The Year's Best Horror Stories 16 Part 21

But she had to laugh at him too. He seemed destined to be comic. His patients were generally a waddling, pachydermous lot, shabbily and baggily dressed. They often compounded the impact of their grotesqueness by arriving in number for what must have been group sessions. And, as if more were needed, they often arrived with stray dogs and cats in tow. That the animals were not their own was made ludicrously plain by the beasts' struggles with leash or carrying cage. The doctor obviously recruited his patients to the support of his stray clinic, exploiting their dependency with a charitable unscrupulousness. For it seemed that the clinic had to be an altruistic work. It supported several collection vans, and leafleted widely-even bought cheap radio spots. The bulletins implored telephone notification of strays wherever observed. Patti had fondly pocketed one of the leaflets: Help us Help!

Let our aid reach these unfortunate creatures.

Nourished, spayed, medicated, They may have a better chance for health and life!

This generosity of feeling in Fat Face did not prevent his being talked of over in the lobby of the Parna.s.sus, where great goiter-rubbing, water-splashing orgies were raucously hypothesised, with Fat Face flourishing whips and baby-oil, while cries of "rub my blubber!" filled the air. At such times Patti was impelled to leave the lobby, because it felt like betrayal to be laughing so hard at the goodly man.

Indeed, in her convalescent mellowness, much augmented by Valium, she had started to fantasize going up to his office, pulling the blinds, and ravishing him at his desk. She imagined him lonely and h.o.r.n.y. Perhaps he had nursed his wife through a long illness and she had at last expired gently ... He would be so grateful!

This fancy took on such a quality of yearning that it alarmed Patti. Although she was a good and well-adapted hooker, she was, outside her trade's rituals of exchange, very shy in her dealing with people. She was not forward in these emotional matters, and she felt her longing to be forward as an impulse in some way alien to her, put upon her. Nonetheless, the sweet promptings retained a fascination, and she was kept swinging between these poles of feeling, to the point where she felt she had to talk about them. Late one afternoon she dragged Sheri, her best friend, out of the lobby and into a bar a couple blocks away. Sheri would keep confidence, but on first hearing the matter, she was as facetious as Patti had foreseen.

"Jesus, Patti," she said. "If the rest of him's as fat as his face it'd be like humping a hill!"

"So you pile only superstars? I mean, so what if he's fat? Try and think how nice it would be for him!"

"I bet he'd blush till his whole head looked like an eggplant. Then, if there was just a slit in the top, like Melanie was saying-" Sheri had to break off and hold herself as she laughed. She had already done some drinking earlier in the afternoon. Patti called for another double and exerted herself to catch up, and meanwhile she harped on her theme to Sheri and tried to get her serious attention: "I mean I've been working out of the Parna.s.sus-what? Maybe three years now? No, four! Four years. I'm part of these people's community-the druggist, Arnold, Fat Face-and yet we never do anything to show it. There's no getting-together. We're just faces. I mean like Fat Face-I couldn't even call him that!"

"So let's go look in the directory of his building!"

Patti was about to answer when, behind the bar, she saw a big roach scamper across a rubber mat and disappear under the baseboard. She remembered the plump body in the towel, and remembered-as a thing actually seen-the slug-fragmented skull.

Sheri quickly noted the chill on her friend. She ordered more drinks and set to work on the idea of a jolly expedition, that very hour, over to Fat Face's office. And when Patti's stomach had thawed out again, she took up the project with grateful humor, and eagerly joined her friend's hilarity, trading bawdy suppositions of the outcome.

