It (10 page)

She could see the drops forming on the snout of the faucet, growing heavy and fat there, growing
pregnant
there, and then falling off:
plink.

Just that sound. No other. And she was suddenly, terribly sure that it had been Stanley, not her father, who had been stricken with a heart attack tonight.

With a moan, she gripped the cut-glass doorknob and turned it. Yet still the door would not move: it was locked. And suddenly three
nevers
occurred to Patty Uris in rapid succession: Stanley never took a bath in the early evening, Stanley never closed the door unless he was using the toilet, and Stanley had never locked the door against her at all.

Was it possible, she wondered crazily, to
prepare
for a heart attack?

Patty ran her tongue over her lips—it produced a sound in her head like fine sandpaper sliding along a board—and called his name again. There was still no answer except the steady, deliberate drip of the faucet. She looked down and saw she still held the can of Dixie beer in one hand. She gazed at it stupidly, her heart running like a rabbit in her throat; she gazed at it as if she had never seen a can of beer in her whole life before this minute. And indeed it seemed she never had, or at least never one like this, because when she blinked her eyes it turned into a telephone handset, as black and as threatening as a snake.

“May I help you, ma'am? Do you have a problem?” the snake spat at her. Patty slammed it down in its cradle and stepped away, rubbing the hand which had held it. She looked around and saw she was back in the TV room and understood that the panic which had come into the front of her mind like a prowler walking quietly up a flight of stairs had had its way with her. Now she could remember dropping the beer can outside the bathroom door and pelting headlong back down the stairs, thinking vaguely:
This is all a mistake of some kind and we'll laugh about it later. He filled up the tub and then remembered he didn't have cigarettes and went out to get them before he took his clothes off—

Yes. Only he had already locked the bathroom door from the inside and because it was too much of a bother to unlock it again he had simply opened the window over the tub and gone down the side of the house like a fly crawling down a wall. Sure, of course, sure—

Panic was rising in her mind again—it was like bitter black coffee threatening to overflow the rim of a cup. She closed her eyes and fought against it. She stood there, perfectly still, a pale statue with a pulse beating in its throat.

Now she could remember running back down here, feet stuttering on the stair-levels, running for the phone, oh yes, oh sure, but who had she meant to call?

Crazily, she thought:
I would call the turtle, but the turtle couldn't help us.

It didn't matter anyway. She had gotten as far as 0 and she must have said something not quite standard, because the operator had asked if she had a problem. She had one, all right, but how did you tell that faceless voice that Stanley had locked himself in the bathroom and didn't answer her, that the steady sound of the water dripping into the tub was killing her heart?
Someone
had to help her. Someone—

She put the back of her hand into her mouth and deliberately bit down on it. She tried to think, tried to
force
herself to think.

The spare keys. The spare keys in the kitchen cupboard.

She got going, and one slippered foot kicked the bag of buttons resting beside her chair. Some of the buttons spilled out, glittering like glazed eyes in the lamplight. She saw at least half a dozen black ones.

Mounted inside the door of the cupboard over the double-basin sink was a large varnished board in the shape of a key—one of Stan's clients had made it in his workshop and given it to him two Christmases ago. The key-board was studded with small hooks, and swinging on these were all the keys the house took, two duplicates of each to a hook. Beneath each hook was a strip of Mystik tape, each strip lettered in Stan's small, neat printing:
GARAGE, ATTIC, D'STAIRS BATH, UPSTAIRS BATH, FRONT DOOR, BACK DOOR
. Off to one side were ignition-key dupes labelled
M-B
and
VOLVO
.

Patty snatched the key marked
UPSTAIRS BATH
, began to run for the stairs, and then made herself walk. Running made the panic want to come back, and the panic was too close to the surface as it was. Also, if she just walked, maybe nothing would be wrong. Or, if there
was
something wrong, God could look down, see she was just walking, and think:
Oh, good—I pulled a hell of a boner, but I've got time to take it all back.

Walking as sedately as a woman on her way to a Ladies' Book Circle meeting, she went up the stairs and down to the closed bathroom door.

“Stanley?” she called, trying the door again at the same time, suddenly more afraid than ever, not wanting to use the key because having to use the key was somehow too final. If God hadn't taken it back by the time she used the key, then He never would. The age of miracles, after all, was past.

But the door was still locked; the deliberate
plink . . .
pause of dripping water was her only answer.

Her hand was shaking, and the key chattered all the way around the plate before finding its way into the keyhole and socking itself home. She turned it and heard the lock snap back. She fumbled for the cut-glass knob. It tried to slide through her hand again—not because the door was locked this time but because her palm was wet with sweat. She firmed her grip and made it turn. She pushed the door open.

“Stanley? Stanley? St—”

She looked at the tub with its blue shower curtain bunched at the far end of the stainless steel rod and forgot how to finish her husband's name. She simply stared at the tub, her face as solemn as
the face of a child on her first day at school. In a moment she would begin to scream, and Anita MacKenzie next door would hear her, and it would be Anita MacKenzie who would call the police, convinced that someone had broken into the Uris house and that people were being killed over there.

But for now, this one moment, Patty Uris simply stood silent with her hands clasped in front of her against her dark cotton skirt, her face solemn, her eyes huge. And now the look of almost holy solemnity began to transform itself into something else. The huge eyes began to bulge. Her mouth pulled back into a dreadful grin of horror. She wanted to scream and couldn't. The screams were too big to come out.

