“Ooo durd!”
Paul pulled himself around in a half-circle and began to crawl for the door. He could hear her behind him. And then, as he entered the zone of broken glass, he felt her hand close around his left ankle and squeeze his stump excruciatingly. He screamed.
“DIRT!” Annie cried triumphantly.
He looked over his shoulder. Her face was turning slowly purple, and seemed to be swelling. He realized she actually was turning into the Bourkas’ idol.
He yanked with all his might and his leg slithered footlessly out of her grasp, leaving her with nothing but the circlet of leather with which she had capped the stump.
He crawled on, beginning to cry, sweat pouring down his cheeks. He pulled himself along on his elbows like a soldier advancing beneath heavy machine-gun fire. He heard the thud of first one knee from behind him, then the other, then the first again. She was still coming. She was as solid as he had always feared. He had burned her broken her back stuffed her tubes full of paper and still still still she was coming.
“BIRT!” Annie screamed now. “DIRT . . . BIRT!”
One of his elbows came down on a hook of glass and it jabbed up into his arm. He crawled forward anyway with it sticking out of him like a push-pin.
Her hand closed over his left calf.
“AW! GAW . . . OOO OW ... AW!”
He turned back again and yes, her face had gone black, a dusky rotted-plum black from which her bleeding eyes bulged wildly. Her pulsing throat had swelled up like an inner-tube, and her mouth was writhing. She was, he realized, trying to grin.
The door was just in reach. Paul stretched out and laid hold of the jamb in a death-grip.
“GAW . . . OOO . . . OW!”
Her right hand on his right thigh.
Thud. One knee. Thud. The other.
Closer. Her shadow. Her shadow falling over him.
“No,” he whimpered. He felt her tugging, pulling. He held onto the jamb grimly, eyes now squeezed shut.
“GAW . . . OOO . . . AW!”
Over him. Thunder. Goddess-thunder.
Now her hands scuttled up his back like spiders and settled upon his neck.
“GAW . . . OOO . . . DIRT . . . BIRT!”
His air was gone. He held the jamb. He held the jamb and felt her over him felt her hands sinking into his neck and he screamed Die can’t you die can’t you ever die can’t you—
“GAW . . . G—”
The pressure slackened. For a moment he could breathe again. Then Annie collapsed on top of him, a mountain of slack flesh, and he couldn’t breathe at all.
45
He worked his way out from under her like a man burrowing his way out of a snowslide. He did it with the last of his strength.
He crawled through the door, expecting her hand to settle around his ankle again at any moment, but that did not happen. Annie lay silent and face-down in blood and spilled champagne and fragments of green glass. Was she dead? She must be dead. Paul did not believe she was dead.
He slammed the door shut. The bolt she had put on looked like something halfway up a high cliff, but he clawed his way up to it, shot it, and then collapsed in a shuddery huddle at the door’s foot.
He lay in a stupor for some unknown length of time. What roused him from it was a low, minute scratching sound. The rats, he thought. It’s the r—
Then Annie’s thick, blood-grimed fingers poked under the door and tugged mindlessly at his shirt.
He shrieked and jerked away from them, his left leg creaking with pain. He hammered at the fingers with his fist. Instead of pulling back, they jerked a little and lay still.
Let that be the end of her. Please God let that be the end of her.
In horrible pain now, Paul began to crawl slowly toward the bathroom. He got halfway there and looked back. Her fingers were still poking out from under the door. As bad as his pain was, he could not stand to look at that, or even think of that, and so he reversed direction, went back, and pushed them under. He had to nerve himself to do it; he was certain that the moment he touched them, they would clutch him.
He finally reached the bathroom, every part of him throbbing. He pulled himself inside and shut the door.
God, what if she’s moved the dope?
But she hadn’t. The untidy litter of boxes