Except it wasn't dark. Something was rushing up through that blackness, hurrying up that small-bore, oozy pipe to greet him, to greet its good friend Howard Mitla.
"Take this!" Howard screamed, and tilted the bottle of Drain-Eze over the sink. Greenish-blue sludge spilled out and struck the drain just as the finger emerged.
The result was immediate and terrifying. The glop coated the nail and the tip of the finger. It went into a frenzy, whirling like a dervish around and around the limited circumference of the drain, spraying off small blue-green fans of Drain-Eze. Several droplets struck the light-blue cotton shirt Howard was wearing and immediately ate holes in it. These holes fizzed brown lace at the edges, but the shirt was rather too large for him, and none of the stuff got through to his chest or belly. Other drops stippled the skin of his right wrist and palm, but he did not feel these until later. His adrenaline was not just flowing; it was at flood tide.
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 chinline 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 (Doublejointed! 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 hedgeclippers. 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 hedgeclippers 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 BUBBLEGUM! YOU'LL WISH YOU'D STAYED DOWN THE DRAIN!"
He slammed the batteries into the compartment set into the handle of the hedgeclippers 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 hedgeclippers 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 hedgeclipper instead of a .38. He pressed his thumb firmly on the power button set high on the handle of the hedgeclippers. 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 hedgeclippers 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 hedgeclippers 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 coathanger 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, 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 hedgeclippers 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 t
he 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. "Get the hell out of here or you're going down to the station with this guy Mittle."
"Mitla," Feeney said, and slunk unwillingly toward the door to the hallway, casting glances back at the kitchen as he went.
O'Bannion had sent Feeney back mostly because he didn't want Feeney to see how nervous he was. The mess in the kitchen was one thing. The way the place smelled was another--some sort of chemistry-lab stink on top, some other smell underneath it. He was afraid the underneath smell might be blood.
He glanced behind him to make sure that Feeney had gone back all the way--that he was not lingering in the foyer where the coats were hung--and then he advanced slowly across the living room. When he was beyond the view of the onlookers, he unsnapped the strap across the butt of his pistol and drew it. He went to the kitchen and looked all the way in. Empty. A mess, but empty. And . . . what was that splattered across the cabinets? He wasn't sure, but judging by the smell--
A noise from behind him, a little shuffling sound, broke the thought off and he turned quickly, bringing his gun up.