as the center of pain now, just as his nose had replaced his jammed knee and his outraged balls. What had she done to him? The lower half of his face felt not just torn open but extended, somehow; his teeth seemed to be satellites floating somewhere out beyond the end of his nose.
Don’t be an idiot, Normie, his father whispered. She’s dislocated your jaw, that’s all. You know what to do about that, so do it!
‘Shut up, you old queer,’ Norman tried to say, but with his face pulled out of shape, what emerged was Ut uh, ooo ole heer! He put down th e gun, hooked up the sides of the mask with his thumbs (he hadn’t pulled it all the way down when he put it on, which made this part of the job easier), and then gently pressed the heels of his hands against the points of his jaw. It was like touching ball-bearings that had jumped out of their sockets.
Steeling himself against the pain, he slid his hands farther down, tilted them up, and shoved sharply. There was pain, all right, but mostly because only one side of his jaw went back into place at first. That left the lower part of his face askew, like a dresser drawer that’s been pushed in crooked.
Squinch your face that way for long, Norman, and it’ll freeze that way! his mother spat inside his head — the old venom he remembered so well.
Norman shoved up on the right side of his face again. This time he heard a click deep inside his head as the right half of his jaw socked back into place. The whole thing felt weirdly loose, however, as if the tendons had been savagely stretched and might take quite some time to tighten up again. He had the oddest sensation that, if he yawned, his jaw might plummet all the way to his belt-buckle.
The mask, Normie, his father whispered. The mask’ll help, if you pull it all the way down.
‘That’s right,’ the bull said. Its voice was muffled because of the way it was rumpled up on the sides of his face, but Norman had no trouble understanding it.
He pulled it down carefully, all the way this time, getting the hem well under his jawline, and it did help; it seemed to hold his face in place like an athletic supporter.
‘Yep,’ ze bool said. Just think of me as a jawstrap.’
Norman breathed deeply as he struggled to his feet, stuffing the cop’s .45 into the waistband of his pants as he did. All’s cool, he thought. Nobody in here but the boys; no gals allowed. It even seemed as if he could see more clearly through the eyeholes of the mask now, as if his vision had been in some way boosted. Undoubtedly just his imagination, but it really did feel that way, and it was a nice feeling to have. A confidence-builder.
He pressed himself back against the wall, then sprang forward and hit the door she and her cocksucker friend had gone through. It made his jaw waggle painfully even inside the tight webbing of the mask, but he went again, and just as hard, with no hesitation. The door rattled in its frame and a long sliver of wood popped out of the upper panel.
He found himself wishing suddenly that Harley Bissington were here. The two of them could have taken the door in one hit, and he could’ve let Harley have ago at his wife while he, Norman, took care of her friend. Having a go at Rose had been one of the great unexpressed desires of Harley’s life, something Norman did not understand but had read in the man’s eyes every time he came over to the house.
He hit the door again.
On the sixth hit — or maybe it was lucky seven, he’d lost count — the lock tore free and Norman catapulted into the room. She was in here, both of them were, had to be, but for the moment he saw neither. Sweat ran into his eyes, momentarily blurring his vision. The room looked empty, but it couldn’t be. They hadn’t gone out the window; it was closed and locked.
He charged across the room, running through the listless light thrown by the fog-wrapped streetlamp outside, swinging his head from side to side, Ferdinand’s horns goring the air.
Where was she? The bitch! Where in Christ’s name could she have gone?
He spotted an open door on the far side of the room, and the closed lid of a commode. He chased across to it and stood peering into the bathroom. Empty. Unless —
He drew the pistol and fired two shots through the shower curtain, opening a pair of surprised black eyes in the flower-patterned vinyl. Then he rattled it back on its rings. The tub was empty. The bullets had blown a couple of porcelain tiles off the wall; that was the extent of the damage. But maybe that was all right. He hadn’t wanted to shoot her, anyway.
No, but where had she gone?
Norman charged back into the room, dropped to his knees (wincing at the pain but not really feeling it), and swept the muzzle of the gun back and forth under the bed. Nothing. He pounded his fist on the floor in frustration.
He started toward the window in spite of what his eyes had told him, because the window was all that was left . . . or so he thought until he saw light — bright light, moonlight, it looked like — spilling out of another open door, one he had trampled right past during his first charge into the room.
Moonlight? Is that what you think you’re seeing? Are you nuts, Normie? I don’t know if you remember, but it’s foggy outside, son. Foggy. And even if this was the night of the fullest full moon of the century, that’s a closet. A second-floor closet, in fact.
Maybe it was, but he had come to believe that his sweat-smelling, greasy-haired, crotchgrabbing, cockgobbling poor excuse for a father didn’t automatically know everything about everything. Norman knew that moonlight spilling out of a second-floor closet didn’t make much sense . . . but that was what he was seeing.
He walked slowly toward the door with the pistol dangling from his hand and stood in the flood of radiance. He looked through the eyeholes of the mask (except now, queerly, it seemed like just one eyehole that both his eyes were looking through) and stared into the closet.
There were hooks sticking out of the room’s bare plank sides and empty hangers dangling from the metal bar running down the middle, but the closet’s back wall was gone. Where it should have been was a moonlit hillside overgrown with tall grass. He could see fireflies stitching random lines of light in a dark blur of trees. The clouds sliding across the sky looked like lamps when they passed near or in front of the moon, which wasn’t full but close to it. At the bottom of the hill was a sort of ruin. To Norman it looked like a busted-down old plantation-house, or perhaps an abandoned church.
I’ve gone completely crazy, he thought. Either that or she’s knocked me out somehow and this is all some kind of nutty dream.
No, he didn’t accept that. Wouldn’t accept that.
‘COME BACK HERE, ROSE!’ he screamed into the closet . . . which was, strictly speaking, no longer a closet at all. ‘COME BACK, YOU BITCH!’
Nothing. Only that improbable vista . . . and a tiny breath of breeze, fragrant with grass and flowers, to prove it wasn’t an eerily perfect optical illusion.
And something else: the sound of crickets.
‘You stole my bank card, you bitch,’ Norman said in a low voice. He reached up and grabbed one of the coathooks jutting out of the board wall, looking like a straphanging commuter in a subway car. Beyond him was a strange, moonlit world, but any fear he might have felt was buried in outrage. ‘You stole it and I want to talk to you about it. Right . . . up . .
. close.’
He stepped into the closet and ducked under the bar, knocking a couple of coathangers to the wood floor. He stood where he was for just a moment longer, looking into the other world he could see stretching before him.
Then he went forward.
There was a sense of stepping down a bit, the way you sometimes had to do in old houses
where the floors of the various rooms were no longer quite matched, but that was all. One step and he was no longer on boards, no longer in anyone’s second-floor room; he was standing on grass and that fragrant breeze was hushing all around him. It slipped into the eyehole (yes, there was only one of them now; he didn’t know how that could be, but after the step he’d just taken it didn’t seem all that strange), refreshing his bruised and sweaty skin. He grasped the sides of the mask, meaning to slip it up for awhile so he could treat his whole face to a taste of that breeze, but the mask wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t budge at all.