one of the flaps at the top of the box. ‘No harm in checkin', Mr Rook. We don't want to go incineratin' some poor critter while it's still livin' and breathin', do we?'

‘He's
dead
, Dunstan, for Christ's sake. The crows pecked out his eyes and half of his goddamned guts.'

Dunstan took no notice, but lifted the other three flaps and folded them back. As he did so, there was a hideous screech, like a hundred knives scraping on a hundred dinner plates. Tibbles came bursting out of the box and leaped on to Dunstan's face, clawing furiously at his forehead and his cheeks and his eyelids. Dunstan fell backward on to the floor, screaming, and trying to fight Tibbles off.

‘Ahhh! My eyes! It's scratchin' my eyes! Lord in Heaven, get it off of me!'

Dunstan pulled Tibbles away from his face and threw him sideways across the boiler room. Tibbles rolled over and over, but immediately got back on to his feet and came flying at Dunstan with his teeth bared and his fur sticking up as if he had been electrocuted. Jim saw that Dunstan's hands were smothered in blood, and that the bib of his dungarees was spattered with blood, too. Dunstan tried to roll himself over so that Tibbles wouldn't jump on his face again, and it was then that Jim saw his right eyeball hanging out its socket like a glass eye, staring at nothing.

Tibbles jumped on to Dunstan's shoulder and started clawing at his left ear and the side of his face, screeching and spitting as he did so. Jim picked up the poker that Dunstan had dropped on to the floor and hit Tibbles so hard that Tibbles hit the opposite wall, and dropped down behind a stack of discarded Mazola boxes.

Jim knelt down beside Dunstan and turned him on to his back. Dunstan was moaning, ‘My eye . . . my eye, Mr Rook. That critter pulled out my eye.'

‘Don't try to touch it,' Jim told him. ‘I'm calling nine-one-one right now.'

He reached into his shirt pocket, where he usually kept his cellphone, but his pocket was empty. He remembered then that he had taken it out and put it down on his desk, because he had been meaning to call Summer.

‘Please, Dunstan, try to stay still,' he said. ‘So long as you don't touch your eye you should be OK. I don't have my cell with me. Where's the nearest phone?'

Dunstan was quivering with shock. ‘It's down the end of the corridor. Is that cat gone? What did you do with that cat, Mr Rook?'

‘I don't know. I can't see him. I think I must have knocked him out. I don't know how he could have jumped up and attacked you like that. I was sure he was dead. Listen – wait here while I go to the phone. I won't be long.'

Jim stood up and headed for the door. As he did so, however, Tibbles came slinking out from underneath the Mazola boxes. He came creeping across the boiler-room floor, keeping very low, like a lion stalking a wildebeest, but what horrified Jim was that his eye-sockets were empty, and that his pale and bloody intestines were dragging across the concrete beneath his belly. He had to be dead, and yet he wasn't.

‘
Tibbles!
' Jim shouted at him. The cat hesitated, and blindly lifted his head, but then he continued to advance toward Dunstan, and he started to creep faster and faster, as if he were confident that his prey couldn't escape.

Jim threw himself across the room and grabbed Tibbles with both hands. Tibbles screeched and struggled and clawed at him, but Jim lifted him up and carried him over to the furnace. There was a moment when Tibbles was twisting so violently and scratching at him with such fury that Jim thought that he was going to drop him, but he managed to seize his tail and swing him around and around like a slingshot. Tibbles hissed in rage; but at the point of maximum velocity Jim let go of him and he flew into the open door of the furnace and instantly flared up.

Jim picked up the poker, so that he could close the furnace door, but as he bent over, Tibbles came hurtling back out of the flames, blazing from head to tail, and screaming like a child. He went after Jim in a fiery zigzag, jumping up on to the leg of his pants and clinging on with his claws. Jim hit him with the poker, again and again, and eventually Tibbles dropped off on to the floor, although he was still writhing and hissing and trying to get back on to his feet.

Now Jim beat Tibbles relentlessly, until he had beaten all of the flames out, and smashed his smoking carcass so completely that he had to be dead. Jim was panting by the time he had finished, and coughing from the smell of burning cat fur, but he didn't feel guilty, or cruel. Whatever had sprung out of that box and taken Dunstan's eye out couldn't have been Tibbles. It had been some demonic apparition, some demon's familiar, like a witch's cat.

He picked up a shovel that was leaning up against the wall and scooped Tibbles' charred and flattened body into the furnace. Then he closed the furnace door and locked it, so that there was absolutely no chance that Tibbles could leap out again.

‘OK, Dunstan,' he said, unsteadily. ‘Hold on, feller. I'm going to get you some help.'

Still coughing, he made his way along the corridor to the telephone, lifted the receiver and punched out 911 to call for an ambulance.

‘Please hurry. The guy's in shock.'

As he hung up, he looked out of the basement window and saw a girl walking past, wearing purple jeans and a bronze satin blouse. Although she was too high up for him to be able to see her face, he recognized at once who she was. Maria Lopez. But what was she doing, walking around outside, when she should have been in class, trying to compile a list of nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs?

It was then that he began to get an inkling of what was happening. Maria was wearing the same jeans and the same blouse that she had been wearing on the first day of the new semester, or what had seemed like the first day of the semester. And she had left the classroom today at exactly the same time as she had left the classroom on that day, too. Today, though, something was different. Today, one of the groundskeepers was mowing the grass.

Jim ran back to the boiler room. Dunstan was sitting up now, although his eye was still hanging out on his cheek. His face was a dirty gray color, and he was trembling.

‘The paramedics are going to be here in just a few minutes,' Jim told him. ‘Right now, though, you're going to have to forgive me. I have to do something really, really urgent.'

‘
Please
,' Dunstan begged him. ‘Please don't leave me.'

‘I have to, Dunstan. It's one of my students. She's in serious danger.'

Dunstan reached out to him in a mute appeal for him to stay, but Jim said, ‘I'm sorry, Dunstan, I really am.' He ran off along the corridor, pushed open the door, and vaulted up the steps. He could hear the lawnmower, but he couldn't see it yet. There was no sign of Maria, either. He hurried around the corner of the building, just in time to see Maria walking out of the shadow of the cedar tree, and up the grassy bank that led to the swimming pool.

‘Maria!' he shouted, and ran toward her as fast as he could. ‘Maria! Stop!'

He took a short cut by running up the steps in front of the main entrance. As he did so, one of the doors opened and Sheila Colefax appeared, wearing a pink sweater the color of Pepto-Bismol.

‘Oh, Jim!' she exclaimed. ‘I was looking for you!'

‘Later!' Jim blurted, and ran down the steps on the other side.

‘It's about that poetry reading!' Sheila called after him, in a weak, hopeless voice. ‘If you still want to come—'

‘Maria!' Jim shouted, yet again. ‘Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't do it!'

Somehow, both time and distance seemed to be distorted. Although Jim was running after Maria as fast as he could, he didn't seem to be able to catch up with her. She always seemed to be thirty yards ahead of him, and even though he was shouting at her she didn't show any indication that she could hear him.