They lingered over yet a further round of drinks and at length barged, laughing, out into the late-afternoon streets. The gold-drenched sidewalks swarmed, the pavements were jammed with rumbling motors. Jaunty and loud, the girls sauntered back to their intersection, and crossed over to the old building. Its heavy oak-and-gla.s.s doors were pneumatically stiff, and cost them a stagger to force open. But when they swung shut, it was swiftly, with a deep click, and they sealed out the streetsound with amazing, abrupt completeness. The gla.s.s was dirty and it put a sulfurous glaze on the already surreal copper of the declining sun's light outside. Suddenly it might be Mars or Jupiter out beyond those doors, and they themselves stood within a great dim stillness that might have matched the feeling of a real Mesopotamian ruin, out on some starlit desert. The images were alien to Patti's thought-startling intrusions in a mental voice not precisely her own. Sheri gave a comic shiver but otherwise made no acknowledgment of similar feelings. She merrily cursed the old elevators with a hand-written out-of-order sign affixed to their switchplate by yellowed scotch tape, and then gigglingly led the way up the green-carpeted stairs, up which a rubber corridor mat ran that gave Patti murky imaginings of scuffed, supple, reptilian skin. She struggled up the stairs after her skylarking friend, gaping with amazement at the spirit of gaiety which had so utterly deserted her own thoughts at the instant of those doors' closing.

At the first two landings they peeked down the halls at similar vistas: green-carpeted corridors of frosted-gla.s.s doors with rich bra.s.s k.n.o.bs. Bulbs burned miserly few, and in those corridors Patti sensed, with piercing vividness, the feeling of kept silence. It was not a void silence, but a full one, made by presences not stirring.

Patti's dread was so fierce and gratuitous, she wondered if it was a freak of pills and booze. She desperately wanted to stop her friend and retreat with her, but she couldn't find the breath or the words to broach her crazy panic. Sheri leapt triumphantly onto the fourth-floor landing and bowed Patti into the corridor.

Every door they pa.s.sed bore the clinic's rubric and referred the pa.s.ser to the room at the end of the hall, and every step Patti took toward that door sharpened the kick of panic in her stomach. They'd gotten scarcely halfway down the hallway when she reached her limit, and knew that no imaginable compulsion could make her go nearer to that room, Sheri tugged at her, and rallied her, but finally abandoned her and tiptoed hilariously up to the door, trying to do a parody of Patti's sudden fear.

She didn't knock, to Patti's relief. She took out her notepad, and mirthfully scrawled a moderately long message. She folded the note, tucked it under the door, and ran back to Patti.

When they reached the last flight of stairs, Patti dared speech. She scolded Sheri about the note.

"Did you think I was trying to steal him?" Sheri taunted, "giving him my address?" She alluded to a time, at a crowded party, when Patti had given Sheri a note to pa.s.s to a potential john, and Sheri had tampered with it and brought the trick to her own apartment. Patti was shocked at the possibility of such a trick, before discarding the idea as exceeding even Sheri's quirkishness.

"Did you hear any music up there?" Patti asked as they stepped out on the street. Coming into the noise outside was a blessed relief-breaking out into air and the color, as if surfacing from the long, crushing stillness of a deep drowning. But even in this sweet rush she could call up clearly a weird, piping tune-scarcely a tune really, more an eerie melodic ramble-which had come into her mind as they hurried down the slick-rubbered flights of stairs. What bothered her as much as the strange feeling of the music was the way in which she had received it. It seemed to her that she had not heard it, but rather remembered it-suddenly and vividly-though she hadn't the trace of an idea now where she might have heard it before. Sheri's answer confirmed her thought: "Music? Baby, there wasn't a sound up there! Wasn't it kind of spooky?" Her mood stayed giddy and Patti gladly fell in with it. They went to another bar they liked and drank for an hour or so-slowly, keeping a gloss on things, feeling humorous and excited like schoolgirls on a trip together. At length they decided to go to the Parna.s.sus, find somebody with a car and scare up a cruising party.

As they crossed to the hotel Sheri surprised Patti by throwing a look at the old office building and giving a shrug that may have been half shudder. "Jesus. It was like being under the ocean or something in there, wasn't it, Patti?"

This echo of her own dread made Patti look again at her friend. Then Arnold, the vendor, stepped out from the newsstand and blocked their way.

