said. 'He's had his own way too long. Fight him, kill him, make him stay d - '
He swung his foot and kicked my right crutch out from under me. I struggled to stay up, tottered, almost made it . . . and then he kicked the left crutch away. I fell down on the cold packed snow. He took another step and stood above me, his face hard and alien.
'You got it coming, and you're going to get it,' he said remotely.
'Yeah, right,' I gasped. 'You remember the ant farms, Arnie? Are you in there someplace? This dirty sucker never had a fucking ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life.'
And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face - his face roiled. I don't know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there - drawn, tired, ashamed, but, most of all, desperately unhappy. Then LeBay again, and his foot drew back to kick me as I lay on the snow groping for my crutches and feeling helpless and useless and dumb. Then it was Arnie again, my friend Arnie, brushing his hair back off his forehead in that familiar, distracted gesture; it was Arnie saying, 'Oh, Dennis . . . Dennis . . . I'm sorry. . . I'm so sorry.'
'It's too late for sorry, man,' I said.
I got one crutch and then the other. 1 pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.
'Dennis, I can't help it,' he whispered. 'Sometimes I feel like I'm not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.'
'When Christine . . . when she goes, then he's with her. That's the only time he's . . . he's . . .'
Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:
'Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!'
Then nothing for maybe five seconds nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his 'clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.
I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.
'It's all going to happen just like he said,' LeBay told me. 'Let it go, boy. Maybe I won't drive over you.'
Come on over to Darnell's tonight, I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. 'We'll play. I'll bring Leigh. You bring Christine.'
'I'll pick my own time and place,' LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie's mouth, showing Arnie's teeth, which were young and strong - a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. 'You won't know when or where. But you'll know. . . when the time comes.'
'Think again,' I said, almost casually. 'Come to Darnell's tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow.'
He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. 'And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?'
'Oh, we won't be taken seriously at first,' I said. 'I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons . . . uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff.'
He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.
'And what you don't seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong.'
His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.
'Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up