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would not be necessary, he had noted. Nor the food. Like an Egyptian burial it would look, he had decided, with this food for the departed soul.)
    He had pulled himself out of the vault, his flesh creeping with the cold and damp and had gone back to the front door to open it a little, so that the light from the living room would help him see farther across the grounds, since he could not train the flashlight while he carried the boy. He had warned himself that he must not slip. In case this burial wasn’t to be temporary. (He must remember to tell the police that what he had done on that night had been accomplished more easily because he kept reminding himself that it wasn’t irrevocable. That he might still go into the house and pick up the telephone. Yes, that had been a real part of it.)
    He had warned himself—just in case he did not change his mind and tell the police—that he must not leave signs which could talk. Yes, wash the terrace stones of the blood, he had warned himself, for the blood could speak. But if the blood spilled in accidents cried out, then the whole world would resound.
    He had told himself, One thing at a time. Oh, God, what a one thing it had been, though!
    He had tucked the stained bathrobe around the body in a travesty of the way he tucked Puppchen in each evening. “Good night, my darling.” And that body, not stiff, but cold, cold! He had hoisted it over his shoulder and, bending under the weight, had started down the path. It was only a hundred yards to the funk hole, but it had seemed a thousand. (It had been as if he had only been able to think in clichés—a hundred yards that felt a thousand was a cliché—because he had not felt. What he had been able to feel that night was Puppchen’s body, cold, cold as this boy’s if he allowed the police to come and punish him and leave her alone again.)
    Then there had been a sound which had been only a cat, only a cliché cat from the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. “ Silent be! It was the cat! ” Yes, he had felt from the beginning that it wasn’t real, was theatre. This was what he had tried to explain to the K.K.K. He wasn’t there. It had never happened. But, nevertheless, he had not put the body down on the ground where it might leave traces, but leaning his back against the oak tree, the oak tree from which little acorns grew, had waited there until he could do the other fifty yards.
    If he could get the boy into the funk hole, if he could pull the trap door over him, then, he had told himself, the best way would be to preserve this feeling that it never had happened, that it wasn’t real. A truck had gone by. “I’m going to catch a hitch back to New York on a truck,” the boy had said. The sound of the truck had set him into motion again.
    He had not permitted himself to feel how the boy must look in his arms. This, too, must remain a cliché, a movie cliché, for he had carried many bodies before, on celluloid. Always the dead hand flopping out of the covering, always that pathetic shot of the sole of one shoe, a flash of dead eyes, a lolling head.
    It was not the body of a boy he was carrying, he had told himself, merely one more story line.
    Then he had reached the funk hole and knew by the buzzing in his ears that it was good he had reached it. But, even then, he had carefully lowered the body into the pit. Why not have dropped it, simply let it fall? He had shoved the boy with all his strength when he had been real, but then it had turned to celluloid, and he had needed to lower the body carefully, to treat it reverently, because he was not playing a “murderer.” His role was that of an unfortunate victim of fate with whom the audience must be made to sympathize; therefore, he had composed the limbs decently and reverently closed the eyes.
    His breath had been like a bellows doing these preposterous things—He remembered his bellowing breath