The uncharacteristic aggressiveness gave Patti a nasty twinge. Arnold was unlovely. There was a babyish fatness and a redness about every part of him. His scanty red hair alternately suggested infancy or feeble age, and his one eyeless socket, with its weepy red folds of baggy lid, made his whole face look as if screwed up to cry. Over all his red, ambling softness there was a bright blackish glaze of inveterate filth. And, moronic though his manner was most of the time, Patti now felt a cunning about him, something sly and corrupt. The cretinous, wet-mouthed face he now thrust close to the girls seemed, somehow, to be that of a grease-painted conman, not an imbecile. As if it were a sour fog that surrounded the newsman, fear entered Patti's nostrils, and dampened the skin of her arms. Arnold raised his hand. Pinched between his smudgy thumb and knuckle were an envelope and a fifty-dollar bill.

"A man said to read this, Patti!" Arnold's childish intonation now struck Patti as an affectation, like his dirtiness, part of a chosen disguise.

"He said the money was to pay you to read it. It's a trick! He gave me twenty dollars!" Arnold giggled. The sense of cold-blooded deception in the man made Patti's voice shake when she questioned him about the man who'd given him the commission. He remembered nothing, an arm and a voice in a dark car that pulled up and sped off.

"Well, how is she supposed to read it?" Sheri prodded. "Should she be by a window? Should she wear anything special?"

But Arnold had no more to tell them, and Patti willingly gave up on him to escape the revulsion he so unexpectedly roused in her.

They went into the lobby with the letter, but such was its strangeness-so engrossingly lurid were the fleeting images that came clear for them-that they ended taking it back to the bar, getting a booth, and working over it with the aid of whiskey and lively surroundings. The doc.u.ment was in the form of an unsigned letter which covered two pages in a lucid, cursive script of bizarre elegance, and which ran thus: Dear Girls:.

How does a Shoggoth lord go wooing? You do not even guess enough to ask! Then let it be asked and answered for you. As it is written: "The Shoggoth lord stumbleth unto his bel.u.s.ted, lo, he cometh heavily unto her, upon alien feet. From the sunless sea, from under the mountains of ice, cometh the mighty Shoggoth lord unto her."

Dear, dear girls! Where is this place the Shoggothoi come from? In your tender, sensual ignorance you might well lack the power to be astonished by the prodigious gulfs of s.p.a.ce and Time this question probes. But let it once more be asked and answered for you. Thus has the answer been written: "Shun the gulf beneath the peaks, The caverned ocean black as night, Where star-sp.a.w.ned G.o.ds made their retreat From the slowly freezing world of light.

For even star-sp.a.w.n may grow weak, While what has been its slave gains strength; Even star-sp.a.w.n's will may break, While slaves feed on their lords at length."

Sweet harlots! Darling, heedless trollops! You cannot imagine the Shoggoth lord's mastery of shapes! His race has bred smaller since modern men last met with it. Oh, but the Shoggoth lords are limber now! Supremest polymorphs-though what they are beneath all else, is Horror itself.

But how is it they press their loving suit? What do they murmur to her they hotly crave? You must know that the Shoggoth craves her fat with panic-full of the psychic juices of despair. Therefore he taunts her with their ineluctable union; therefore he pipes and flutes to her his bold, seductive lyric, while he vows with a burning glare in his myriad eyes that she'll be his. Thus he sings: "Your veil shall be the wash of blood That dims and drowns your dying eyes.

You'll have for bridesmaids Pain and Dread, For vows, you'll jabber blasphemies.

My scalding flesh will be your gown, And Agony your bridal song.

You shall both be my bread And, senses reeling, watch me fed.

O maids, prepare her swiftly!

Speedily her loins unlace!

Her tender paps annoint, And bare unto my seething face!"

Thus, dear girls, he ballads and rondelays his bel.u.s.ted, thus he waltzes her spirit through dark, empty halls of expectation, of always-harkening Horror, until the dance has reached that last, closed room of consummation!

