Quoth the Raven(38)

“You,” Gregor said, “Dr. Crockett. Come here please. I need some help.”

“Me?” Kenneth Crockett said.

“I have more of them,” Bennis said, stumbling into the open space and dumping another load of milk next to Gregor’s knees. “More?”

“No. Go find out what’s happened to Tibor. I sent him to the phone.”

“Right,” Bennis said. She took off again.

Gregor motioned Dr. Crockett in toward the writhing body. This time, he came, slowly but steadily, as if he were forcing himself to move.

“What I need you to do,” Gregor told him, “is to get her mouth open and your finger on her tongue, so that she can’t swallow it or block the progress of the milk. She’ll have third-degree burns in her mouth and we’ll get to them, but we have to get to the esophagus first. Lye is a corrosive. It will eat right through her windpipe if we let it, and if it does she wont be able to breathe, not now and not later, no matter what anybody does for her.”

“Lye,” Ken Crockett hissed. “Oh, my God.”

Gregor took one of the cartons of milk, ripped it open, and poured it on Miss Maryanne Veer’s chin and chest. It wouldn’t be much help, but it would be some. He didn’t want to look at that pulped, untreated skin a moment longer. He motioned to Ken Crockett and the other man leaned forward, got his thumbs around Miss Maryanne Veer’s teeth, and pulled.

“Dear God,” Ken Crockett said. “She’s fighting me.”

Gregor got another carton of milk open, took aim, and poured the contents straight down Miss Maryanne Veer’s throat.

“She’s not fighting you on purpose,” he said. “From the state of her pupils, I’d say she was barely conscious. But she will try to clamp down. It’s sheer instinct. The lye came in that way. The body is trying to keep it out.”

“I don’t blame her,” Ken Crockett said.

Gregor opened another carton, took aim again, poured again. “You were standing near her when it happened. Do you remember what she was carrying on her tray? What besides tea or coffee or whatever was in the cup.”

“I remember the tea. She always had tea.”

“The lye couldn’t have been in the tea. Tea is full of tannic acid. Lye is an alkali. Even if the tea was weak—even if the tannic acid wasn’t strong enough to neutralize the alkali, and it probably wouldn’t have been, it isn’t that strong an acid to begin with when it’s derived from tea leaves—anyway, tannic acid or no tannic acid, most of the available forms of lye foam when they come in contact with water.”

“What do you mean, ‘most of the available forms’?”

Another carton, another aim, another pour. Dr. Crockett was holding Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth wide open and her head tilted back toward the light. Gregor could see well into her throat. The skin there was raw and unforgiving. He grabbed another carton and opened it.

“Drain cleaners,” he said. “Almost all of those have sodium hydroxide. So do the acids in some batteries—”

“Sodium hydroxide is lye?” Ken Crockett said.

“That’s right. In the days before packaged cleaning products, people used to keep it, almost pure, in buckets, for washing out latrines and that kind of thing. But these days almost nobody—”

“I know somebody who does.” It was the girl in the pumpkin dress, pushing forward in the crowd. “I don’t mean somebody. I mean someplace. I’ve seen it.”

“Seen what?” Ken Crockett demanded. “Chessey, what are you talking about?”

“The Climbing Club,” Chessey said desperately. “The cabin up on Hillman’s Rock. There are outhouses up there and there’s a bucket just outside of them and it’s marked ‘lye.’ ”

Gregor opened another carton, took aim again, poured again—the process was beginning to feel like assemblyline work, and just as futile. He thought: So this is the Chessey that Tibor was talking about; there couldn’t be two girls named Chessey on a small campus like this one. Then he grabbed another carton and started all over again.

“Even if what we had here was pure sodium hydroxide,” he said firmly, “it still would have at least fizzed when it came in contact with water. The best way to feed somebody lye—”

“Feed somebody?”

Gregor had no idea who had said it. Part of him was concentrating on Miss Maryanne Veer. Part of him was delivering this absurd lecture on sodium hydroxide. The rest of him was thinking that the bat the girl Chessey had been hanging on to must have been Jack Carroll. She was supposed to be Jack Carroll’s girlfriend. “—or for someone to take it accidentally,” he went on, “is for the lye to be delivered dry. For best effectiveness, it should be delivered dry and washed down with some kind of nonacidic liquid, done fast, so that the victim wouldn’t notice until it was too late.”