— as he came.
‘I can walk,’ Bill said suddenly. His voice was pinched and small, but she was grateful to hear it just the same. ‘I can walk, Rosie, let’s get to your room. The crazy bastard is coming again.’
Bill started coughing. Below them — but not much below — Norman laughed. ‘That’s
right, Sunny Jim, the crazy bastard is coming again. The crazy bastard is going to poke your eyeballs right out of your fucking head and then make you eat them. I wonder how they’ll taste?’
‘STAY AWAY, NORMAN!’ Rosie shrieked, and began to guide Bill down the pitch-black hall.
Her left arm was still wrapped around his midsection; with her right hand she felt the wall, trailing her fingers along it, hunting for her door. Her left hand was a fist against Bill’s side with the only three keys she had so far accumulated in this new life — front door key, mailbox key, and room key — clutched in it. ‘STAY AWAY, I’M WARNING YOU!’
And from the dark behind her — still on the stairs but now very close to the top of them again — the ultimate absurdity came floating: ‘Don’t you DARE warn me, you BITCH!’
The wall notched in to a door that had to be hers. She let go of Bill, picked out the key that opened this one — unlike the one to the front door, her room key had a square head — and then jabbed it at the lock in the dark. She could no longer hear Norman. Was he on the stairs?
In the hall? Right behind them, and reaching toward the sounds of Bill’s choked breathing?
She found the lock, pressed her right index finger over the vertical slot of the keyway as a.
guide, then brought the key to it. It wouldn’t go in. She could feel the tip of it pressing into the slot, but it refused to budge beyond that point. She felt panic starting to rip at her mind with busy little rat-teeth.
‘It won’t go in!’ she panted at Bill. ‘It’s the right key but it won’t go in!’
‘Turn it over. You’re probably trying it upside-down.’
‘Say, what’s going on down there?’ This was a new voice, farther down the hall and above them. Probably on the third-floor landing. It was followed by the fruitless dick-dick-dick of a light switch. ‘And why’re the lights out?’
‘Stay — ‘ Bill shouted, and immediately started coughing again. He made a terrific grinding sound in his throat, trying to clear his voice. ‘Stay where you are! Don’t come down here!
Call the p — ‘
‘I am the police, fuckstick,’ a soft, strangely muffled voice said from the darkness right beside them. There was a low, thick grunt, a sound that was both eager and satisfied. Bill was jerked away from her just as she finally managed to run her room key into its slot.
‘No!’ she screamed, flailing in the dark with her left hand. On her upper arm, the circlet was hotter than ever. ‘No, leave him alone! LEA VE HIM ALONE!’
She grasped smooth leather — Bill’s jacket — and then it slipped away. The horrible choking sounds, the sounds of someone whose throat is being packed tight with fine sand, began again. Norman laughed. This sound was also muffled. Rosie stepped toward it, arms in front of her, hands splayed and questing. She touched the shoulder of Bill’s jacket, reached over it, and touched something gruesome — it felt like dead flesh that was also somehow alive. It was lumpy . . . rubbery . . .
Rubbery.
He’s wearing a mask, Rosie thought. Some kind of mask.
Then her left hand was seized and pulled into a humid dampness that she had just time to recognize as his mouth before his teeth clamped down on her fingers and she was bitten all the way to the bone.
The pain was terrific, but once again her reaction to it was not fear and the helpless urge to give in, to let Norman have his way as Norman had always had his way, but a rage so great it was like insanity. Instead of trying to pull free of his grinding, baleful teeth, she folded her ringers at the second knuckle, pressing the pads of her fingers against the gumline inside his front teeth. Then she set the heel of her preternaturally strong left hand against his chin and pulled.
There was a strange creaking sensation under her hand, the sound a board under a man or woman’s knee might make just before it snapped. She felt Norman jerk, heard him make a
hollow interrogative sound which seemed to consist solely of vowels — Aaaoouuuu? — and then his lower face slid forward like a bureau drawer, coming dislocated from the hinges of his jaw. He screamed in agony and Rosie pulled her bleeding hand free, thinking That’s what you get for biting, you bastard, try to do it now.
She heard him go reeling backward, tracking him by his screams and the sound of his shirt sliding along the wall. Now he’ll use the gun, she thought as she turned back to Bill. He leaned against the wall, a darker shape in the darkness, coughing desperately again.
‘Hey, you guys, come on, a joke’s a joke and enough’s enough.’ It was the man from upstairs, sounding petulant and put-out, only now he sounded as if he was downstairs, at the far end of this hallway, and Rosie’s heart filled with foreknowing even as she twisted the key in the lock and shoved her door open. She didn’t sound like herself at all when she screamed, she sounded like the other one.
‘Get out of here, you fool! He’ll kill you! Don’t — ‘
The gun went off. She was looking to her left and had a nightmarish glimpse of Norman, sitting on the floor with his legs folded under him. There wasn’t enough time in that flash for her to recognize what he was wearing on his head, but she did, just the same: it was a bullmask with a vapidly grinning face. Blood — hers — ringed the mouth-hole. She could see Norman’s haunted eyes looking out at her, the eyes of a cave-dweller who is about to commence some final, cataclysmic battle.
The complaining tenant screamed as Rosie pulled Bill in through the door and slammed it behind them. Her room was filled with shadows, and the fog had muted the glow from the streetlamp which usually cast a bar of light across the floor, but the place seemed bright after the vestibule, staircase, and upstairs hall.
The first thing Rosie saw was the armlet, glimmering softly in the dark. It was laying on the nighttable beside the base of the lamp.
I did it myself, she thought. Her amazement was so great she felt stupid with it. I did it all myself, just thinking I was wearing it was enough —
Of course, another voice replied: Practical-Sensible. Of course it was, because there was never power in the armlet, never, the power was always in her, the power was always in —
No, no. She wouldn’t go any further down that road, absolutely not. And at that moment her attention was diverted anyway, because Norman hit the door like a freight-train. The cheap wood splintered under his weight; the door groaned on its hinges. Farther away, the upstairs neighbor, a man Rosie had never met, began to wail.
Quick, Rosie, quick! You know what to do, where to go —
‘Rosie . . . call . . . have to call . . .’ Bill got that far, then began coughing again — too hard to finish. She had no time to listen to such foolishness, anyway. Later his ideas might be good, but now all they were apt to do was get them killed. Now her job was to take care of him, shelter him . . . and that meant getting him to a place where he might be safe. Where they might both be safe.
Rose jerked open the closet door, expecting to see that strange other world filling it, the way it had filled her bedroom wall when she had awakened to the sound of thunder. Sunlight would come streaming out, dazzling their dark-adapted eyes . . .
But it was only a closet, small and musty and nothing at all in it — she was wearing the only two items of clothing she had stored in there, a sweater and a pair of sneakers. Oh yes, the picture was there, propped against the wall where she had put it, but it hadn’t grown or changed or opened up or whatever it was it did. It was only a picture broken out of its frame, the sort of mediocre painting a person was apt to find in the back of a curio shop or a flea market or a pawnshop. Nothing more than that.