As many times as the girls flung these pages onto the table, they picked them up again after short hesitation. Both Sheri and Patty were very marginal readers, but the flashes of coherent imagery in the letter kept them coming back to the murky parts, trying to pick the lock of their meaning. They held menace even in their very calligraphy, whose baroque, barbed elegance seemed sardonic and alien. The mere sonority of some of the obscure pa.s.sages evoked vivid images, a sense of murky submersion in benthic pressures of fearful expectation, while unseen giants abided in the dark nearby.

It put Patti in a goosefleshy melancholy, but of real fear it raised little, even though it meant that some out-to-lunch hurt-freak had quite possibly singled her and Sheri out. The letter held as much creepy entertainment for her as it did threat. The ones really into letter writing were much less likely to be real doers. Besides that, it was a very easy fifty dollars.

She was the more surprised, then, at Sheri's sudden, jagged confession of paranoia. She had been biting back panic for some time, it appeared, and Patti was sure that even as she spoke she was holding back more than she told. She was afraid to go home alone.

"All this bulls.h.i.t," she pointed at the letter, "it's spooked me, Patti, I can't explain it. I got the bleep scared out of me, girl. Come on, we can sleep in the same bed, just like slumber parties in school, Patti. I just don't want to face walking into my living room tonight and turning on the light."

"Sure you can sleep over! But no kicking, right?"

"Oh, that was only because I had that dream!" Sheri shrilled. She was so happy and relieved it was pitiful, and Patti found herself developing an answering chill that made her glad of the company.

They got some sloe gin and some vodka and some bags of ice and bottles of Seven-Up. They got several bags of chips and puffs and cookies and candy bars, and repaired with their purchases to Patti's place.

She had a small cottage in a four-cottage court, with very old people living in the other three units. The girls shoved the bed into the corner so they could prop pillows against all the walls to lean back on. They turned on the radio, and the tv, and got out the phone book, and started making joke calls to people with funny names while eating, drinking, smoking, watching, listening and bantering each other.

Their consciousness outlasted their provisions, but not by long. Soon, back to back, they slept, bathed and laved by the gently burbling soundwash, and the ash-gray light of the pulsing images.

They woke to a day that was sunny, windy and smogless. They rose at high, glorious noon, and walked to a coffee shop for breakfast. The breeze was combing b.u.t.tery light into the waxen fronds of the palms, while the Hollywood Hills seemed most opulently brocaded-under the sky's flawless blue-with the silver-green of sagebrush and sumach.

As they ravened breakfast, they plotted borrowing a car and taking a drive. Then Sheri's man walked in. She waved him over brightly, but Patti was sure she was as disappointed as herself. Rudy took a chair long enough to inform Sheri how lucky she was he'd run into her, since he'd been trying to find her. He had something important for her that afternoon. Contemptuously he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the bill and paid for both girls. Sheri left in tow, and gave Patti a rueful wave from the door.

Patti's appet.i.te left her. She dawdled over coffee, and stepped at last, unwillingly, out into the day's polychrome splendor. Its very clarity took on a sinister quality of remorselessness. Behold, the whole world and all its children moved under the glaring sun's brutal, endless revelation. Nothing could hide. Not in this world ... though of course there were other worlds, where beings lie hidden immemorially ...

She shivered as if something had crawled across her. The thoughts had pa.s.sed through her, but were not hers. She sat on a bus-stop bench and tightly crossed her arms as if to get a literal hold on herself. The strange thoughts, by their feeling, she knew instinctively to be echoes raised somehow by what they had read last night. Away with them, then! The creep had had more than his money's worth of reading from her already, and now she would forget those unclean pages. As for her depression, it was a freakish sadness caused by the spoiling of her holiday with Sheri, and it was silly to give in to it.

