Rupert Wale's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

A week after the crates arrived, the scraping started. Rupert heard it first at two in the morning, over the hum of the compressor. A slow drag along the inside of the sealed door. Then a pause. Then again. He stood at the table with the old man's jaw under his fingers and could not write the number he had come upstairs to write. He put down the pencil. He wrote his own pulse on the wall instead. One-twenty. Fear as data. He did not open the door. He had signed that away. But he could not work while something inside the cold room moved against the metal. Three nights of it. Three nights of numbers he did not trust because his hand shook when he wrote them. On the fourth night he walked to the concrete morgue building where his aunt cleaned. She was on her knees by the drawers with a bleach bucket, smock stained yellow at the hem. She did not look up when he came in. She never looked at the drawers now, and she barely looked at him. "Delia." "Rupert." "Something in my cold room is scraping." She wrung the mop. "Rats." "It's sealed." "Then something bigger." She corrected herself. "Something that was already inside." He watched her scrub a spot that was already clean. She would not ask more. She never did. He left with nothing and everything. He went to find the red-haired woman. She was on the corner by the fountain, smiling at no one, a black crown resting in her gloved hands. She had not given him one yet. He had counted the days again on the walk over. "Your buyer's crates are moving," he said. "They aren't." "Something in there is scraping the door." She tilted her head. "Then it isn't the crates." "What is it." "You gave up asking." She said it flat, the way she said everything. "Four hundred bought that." "I need to sleep. I need to work." She looked at him a long moment. Then she reached into the folds of her dress and pulled out a small tin. She set it on the low bench beside her without touching him. Inside were pale bulbs of garlic-looking root and a folded paper. "Wedge these under the door. All the way around. It will stop scraping tonight." "What is it." "Something that stays still when this is near it." She closed his question with a shrug. "Don't open the door." He took the tin. He walked home. He wedged the roots along the base of the sealed door until the seam was choked with them. The scraping stopped inside an hour. He went back to the table. He wrote the old man's jaw temperature. Fifty-one. Correct. His hand was steady. He worked until dawn. Then he saw the smear on the floor at the base of the sealed door. A thin dark line, seeping out under the roots, spreading toward his boots.