What Warren Pike Saw in the Basement

Warren Pike lived in a small house in Worthington with an unfinished basement, and he had been dying for a year and a half in the slow, orderly fashion of a man who has always kept good records. He did not have a nurse. From the doorway Amos could see the pillbox on the sill with the days printed on it, the chair turned toward the window, and a cordless phone with three numbers written on a card beside it.

He did not want to see Amos. He said so at the door, in a voice that had begun to lose its middle, and then he stood aside anyway, because he had been wanting to see somebody for a year and a half and had not been able to say so.

"If you're here about Adrian," he said, before Amos had sat down, "I'll tell you what I told the two men from the paper. He was the best man I ever worked with and I haven't spoken to him since 2013 and I don't intend to start."

"You were his partner."

"I was the other half of his patent." Pike got into the chair and arranged himself in it slowly, and for a while he seemed to be deciding whether he had the strength to be angry. "Filed in 2009, both our names on it, and the whole thing assigned to a company he owned. He kept the building; I kept my name off it. We have been two old men in the same city ever since."

"The forty-one compound," Amos said.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody. I read your patent."

Pike looked at him for a long moment. And then he did something Amos was not prepared for, which was that he laughed — a short, dry, unhappy sound — and said, "Well, at least you read it. Nobody else ever has."

Amos asked his question, and asked it plainly. He said: What did you see?

And Warren Pike, who had spent thirteen years keeping the answer behind his teeth, and who had, in the end, less time in front of him than he had left to be careful with, went into the other room, and came back with a small recorder, and pressed the red key, and said the following sentence, which Amos has kept on his own phone ever since, because there was never going to be a court:

"I saw him do it. Two times, and the second time he didn't ask me to be there, he just needed somebody with the code to the freezer and I was the only person left who had it. I'm not going to tell you what it looks like. I am going to tell you what it costs. He came over here in the spring of 2013 and he sat in that chair and he said, Warren, I have made something that makes a better man out of me, and I want you to see it, and then he drank it, standing where you are standing, and I watched him turn into somebody else in my kitchen, and I will be honest with you, I was a scientist. What I felt was interest, and then horror, and then interest again, which is the thing I will have to answer for. And after that he went away and I did not call him, and thirteen years is a long time to not call somebody, Mr. Whitlock, and I would like you to understand that I thought about it every week and I never once picked up the phone."

Amos said, "Why not?"

Pike turned the recorder off before he answered. He said: "Because he liked it."