Thus she rallied herself, and got to her feet. She walked a few blocks without aim, somewhat stiff and resolute. At length the sunlight and her natural health of body had healed her mood, and she fell into a pleasant veering ramble down miles of Hollywood residential streets, relishing the cheap cuteness of the houses, and the lushness of their long-planted trees and gardens.

Almost she left the entire city. A happy, rushing sense of her freedom grew upon her and she suddenly pointed out to herself that she had nearly four hundred dollars in her purse. She came within an ace of swaggering into a Greyhound station with two quickly packed suitcases, and buying a ticket either to San Diego or Santa Barbara, whichever had the earliest departure time. With brave suddenness to simplify her life and remove it, at a stroke, from the evil that had seemed to haunt it recently ...

It was her laziness that, in the end, made her veer away from the decision-her dislike of its necessary but inherently tedious details: the bus ride, looking for an apartment, looking for a job. As an alternative to such dull preliminaries, the endless interest and familiarity of Hollywood took on renewed allure.

She would stay then. The knowledge didn't dull her sense of freedom. Her feet felt confident, at home upon these shady, root-buckled sidewalks. She strode happily, looking on her life with new detachment and ease. Such paranoias she'd been having! They seemed now as fogs that her newly freshened spirit could scatter at a breath.

She had turned onto a still, green block that was venerably overhung by great old peppertrees, and she'd walked well into it before she realized that the freeway had cut it off at the far end. An arrow indicated a narrow egress to the right, however, so she kept walking. Several houses ahead, a very large man in overalls appeared, dragging a huge German shepherd across the lawn.

Patti saw a new, brown van parked by the curb, and recognized it and the man at once. The vehicle was one of two belonging to Fat Face's stray refuge, and the man was one of his two full-time collectors.

He had the struggling brute by the neck with a noosed stick. He stopped and looked at Patti with some intensity as she approached. The vine-drowned cottage whose lawn he stood on was dark, tight-shut, and seemed deserted-as did the entire block-and it struck Patti that the man might have spotted the dog by chance, and might now be thinking it hers. She smiled and shook her head as she came up.

"He's not mine! I don't even live around here!"

Something in the way her own words echoed down the stillness of the street gave Patti a pang. She was sure they had made the collector's eyes narrow. He was tall, round and smooth, with a face of his employer's type, though not as jovial. He was severely club footed and bloat-legged on the left, as well as being inordinately bellied, all things which the coveralls lent a merciful vagueness. The green baseball cap he wore somehow completed the look of ill balance and slow wit that the man wore.

But as she got nearer, already wanting to turn and run the other way, she received a shocking impression of strength in the uncouth figure. The man had paused in a half-turn and was partly crouched-not a position of firm leverage. The dog-whose paws and muzzle showed some Bernard-weighed at least 170, and it resisted violently-yet scarcely stirred the heavy arms. Patti edged to one side of the walk, pretending a wariness of the dog which its helplessness made droll, and moved to pa.s.s. The collector's hand, as if absently, pressed down on the noose. The beast's head seemed to swell, its struggles grew more galvanic and constricted by extreme distress. And while thus smoothly he began throttling the beast, the collector cast a glance up and down the block, and stepped into Patti's path, effortlessly dragging the animal with him.

They stood face to face, very near. The ugly mathematics of peril swiftly clicked in her brain: the ma.s.s, the force, the time-all were sufficient. The next couple of moments could finish her. With a jerk he could kill the dog, drop it, seize her and thrust her into the van. Indeed, the dog was at the very point of death. The collector began to smile nastily and his breath came-foul and oddly cold-gusting against her face. Then something began to happen to his eyes. They were rolling up, like a man's when he's coming-but they didn't roll white-they were rolling up a jet black-two glossy obsidian globes eclipsing from below the watery blue ones. Her lungs began to gather air to scream. A taxi-cab swung onto the street.

