to his room, pausing to rub away the hub-marks on the sides of the doorway. The signs of his passage were nevertheless becoming clearer.
Doesn’t matter. If she misses them one more time, she misses them for good.
He put the knife on the night-table, hoisted himself into bed, then slid it under the mattress. When Annie came back he was going to ask her for a nice cold glass of water, and when she leaned over to give it to him he was going to plunge the knife into her throat.
Nothing fancy.
Paul closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep, and when the Cherokee came whispering back into the driveway that morning at four o’clock with both its engine and its lights shut off, he did not stir. Until he felt the sting of the hypo sliding into his arm and woke to see her face leaning over his, he hadn’t the slightest idea she was back.
21
At first he thought he was dreaming about his own book, that the dark was the dream-dark of the caves behind the huge stone head of the Bourka Bee-Goddess and the sting was that of a bee—
“Paul?”
He muttered something that meant nothing—something that meant only get out of here, dreamvoice, get gone.
“Paul.”
That was no dreamvoice; it was Annie’s voice.
He forced his eyes open. Yes, it was her, and for a moment his panic grew even stronger. Then it simply seeped away, like fluid running down a partly clogged drain.
What the hell—?
He was totally disoriented. She was standing there in the shadows as if she had never been away, wearing one of her woolly skirts and frumpy sweaters; he saw the needle in her hand and understood it hadn’t been a sting but an injection. What the fuck—either way it was the same thing. He had been gotten by the goddess. But what had she—?
That bright panic tried to come again, and once again it hit a dead circuit. All he could feel was a kind of academic surprise. That, and some intellectual curiosity about where she had come from, and why now. He tried to lift his hands and they came up a little ... but only a little. It felt as if there were invisible weights dangling from them. They dropped back onto the sheet with little dull thumps.
Doesn’t matter what she shot me up with. It’s like what you write on the last page of a book. It’s THE END.
The thought brought no fear. Instead he felt a kind of calm euphoria.
At least she’s tried to make it kind ... to make it ...
“Ah, there you are!” Annie said, and added with lumbering coquettishness: “I see you, Paul ... those blue eyes. Did I ever tell you what lovely blue eyes you have? But I suppose other women have—women who were much prettier than I am, and much bolder about their affections, as well.”
Came back. Came creeping in the night and killed me, hypo or bee-sting, no difference, and so much for the knife under the bed. All I am now is the latest number in Annie’s considerable body-count. And then, as the numbing euphoria of the injection began to spread, he thought almost with humor: Some lousy Scheherazade I turned out to be.
He thought that in a moment sleep would return—a more final steep—but it did not. He saw her slip the hypo into the pocket of her skirt and then she sat down on the bed ... not where she usually sat, however; she sat on its foot and for a moment he saw only her solid, impervious back as she bent over, as if to check on something. He heard a wooden thunk, a metallic clunk, and then a shaking sound he had heard someplace before. After a moment he placed it. Take the matches, Paul.
Diamond Blue Tips. He didn’t know what else she might have there at the foot of the bed, but one of them was a box of Diamond Blue Tip matches.
Annie turned to him and smiled again. Whatever else might have happened, her apocalyptic depression had passed. She brushed an errant lock of hair back behind her ear with a girlish gesture. It went oddly with the lock’s dull dirty half-shine.
Dull dirty half-shine oh boy you gotta remember that one that one ain’t half-bad oh boy I am stoned now, all the past was prologue to this shit hey baby this here is the mainline oh fuck I’m fucked but this is crystal top-end shit this