“Oh,” God,” somebody else said.
Carton, aim, pour. He was getting a headache, straining to see into that throat. “If the lye had been in her tea, she would have seen it foam. She wouldn’t have drunk it. There had to be something else. A sandwich. A piece of cake. Something.”
“There isn’t any lye up at the cabin on Hillman’s Rock,” Ken Crockett said. “There never has been while I’ve been with the Climbing Club. The cabin was remodeled for plumbing years ago.”
“We’re beginning to make some progress,” Gregor told him. “I want to do a wash of the mouth. When I tell you, release the tongue so I can get some milk under it.”
Ken Crockett braced forward, ready. Gregor reached for yet another carton of milk, thinking as he did that the seriously adrenalated part of this crisis was over. From now on it would be steady, a routine, holding the fort until the medical people arrived and could get a tube down Miss Veer’s throat to ensure that the air passage stayed open. He got the carton open and poured it in with a swirling, circular motion that reminded him—it was horrible, but he couldn’t help it; the metaphor was there and it wouldn’t leave him alone—of the way you were supposed to pour heavy-duty cleaners into toilet bowls. He tossed the empty carton on the floor and reached for another one, wishing that Bennis and Tibor would come back and tell him that help was on the way.
He was just reaching for carton number three, destination the mouth, when all hell broke loose.
2
AT FIRST, IT WAS impossible to know what was going on. Gregor was in the process of pouring even more milk into Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth. He couldn’t turn around or look up or do anything else to pinpoint the cause of the disturbance. He didn’t dare. Dr. Kenneth Crockett was looking up, and the expression on his face was shock. Gregor tried to tell himself that the noise he was hearing was the arrival of the ambulance men—who else could be coming in force at a time like this?—but there was no way to sustain the illusion, even with his back to the source of the commotion. What he was hearing was not the barked commands of an emergency medical squad, but the wavering distortion of a Gregorian chant.
“Jesus screaming Christ,” Ken Crockett said, and then rose, involuntarily, to his feet, letting Miss Maryanne Veer’s face drop out of his hands and the back of her head hit the floor with a thud. “Jesus screaming Christ, what do these idiots think they’re doing?”
“Dr. Crockett,” Gregor said. “Get back here. Get back here now.”
Dr. Crockett was walking away, unhearing. Gregor was giving serious consideration to screaming out loud when one of the bats dropped into the doctor’s place, grabbed Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth, and yanked it open.
“Jack Carroll,” the bat said.
“I thought so,” Gregor told him.
Behind Gregor’s back, the chant had grown louder, strident. He’d had enough Latin in school to know it wasn’t Latin he was hearing. It was nonsense, but angry nonsense, and it was getting louder.
Suddenly, Bennis dropped down beside him, holding a carton of milk in her hand.
“Get up,” she said. “I’ll do this for a while. Somebody’s got to get those people out of here.”
“Where’s Tibor?” Gregor demanded. “Where’s the ambulance?”
“The ambulance and the police are on the way. I talked to the sheriff of the county myself and explained the whole thing. You shouldn’t have sent Tibor, Gregor, he’s in shock.”
“I had to send Tibor. He was the only one I could trust who knew where the phones were.”
“Right. Let me do this. Turn around and see what’s going on. And get that Crockett person and calm him down. Oh, for God’s sake. I can’t believe this.”
She shoved him unceremoniously out of the way, positioned herself right in front of Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth, and shot the carton of milk down it as he had been doing at the beginning. Obviously, she hadn’t been watching him over the past three or four minutes. She didn’t realize he had switched from the throat to the mouth. It didn’t matter. The throat was the important thing anyway. It was time somebody got back to it.
Gregor stood up, turned around, and stopped. For endless minutes it seemed as if he could enumerate everything he saw, but make no sense of it. There was a small knot of women standing in a circle at the end of the room near the cash register, blocking all passage in or out except by window. They were all dressed in identical black—black tights, black ballet slippers, black leotards, black gloves. Their faces were painted in mock harlequin design, black on one side and white on the other, with a symbol Gregor vaguely remembered as being an ancient sign of the Devil plastered under each of their right eyes. The one in the center was taller than the rest and had hair so red it seemed to burn. It was long and teased out around her face like radioactive cotton candy. She stepped out a little into the room, threw her arms out, threw her head back, and screeched.