The collector's grip eased on the half-unconscious dog. He stood blinking furiously, and it seemed he could not unwind his bulky body from the menacing tension it had taken on. He stood, still frozen on the very threshold of a.s.sault, and the cold foulness still gusted from him with the labor of his breathing. In another instant Patti's reflexes fired and she was released with a leap from the curb out into the street, but there was time enough before for her to have the thought she knew that stench the blinking gargoyle breathed.

And then she was in the cab. The driver sullenly informed her of her luck in catching him on his special shortcut to a freeway on-ramp. She looked at him as if he'd spoken in a foreign tongue. More gently he asked her destination, and without thought she answered: "The Greyhound station."

Flight. With sweet, simple motion to cancel Hollywood, and its walking ghosts of murder, and its lurking plunderers of the body, and its nasty, nameless scribblers of letters whose pleasure it was to defile the mind with nightmares. But of course, she must pack. She re-routed the driver to her apartment.

This involved a doubling-back which took them across the street of her encounter. The van was still parked by the curb, but neither collector nor dog were in sight. Oddly, the van seemed to be moving slightly, rocking as if with interior movement of fitful vigor. Her look was brief, from a half block's distance, but in the shady stillness the subtle tremoring made a vivid impression.

Then she bethought herself of Fat Face. She could report the collector to him! That just and genial face instantly quelled all the horror attaching to the collector's uglier one. What, after all, had happened? A creepy, disabled type with some eye infection had been dangerously tempted to rape her, and she had lucked out. That last fact was grounds for celebration, while all that was strong and avuncular in the good doctor's expression promised that she would be vigorously protected from further danger at the same hands. She even smiled to imagine the interview: her pretty embarra.s.sment, the intimate topic, her warmly expressed girlish grat.i.tude. It could become the tender seduction of her fantasy.

So she re-routed the driver again-not without first giving him a ten-dollar tip in advance-to the boulevard. There she walked a while, savoring the sunlight, and lunched opulently, and went to two different double-bills, one right after the other.

But her mood could have been better. She kept remembering the collector. It was not his grotesqueness that nagged at her so much as a fugitive familiarity in the whole aura of him. His chill, malignant presence was like a gust out of some place obscurely known to her. What dream of her own, now lost to her, had shown her that world of dread and wonder and colossal age which now she caught-and knew-the scent of, in this man? The thought was easy to shake off as a freak of mood, but it was insistent in its return, like a fly that kept landing on her, and after the movies, feeling groggy and cold in the dusk, she called Sheri.

Her friend had just got home, exhausted from a multiple trick, and wearing a few bruises from a talk with Rudy afterward.

"Why don't I come over, Share? Hey?"

"Naw, Patti. I'm wrung out, girl. You feel OK?"

"Sure. So get to sleep then."

"Naw, hey now-you come over if you want to, Patti. I'm just gonna be dead to the world is all."

"Whaddya mean? If you're tired you're tired and I'll catch you later. So long." She could hear, but not change the anger and disappointment in her own voice. It told her, when she'd hung up but remained staring at the phone, how close to the territory of Fear she still stood. Full night had surrounded her gla.s.s booth. Against the fresh, purple dark, all the street's scribbly neon squirmed and swam, like sea-things of blue and rose and gold, bannering and twisting cryptically over the drowned pavements.

And, almost as though she expected watery death, Patti could not, for a moment, step from the booth out onto those pavements. Their lethal, cold strangeness lay, if not undersea, then surely in an alien, poisonous atmosphere that would scorch her lungs. For a ridiculous moment, her body defied her will. Then she set her sights on a bar half a block distant. She plunged from the booth and grimly made for that haven.

Some three hours later, no longer cold, Patti was walking to Sheri's. It was a weeknight and the stillness of the residential streets was not unpleasant. The tree-crowded streetlamps shed a light that was lovely with its whiskey gloss. The street names on their little banners of blue metal had a comic flavor to her tongue and she called out each as it came into view.

