"Oh, God," he said. "Oh, God, Jan. It's the Doyle boy."
* * *
Milo was screaming again, in the kitchen.
They ran. Del got there first, flung open the door to the garage and slapped the light switch. The single bulb came on over the workbench. The cold hit them like a wall; the garage was barely warmer than outside. Milo was on top of the chest freezer, standing on his hind legs, clawing at the plywood Del had nailed over the scuttle hole, crying in that terrible raw voice.
"I nailed it shut," Del said. His voice was shaking. "Jan. Thursday night. I nailed it shut. If he came in and out through here—"
"Then he couldn't get out."
"And I put the chair under the door. And it was six degrees—" He was already climbing. He stepped up onto the freezer lid in his bare feet, pushed Milo gently aside, got the claw end of a hammer from the pegboard and jammed it under the edge of the plywood and pulled. The nails screamed. The board came half off, then all the way, and clattered down behind the freezer.
The smell that came down out of that black square made Janet's eyes water.
Del shone the flashlight up. All she could see from below was rafters, the pink fluff of insulation, the underside of the roof. He reached up and caught a rafter and pulled himself up, grunting, his bare heels kicking at the shelf above the freezer, and she watched her forty-one-year-old husband with his cholesterol of two-sixty haul himself up into a crawlspace like a teenager going over a fence, and then the flashlight beam swung away into the dark and she couldn't see him at all.
"Del!"
Milo went up after him. One leap from the freezer to the shelf, another from the shelf to the edge of the hole, and he was gone, a gray streak into the black.
"Jan." Del's voice came down muffled. "Jan, he's here. He's here. He's—oh, Christ. He's not waking up right."
"Turn off the heater. Del, turn it off first, there's a knob on the side, turn it all the way down till the flame goes out. Then open the vent. Is the gable vent blocked?"
A pause. Scuffling. "There's a—he's got a blanket over it. Over the vent. There's a blanket hung over the vent."
To hide the light, she thought. So Arliss wouldn't see it. So nobody would see it.
"Pull it down. Pull it down and get him to the hole. Can you get him to the hole?"