The finger blurted up from the drain — joint after impossible joint of it. It was now smoking, and it smelled like a rubber boot sizzling on a hot barbecue grill.
‘Take this! Lunch is served, you bastard!’ Howard screamed, continuing to pour as the finger rose to a height of just over a foot, rising out of the drain like a cobra from a snake-charmer’s basket. It had almost reached the mouth of the plastic bottle when it wavered, seemed to shudder, and suddenly reversed its field, zipping back down into the drain. Howard leaned farther over the basin to watch it go and saw just a retreating flash of white far down in the dark. Lazy tendrils of smoke drifted up.
He drew a deep breath, and this was a mistake. He inhaled a great double lungful of Drain-Eze fumes. He was suddenly, violently sick. He vomited forcefully into the basin and then staggered away, still gagging and trying to retch.
‘I did it!’ he shouted deliriously. His head swam with the combined stench of corrosive chemicals and burned flesh. Still, he felt almost exalted. He had met the enemy and the enemy, by God and all the saints, was his. His!
‘Hidey-ho! Hidey-fucking-ho! I did it! I — ‘
His gorge rose again. He half-knelt, half-swooned in front of the toilet, the bottle of Drain-Eze still held stiffly out in his right hand, and realized too late that Vi had put both the ring and the lid down this morning when she vacated the throne. He vomited all over the fuzzy pink toilet-seat cover and then fell forward into his own gloop in a dead faint.
He could not have been unconscious for long, because the bathroom enjoyed full daylight for less than half an hour even in the middle of summer — then the other buildings cut off the direct sunlight and plunged the room into gloom again.
Howard raised his head slowly; aware he was coated from hairline to chin-line with sticky, foul-smelling stuff. He was even more aware of something else. A clittering sound. It was coming from behind him, and it was getting closer.
He turned his head, which felt like an overfilled sandbag, slowly to his left. His eyes slowly widened. He hitched in breath and tried to scream, but his throat locked.
The finger was coming for him.
It was easily seven feet long now, and getting longer all the time. It curved out of the sink in a stiff arc made by perhaps a dozen knuckles, descended to the floor, then curved again (Double-jointed! some distant commentator in his disintegrating mind reported with interest). Now it was tapping and feeling its way across the tile floor toward him. The last nine or ten inches were discolored and smoking. The nail had turned a greenish-black color. Howard thought he could see the whitish shine of bone just below the first of its knuckles. It was quite badly burned, but it was not by any stretch of the imagination dissolved.
”Get away,’ Howard whispered, and for a moment the entire grotesque, jointed contraption came to a halt. It looked like a lunatic’s conception of a New Year’s Eve party-favor. Then it slithered straight toward him. The last half a dozen knuckles flexed and the tip of the finger wrapped itself around Howard Mitla’s ankle.
‘No!’ he screamed as the smoking Hydroxide Twins — Sodium and Potassium — ate through his nylon sock and sizzled his skin. He gave his foot a tremendous yank. For a moment the finger held — it was very strong — and then he pulled free. He crawled toward the door with a huge clump of vomit-loaded hair hanging in his eyes. As he crawled he tried to look back over his shoulder, but he could see nothing through his coagulated hair. Now his chest had unlocked and he gave voice to a series of barking, frightful screams.
He could not see the finger, at least temporarily, but he could hear the finger, and now it was coming fast, tictictictictic right behind him. Still trying to look back over his shoulder, he ran into the wall to the left of the bathroom door with his shoulder. The towels fell off the shelf again. He went sprawling and at once the finger was around his other ankle, flexing tight with its charred and burning tip.
It began to pull him back toward the sink. It actually began to pull him back.
Howard uttered a deep and primitive howl — a sound such as had never before escaped his polite set of CPA vocal cords — and flailed at the edge of the door. He caught it with his right hand and gave a huge, panicky yank. His shirttail pulled free all the way around and the seam under his right arm tore loose with a low purring sound, but he managed to get free, losing only the ragged lower half of one sock.
He stumbled to his feet, turned, and saw the finger feeling its way toward him again. The nail at the end was now deeply split and bleeding.
Need a manicure, bud, Howard thought, and uttered an anguished laugh. Then he ran for the kitchen.
Someone was pounding on the door. Hard.
‘Mitla! Hey, Mitla! What’s going on in there?’ Feeney, from down the hall. A big loud Irish drunk. Correction: a big loud nosy Irish drunk.
‘Nothing I can’t handle, my bog-trotting friend!’ Howard shouted as he went into the kitchen.
He laughed again and tossed his hair off his forehead. It went, but fell back in exactly the same jellied clump a second later. ‘ ‘Nothing I can’t handle, you better believe that! You can take that right to the bank and put it in your NOW account!’
‘What did you call me?’ Feeney responded. His voice, which had been truculent, now became ominous as well. ‘Shut up!’ Howard yelled. ‘I’m busy!’ ‘I want the yelling to stop or I’m calling the cops!’
‘ Fuck off!” Howard screamed at him. Another first. He tossed his hair off his forehead, and clump! Back down it fell.
‘I don’t have to listen to your shit, you little four-eyes creep!’
Howard raked his hands through his vomit-loaded hair and then flung them out in front of him in a curiously Gallic gesture — Et voila! it seemed to say. Warm juice and shapeless gobbets splattered across Vi’s white kitchen cabinets. Howard didn’t even notice. The hideous finger had seized each of his ankles once, and they burned as if they were wearing circlets of fire. Howard didn’t care about that, either. He seized the box containing the electric hedge-clippers. On the front, a smiling dad with a pipe parked in his gob was trimming the hedge in front of an estate-sized home.
‘You having a little drug-party in there?’ Feeney inquired from the hall.
‘You better get out of here, Feeney, or I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine!’ Howard yelled back. This struck him as incredibly witty. He threw his head back and yodeled at the kitchen ceiling, his hair standing up in strange jags and quills and glistening with stomach juices. He looked like a man who has embarked upon a violent love affair with a tube of Brylcreem.
‘Okay, that’s it,’ Feeney said. ‘That’s it. I’m callin the cops.’
Howard barely heard him. Dennis Feeney would have to wait; he had bigger fish to fry. He had ripped the electric hedge-clippers from the box, examined them feverishly, saw the battery compartment, and pried it open.
‘C-cells,’ he muttered, laughing. ‘Good! That’s good! No problem there!’
He yanked open one of the drawers to the left of the sink, pulling with such force that the stop broke off and the drawer flew all the way across the kitchen, striking the stove and landing upside down on the linoleum floor with a bang and a clatter. Amid the general rick-rack —
tongs, peelers, graters, paring knives, and garbage-bag ties — was a small treasure-trove of batteries, mostly C-cells and square nine-volts. Still laughing — it seemed he could no longer stop laughing — Howard fell on his knees and grubbed through the litter. He succeeded in cutting the pad of his right palm quite badly on the blade of a paring knife before seizing two of the C-cells, but he felt this no more than he felt the burns he had sustained when he had been backsplashed. Now that Feeney had at last shut his braying Irish donkey’s mouth, Howard could hear the tapping again. Not coming from the sink now, though — huh-uh, no way. The ragged nail was tapping on the bathroom door . . . or maybe the hall floor. He had neglected to close the door, he now remembered.
‘Who gives a fuck?’ Howard asked, and then he screamed: ‘WHO GIVES A FUCK, I SAID! I’M READY
FOR YOU, MY FRIEND! I’M COMING TO KICK ASS AND CHEW BUBBLEGUM, AND I’M ALL OUT OF