（外文电子版资料）Stephen King - The Crate.pdf

\c\bThe Crate Stephen King: The Crate ELECTRONIC VERSION 1.0 (Apr 06 00). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute. Dexter Stanley was scared. More; he felt as if that central axle that binds us to the state we call sanity were under a greater strain than it had ever been under before. As he pulled up beside Henry Northrups house on North Campus Avenue that August night, he felt that if he didnt talk to someone, he really, would go crazy. There was no one to talk to but Henry Northrup. Dex Stanley was the head of the zoology department, and once might have been university president if he had been better at academic politics. His wife had died twenty years before, and they had been childless. What remained of his own family was all west of the Rockies. He was not good at making friends. Northrup was an exception to that. In some ways, they were two of a kind; both had been disappointed in the mostly meaningless, but always vicious, game of university politics. Three years before, Northrup had made his run at the vacant English department chairmanship. He had lost, and one of the reasons had undoubtedly been his wife, Wilma, an abrasive and unpleasant woman. At the few cocktail parties Dex had attended where English people and zoology people could logically mix, it seemed he could always recall the harsh mule-bray of her voice, telling some new faculty wife to call me Billie, dear everyone does! Dex made his way across the lawn to Northrups door at a stumbling run. It was Thursday, and Northrups unpleasant spouse took two classes on Thursday nights. Consequently, it was Dex and Henrys chess night. The two men had been playing chess together for the last eight years. Dex rang the bell beside the door of his friends house; leaned on it. The door opened at ast and Northrup was there. Dex, he said. I didnt expect you for anot