At last, unable to bear the sound, he reached over and switched on the bedside lamp. As he moved across the room in his stocking feet, he heard the dog trying suddenly to jerk loose from the blanketing. But it got all tangled up in the folds and began yelping, terror-stricken, while its body flailed wildly under the wool.
Neville knelt beside it and put his hands on its body. He heard the choking snarl and the muffled click of its teeth as it snapped at him through the blanket.
“All right,” he said. “Stop it now.”
The dog kept struggling against him, its high-pitched whining never stopping, its gaunt body shaking without control. Neville kept his hands firmly on its body, pinning it down, talking to it quietly, gently.
“It’s all right now, fella, all right. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Take it easy, now. Come on, relax, now. Come on, boy. Take it easy. Relax. That’s right, relax. That’s it. Calm down. Nobody’s going to hurt you. We’ll take care of you.”
He went on talking intermittently for almost an hour, his voice a low, hypnotic murmuring in the silence of the room. And slowly, hesitantly, the dog’s trembling eased off. A smile faltered on Neville’s lips as he went on talking, talking.
“That’s right. Take it easy, now. We’ll take care of you.”
Soon the dog lay still beneath his strong hands, the only movement its harsh breathing. Neville began patting its head, began running his right hand over its body, stroking and soothing.
“That’s a good dog,” he said softly. “Good dog. I’ll take care of you now. Nobody will hurt you. You understand, don’t you, fella? Sure you do. Sure. You’re my dog, aren’t you?”
Carefully he sat down on the cool linoleum, still patting the dog.
“You’re a good dog, a good dog.”
His voice was calm, it was quiet with resignation.
After about an hour he picked up the dog. For a moment it struggled and started whining, but Neville talked to it again and it soon calmed down.
He sat down on his bed and held the blanket-covered dog in his lap. He sat there for hours holding the dog, patting and stroking and talking. The dog lay immobile in his lap, breathing easier.
It was about eleven that night when Neville slowly undid the blanket folds and exposed the dog’s head.
For a few minutes it cringed away from his hand, snapping a little. But he kept talking to it quietly, and after a while his hand rested on the warm neck and he was moving his fingers gently, scratching and caressing.
He smiled down at the dog, his throat moving.
“You’ll be all better soon,” he whispered. “Real soon.” The dog looked up at him with its dulled, sick eyes and then its tongue faltered out and licked roughly and moistly across the palm of Neville’s hand.
Something broke in Neville’s throat. He sat there silently while tears ran slowly down his cheeks.
In a week the dog was dead.
There was no debauch of drinking. Far from it. He found that he actually drank less. Something had changed. Trying to analyze it, he came to the conclusion that his last drunk had put him on the bottom, at the very nadir of frustrated despair. Now, unless he put himself under the ground, the only way he could go was up.
After the first few weeks of building up intense hope about the dog, it had slowly dawned on him that intense hope was not the answer and never had been. In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.
Burying the dog had not been the agony he had supposed it would be. In a way, it was almost like burying threadbare hopes and false excitements. From that day on he learned to accept the dungeon he existed in, neither seeking to escape with sudden derring — do nor beating his pate bloody on its walls.
And, thus resigned, he returned to work.
It had happened almost a year before, several days after he had put Virginia to her second and final rest.
Hollow and bleak, a sense of absolute loss in him, he was walking the streets late one afternoon, hands listless at his sides, feet shuffling with the rhythm of despair. His face mirrored nothing of the helpless agony he felt. His face was a blank.
He had wandered through the streets for hours, neither knowing nor caring where he was going. All he knew was that he couldn’t return to the empty rooms of the house, couldn’t look at the things they had touched and held and known with him. He couldn’t look at Kathy’s empty bed, at her clothes hanging still and useless in the closet, couldn’t look at the bed that he and Virginia had slept in, at Virginia’s clothes, her jewelry, all her perfumes on the bureau. He couldn’t go near the house.
