BUBBLEGUM! YOU’LL WISH YOU’D STAYED DOWN THE DRAIN!’
He slammed the batteries into the compartment set into the handle of the hedge-clippers and tried the power switch. Nothing.
‘Bite my crank!’ Howard muttered. He pulled one of the batteries out, reversed it, and put it back in. This time the blades buzzed to life when he pushed the switch, snicking back and forth so rapidly they were only a blur.
He started for the kitchen door, then made himself switch the gadget off and go back to the counter. He didn’t want to waste time putting the battery cover back in place — not when he was primed for battle — but the last bit of sanity still flickering in his mind assured him that he had no choice. If his hand slipped while he was dealing with the thing, the batteries might pop out of the open compartment, and then where would he be? Why, facing the James Gang with an unloaded gun, of course.
So he fiddled the battery cover back on, cursing when it wouldn’t fit and turning it in the other direction.
‘You wait for me, now!’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘I’m coming! We’re not done yet!’
At last the battery cover snapped down. Howard strode briskly back through the living room with the hedge-clippers held at port arms. His hair still stood up in punk-rock quills and spikes.
His shirt — now torn out under one arm and burned in several places — flapped against his round, tidy stomach. His bare feet slapped on the linoleum. The tattered remains of his nylon socks swung and dangled about his ankles.
Feeney yelled through the door, ‘I called them, birdbrain! You got that? I called the cops, and I hope the ones who show up are all bog-trotting Irishmen, just like me!’
‘Blow it out your old tan tailpipe,’ Howard said, but he was really paying no attention to Feeney. Dennis Feeney was in another universe; this was just his quacking, unimportant voice coming in over the sub-etheric.
Howard stood to one side of the bathroom door, looking like a cop in a TV show . . . only someone had handed him the wrong prop and he was packing a hedge-clipper instead of a.38. He pressed his thumb firmly on the power button set high on the handle of the hedge-clippers. He took a deep breath . . . and the voice of sanity, now down to a mere gleam, offered a final thought before packing up for good.
Are you sure you want to trust your life to a pair of electric hedge-clippers you bought on sale?
‘I have no choice,’ Howard muttered, smiling tightly, and lunged inside.
The finger was still there, still arced out of the sink in that stiff curve that reminded Howard of a New Year’s Eve party-favor, the kind that makes a farting, honking sound and then unrolls toward the unsuspecting bystander when you blow on it. It had filched one of Howard’s loafers.
It was picking the shoe up and slamming it petulantly down on the tiles again and again. From the look of the towels scattered about, Howard guessed the finger had tried to kill several of those before finding the shoe.
A weird joy suddenly suffused Howard — it felt as if the inside of his aching, woozy head had been filled with green light.
‘Here I am, you nitwit!’ he yelled. ‘Come and get me!’
The finger popped out of the shoe, rose in a monstrous ripple of joints (Howard could actually hear some of its many knuckles cracking), and floated rapidly through the air toward him.
Howard turned on the hedge-clippers and they buzzed into hungry life. So far, so good.
The burned, blistered tip of the finger wavered in front of his face, the split nail weaving mystically back and forth. Howard lunged for it. The finger feinted to the left and slipped around his left ear. The pain was amazing. Howard simultaneously felt and heard a grisly ripping sound as the finger tried to tear his ear from the side of his head. He sprang forward, seized the finger in his left fist, and sheared through it. The clippers lugged down as the blades hit the bone, the high buzzing of the motor becoming a rough growl, but it had been built to clip through small, tough branches and there was really no problem. No problem at all. This was Round Two, this was Double Jeopardy, where the scores could really change, and Howard Mitla was racking up a bundle. Blood flew in a fine haze and then the stump pulled back. Howard blundered after it, the last ten inches of the finger hanging from his ear like a coat hanger for a moment before dropping off.
The finger lunged at him. Howard ducked and it went over his head. It was blind, of course.
That was his advantage. Grabbing his ear like that had just been a lucky shot. He lunged with the clippers, a gesture which looked almost like a fencing thrust, and sheared off another two feet of the finger. It thumped to the tiles and lay there, twitching.
Now the rest of it was trying to pull back.
‘No you don’t,’ Howard panted. ‘No you don’t, not at all!’
He ran for the sink, slipped in a puddle of blood, almost fell, and then caught his balance. The finger was blurring back down the drain, knuckle after knuckle, like a freight-train going into a tunnel. Howard seized it, tried to hold it, and couldn’t — it went sliding through his hand like a greased and burning length of clothesline. He sliced forward again nevertheless, and managed to cut off the last three feet of the thing just above the point where it was whizzing through his fist.
He leaned over the sink (holding his breath this time) and stared down into the blackness of the drain. Again he caught just a glimpse of retreating white.
‘Come on back anytime!’ Howard Mitla shouted. ‘Come back anytime at all! I’ll be right here, waiting for you!’
He turned around, releasing his breath in a gasp. The room still smelled of drain-cleaner.
Couldn’t have that, not while there was still work to do. There was a wrapped cake of Dial soap behind the hot-water tap. Howard picked it up and threw it at the bathroom window. It broke the glass and bounced off the crisscross of mesh behind it. He remembered putting that mesh in —
remembered how proud of it he had been. He, Howard Mitla, mild-mannered accountant, had been TAKING CARE OF THE OLD HOMESTEAD. Now he knew what TAKING CARE OF THE OLD
HOMESTEAD was really all about. Had there been a time when he had been afraid to go into the bathroom because he thought there might be a mouse in the tub, and he would have to beat it to death with a broomhandle? He believed so, but that time — and that version of Howard Mitla —
seemed long ago now.
He looked slowly around the bathroom. It was a mess. Pools of blood and two chunks of finger lay on the floor. Another leaned askew in the basin. Fine sprays of blood fanned across the walls and stippled the bathroom mirror. The basin was streaked with it.
‘All right,’ Howard sighed. ‘Clean-up time, boys and girls.’ He turned the hedge-clippers on again and began to saw the various lengths of finger he had cut off into pieces small enough to flush down the toilet.
The policeman was young and he was Irish — O’Bannion was his name. By the time he finally arrived at the closed door of the Mitla apartment, several tenants were standing behind him in a little knot. With the exception of Dennis Feeney, who wore an expression of high outrage, they all looked worried.
O’Bannion knocked on the door, then rapped, and finally hammered.
‘You better break it down,’ Mrs. Javier said. ‘I heard him all the way up on the seventh floor.’
‘The man’s insane,’ Feeney said. ‘Probably killed his wife.’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Dattlebaum. ‘I saw her leave this morning, just like always.’
‘Doesn’t mean she didn’t come back again, does it?’ Mr. Feeney asked truculently, and Mrs.
Dattlebaum subsided.
‘Mr. Mitter?’ O’Bannion called.
‘It’s Mitla’ Mrs. Dattlebaum said. ‘With an l.’
‘Oh, crap,’ O’Bannion said, and hit the door with his shoulder. It burst open and he went inside, closely followed by Mr. Feeney. ‘You stay here, sir,’ O’Bannion instructed.
‘The hell I will,’ Feeney said. He was looking into the Kitchen, with its strew of implements on the floor and the splatters of vomit on the kitchen cabinets. His eyes were small and bright and interested. ‘The guy’s my neighbor. And after all, I was the one who made the call.’
‘I don’t care if you made the call on your own private hotline to the Commish,’ O’Bannion said.