‘Well?’ Sandy asked when he was finally finished.
‘I’m going in,’ Curt replied, a response that didn’t surprise Sandy in the slightest; why else had he bothered to get the rope? ‘And if it doesn’t rear up and try to bite me, I’ll photograph it, video it, and bag it. Just give me five minutes to get ready.’
It didn’t take him even that. He came out of the barracks wearing surgical gloves — what were already coming to be known in the PSP as ‘AIDS mittens’ — a barber’s smock, rubber galoshes, and a bathing cap over his hair. Hung around his neck was a Puff-Pak, a little plastic breathing mask with its own air supply that was good for about five minutes. In one of his gloved hands he had a Polaroid camera. There was a green plastic garbage bag tucked into his belt.
Huddie had unlimbered the videocam and now he trained it on Curt, who looked très fantastique as he strode manfully across the parking lot in his blue bathing cap and red galoshes (and even more so when Sandy had knotted the yellow rope around his middle).
‘You’re beautiful!’ Huddie cried, peering through the video camera. ‘Wave to your adoring fans!’
Curtis Wilcox waved dutifully. Some of his fans would look at this tape in the days after his sudden death seventeen years later, trying not to cry even as they laughed at the foolish,
amiable look of him.
From the open dispatch window, Matt sang after him in a surprisingly strong tenor voice:
‘Hug me . . . you sexy thing! Kiss me . . . you sexy thing!’
Curt took all the ribbing well, but it was secondary to him, his mates’ laughter like something overheard in another room. That light was in his eyes.
‘This really isn’t very bright,’ Sandy said as he cinched the loop of the rope snugly around Curt’s waist. Not with any real hope of changing Curt’s mind, however. ‘We should probably wait and see what develops. Make sure this is all, that there’s nothing else coming through.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ Curt said. His tone was absent; he was barely listening. Most of him was inside his own head, running over a checklist of things to do.
‘Maybe,’ Sandy said, ‘and maybe we’re starting to get a little careless with that thing.’ Not knowing if it was really true, but wanting to say it out loud, try it on for size. ‘We’re starting to really believe that if nothing’s happened to any of us so far, nothing ever will. That’s how cops and lion-tamers get hurt.’
‘We’re fine,’ Curt said, and then — appearing not to sense any contradiction — he told the other men to stand back. When they had, he took the video camera from Huddie, put it on the tripod, and told Arky to open the door. Arky pushed the remote clipped to his belt and the door rattled up on its tracks.
Curt let the Polaroid’s strap slip to his elbow, so he could pick up the videocam tripod, and went into Shed B. He stood for a moment on the concrete halfway between the door and the Buick, one gloved hand touching the Puff-Pak’s mask under his chin, ready to pull it up at once if the air was as foul as it had been on the day of the fish.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Just a little whiff of something sweet. Maybe it really is an Easter lily.’
It wasn’t. The trumpet-shaped flowers — three of them — were as pallid as the palms of a corpse, and almost translucent. Within each was a dab of dark blue stuft that looked like jelly.
Hanging in the jelly were little pips. The stalks looked more like treebark than parts of a flowering plant, their green surfaces covered with a network of cracks and crenellations.
There were brown spots that looked like some sort of fungoid growth, and these were spreading. The stems came together in a rooty clod of black soil. When he leaned toward this (none of them liked seeing Curt lean into the trunk that way, it was too much like watching a man stick his stupid head into a bear’s mouth), Curt said he could smell that cabbagey aroma again. It was faint but unmistakable.
‘And I tell you, Sandy, there’s the smell of salt, as well. I know there is. I spent a lot of summers on Cape Cod, and you can’t miss that smell.’
‘I don’t care if it smells like truffles and caviar,’ Sandy replied. ‘Get the hell out of there.’
Curt laughed — Silly old Gramma Dearborn! — but he pulled back. He set the video camera pointing down into the trunk from its tripod, got it running, then took some Polaroids for good measure.
