Tales From the Darkside Part 6

"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.

Dreamed she was still awake, staring through the curtains and the closed windows and through the dense evergreens to the distant streetlight. Dreamed that another pair of eyes stared at the streetlight too.

Large, round, wet, blinking eyes.

Stared from beneath the bed.

Gail dreamed she stayed awake all night, huddled beneath the covers, not daring to get out of bed, drop to her kneed, and peer beneath the bed at the creature that had taken refuge there. The creature that lived in the closet.

"If you still want a ride to campus, I'm leaving in two minutes," said Fenner.

She hurried around, clearing cup, saucer, plate, knife, and spoon. She hadn't slept properly, she had dreamed too much, and she was short with him. "There's a rat in that closet."

Fenner looked at the closet but said nothing.

"I managed to get it open."

"How?"

"The key to this door also fits the closet. I'll show you."

She took the key from the hallway door, knelt before the closet door, and inserted it.

The key didn't work.

"My daughter lost the key a long time ago. That door hasn't been opened in years."

"I got it open last night," Gail returned sharply. "And I put a mousetrap inside."

Fenner raised one brow. "What did you catch?"

"Nothing. The trap disappeared." She stared gathering her books.

Fenner glanced around the room. "Do you think the rat appropriated it to his own uses?"

"It must have moved the trap somewhere else."

Gail noticed she had left her hair dryer on the chair.

She put down her books, picked up the dryer, and neatly wrapped it in its cord.

"Maybe your rat was raised on rutabagas."

"Rutabagas?"

"Rutabagas are brain food," Fenner explained with deadpan seriousness. "Rats may be smart enough to avoid a trap, but they're not smart enough to rearrange the furniture."

Gail pulled the box of appliances from beneath the bed and put the hair dryer in it. She stood up and looked Fenner in the eye.

"What's on the other side of that closet?"

"Attic s.p.a.ce. But it's closed off. There's no way of getting to it."

"It could be fumigated," Gail suggested.

Fenner checked his watch. "I'm going to be late." He turned on his heel and started down the stairs.

Gail hurriedly picked up her books and started out. As she was pulling the door shut behind her, she noticed she had forgotten to put her box of appliances back beneath the bed.

It grated against her sense of order and neatness, but Fenner's tread down the stairs was quick and hurried, so she left it and pulled the door shut behind her.

A moment later she caught up with Fenner.

A moment after that he locked the front door behind them.

A moment after that Gail got into the front seat of Fen ner's car and peered through the winds.h.i.+eld up at the windows of her room.

A moment after that, inside Gail's locked room, inside the locked house, the cardboard box of Gail's appliances was drawn slowly back beneath the bed, where it belonged.

"No," said Gail, speaking aloud to the writer of the letter she had just received, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. G. Aynsley, "I would not care to invest in Krugerrands today, thank you very much. All my a.s.sets are tied up in rutabagas. . ."

She tossed the letter into the trash and stacked her books neatly on the table. It had taken an investment firm located in Dover, Delaware, only three days, both to find her in this new home and to create an imaginary companion for her. She shook her head, wondering ata""a"wondering at the open closet door.

In the three days since she'd heard the trap snap shut behind the door, she'd heard nothing else from inside the closet.

She'd dreamed no dreams of something that hid behind that door she could not open.

She smoothed the front of her dress and went over to the closet. She knelt before it and slowly pulled the door wide.

The closet was filled with clothes.

The rack sagged with the weight of dozens of dresseda"a little girl's dresses, with crinoline skirts, puffed sleeves, ruffs, pleats, and swags. The shelves were jammed with neatly stacked cotton underwear, crisply folded blouses, and folded socks. The floor was lined with a dozen pair of tiny polished shoes.

It was the wardrobe of a five-year-old girl, the way an obsessive mother would arrange it. But all the clothes were definitely out of current fas.h.i.+on. They weren't even the fas.h.i.+on of the clothes Gail had worn as a child. They were the clothes Gail had seen in photos of her mother, who's been five in 1954.

When Gail pushed aside the dresses to see if there was anything on the hoods on the back wall, she saw two large round eyes staring coldly back at her.

She startled and fell back. As she scrambled to her feet and flailed out to slam shut the closet door on whatever the creature was inside there, one of the staring pupils s.h.i.+fted so that the two eyes became quite comically crossed.

Gail pushed the dresses even farther aside, revealing a china-headed doll lolling on a hook that snagged her pink pinafore. Gail laughed at her own fear, and placing her left hand on the floor of the closet for leverage, she reached deep into the closet to unsnag the doll and- Snap. That was the mousetrap, clapping shut on Gail's ring finger.

She cried out in pain, stood up suddenlya"and banged her head on the door lintel.

Crying both for the pain in her fingers and on the crown of her head, she shook the trap loose and ran to the sink to run cold water over the throbbing joints. She fumbled with the faucet handle, then thrust her fingers beneath the cold water.

At the same time she rubbed the crown of her head, and at the same time as that, looked back at the closet wondering how the trap had been set again and how- The closet door swung shut of its own accord.

The water spilled from the faucet and swirled down the drain.