‘Not the worst one I ever had, but still pretty bad,’ she mumbled as she brushed past him, hiked her nightdress, and plopped onto the Jakes. She propped her forehead in one hand. ‘No more of that stuff, please and thank you. American Grain, my rosy red ass. Someone should have told those babies you put the fertilizer on the hops before you grow em, not after. A headache on three lousy beers! Gosh! Well — you buy cheap, you get cheap. Especially when it’s those creepy Lahs doing the selling. Be a dollface and get me some aspirin, will you, Howie?’
‘Sure,’ he said, and approached the sink carefully. The finger was gone again. Vi, it seemed, had once more frightened it off. He got the aspirin out of the medicine cabinet and removed two.
When he reached to put the bottle back, he saw the tip of the finger protrude momentarily from the drain. It came out no more than a quarter of an inch. Again it seemed to execute that miniature wave before diving back out of sight.
I’m going to get rid of you, my friend, he thought suddenly. The feeling that accompanied the thought was anger — pure, simple anger — and it delighted him. The emotion cruised into his battered, bewildered mind like one of those huge Soviet icebreakers that crush and slice their way through masses of pack-ice with almost casual ease. I am going to get you. I don’t know how yet, but I will.
He handed Vi the aspirin and said, ‘Just a minute — I’ll get you a glass of water.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Vi said drearily, and crunched both tablets between her teeth. ‘Works faster this way.’
‘I’ll bet it plays hell on your insides, though,’ Howard said. He found he didn’t mind being in the bathroom very much at all, as long as Vi was in here with him.
‘Don’t care,’ she said, more drearily still. She flushed the toilet. ‘How are you this morning?’
‘Not great,’ he said truthfully.
‘You got one, too?’
‘A hangover? No. I think it’s that flu-bug I told you about. My throat’s sore, and I think I’m running a finger.’
‘What?’
‘Fever,’ he said. ‘Fever’s what I meant to say.’
‘Well, you better stay home.’ She went to the sink, selected her toothbrush from the holder, and began to brush vigorously.
‘Maybe you better, too,’ he said. He did not want Vi to stay home, however; he wanted her right by Dr. Stone’s side while Dr. Stone filled cavities and did root canals, but it would have been unfeeling not to have said something.
She glanced up at him in the mirror. Already a little color was returning to her cheeks, a little sparkle to her eye. Vi also recovered con brio. ‘The day I call in sick at work because I’ve got a hangover will be the day I quit drinking altogether,’ she said. ‘Besides, the doc’s gonna need me.
We’re pulling a complete set of uppers. Dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.’
She spat directly into the drain and Howard thought, fascinated: The next time it pops up, it’ll have toothpaste on it. Jesus!
‘You stay home and keep warm and drink plenty of fluids,’ Vi said. She had adopted her Head Nurse Tone now, the tone which said If you’re not taking all this down, be it on your own head.
‘Catch up on your reading. And, by the bye, show that Mr. Hot Shit Lathrop what he’s missing when you don’t come in. Make him think twice.’
‘That’s not a bad idea at all,’ Howard said.
She kissed him on the way by and dropped him a wink. ‘Your Shrinking Violet knows a few of the answers, too,’ she said. By the time she left to catch her bus half an hour later, she was singing lustily, her hangover forgotten.
The first thing Howard did following Vi’s departure was to haul the step-stool over to the kitchen sink and whiz into the drain again. It was easier with Vi out of the house; he had barely reached twenty-three, the ninth prime number, before getting down to business.
With that problem squared away — at least for the next few hours — he walked back into the hall and poked his head through the bathroom door. He saw the finger at once, and that was wrong. It was impossible, because he was way over here, and the basin should have cut off his view. But it didn’t and that meant —
‘What are you doing, you bastard?’ Howard croaked, and the finger, which had been twisting back and forth as if to test the wind, turned toward him. There was toothpaste on it, just as he had known there would be. It bent in his direction . . . only now it bent in three places, and that was impossible, too, quite impossible, because when you got to the third knuckle of any given finger, you were up to the back of the hand.
It’s getting longer, his mind gibbered. I don’t know how that can happen, but it is — if I can see it over the top of the basin from here, it must be at least three inches long . . . maybe more!
He closed the bathroom door gently and staggered back into the living room. His legs had once again turned into malfunctioning pogo-sticks. His mental ice-breaker was gone, flattened under a great white weight of panic and bewilderment. No iceberg this; it was a whole glacier.
Howard Mitla sat down in his chair and closed his eyes. He had never felt more alone, more disoriented, or more utterly powerless in his entire life. He sat that way for quite some time, and at last his fingers began to relax on the arms of his chair. He had spent most of the previous night wide-awake. Now he simply drifted off to sleep while the lengthening finger in his bathroom drain tapped and circled, circled and tapped.
He dreamed he was a contestant on Jeopardy — not the new, big-money version but the original daytime show. Instead of computer screens, a stagehand behind the game-board simply pulled up a card when a contestant called for a particular answer. Art Fleming had replaced Alex Trebek, with his slicked-back hair and somehow prissy poor-boy-at-the-party smile. The woman in the middle was still Mildred, and she still had a satellite downlink in her ear, but her hair was teased up into a Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant and a pair of cat’s-eye frames had replaced her wire-rimmed glasses.
And everyone was in black and white, him included.
‘Okay, Howard,’ Art said, and pointed at him. His index finger was a grotesque thing, easily a foot long; it stuck out of his loosely curled fist like a pedagogue’s pointer. There was dried toothpaste on the nail. ‘It’s your turn to select.’
Howard looked at the board and said, ‘I’d like Pests and Vipers for one hundred, Art.’
The square with $100 on it was removed, revealing an answer which Art now read: ‘The best way to get rid of those troublesome fingers in your bathroom drain.’
‘What is . . . ‘ Howard said, and then came up blank. A black-and-white studio audience stared silently at him. A black-and-white camera man dollied in for a close-up of his sweat-streaked black-and-white face. ‘What is . . . um . . . ‘
‘Hurry up, Howard, you’re almost out of time,’ Art Fleming cajoled, waving his grotesquely elongated finger at Howard, but Howard was a total blank. He was going to miss the question, the hundred bucks would be deducted from his score, he was going to go into the minus column, he was going to be a complete loser, they probably wouldn’t even given him the lousy set of encyclopedias . . .
A delivery truck on the street below backfired loudly. Howard sat up with a jerk, which almost pitched him out of his chair.
‘What is liquid drain-cleaner?’ he screamed. ‘What is liquid drain-cleaner?”
It was, of course, the answer. The correct answer.
He began to laugh. He was still laughing five minutes later, as he shrugged into his topcoat and stepped out the door.
Howard picked up the plastic bottle the toothpick-chewing clerk in the Queens Boulevard Happy Handyman Hardware Store had just set down on the counter. There was a cartoon woman in an apron on the front. She stood with one hand on her hip while she used the other hand to pour a gush of drain-cleaner into something that was either an industrial sink or Orson Welles’s bidet.
DRAIN-EZE, the label proclaimed. TWICE the strength of most leading brands! Opens bathroom sinks, showers, and drains IN MINUTES! Dissolves hair and organic matter!
‘Organic matter,’ Howard said. ‘Just what does that mean?’
The clerk, a bald man with a lot of warts on his forehead, shrugged. The toothpick poking out between his lips rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘Food, I guess. But I wouldn’t stand the bottle next to the liquid soap, if you know what I mean.’