been such a comfort to me while you were away, Willis. He kept me warm every night.'
'You should've called the doctor yourself, Mayell. You look terrible, much worse than when I left.'
'I do?' She sounded puzzled and oddly unconcerned, as though unable to grasp the seriousness of her condition. 'Then I must get better, mustn't I?'
Oakley rose, looked meaningfully at Willis. They moved to a far corner. 'I want that woman in the hospital at Montpelier. Immediately. Tonight. It's criminal she's still in this house.'
'I told you, I was in New York. I didn't know. The last of the regular servants left three weeks ago, and we were going to do the same at the end of the month. She wasn't nearly this bad when I left.' Despite the reasonable excuse, Willis still felt guilty. 'What's wrong with her?'
Oakley studied the floor and chewed his upper lip before looking back at the bed and its sleeping skeleton.
'I don't know that I can give a name to any specific disease, or diseases, since I think she's suffering from at least three different ones. She's terribly sick. Can't tell for certain what's wrong until I get her into the hospital and run some tests. Acute anemia, muscular degeneration-of the most severe kind, calcium deficiency probably caused by reabsorption . . . that's what's wrong with her. What's causing it I can't say. She can't have been eating much lately.'
'But she has been,' Willis protested. 'I know. I checked the refrigerator and pantry this morning when I made my own breakfast.'
'That so? Then I just don't know where those calories are going. She's burning them up at an incredible rate. Daywalking, mebbee. People don't consume themselves by lying in bed.' He checked his watch.
'I'll want to travel with you to the hospital. It's after five. You have her ready by eight. I'll want to prep the ambulance team. We're –going to put her on massive intravenous immediately, squirt all the glucose and dextrose into her that her system will take. Try to get her to eat something solid tonight. A steak would be good if she can keep it down. And a malted with it.'
'I'll take care of it, Doc. Eight o'clock. We'll be ready.'
It was hard to keep himself busy while he waited for the ambulance to arrive. He checked the window locks and the alarms. If they were going to be away for a while, best to make certain no one broke in and carried off their valuable furniture. He was still worried about Mayell, took some comfort from the fact that Oakley told him on departing that she would probably recover with proper medication and attention. She had to recover. If she died, his own hopes for an easy life would die with her.
Not unnaturally, his overwrought mind turned to thoughts of some sinister plot against them. Could someone, some disgruntled relative left out of the will, be poisoning Mayell in a fashion similar to the way in which they'd polished off Hanford? That was crazy, though. The house had hosted no visitors who might qualify as potential murderers while he'd been there, and Mayell had begun to deteriorate well before he'd departed for New York.
Besides, if he recalled the will correctly, in the event of any recipient's death, that portion of the inheritance was to go not to others but to several of Hanford's favorite charities. He remembered the faces present at the reading of the will, could not consider one capable of killing solely out of spite.
Saugen tried to keep him company, meowing and hovering about his legs as he kept an eye on the steak. He glanced irritably down at those fathomless feline eyes. Gently but firmly, he kicked the sable shape away. It meowed once indignantly and left him to his thoughts.
Some plot of Hanford's, maybe? Had he suspected what was being done to him, there at the last, and hired a vengeful killer to exact a terrible revenge?
There was the dinner to fix. Potatoes were beyond him, but he did right by the meat, and heating the frozen peas was easy enough. Recalling that honey was supposed to give one strength, he dosed her tea liberally.
As he mounted the stairs toward her room, the clock chimed seven times in the hallway below. An hour would give her enough time to eat.
'Mayell? Darlin'?' She didn't respond to his knock, so he balanced the tray carefully in one hand and turned the knob with the other.
It was dim in the room, lit only by early moonlight and the single small bulb of the end-table night-light. She was still asleep. He moved toward the other side of the bed. There was a pole lamp there. As he fumbled for the switch, he noticed a familiar shape on her ribs. It meowed, an odd sort of meow, almost a territorial growl.
Saugen moved, lifting to a sitting position on his mistress's chest. Willis thought he saw something glisten and looked closer, one hand on the light switch.
The carpet muffled the clang of the tray when it hit, but it was still louder than expected. Peas rolled short distances to hide in the low shag, and the juice from the still steaming steak stained the delicate rose pattern as Willis stumbled backward. He fell into the lamp, and it broke into a thousand glass splinters when it struck the floor. Funny, half-verbalized noises were coming from his throat as he tried to give voice to what he was seeing, but he could do no more than gargle his fear.
Eyes bright and burning tracked him as he staggered toward the door. A penetrating meow started his vertebrae clattering like an old woman's teeth. He could still see the fur on Saugen's stomach wriggling of its own accord as dozens of the thin, wormlike tendrils reluctantly withdrew from the drained husk of what had once been Mayell. They reminded Willis of tiny snakes, all curling and writhing as though possessed of some horrible life of their own. The hypodermic-size holes they had left in the wasted skin closed up behind them. Willis thought of the spiders he'd seen so often in the gardens, liquefying the insides of their victims and sucking them empty like so many inflexible bottles. The glistening he'd seen had been caused .by moonlight reflecting off the myriad drops of red liquid still clinging to the tip of each unhair. He retched as he finally found the door and rushed out, thinking of how many nights the cat-thing had spent seemingly asleep on the girl's chest when all the while it had been silently feeding.
'Keep him contented and well fed,' the will had stated. Ah, damn the old man, he'd known!
Nothing in the house looked familiar as he half fell, half stumbled down the stairs. His thoughts were jumbled, confused. The full bowls of cat food left untouched in the kitchen these past weeks, the privacy whenever Hanford had fed his pet, the regular visits of poor women from the city who had come expecting to fill one normal desire and who had left, their eyes darting and fearful, never to return a second time.
Somewhere in the gardener's shed there was a gun, a pistol he kept to ward off thieves and trespassers. He sought the front door. Oakley would be there soon with the ambulance and its crew. They wouldn't believe, but that didn't matter, wouldn't matter, because he would get the gun first and . . .
He stopped in midbreath, frozen as he stared forward, paralyzed by a pair of deliberate, mesmerizing yellow orbs confronting him. He tried to move, fought to look elsewhere. He couldn't budge, could only scream silently as those fiery fluorescent eyes held his swaying body transfixed.
Its belly fur flexing expectantly, the plump crimson cat left its place by the door and padded deliberately forward.
RUNNING
I always liked running. It's just that I was never any good at it, and I'm not any better now. Weak lungs have a lot to do with it, the product of severe bouts with infantile scarlet fever and adolescent tracheal bronchitis.
Nevertheless, I liked it. And I tried. There was something about the wind rushing past you, the world becoming a pastiche of impressionistic shapes and colors. Maybe I was trying to find the subways of my infancy.
Trouble was, my body wouldn't cooperate. The pain would arise shortly after I began to move, intensifying until my lungs felt like newspaper in a fireplace: little crumpled sheets of blackness twisting and darting as they ascended up the chimney. 1'd have to slow down and gasp for air while others, seemingly without breathing at all, would rush past me, their arms and legs functioning in perfect harmony, their feet never touching the earth.
As time passed, running somehow became 'jogging.' I think I know what jogging is now. It's running, only in designer clothes. Its emblem is a set of shoes that cost only slightly less than a good color TV; shoes that can be bought at K Mart without a ridiculous name stitched on the side for one-tenth the cost of a pair with a name. Its
