The Collective

by The Collective [lit]

  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.

  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.

  ARCTIC EXPEDITION.

  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 vet another series of stencils:

  PAELLA/SANTIAGO/SAN FRANCISCO/CHICAGO/NEW

  YORK/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 vears 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 hamme
r 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

  me 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

  blood-spattered. 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 fr
om 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.

  Tile 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