Lancelot

to do but make a crude abutted joint and seal it as best I could with PBC compound and many wrappings of duct tape. A bad job but it should hold against the low pressure.
    The rest was simple: a ninety-degree elbow and three ten-foot sections of the Gerona which reached to within a foot of the main intake duct of the new fifteen-ton Carrier. Using the Bowie knife, I sliced off fiberglass insulation until metal showed. Then, using it like a chisel and the Stillson as a hammer, I made an X in the sheet metal and bent the corners in. Then drive a nipple into the opening—take care not to lose it!—and connect it with the Gerona system with a sleeve and another nipple. Slice off more fiberglass, pack it into the crude joint, seal with compound, and wrap the whole with the rest of the duct tape, perhaps fifty feet or so. The difficulty was propping the flashlight at the right angle.
    How strange memory is! Do you know what my memory records as the most unpleasant experience of that night? The damn fiberglass. Particles of it worked under my sleeve and collar. It makes my neck and arms itch just to think of it. Death’s banal, but fiberglass in the neck is serious business.
    I switched off the light and sat leaning back against the chimney gazing up into the darkness and waited for the compound to set.
    Then I opened the valve. The gas made no sound in the pipe. At least I could not hear it, but I fancied I could feel a slight shudder in the ten-foot sections of Gerona. Naturally there was no smell because the captan which gives house gas its characteristic odor had not been added.
    Sticking the knife and flashlight back in my hunting coat, I picked up the two kerosene lamps and went upstairs in the dark.
    At the top of the hanging staircase in the upper hall it was pitch black. But I knew every inch. A foot or so (I reckoned) from the cathedral chair I set down the kerosene lamps and put out my hand—yes, it was there, the chair. I listened. There was no sound but the murmur of the storm and the creak and pop of the timbers in the attic, as if Belle Isle were laboring through heavy seas. Somewhere a window glass broke. There was no sound from the bedrooms.
    I went to each door, Troy’s Margot’s, Raine’s. At Raine’s door there was a different kind of murmuring, an overtone to the storm. A weak watery light flowed through the crack in the door.
    I felt along the wall until I touched the air-conditioning register. My hand felt nothing, but when I put my face against it, there was a cool breath against my cheek. There was no odor. It could have been air.
    For a long time I stood at Raine’s door. I can’t remember whether I was listening or thinking or doing nothing. What I remember is that it was possible to stand there at least twenty minutes, hands at my sides, without fatigue, registering the sensations of my body. My heart was beating slowly, my breathing was deeper than usual—was it the low pressure of the storm? The storm roared softly like a conch shell over my ear. The fiberglass was beginning to bother my neck.
    Then, taking some thirty seconds to do so, I opened the door. So well did I know every inch and quirk of Belle Isle that without thinking I put a slight strain upwards on the silver doorknob while turning it because the heavy door had settled on its hinges and the latch did not move easily.
    The door opened at the rate perhaps of an inch every five seconds. The first thing that came into view was the curio cabinet next to the iron fireplace, then a corner of the bed. The light probably came from an electric camp lantern set on the floor. The weak light seemed to radiate in rays, like a child’s drawing of light.
    Once several years ago, passing in the hall, I heard Elgin in this bedroom conducting a tour, eight or ten Michiganers. “This cabinet was sealed up before the Civil War.” There was a marvel about it which Elgin saw and the tourists liked and I hadn’t thought of, this small volume of 1850 air trapped and sealed in glass. Elgin had a sense of the legendary. “These little bilbos you see still have General Beauregard’s fingerprints on them.” Bilbos? Where did he get that? He must have meant bibelots, the little bric-a-brac figures.
    The door was opening without a noise. Or if there was a noise, it could not be heard. The storm beyond the shuttered widow was like a heavy surf.
    There was the Ray-O-Vac lantern, not on the