‘Come on in, Sandy — check it out.’
Sandy thought it over. Bad idea, very bad idea. Stupid idea. No doubt about it. And once he had that clear in his head, Sandy handed the coil of rope to Huddie and went on in. He looked at the deflated flowers lying in the Buick’s trunk (and the one hanging over the lip, the one Brian Cole had seen) and couldn’t suppress a little shiver.
‘I know,’ Curt said, lowering his voice so the Troopers outside wouldn’t hear. ‘Hurts just to look, doesn’t it? It’s the visual equivalent of hearing someone scrape a blackboard with his fingernails.’
Sandy nodded. Hole in one.
‘But what triggers that reaction?’ Curt asked. ‘I can’t put my finger on any one thing. Can you?’
‘No.’ Sandy licked his lips, which had gone dry. ‘And I think that’s because it’s everything together. A lot of it’s the white.’
‘The white. The color.’
‘Yeah. Nasty. Like a toad’s belly.’
‘Like cobwebs spun into flowers,’ Curt said.
They looked at each other for a moment, trying to smile and not doing a very good job of it. State Police poets, Trooper Frost and Trooper Sandburg. Next they’d be comparing the goddam thing to a summer’s day. But you had to try doing that, because it seemed you could only grasp what you were seeing by an act of mental reflection that was like poetry.
Other similes, less coherent, were banging and swerving in Sandy’s head. White like a communion wafer in a dead woman’s mouth. White like a thrush infection under your tongue.
White like the foam of creation just beyond the edge of the universe, maybe.
‘This stuff comes from a place we can’t even begin to comprehend,’ Curt said. ‘Our senses can’t grasp any of it, not really. Talking about it’s a joke — you might as well try to describe a four-sided triangle. Look there, Sandy. Do you see?’ He pointed the tip of a gloved finger at a dry brown patch just below one of the corpse-lily flowers.
‘Yeah, I see it. Looks like a burn.’
‘And it’s getting bigger. All the spots are. And look there on the flower.’ It was another brown patch, spreading as they looked at it, gobbling an ever-widening hole in the flower’s fragile white skin. ‘That’s decomposition. It’s not going in quite the same way as the bat and the fish, but it’s going, just the same. Isn’t it?’
Sandy nodded.
‘Pull the garbage bag out of my belt and open it, would you?’
Sandy did as he was asked. Curt reached into the trunk and grasped the plant just above its rooty bulb. When he did, a fresh whiff of that watery cabbage/spoiled cucumber stench drifted up to them. Sandy took a step back, hand pressed against his mouth, trying not to gag and gagging anyway.
‘Hold that bag open, goddammit!’ Curt cried in a choked voice. To Sandy he sounded like someone who has just taken a long hit off a primo blunt and wants to hold the smoke down as long as possible. ‘Jesus, it feels nasty! Even through the gloves!’
Sandy held the bag open and shook the top. ‘Hurry up, then!’
Curt dropped the decaying corpse-lily plant inside, and even the sound it made going down the bag’s plastic throat was somehow wrong — like a harsh whispered cry, something being pressed relentlessly between two boards and almost silently choking. None of the similes was right, yet each seemed to flash a momentary light on what was basically unknowable. Sandy Dearborn could not express even to himself how fundamentally revolting and dismaying the corpse-lilies were. Them and all the Buick’s miscarried children. If you thought about them too long, the chances were good that you really would go mad.
Curt made as if to wipe his gloved hands on his shirt, then thought better of it. He bent into the Buick’s trunk instead, and rubbed them briskly on the brown trunk-mat. Then he stripped the gloves off, motioned for Sandy to open the plastic bag again, and threw them inside on top of the corpse-lily. That smell puffed out again and Sandy thought of once when his mother, eaten up by cancer and with less than a week to live, had belched in his face. His instinctive but feeble effort to block that memory before it could rise fully into his consciousness was useless.