Sheri, after all, had said to come over. The petty cruelty of waking her seemed, to Patti, under the genial excuse of the alcohol, merely prankish. So she sauntered through sleeping Hollywood, knowing the nightwalker's exhilaration of being awake in a dormant world.

Sheri lived in a stucco cottage that was a bit tackier than Patti's, though larger, each cottage possessing a little driveway and a garage in back. And though there was a light on in the livingroom, it was up the driveway that Patti went, deciding, with sudden impishness, to spook her friend. She crept round the rear corner, and stole up to the screened window of Sheri's bedroom, meaning to make noises through a crack if one had been left open.

The window was in fact fully raised, though a blind was drawn within. Even as Patti leaned close, she heard movement inside the darkened room. In the next instant a gust of breeze came up and pushed back the blind within.

Sheri was on her back in the bed and somebody was on top of her, so that all Patti could see of her was her arms and her face, which stared round-eyed at the ceiling as she was rocked again and again on the bed. Patti viewed that surging, grappling labor for two instants, no more, and retreated, almost staggering, in a primitive reflex of shame more deep-lying in her than any of the sophistications of her adult professional life.

Shame and a weird, childish glee. She hurried out to the sidewalk. Her head rang, and she felt giggly and frightened to a degree that managed to astonish her even through her liquor. What was with her? She'd been paid to watch far grosser things than a simple coupling. On the other hand there had been a foul smell in the bedroom, and there had been a nagging hint of music too, she thought, a faint, unpleasant twisty tune coming from somewhere indefinite ...

These vague feelings quickly yielded to the humorous side of the accident. She walked to the nearest main street and found a bar. In it, she killed half an hour with two further doubles and then, reckoning enough time had pa.s.sed, walked back to Sheri's.

The livingroom light was still on. Patti rang the bell and heard it inside, a rattly probe of noise that raised no stir of response. All at once she felt a light rush of suspicion, like some long-legged insect scuttling daintily up her spine. She felt that, as once before in the last few days, the silence she was hearing concealed a presence, not an absence. But why should this make her begin, ever so slightly, to sweat? It would be Sheri, playing possum. Trying by abruptness to throw off her fear she seized the k.n.o.b. The door opened and she rushed in, calling: "Ready or not, one two three!"

Before she was fully in the room, her knees buckled under her, for a fiendish stench filled it. It was a carrion smell, a fierce, damp rankness which bit and pierced the nose. It was so palpable an a.s.sault it seemed to crawl all over her-to wriggle through her scalp and stain her flesh as if with brimstone and graveslime.

Clinging still to the doork.n.o.b she looked woozily about the room, whose sloppy normality, coming to her as it did through that surreal fetor, struck her almost eerily. Here was the litter of wrappers, magazines and dishes-thickest round the couch-so familiar to her. The tv, on low, was crowned with ashtrays and beercans, while on the couch which it faced a freshly open bag of Fritos lay.

But it was from the bedroom door, partly ajar, that the nearly visible miasma welled most thickly, as from its source. And it would be in the bedroom that Sheri lay. She would be lying dead in its darkness. For, past experience and description though it was, the stench proclaimed that meaning grim and clear: death. Patti turned behind her to take a last clean breath, and stumbled toward the bedroom.

Every girl ran the risk of rough trade. It was an ugly and lonely way to die. With the dark, instinctive knowledge of their sisterhood, Patti knew that it was only laying out and covering up that her friend needed of her now. She shoved inward on the bedroom door, throwing a broken rhomb of light upon the bed.

It and the room were empty-empty save for the near physical ma.s.s of the stench. It was upon the bed that the reek fumed and writhed most nastily. The blankets and sheets were drenched with some vile fluid, and pressed into sodden seams and folds. The coupling she had glimpsed and snickered at-what unspeakable species of intercourse had it been? And Sheri's face staring up from under the shadowed form's lascivious rocking-had there been more to read in her expression than the slack-faced shock of s.e.x? Then Patti moaned: "O Jesus G.o.d!"