The bathroom was lit by fluorescent tubes. It was very bright. There were no shadows. You could see everything, whether you wanted to or not. The water in the tub was bright pink. Stanley lay with his back propped against the rear of the tub. His head had rolled so far back on his neck that strands of his short black hair brushed the skin between his shoulder-blades. If his staring eyes had still been capable of seeing, she would have looked upside down to him. His mouth hung open like a sprung door. His expression was one of abysmal, frozen horror. A package of Gillette Platinum Plus razor blades lay on the rim of the tub. He had slit his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow, and then had crossed each of these cuts just below the Bracelets of Fortune, making a pair of bloody capital T's. The gashes glared red-purple in the harsh white light. She thought the exposed tendons and ligaments looked like cuts of cheap beef.

A drop of water gathered at the lip of the shiny chromium faucet. It grew fat. Grew
pregnant,
you might say. It sparkled. It dropped.
Plink.

He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and had written a single word on the blue tiles above the tub, written it in two huge, staggering letters. A zig-zagging bloody fingermark fell away from the second letter of this word—his finger had made that mark, she saw, as his hand fell into the tub, where it now floated. She thought Stanley must have made that mark—his final impression on the world—as he lost consciousness. It seemed to cry out at her:

Another drop fell into the tub.

Plink.

That did it. Patty Uris at last found her voice. Staring into her husband's dead and sparkling eyes, she began to scream.

Rich felt like he was doing pretty good until the vomiting started.

He had listened to everything Mike Hanlon told him, said all the right things, answered Mike's questions, even asked a few of his own. He was vaguely aware that he was doing one of his Voices—not a strange and outrageous one, like those he sometimes did on the radio (Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant was his own personal favorite, at least for the time being, and positive listener response on Kinky was almost as high as for his listeners' all-time favorite, Colonel Buford Kissdrivel), but a warm, rich, confident Voice. An I'm-All-Right Voice. It sounded great, but it was a lie. Just like all the other Voices were lies.

“How much do you remember, Rich?” Mike asked him.

“Very little,” Rich said, and then paused. “Enough, I suppose.”

“Will you come?”

“I'll come,” Rich said, and hung up.

He sat in his study for a moment, leaning back in the chair behind his desk, looking out at the Pacific Ocean. A couple of kids were down on the left, horsing around on their surfboards, not really riding them. There wasn't much surf to ride.

The clock on the desk—an expensive L.E.D. quartz that had been a gift from a record company rep—said that it was 5:09
P.M.
. on
May 28th, 1985. It would, of course, be three hours later where Mike was calling from. Dark already. He felt a prickle of gooseflesh at that and he began to move, to do things. First, of course, he put on a record—not hunting, just grabbing blindly among the thousands racked on the shelves. Rock and roll was almost as much a part of his life as the Voices, and it was hard for him to do anything without music playing—and the louder the better. The record he grabbed turned out to be a Motown retrospective. Marvin Gaye, one of the newer members of what Rich sometimes called The All-Dead Band, came on singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

“Oooh-hoo, I bet you're wond'rin' how I knew. . . .”

“Not bad,” Rich said. He even smiled a little. This
was
bad, and it had admittedly knocked him for a loop, but he felt that he was going to be able to handle it. No sweat.

He began getting ready to go back home. And at some point during the next hour it occurred to him that it was as if he had died and had yet been allowed to make all of his own final business dispositions . . . not to mention his own funeral arrangements. And he felt as if he was doing pretty good. He tried the travel agent he used, thinking she would probably be on the freeway and headed home by now but taking a shot on the off-chance. For a wonder, he caught her in. He told her what he needed and she asked him for fifteen minutes.

“I owe you one, Carol,” he said. They had progressed from Mr. Tozier and Ms. Feeny to Rich and Carol over the last three years—pretty chummy, considering they had never met face to face.

“All right, pay off,” she said. “Can you do Kinky Briefcase for me?”

Without even pausing—if you had to pause to find your Voice, there was usually no Voice there to be found—Rich said: “Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, here—I had a fellow come in the other day who wanted to know what the worst thing was about getting AIDS.” His voice had dropped slightly; at the same time its rhythm had speeded up and become jaunty—it was clearly an American voice and yet it somehow conjured up images of a wealthy British colonial chappie who was as charming, in his muddled way, as he was addled.
Rich hadn't the slightest idea who Kinky Briefcase really was, but he was sure he always wore white suits, read
Esquire,
and drank things which came in tall glasses and smelled like coconut-scented shampoo. “I told him right away—trying to explain to your mother how you picked it up from a Haitian girl. Until next time, this is Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, saying ‘You need my card if you can't get hard.' ”

Carol Feeny screamed with laughter. “That's perfect!
Perfect!
My boyfriend says he doesn't believe you can just
do
those voices, he says it's got to be a voice-filter gadget or something—”

“Just talent, my dear,” Rich said. Kinky Briefcase was gone. W. C. Fields, top hat, red nose, golf-bags and all, was here. “I'm so stuffed with talent I have to plug up all my bodily orifices to keep it from just running out like . . . well, just running out.”

She went off into another screamy gale of laughter, and Rich closed his eyes. He could feel the beginnings of a headache.

“Be a dear and see what you can do, would you?” he asked, still being W. C. Fields, and hung up on her laughter.