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 YOUI"
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 click-click-click 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! LEAVE 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 fingers 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 lying 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.
Out in the hall, Norman rammed the door again. The crack was louder this time; a long splinter jumped out of the wood and clattered onto the floor. A few more hits would do it; two or three might be enough. Rooming-house doors were not built to withstand insanity.
"It was more than just some goddam picture!" Rosie cried. "It was left there for me, and it was more than just some goddam picture! It went into some other world! I know it did, because I've got her bracelet!"
She turned her head, looked at it, then ran over to the nighttable and snatched it up. It felt heavier than ever. And hot "Rosie," Bill sai
d. She could just make him out, holding his hands against his throat. She thought there was blood on his mouth. "Rosie we have to call the--" Then he cried out as bright light washed the room ... except it wasn't bright enough to be the hazy summer sunlight she had expected. It was moonlight, flooding out of the open closet and washing across the floor. She walked back to Bill with the armlet in her hand and looked in. Where the closet's back wall had been she saw the hilltop, saw tall grasses rippling in a soft and intermittent night breeze, saw the livid lines and columns of the temple gleaming in the dark. And above all was the moon, a bright silver coin riding in a purple-black sky.
She thought of the mother fox they had seen today, a thousand years ago, looking up at such a moon. The vixen looking up as her kits slept beside her in the lee of the fallen trunk, looking raptly up at the moon with her black eyes.
Bill's face was bewildered. The light lay on his skin like silver gilt. "Rosie," he said in a weak and worried voice. His lips continued to move, but he said no more.
She took his arm. "Come on, Bill. We have to go."
"What's happening?" He was pitiful in his hurt and confusion. The expression on his face roused strange and contrasting emotions in her: wild impatience at his slow, ox-like responses, and fierce love--not quite maternal--that felt like a flame in her mind. She would protect him. Yes. Yes. She would protect him unto death, if that was what it took.
"Never mind what's happening," she said. "Only trust me, the way I trusted you to drive the motorcycle. Trust me and come. We have to go right now!"
She pulled him forward with her right hand; the armlet dangled from her left like a gold doughnut. He resisted for a moment, and then Norman screamed and hit the door again. With a cry of fear and rage, Rosie renewed her grip on Bill's arm. She yanked him into the closet and then into the moonlit world which now lay beyond its far wall.
13
Things started to go seriously wrong when the bitch pushed the coat-tree in front of the stairs. Norman got tangled in it somehow, or at least the London Fog he'd liked so much did One of the brass coathooks somehow ran right through a buttonhole, neatest trick of the week, and another was in his pocket, like an inept pickpocket groping for a wallet. A third speared one blunt brass finger into his much-abused balls. Roaring, cursing her, he tried to lurch forward and upward. The hideous, clinging coat-tree refused to let go of him, and even dragging it along behind him proved to be an impossibility; one of its claw-feet had somehow hooked the newel post, clutching like a grappling-hook and holding like an anchor.
He had to get up there, had to. He didn't want her locking herself and the cocksucker with her into her little bolthole before he could get there. He had no doubt he could break the door down if he had to, he'd broken down a shitload of them in his years as a cop, some of them pretty tough old babies, but time was becoming a factor here. He didn't want to shoot her, that would be too quick and far, far too easy for the likes of his rambling Rose, but if the course he was running didn't smooth out a little, and soon, that might be the only option left to him. What a shame that would be!
"Put me in, coach!" the bull cried from the topcoat pocket. "I'm tanned, I'm fit, I'm rested, I'm ready!"
Yes, that was a goddam good idea. Norman snatched the mask out of his pocket and yanked it over his head, inhaling the smell of piss and rubber. The smells weren't bad at all, when you got them together like that; in fact, they were sort of nice. Sort of comforting.
"Viva ze bool!" he cried, and wriggled out of the topcoat. He lunged forward again, gun in hand. The damned coat-tree snapped under his weight, but not before trying to drive one of its goddam hooks through his left knee. Norman hardly felt it. He was grinning and snapping his teeth savagely together inside the mask, liking the heavy click they made, a sound like colliding billiard balls.
"You don't want to play with me, Rose. " He tried for his feet and the kneecap the coat-tree had poked buckled under him. "Stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want to talk to you. "
She screamed back at him, words, words, words, they didn't matter. He resumed crawling, going as fast as he could and being as quiet as he could. At last he sensed movement above him. He shot his arm out, seized her left calf, dug in with his nails. How good it felt! Got you! he thought, savagely triumphant. Got you, by God! Got--
Her foot came out of the dark with the unexpected suddenness of a buckshot-loaded blackjack, striking his nose and smashing it in a new place. The pain was terrible--it felt as if a swarm of African bees had been set loose in his head. She tore away from him, but Norman was hardly aware of this; already he was toppling backward, groping for the bannister and doing nothing but skidding his fingers briefly along its underside. He went tumbling all the way back down to the coat-tree, holding onto the gun with his finger outside the trigger-guard so he wouldn't blow a hole in himself. . . and the way things were going, that seemed all too possible. He lay in a heap for a moment, then shook his head in order to clear it and started back up again.
There was no actual skip in his thoughts this time, no complete break in consciousness, but he didn't have the slightest idea what they might have shouted at him from the top of the stairs or what he might have shouted back. His retraumatized nose was in front of everything, laying down a red screen of pain.
He was aware that someone else was trying to horn in on the party, the fabled innocent bystander, and Rosie's little cocksucker friend was telling him to stay away. The nice thing about that was the way it located the cocksucker friend for him, no problem at all. Norman reached for the cocksucker friend and the cocksucker friend was there. He put his hands around the cocksucker friend's neck and started choking him again. This time he meant to finish the job, only all at once he felt Rosie's hand on the side of his face . . . on the skin of the mask. It was like being caressed after you'd been given a shot of Novocain.
Rosie. Rosie touching him. She was here. For the first time since she'd walked out with his goddam bank card in her purse she was right here, and Norman lost all interest in loverboy He seized her hand, stuffed it through the mouth-hole in the mask, and bit down as hard as he could It was ecstasy. Only--
Only then something happened. Something bad. Something horrible. It felt as if she had ripped his lower jaw right out of its sockets. Pain leaped up the sides of his head in polished steel darts, meeting with a bang at the crown. He screamed and reeled back from her, the bitch, oh the dirty bitch, what had happened to change her from the predictable thing she had been into this monster?
The innocent bystander spoke up then, and Norman was pretty sure he shot him. He'd shot someone, anyway; people who screamed like that had either been shot or burned. Then, as he turned the gun toward the place where Rose and the cocksucker friend were, he heard a door slam shut. The bitch had beaten him into her room after all.
For the time being, even that was of secondary importance. His jaw had replaced his nose 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, 000 ole heer! He put down the 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 a go 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.