The duties were not hard for somebody who had completed two years of medical training. In the beginning odors continued to bother him and he intensely disliked the rasping of the saw as it bit through the skull. But Lobsenz instructed as he worked and he was a good teacher. During the first year of medical school Adam had shared a pickled cadaver named Cora with six other students in an anatomy laboratory. By the time he had inherited Cora her parts and organs had been sliced and examined beyond all recognition. Now he kept his eyes open and listened carefully to Lobsenz who, noticing his interest, was obviously pleased but grumbled that he should be paid tuition. Adam was privately convinced that this was so; it was a first-class private lesson in anatomy.

In the beginning the nights were bad. The night telephone was in his room. From seven to eight-thirty undertakers telephoned, seeking the thirty-five dollars paid them by the county each time they unceremoniously buried an unclaimed body in a plain wooden box, the same price Benson paid for two dives.

The first night he took the calls from the undertakers, studied for two hours, set his alarm, lay down and went to sleep, and dreamed about the diving.

When he awoke he laughed at himself in the dark. Typical of the fool that he was, he thought: not caring a damn during all the high work, but now, in his bed, trembling over what might have happened.

The second night he talked on the telephone with the undertakers, studied until after midnight, set the alarm, turned off the light and lay there in the dark, wide awake.

He counted sheep, getting to fifty-six before each sheep turned into a body that floated slowly over the turnstile as he tallied. He counted backwards, beginning at one hundred and reaching one twice without the faintest sign of drowsiness, his eyes searching the darkness around him.

He thought of his grandmother, remembering her holding him to her flat chest as she rocked him to sleep in the kitchen. Fa nana, fa nana, go to sleep, Adamo. Pray to St. Michael, he will drive away the devil with his sword.

It was a large building. There were noises, the wind rattling windowglass, creaks and groanings, a kind of tinkling, the sound of footsteps.

Tinkling?

Footsteps?

He was supposed to be alone in the building. He got out of bed and put on the light so he could find his clothes. It was not spirits he worried about; as a scientist of course he did not believe in the supernatural. But the front door and the ambulance entrance were both locked. He had locked them himself. Therefore somebody had perhaps forced entry for who knew what purpose.

He left his room, turning on lights as he went through the building, first upstairs through the dissection chambers, then past the offices on the second and first floors. There was nobody.