Because he could say none of these things, he just reiterated: 'Being scared isn't the problem. I just don't want to be involved in something that will land me in the nuthatch.'

'Will you at least go with us to talk to him?' Bev asked. 'Listen to what he says?'

'Sure,' Stan said, and then laughed. 'Maybe I ought to bring my bird-book.'

They all laughed then, and it was a little easier.

12

Beverly left them outside the Kleen-Kloze and took the rags back home by herself. The apartment was still empty. She put them under the kitchen sink and closed the cupboard. She stood up and looked down toward the bathroom.

I'm not going down there, she thought. I'm going to watch Bandstand on TV. See if I can't learn how to do the Dog.

So she went into the living room and turned on the TV and five minutes later she turned it off while Dick Clark was showing how much oil just one Stri-Dex medicated pad could take off the face of your average teenager ('If you think you can get clean with just soap and water,' Dick said, holding the dirty pad up to the glassy eye of the camera so that every teenager in America could get a good look, 'you ought to take a good look at this.').

She went back to the kitchen cupboard over the sink, where her father kept his tools. Among them was a pocket tape, the kind that runs out a long yellow tongue of inches. She folded this into one cold hand and went down to the bathroom.

It was sparkling clean, silent. Somewhere, far distant, it seemed, she could hear Mrs Doyon yelling for her boy Jim to get in out of the road, right now.

She went to the bathroom basin and looked down into the dark eye of the drain.

She stood there for some time, her legs as cold as marble inside her jeans, her nipples feeling sharp enough and hard enough to cut paper, her lips dead dry. She waited for the voices.

No voices came.

A little shuddery sigh came from her, and she began to feed the thin steel tape into the drain. It went down smoothly — like a sword into the gullet of a 'county fair sideshow performer. Six inches, eight inches, ten. It stopped, bound up in the elbow-bend under the sink, Beverly supposed. She wiggled it, pushing gently at the same time, and eventually the tape began to feed into the drain again. Sixteen inches now, then two feet, then three.

She watched the yellow tape slipping out of the chromed-steel case, which had been worn black on the sides by her father's big hand. In her mind's eye she saw it sliding through the black bore of the pipe, picking up some muck, scraping away flakes of rust. Down there where the sun never shines and the night never stops, she thought.

She imagined the head of the tape, with its small steel buttplate no bigger than a fingernail, sliding farther and farther into the darkness, and part of her mind screamed What are you doing? She did not ignore that voice . . . but she seemed helpless to heed it. She saw the end of the tape going straight down now, descending into the cellar. She saw it striking the sewage pipe . . . and even as she saw it, the tape bound up again.

She wiggled it again, and the tape, thin enough to be limber, made a faint eerie sound that reminded her a little bit of the way a saw sounds when you bend it back and forth across your legs.

She could see its tip wiggling against the bottom of this wider pipe, which would have a baked ceramic surface. She could see it bending . . . and then she was able to push it forward again.

She ran out six feet. Seven. Nine —

And suddenly the tape began to run through her hands by itself, as if something down there was pulling the other end. Not just pulling it: running with it. She stared at the flowing tape, her eyes wide, her mouth a sagging O of fear — fear, yes, but no surprise. Hadn't she known? Hadn't she known something like this was going to happen?

The tape ran out to its final stop. Eighteen feet; an even six yards.

A soft chuckle came wafting out of the drain, followed by a low whisper that was almost reproachful: 'Beverly, Beverly, Beverly . . . you can't fight us . . . you'll die if you try . . . die if you try . . . die if you try . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . ly-ly-ly . . . '

Something clicked inside the tape– measure's housing, and it suddenly began to run rapidly back into its case, the numbers and hashmarks blurring by. Near the end — the last five or six feet — the yellow became a dark, dripping red and she screamed and dropped it on the floor as if the tape had suddenly turned into a live snake.

Fresh blood trickled over the clean white porcelain of the basin and back down into the drain's wide eye. She bent, sobbing now, her fear a freezing weight in her stomach, and picked the tape up. She tweezed it between the thumb and first finger of her right hand and, holding it in front of her, took it into the kitchen. As she walked, blood dripped from the tape onto the faded linoleum of the hall and the kit chen.

She steadied herself by thinking of what her father would say to her — what he would do to her — if he found that she had gotten his measuring tape all bloody. Of course, he wouldn't be able to see the blood, but it helped to think that.

She took one of the clean rags — still as warm as fresh bread from the dryer — and went back into the bathroom. Before she began to clean, she put the hard rubber plug in the drain, closing that eye. The blood was fresh, and it cleaned up easily. She went up he r own trail, wiping away the dune-sized drops on the linoleum, then rinsing the rag, wringing it out, and putting it aside.

She got a second rag and used it to clean her father's measuring tape. The blood was thick, viscous. In two places there were clots of the stuff, black and spongy.

Although the blood only went back five or six feet, she cleaned the entire length of the tape, removing from it all traces of pipemuck. That done, she put it back into the cupboard over the sink and took the two stained rags out in back of the apartment. Mrs Doyon was yelling at Jim again. Her voice was clear, almost bell-like in the still hot late afternoon.

In the back yard, which was mostly bare din, weeds, and clothes-lines, there Was a rusty incinerator. Beverly threw the rags into it, then sat down on the back steps. Tears came suddenly, with surprising violence, and this time she made no effort to hold them back.

She put her arms on her knees, her head in her arms, and wept while Mrs Doyon called for J im to come out of that road, did he want to get hit by a car and be killed?

'Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui.'

— Virgil

'You don't fuck around with the infinite.'

— Mean Streets

February 14th, 1985 Valentine's Day

Two more disappearances in the past week — both children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was out sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue plastic flying saucers, but nothing else. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before — four inches or so. No tracks but hers, Chief Rademacher said when I called him. He is becoming extremely annoyed with me, I think. Not anything that's going to keep me awake nights; I have worse things to do than that, don't I?

Asked him if I could see the police photos. He refused.

Asked him if her tracks led away toward any sort of drain or sewer grating. This was followed by a long period of silence. Then Rademacher said, 'I'm beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldn't see a doctor, Hanlon. The head-peeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Don't you read the papers?'