‘Look what you did, you fuck!’ the kid shouted. ‘Look what you did to me!’
Hogan tried to pull back, and got half a breath when the kid’s hold slipped momentarily, but with his seatbelt still buckled — and still locked down as well, from the feel — there was really nowhere he could go. The kid’s hands were back almost at once, and this time his thumbs were pressing into his windpipe, pinching it shut.
Hogan tried to bring his own hands up, but the kid’s arms, as rigid as prison bars, blocked him.
He tried to knock the kid’s arms away, but they wouldn’t budge. Now he could hear another wind
— a high, roaring wind inside his own head.
‘Look what you did, you stupid shit! I’m bleedin!’
The kid’s voice, but farther away than it had been.
He’s killing me, Hogan thought, and a voice replied: Right — fuck you, sugar.
That brought the anger back. He groped in his lap for whatever was there besides dirt and glass. It was a paper bag with some bulky object — Hogan couldn’t remember exactly what —
inside it. Hogan closed his hand around it and pistoned his fist upward toward the shelf of the
kid’s jaw. It connected with a heavy thud. The kid screamed in surprised pain, and his grip on Hogan’s throat was suddenly gone as he fell over backward.
Hogan pulled in a deep, convulsive breath and heard a sound like a teakettle howling to be taken off the burner. Is that me, making that sound? My God, is that me?
He dragged in another breath. It was full of flying dust, it hurt his throat and made him cough, but it was heaven all the same. He looked down at his fist and saw the shape of the Chattery Teeth clearly outlined against the brown bag.
And suddenly felt them move.
There was something so shockingly human in this movement that Hogan shrieked and dropped the bag at once; it was as if he had picked up a human jawbone, which had tried to speak to his hand.
The bag hit the kid’s back and then tumbled to the van’s carpeted floor as ‘Bryan Adams’
pushed himself groggily to his knees. Hogan heard the rubber band snap . . . and then the unmistakable click-and-chutter of the teeth themselves, opening and closing.
It’s probably just a cog knocked a little off-track, Scooter had said. I bet a man who was handy could get ’em walkin and chompin again.
Or maybe just a good knock would do it, Hogan thought. If I live through this and ever get back that way, I’ll have to tell Scooter that all you have to do to fix a pair of malfunctioning Chattery Teeth is roll your van over and then use them to hit a psychotic hitchhiker who’s trying to strangle you: so simple even a child could do it.
The teeth clattered and smacked inside the torn brown bag; the sides fluttered, making it look like an amputated lung, which refused to die. The kid crawled away from the bag without even looking at it — crawled toward the back of the van, shaking his head from side to side, trying to clear it. Blood flew from the clots of his hair in a fine spray.
Hogan found the clasp of his seatbelt and pushed the pop-release. Nothing happened. The square in the center of the buckle did not give even a little and the belt itself was still locked as tight as a cramp, cutting into the middle-aged roll of fat above the waistband of his trousers and pushing a hard diagonal across his chest. He tried rocking back and forth in the seat, hoping that would unlock the belt. The flow of blood from his face increased, and he could feel his cheek flapping back and forth like a strip of dried wallpaper, but that was all. He felt panic struggling to break through amazed shock, and twisted his head over his right shoulder to see what the kid was up to.
It turned out to be no good. He had spotted his knife at the far end of the van, lying atop a litter of instructional manuals and brochures. He grabbed it, flicked his hair away from his face, and peered back over his own shoulder at Hogan. He was grinning, and there was something in that grin that made Hogan’s balls simultaneously tighten and shrivel until it felt as if someone had tucked a couple of peach-pits into his Jockey shorts.
Ah, here it is! The kid’s grin said. For a minute or two there I was worried — quite seriously worried — but everything is going to come out all right after all. Things got a little improvisational there for a while, but now we’re back to the script.
‘You stuck, Label Dude?’ the kid asked over the steady shriek of the wind. ‘You are, ain’t you?
Good thing you buckled your belt, right? Good thing for me.’
The kid tried to get up, almost made it, and then his knees gave way. An expression of surprise so magnified it would have been comic under other circumstances crossed his face. Then he flicked his blood-greasy hair out of his face again and began to crawl toward Hogan, his left hand wrapped around the imitation-bone handle of the knife. The Def Leppard tattoo ebbed and
flowed with each flex of his impoverished bleep, making Hogan think of the way the words on Myra’s tee-shirt — NEVADA IS GOD’S COUNTRY — had rippled when she moved.
Hogan grasped the seatbelt buckle with both hands and drove his thumbs against the pop-release as enthusiastically as the kid had driven his into Hogan’s’ windpipe. There was absolutely no response. The belt was frozen. He craned his neck to look at the kid again.
The kid had made it as far as the fold-up bed and then stopped. That expression of large, comic surprise had resurfaced on his face. He was staring straight ahead, which meant he was looking at something on the floor, and Hogan suddenly remembered the teeth. They were still chattering away.
He looked down in time to see the Jumbo Chattery Teeth march from the open end of the torn paper bag on their funny orange shoes. The molars and the canines and the incisors chopped rapidly up and down, producing a sound like ice in a cocktail-shaker. The shoes, dressed up in their tiny white spats, almost seemed to bounce along the gray carpet. Hogan found himself thinking of Fred Astaire tap-dancing his way across a stage and back again; Fred Astaire with a cane tucked under his arm and a straw boater tipped saucily forward over one eye.
‘Oh shit!’ the kid said, half-laughing. ‘Is that what you were dickerin for back there? Oh, man!
I kill you, Label Dude, I’m gonna be doin the world a favor.’
The key, Hogan thought. The key on the side of the teeth, the one you use to wind them up . . .
it isn ‘t turning.
And he suddenly had another of those precognitive flashes; he understood exactly what was going to happen. The kid was going to reach for them.
The teeth abruptly stopped walking and chattering. They simply stood there on the slightly tilted floor of the van, jaws slightly agape. Eyeless, they still seemed to peer quizzically up at the kid.
‘Chattery Teeth,’ Mr. Bryan Adams, from Nowhere, USA, marveled. He reached out and curled his right hand around them, just as Hogan had known he would.
‘Bite him!’ Hogan shrieked. ‘Bite his fucking fingers right off!’
The kid’s head snapped up, the gray-green eyes wide with startlement. He gaped at Hogan for a moment — that big expression of totally dumb surprise — and then he began to laugh. His laughter was high and shrieky, a perfect complement to the wind howling through the van and billowing the curtains like long ghost-hands.
‘Bite me! Bite me! Biiiite me!’ the kid chanted, as if it were the punchline to the funniest joke he’d ever heard. ‘Hey, Label Dude! I thought I was the one who bumped my head!’
The kid clamped the handle of the switchblade in his own teeth and stuck the forefinger of his left hand between the Jumbo Chattery Teeth. ‘Ite ee!’ he said around the knife. He giggled and wiggled his finger between the oversized jaws. ‘Ite ee! Oh on, ite ee!’
The teeth didn’t move. Neither did the orange feet. Hogan’s premonition collapsed around him the way dreams do upon waking. The kid wiggled his finger between the Chattery Teeth one more time, began to pull it out . . . then began screaming at the top of his lungs. ‘Oh shit! SHIT!
Mother FUCKER.”
For a moment Hogan’s heart leaped in his chest, and then he realized that, although the kid was still screaming, what he was really doing was laughing. Laughing at him. The teeth had remained perfectly still the whole time.