“I know they would. But I’ve lived in this apartment almost twenty years. If I’m not safe here, then I wouldn’t be safe anywhere. All my things are here, the best of my memories. Right now I just need to feel everything’s as it should be—normal, ordinary. I’m okay. I’ll be fine.”
He nodded. “All right. But if you need anything, call me. I’ll come straight down.”
She almost asked him to sit with her for a while; however, alone with Bailey, she might not be able to conceal that she was attracted to him. Might not
She thanked Bailey for his kindness, shut the door, and engaged both deadbolts. She was home, in her nest, a nest for one, and she was pleased to be there, where everything was known and carefully tended, where no one who had promised to cherish her was waiting to break his vow.
She needed to steady herself, and the most calming thing she could do was make a fine dessert. In the kitchen, having decided to bake a chocolate Battenberg loaf cake wrapped in white marzipan, she went first to the sink to wash her hands. As Sally turned on the water, she was assaulted from behind, seized by a twisted handful of hair, also cruelly by her left arm, and forced to turn away from the sink to confront her assailant. In the turn, she thought
An instant paralysis came with the bite, cold flooding through her body, followed by a loss of feeling in her limbs. Her suddenly rigid face felt as if it were encased in the plaster of a death mask, and she had no voice for a scream or even for a whisper. She could smell and hear, she could move her eyes, her tongue, could breathe, and her heart raced; but if the creature stopped supporting her, she would collapse to the floor, limp and immobile.
Her terror was so intense that it might have paralyzed her if the bite had not already done so. The past twenty years of nights alone had been for the most part a sweet, peaceful solitude. Only now was Sally Hollander overcome by desperate loneliness, by an awareness of the fearsome abyss that lies under life and threatens at every moment to yawn wide and swallow everyone, everything. Imminent death didn’t terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she’d ever hoped, a life that would end without a witness, in the arms of this creature whose eyes were gateways to a pitiless void.
A tongue thrust from between its pointed teeth, neither like a human tongue nor, as she expected, like that of a serpent. Gray and glistening, tubular, hollow, resembling a length of highly flexible rubber tubing almost an inch in diameter, it fluttered in the air before her, then slithered back into the mouth, as if it were not a tongue after all but, instead, another creature that lived in the larger one’s throat.
At least six and a half feet tall, the demon held Sally in its strong arms and bent forward, its face descending toward hers as if it intended to chew into her and devour her alive. She realized that her mouth sagged open, but she remained powerless to close it or to scream. She was repulsed when the creature’s open mouth closed over hers not in a kiss but as if to draw from her the breath of life. Disgusted beyond tolerance when the tubular tongue slid across her own tongue, she was driven to the edge of sanity when the impossibly long appendage pushed to the back of her mouth and down into her throat, where something cold and thick and foul gushed from it, overwhelming her ability to swallow.
Sparkle Sykes, stepping quietly out of her closet and moving cautiously across the bedroom, followed the six- legged crawling thing that might have been a mutant baby born after a worldwide nuclear holocaust as imagined in the waking nightmares of an insect-phobic, fungi-phobic, rat-crazy mescaline junkie. It
On a Biedermeier chest of drawers stood an eighteen-inch-tall bronze statue of Diana, Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt. It weighed maybe fifteen pounds. Sparkle snared it by the neck and held it in both hands, an awkward but elegant club in case she needed one.
No sooner had she armed herself than she noticed something that bewildered her. The creeping monstrosity, which had seemed as solid as the floor on which it crawled, was now slightly transparent, so that she could see through it to the pattern of the Persian carpet underneath.
If she had been given to the use of drink or drugs, she might have thought that she was hallucinating. Although she knew too well about the varied effects of mescaline and the like, she always had been a teetotaler whose only addiction was coffee of all kinds.
Fright that made Sparkle feel light-headed now quickly acquired the greater gravity of dread, dread so heavy that she felt weighed down to the extent that she had to struggle to remain in pursuit of the creeping nightmare. She fell a couple of steps behind and then came to a halt when the six-legged miscreation veered away from the open bedroom door. Instead of crossing that threshold into the hall, it became yet more transparent, crawled
She remained frozen for a second or two, and then hurried to the door. Afraid that the thing was aware of her and waiting just out of sight, Sparkle remained in the bedroom, cautiously leaned through the doorway, and discovered the hall deserted. The grotesque intruder seemed not to have passed through the wall but
The wall wasn’t nearly thick enough to accommodate such a creature. In going through the wall, it seemed to have gone out of the Pendleton altogether, into some other reality or dimension.
Her hands were damp with sweat, and the statue of Diana wanted to slip through her grip. She put it on the
