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.
She was more than a third of the way up the grassy bank when she took off her bronze satin blouse and tossed it aside. Underneath she was wearing a black bra, and without any hesitation she reached behind her with both hands and unfastened it, and tossed that aside, too. As he came running up the bank after her, Jim could see that her bare back was covered in dark red bruises.
Now the grass-mowing tractor was less than twenty yards away. The groundskeeper was wearing ear protectors, and he was twisted around in his seat with his back to Maria, watching the stripes that the mower was leaving in the vivid green grass.
Maria, don’t! said Jim, inside his head. The clattering noise of the tractor was too loud now for her to be able to hear him, even if she had wanted to listen. She drew off her brown leather belt, and then she hesitated and hopped and half-stumbled for just a moment as she took down her purple jeans. Jim thought he might be able to reach her, but the harder he struggled up the slope, the further away he seemed to be. It was like a nightmare, like Alice Through the Looking-Glass, in which you had to run as fast as you possibly could just to stay in the same place.
He could see Maria and the lawnmower coming together with a terrible inevitability, like two converging lines on a radar screen. ‘Maria!’ he screamed. ‘Maria!’ but still she took no notice.
When she was less than twenty feet away from the lawnmower, Maria pulled down her large black stomach-control panties and threw them aside, so that she was naked, apart from her wooden-bead necklace. Her dimpled buttocks, too, were covered in bruises. Still she kept walking – even faster now, if anything. Jim prayed that the groundskeeper would turn his head around and see her, but the groundskeeper was obviously too concerned with making sure that he was mowing a perfectly straight stripe.
Maria reached the path in which the lawnmower was heading only seconds before the lawnmower itself. Although she was quite a plump girl, she lay down on the grass with fluidity and grace. She crossed herself, and then she stayed there with her arms by her sides, her feet together, facing upward and looking at the sky.
Jim roared, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ so harsh and so loud that he felt as if he were tearing the skin from the back of his throat. He willed his legs to run faster. If he could have willed himself to fly, and scoop up Maria in his arms, and lift her away from the lawnmower’s approaching blades, he would have done that, too.
But he knew that he was going to be too late, and he knew that time was playing confidence tricks, and that when Maria had staggered into Special Class Two on the first day of the new semester, naked and lacerated and covered in blood, it had been this day, and that what they had seen had simply been a warning that this was coming.
THIRTEEN
He closed his eyes tight, but he couldn’t stop himself from hearing the crunching and the grinding and the squealing of gears as the lawnmower’s blades were jammed with arms and legs and hair and flesh.
The lawnmower stopped. The groundskeeper switched off the tractor engine. In the sudden quietness, Jim opened his eyes and saw Maria underneath the machinery, still alive, staring up at him through the cutters as if she were looking through the bars of a prison cell at the world outside.
The groundskeeper jumped down from his tractor cab and came up to Jim with his mouth hanging open in shock. He was only young, no more than twenty or twenty-one, with ginger hair and spots and a straggly goatee like Shaggy Rogers from Scooby-Doo.
‘Man,’ he said. ‘I never saw her, man. I mean, like, what was she doing there, man? I mean, Jesus H. Christ.’
Jim knelt down on the grass and took hold of Maria’s bloodied hand. Half of her thumb and her index finger and her middle finger were missing.
‘Maria?’ he asked her. ‘Can you hear me, Maria?’
She closed her eyes and then opened them again. ‘Yes, sir,’ she whispered. A bubble of blood formed on her lips and then softly popped. ‘I can hear you.’
Jim bent down to see how the lawnmower blades had bitten into her. She was seriously cut up. Her left shoulder was split right down to the whiteness of her bone, and the left side of her stomach was gaping like a bloody mouth, but as far as he could see she wasn’t trapped. He turned around to Shaggy and said, ‘Can you lift this thing off her? We really need to get her out.’
‘Sure. Sure thing. Jesus.’
‘Just go easy, OK? It doesn’t look like she’s tangled up or anything, but we don’t want to hurt her any more than she’s hurt already.’
‘OK, sure. I got you.’
Shaggy climbed back into his tractor and started up the engine again. Then, very slowly, he raised the hydraulic arms so that the lawn-mowing unit rose upward, and Jim could gently pull Maria out from under it. She left a wide trail of glistening blood on the grass.
‘Right,’ said Jim, when Shaggy had switched off the tractor and come back to see what he could do. ‘Go tell Nurse Okeke what’s happened. Tell her that I’ve called for the paramedics already, because Dunstan’s been hurt, in the boiler room. His eye has come out of its socket. But as soon as the paramedics arrive, tell them they’re needed up here first. They’ll probably need to send another ambulance for Dunstan.’
The groundskeeper blinked at him.
‘Did you get all of that?’ Jim demanded.
‘I think so, yeah. Go tell Nurse Okeke. Tell her to come up here real quick.’
‘That’s right. And don’t forget to tell her about Dunstan, too.’
‘Dunstan’s been hurt. His eye’s come out. In the boiler room.’
‘That’s it. You got it. Now go!’
Jim watched Shaggy cantering wildly down the slope toward the main entrance. Then he turned back to Maria. She was still conscious, still looking up at the sky. To his surprise, she was smiling.
‘What happened, Maria?’ Jim asked her. ‘Why did you want to hurt yourself like that?’
She turned her head a little so that she could focus on him. ‘Mr Rook? Is that you?’
‘Yes, Maria, it’s me. I just want to know why you lay down in front of that lawnmower. You’re not that unhappy, surely?’
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ Maria reassured him. ‘I can’t feel anything, anyhow.’
‘But why? You’re much too young to think about ending your lif
e. You have so much ahead of you. So many years, so much happiness.’
Maria shook her head, and coughed up blood. ‘I saw myself. I saw what was going to happen to me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw myself in the future. I saw myself in two, maybe three years’ time.’
‘How did you know it was the future?’
‘I don’t know. I just did. I knew that I wasn’t at college any more, and I had a job at Dillard’s.’
‘So what happened that upset you so much?’
‘When I woke up, Barto was there, in my room, and not just Barto. All of these other men, too. I didn’t know who they were.’
‘Barto? Who’s Barto?’
‘My stepfather. He always treats me mean. He always wants me to do things for him, and if I say I don’t want to, he beats me. Last week he beat me so bad that I was sicking up blood.’
Jim heard an ambulance siren whooping in the near distance. ‘Maria, that’s the paramedics. Lie still, OK? You’re going to be fine. We’re going to get you all patched up and then we’re going to sort your life out, too.’
Maria shook her head. Her bloody hand was growing very cold, and her eyes were filming over. ‘It is too late, Mr Rook. I can do nothing. Barto will never leave me alone. He wants me every night. My mother, she can’t help me. He beats her, too, just as bad.’
‘Maria, once you’re better, we can go to the police. We can have this Barto locked up, so that he never touches you again.’
‘I saw the future, Mr Rook. I woke up and I saw what was going to happen to me. Barto and all of these other men, in my bedroom, maybe five or six men, and Barto said to them, “Here she is, do whatever you like to her, and I mean whatever.” I know this is going to happen to me, Mr Rook. I know this is going to happen to me for sure, and I would rather die.’
Jim turned and saw the ambulance speeding up the college driveway. It circled around and stopped in front of the main entrance, its lights flashing. Jim saw Shaggy and Nurse Okeke and Dr Ehrlichman talking to the paramedics. He waved to them and shouted, ‘Here! Quick as you can!’ Nurse Okeke waved back to him, although she was probably too far away to have heard him. The paramedics climbed back into their ambulance and started to drive it up the grassy slope toward them.
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