Jack smiled. "All right; that's good enough. I think maybe you'll decide not to report this one." He nodded toward his house – "Let's go on up."

I pulled out into the road again, and the headlights caught a figure, maybe a hundred yards ahead, walking toward us. It was a woman, in housedress and apron, arms huddled across her chest, hands cupping her elbows; it gets cool here, in the evenings. Then I saw it was Theodora, Jack's wife.

I pulled toward her in low gear, then stopped beside her. She said, "Hello, Miles," then spoke to Jack, looking into the car through my open window. "I couldn't stay up there alone, Jack. I just couldn't; I'm sorry."

He nodded. "I should have brought you along; it was stupid of me not to."

Opening the car door, I leaned forward to let Theodora into the back seat, then Jack introduced her to Becky, and we drove on up to the house.

Chapter four

Jack's house is a green frame house sitting by itself on the side of a hill, and the garage is a part of the basement. The garage was empty, the door open, and Jack motioned me to drive right in. We got out of the car then, Jack snapped on a light, closed the garage door, then opened a door leading into the basement proper, motioning us to walk on in ahead of him.

We stepped into an ordinary basement: laundry tubs, a washing machine, a wooden sawhorse, stacked newspapers, and against one wall, on the floor, some cardboard cartons and several used paint cans. Jack walked past us across the room to another door, then stopped, turning toward us, his hand on the doorknob. He had a pretty good second-hand billiard table in there, I knew; he'd told me he used it a lot, just knocking the balls around by himself, doing a lot of his writing in his head. Now he looked at Becky, glancing at his wife, too. "Get hold of yourself," he said, then walked in, pulled the chain on the overhead light, and we followed after him.

The light over a billiard table is designed to light up the table surface brilliantly. It hangs low so it won't shine in your eyes as you play, and it leaves the ceiling in darkness. This one had a rectangular shade to confine the light to the table top only, and the rest of the room was left in semi-gloom. I couldn't see Becky's face very clearly, but I heard her gasp. Lying on the bright green table top under the sharp light of the 150-watt bulb, and covered with the rubberized sheet Jack kept on the billiard table, lay what was unmistakably a body. I turned to look at Jack, and he said, "Go ahead; pull it off."

I was irritated; this worried and scared me, and there was too damn much mystery to suit me; it occurred to me that the writer in Jack was laying on the dramatics a little heavily. I grabbed the rubber sheet, yanked it off, and tossed it to a corner of the table. Lying on the green felt, on its back, was the naked body of a man. It was maybe five feet ten inches tall – it isn't too easy to judge height, looking down on a body that way. He was white, the skin very pale in the brilliant shadowless light, and at one and the same time, it looked unreal and theatrical, and yet it was intensely, over real. The body was slim, maybe 140 pounds, but well-nourished and well-muscled. I couldn't judge the age, except that he wasn't old. The eyes were open, staring directly up into the overhead light, in a way that made your own eyes smart. They were blue, and very clear. There was no wound visible, and no other obvious cause of death. I walked over beside Becky, slipped my arm under hers, and turned to Jack. "Well?"

He shook his head, refusing to comment. "Keep looking. Examine it. Notice anything strange?"

I turned back to the body on the table. I was getting more and more irritated. I didn't like this; there was something strange about this dead man on the table, but I couldn't tell what, and that only made me angrier. "Come on, Jack" – I looked at him again. "I don't see anything but a dead man. Let's cut out the mystery; what's it all about?"

Again he shook his head, frowning pleadingly, "Miles, take it easy. Please. I don't want to tell you my impression of what's wrong; I don't want to influence you. If it's there to see, I want you to find it yourself, first. And if it isn't, if I'm imagining things, I want to know that, too. Bear with me, Miles," he said gently. "Take a good look at that thing."

I studied the corpse, walking slowly around the table, stopping to look down at it from various angles, Jack, Becky, and Theodora stepping aside out of my way as I moved. "All right," I said presently, and reluctantly, apologizing to Jack with the tone of my voice. "There is something funny about it. You're not imagining things. Or if you are, so am I." For maybe half a minute longer I stood staring down at what lay on the table. "Well, for one thing," I said finally, "you don't often see a body like this, dead or alive. In a way, it reminds me of a few tubercular patients I've seen – those who've been in sanitariums nearly all their lives." I looked around at them all. "You can't live an ordinary life without picking up a few scars, a few nicks here and there. But these sanitarium patients never had a chance to get any; their bodies were unused. And that's how this one looks" – I nodded at the pale, motionless body under the light. "It's not tubercular, though. It's a well-built, healthy body; those are good muscles. But it never played football or hockey, never fell on a cement stair, never broke a bone. It looks… unused. That what you mean?"

Jack nodded. "Yeah. What else?"

"Becky, you all right?" I glanced across the table at her.

"Yes." She nodded, biting at her lower lip.

"The face," I said, answering Jack. I stood looking down at that face, waxy-white, absolutely still and motionless, the china-clear eyes staring. "It's not – immature, exactly." I wasn't sure how to say this. "Those are good bones; it's an adult face. But it looks" – I hunted for the word, and couldn't find it – "vague. It looks – "

Jack interrupted, his voice tense and eager; he was actually smiling a little. "Did you ever see them make medals?"

"Medals?"

"Yeah, fine medals. Medallions."

"No."

"Well, for a really fine job, in hard metal," Jack said, settling into his explanation, "they make two impressions." I didn't know what he was talking about or why. "First, they take a die and make impression number one, giving the blank metal its first rough shape. Then they stamp it with die number two, and it's the second die that gives it the details: the fine lines and delicate modelling you see in a really good medallion. They have to do it that way because that second die, the one with the details, couldn't force its way into smooth metal. You have to give it that first rough shape with die number one." He stopped, looking firm me to Becky, to see if we were following him.

"So?" I said a little impatiently.

"Well, usually a medallion shows a face. And when you look at it after die number one, the face isn't finished. It's all there, all right, but the details that give it character aren't." He stared at me. "Miles, that's what this face looks like. It's all there; it has lips, a nose, eyes, skin, and bone structure underneath. But there are no lines, no details, no character. It's unformed. Look at it!" His voice rose a notch. "It's like a blank face, waiting for the final finished face to be stamped onto it!"

He was right. I'd never seen a face like that before in my life. It wasn't flabby; you certainly couldn't say that. But somehow it was formless, characterless. It really wasn't a face; not yet. There was no life to it, it wasn't marked by experience; that's the only way I can explain it. "Who is he?" I said.

"I don't know." Jack walked to the doorway and nodded out at the basement and the staircase leading upstairs. "There's a little closet under the stairway; it's walled in with plywood to make a little storage space. It's half full of old junk: clothes in cardboard boxes, burned-out electrical appliances, an old vacuum cleaner, an iron, some lamps, stuff like that. We hardly ever open it. And there are some old books in there, too. I found him in there; I was hunting for a reference I needed, and thought it might be in one of those books. He was lying there, on top of the cartons, just the way you see him now; scared me stiff. I backed out like a cat in a doghouse; got a hell of a bump on the head" – he touched his scalp. "Then I went back and pulled him out. I thought he might still be alive, I couldn't tell. Miles, how soon does rigor mortis set in?"