Sheri was in the room. She lay on the floor, mostly under the bed, only her head and shoulders protruding, her face to the ceiling. There was no misreading its now frozen look. It was a face wherein the recognition of Absolute Pain and Fear had dawned, even as death arrived. Dead she surely was. Living muscles did not achieve that utter fixity. Tears jumped up in Patti's eyes. She staggered into the livingroom, fell on the couch and wept. "O Jesus G.o.d," she said again, softly now.

She went to the kitchenette and got a dishtowel, tied it around her nose and mouth, and returned to the bedroom. Sheri would not, at least, lie half thrust from sight like a broken toy. Her much-used body would have a shred of that dignity which her life had never granted it. She bent, and hooked her hands under those dear, bare shoulders. She pulled, and, with her pull's excess force, fell backward to the floor. For that which she fell hugging to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s needed no such force to move its lightness. It was not Sheri, but a dreadful upper fragment of her, that Patti hugged: Sheri's head and shoulders, one of her arms ... gone were her fat, funny feet they had used to laugh at, for she ended now in a charred stump of ribcage. As a little girl might clutch some unspeakable doll, Patti lay embracing tightly that which made her scream, and scream again.

Valium. Compazene. Mellaril. Stellazine. Gorgeous technicolored tabs and capsules. Bright-hued pillars holding up the Temple of Rest. Long afternoons of Tuonol and tv; night sweats and quiet, groggy mornings. Patti was in County for more than a week.

She had found all there was to be found of her friend. Dismemberment by acid is a new wrinkle, and Sheri got some press, but in a world of trashbag murders and ma.s.s graves uncovered in quiet back yards, even a death like Sheri's could hope for only so much coverage. Patti's bafflement made her call the detectives a.s.signed to the case at least once a day. With gruff tact they heard through her futile rummagings among the things she knew of Sheri's life and background, but soon knew she was helpless to come up with anything material.

She desperately wanted a period of thoughtless rest, but always a vague, unsleeping dread marred her drug-buoyed ease. For she could be waked, even from the gla.s.siest daze, by a sudden sense that the number of people surrounding her was dwindling-that they were, everywhere, stealing off, or vanishing, and that the hospital, and even the city, was growing empty around her.

She put it down to the hospital itself-its constant shifts of bodies, its wheelings in and out on silent gurneys. She obtained a generous scrip for Valium and had herself discharged, hungry for the closer comfort of her friends. A helpful doctor was leaving the building as she did, and gave her a ride. With freakish embarra.s.sment about her trade and her world, Patti had him drop her at a coffee shop some blocks from the Parna.s.sus. When he had driven off, she started walking. The dusk was just fading. It was Sat.u.r.day night, but it was also the middle of a three-day weekend (as she had learned with surprise from the doctor) and the traffic on both pavement and asphalt was remarkably light.

Somehow it had a small-town-on-Sunday feel, and alarm woke in her and struggled in its heavy Valium shackles, for this was as if the confirmation of her frightening hallucinations. Her fear mounted as she walked. She pictured the Parna.s.sus with an empty lobby, and imagined that she saw the traffic beginning everywhere to turn off the street she walked on, so that in a few moments, it could stretch deserted for a mile either way.

But then she saw the many lively figures through the beloved plategla.s.s windows. She half ran ahead, and as she waited with happy excitement for the light, she saw Fat Face up in his window. He spotted her just when she did him, and beamed and winked. Patti waved and smiled and heaved a deep sigh of relief that nearly brought tears. This was true medicine, not pills, but friendly faces in your home community! Warm feelings and simple neighborliness! She ran forward at the "walk" signal.

There was a snag before she reached the lobby, for Arnold from his wooden cave threw at her as she pa.s.sed a leer of wet intensity that scared her even as she recognized that some kind of frightened greeting was intended by the grimace. There was such ... speculation in his look. But then she had pushed through the gla.s.s doors, and was in the warm ebullience of shouts and hugs and jokes and droll nudges.