Clay stood there, making no move toward the lock, but morbidly curious to see if Barry would burst through the door like the Kool-Aid Man. The dealer employed his substantial shoulder as a battering ram, the door jumped in its frame, but the wood was solid and new and it held. He was backing up, steeling himself for a running leap, when the stairwell clicked open again. And Barry moaned—so hysterically fearful that Clay almost opened the door for the basic decency of it. Almost. An instant later, those high screams took hold of the dark again, tearing at the dealer’s vocal chords as he bolted away.
And just as his screams receded, another sound rose to replace them. Clay had been backtracking to the bedroom when he caught it, the faint dragging—like someone pushing a heavy box along the floor.
And he went back to the door, as if this was all a dream, without terror or consequence, his duty merely to witness.
Mr. Right’s pursuer was advancing through the dark with no sense of urgency. So that there was time for Clay to think twice about what he was doing. To think, I could slip away without a sound. I don’t ever have to see what’s coming.
His eyes moved to the peephole.
It took a long time. An hour that might have been twenty seconds. Finally, something reached his periphery, a black shape darker than dark itself, and Clay immediately wished his brain had been stronger than his eye, that he’d run back to Renee and dragged her into the closet. The shadow—the Queen Bitch, as Barry had so eloquently deemed her—was feminine in shape; Clay understood this even in the limited light. She wore a loose-fitting evening gown and her hair, from what could be gathered, was done up in dreads that looped and spider-legged around her head. Her body was disproportionately small—a frail scarecrow’s frame that made the gown flap and trail on the floor behind her—to her head, which seemed badly misshapen, a horse head perhaps, but surely not a human one. And when the shadow moved, it wasn’t with a human gait so much as an unbroken slide. Impossible to see her feet in such darkness, but it was almost like she… Like she isn’t touching the floor.
“Clay?” Renee called out with the world’s worst timing. “What’s happening?”
And Clay grit his teeth; his whole body screwed tight as the Queen Bitch halted her progress at their door. No, please, no, no….
The shadow turned knowingly. The inhuman face smiled in at him.
Clay dropped into a crouch, his heart seizing mid-pump. Despite Barry Right’s failure to break and enter, the door between him and the Queen Bitchfelt wafer-thin. She would only need to touch the wood to blow it to pieces.
She didn’t breathe and Clay didn’t breathe. The hall was so profoundly quiet that a bigger fool might have throw the door open, just to see if she was still there.
She was, though, Clay didn’t doubt. Barry had made his getaway and someone would have to pay for that. So she was waiting on Clay. Standing there with her gown falling all around her, her wide forehead pressed to the door, and a bottomless black eye, darker even than her shadow, gazing into the peephole, just baiting him to gaze back.
And her hands. Where were her hands exactly?
The thought came too late. Something ice-cold touched his leg, and Clay’s eyes dropped to the gap under the door, where four thin, and impossibly long, white fingers were caressing his ankle. Clay felt her fingernails, as hard and sharp as the teeth of a saw blade, and he cried out.
“Claaaaaaay,” the Queen Bitch whispered to him. “Haaarrrrper….”
Clay’s bladder let go, the urine a hot flood between his bare legs, pooling on the hardwood. The voice was androgynous, alien, and from that moment Clay would always know the fear of the mouse in the trap, the boar in the tiger’s jaws, the innocent man at the bloodthirsty gallows.
I know what you are, he thought distantly, his body going into shock. I know the devil when I see her.
Clay couldn’t have said how much time passed before he realized the Queen Bitch was gone, only that silence had reinstated itself, his limp dick dripping noiselessly.
A moment later Renee grabbed him and he yelped and shot to his feet. “—fucking cops,” Renee was trying to tell him. “Time to bail. Now, Clay!”
She was right. There were sirens outside, panicked voices, their neighbors shouting and arguing over the division of drugs. But the relief of such a mundane predicament broke Clay’s spell. After hearing the devil speak your name, the idea of incarceration was like a slap on the wrist when you’d feared torture and death.
In his mental absence, Renee had collected his clothing, balled in a heap against her chest. “Let me have my pants.”
“There’s no time now, love. When we’re on the street.”
“You’re fully dressed, just give me my pants.”
With her free hand, Renee fought the nearest window open. She had a whole leg out before Clay grabbed her by both arms and shook the bones under her flesh. “You almost got us killed tonight, you selfish fuck!” he shouted into her pale face. And Renee’s brow crumpled angrily, right before she broke down weeping, dropping the laundry at his feet.
A moment later, Clay had his pants on and they were spilling onto the fire escape, clanging downward with dozens of others in various states of dress and sobriety. The first cops to arrive were overwhelmed and unable to control the chaos. Clay hurried Renee past the speeding backup units and didn’t stop until his Jeep was idling safely in front of Renee’s house.
“I’m
