فصل سی و هشتم

CHAPTER 38

Francis Dolarhyde never got to work on Monday morning.

He started from his house exactly on time, as he always did. His appearance was impeccable, his driving precise. He put on his dark glasses when he made the turn at the Missouri River bridge and drove into the morning sun.

His Styrofoam cooler squeaked as it jiggled against the passenger seat He leaned across and set it on the floor, remembering that he must pick up the dry ice and get the film from . . .

Crossing the Missouri channel now, moving water under him. He looked at the whitecaps on the sliding river and suddenly felt that he was sliding and the river was still. A strange, disjointed, collapsing feeling flooded him. He let up on the accelerator.

The van slowed in the outside lane and stopped. Traffic behind him was stacking up, honking. He didn’t hear it.

He sat, sliding slowly northward over the still river, facing the morning sun. Tears leaked from beneath his sunglasses and fell hot on his forearms.

Someone was pecking on the window. A driver, face earlymorning pale and puffed with sleep, had gotten out of a car behind him. The driver was yelling something through the window.

Dolarhyde looked at the man. Flashing blue lights were coming from the other end of the bridge. He knew he should drive. He asked his body to step on the gas, and it did. The man beside the van skipped backward to save his feet.

Dolarhyde pulled into the parking lot of a big motel near the U.S. 270 interchange. A school bus was parked in the lot, the bell of a tuba leaning against its back window.

Dolarhyde wondered if he was supposed to get on the bus with the old people.

No, that wasn’t it, He looked around for his mother’s Packard.

“Get in. Don’t put your feet on the seat,” his mother said.

That wasn’t it either.

He was in a motel parking lot on the west side of St. Louis and he wanted to be able to Choose and he couldn’t.

In six days, if he could wait that long, he would kill Reba McClane. He made a sudden high sound through his nose.

Maybe the Dragon would be willing to take the Shermans first and wait another moon.

No. He wouldn’t.

Reba McClane didn’t know about the Dragon. She thought she was with Francis Dolarhyde. She wanted to put her body on Francis Dolarhyde. She welcomed Francis Dolarhyde in Grandmother’s bed.

“I’ve had a really terrific time, D.,” Reba McClane said in the yard.

Maybe she liked Francis Dolarhyde. That was a perverted, despicable thing for a woman to do. He understood that he should despise her for it, but oh God it was good.

Reba McClane was guilty of liking Francis Dolarhyde. Demonstrably guilty.

If it weren’t for the power of his Becoming, if it weren’t for the Dragon, he could never have taken her to his house. He would not have been capable of sex. Or would he?

“My God, man. That’s so sweeeet.”

That’s what she said. She said “man.”

The breakfast crowd was coming out of the motel, passing his van. Their idle glances walked on him with many tiny feet.

He needed to think. He couldn’t go home. He checked into the motel, called his office and reported himself sick. The room he got was bland and quiet. The only decorations were bad steamboat prints. Nothing glowed from the walls.

Dolarhyde lay down in his clothes. The ceiling had sparkling flecks in the plaster. Every few minutes he had to get up and urinate. He shivered, then he sweated. An hour passed.

He did not want to give Reba McClane to the Dragon. He thought about what the Dragon would do to him if he didn’t serve her up.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can’t stand it for long at a time. In the heavy calm between the waves, Dolarhyde could think. How could he keep from giving her to the Dragon? One way kept nudging him. He got up. The light switch clacked loud in the tiled bathroom. Dolarhyde looked at the showercurtain rod, a solid piece of oneinch pipe bolted to the bathroom walls. He took down the shower curtain and hung it over the mirror.

Grasping the pipe, he chinned himself with one arm, his toes dragging up the side of the bathtub. It was stout enough. His belt was stout enough too. He could make himself do it. He wasn’t afraid of that.

He tied the end of his belt around the pipe in a bowline knot. The buckle end formed a noose. The thick belt didn’t swing, it hung down in a stiff noose.

He sat on the toilet lid and looked at it. He wouldn’t get any drop, but he could stand it. He could keep his hands off the noose until he was too weak to raise his arms.

But how could he be positive that his death would affect the Dragon, now that he and the Dragon were Two? Maybe it wouldn’t. How could he be sure the Dragon then would leave her alone?

It might be days before they found his body. She would wonder where he was. In that time would she go to his house and feel around for him? Go upstairs and feel around for him and get a surprise?

The Great Red Dragon would take an hour spitting her down the stairs.

Should he call her and warn her? What could she do against Him, even warned? Nothing. She could hope to die quickly, hope that in His rage He would quickly bite deep enough.

Upstairs in Dolarhyde’s house, the Dragon waited in pictures he had framed with his own hands. The Dragon waited in art books and magazines beyond number, rebom every time a photographer . . . did what?

Dolarhyde could hear in his mind the Dragon’s powerful voice cursing Reba. He would curse her first, before he bit. He would curse Dolarhyde too - tell her he was nothing.

“Don’t do that. Don’t . . . do that,” Dolarhyde said to the echoing tile. He listened to his voice, the voice of Francis Dolarhyde, the voice that Reba McClane understood easily, his own voice. He had been ashamed of it all his life, had said bitter and vicious things to others with it.

But he had never heard the voice of Francis Dolarhyde curse him.

“Don’t do that.”

The voice he heard now had never, ever cursed him. It had repeated the Dragon’s abuse. The memory shamed him.

He probably was not much of a man, he thought. It occurred to him that he had never really found out about that, and now he was curious.

He had one rag of pride that Reba McClane had given him. It told him dying in a bathroom was a sorry end.

What else? What other way was there?

There was a way and when it came to him it was blasphemy, he knew. But it was a way.

He paced the motel room, paced between the beds and from the door to the windows. As he walked he practiced speaking. The words came out all right if he breathed deep between the sentences and didn’t hurry.

He could talk very well between the rushes of fear. Now he had a bad one, he had one that made him retch. A calm was coming after. He waited for it and when it came he hurried to the telephone and placed a call to Brooklyn.

A junior high school band was getting on the bus in the motel parking lot. The children saw Dolarhyde coming. He had to go through them to get to his van.

A fat, roundfaced boy with his Sam Browne belt all crooked put on a scowl, puffed up his chest and flexed his biceps after Dolarhyde passed. Two girls giggled. The tuba blatted out the bus window as Dolarhyde went by, and he never heard the laughter behind him.

In twenty minutes he stopped the van in the lane three hundred yards from Grandmother’s house.

He mopped his face, inhaled deeply three or four times. He gripped his house key in his left hand, the steering wheel with his right.

A high keening sounded through his nose. And again, louder. Louder, louder again. Go.

Gravel showered behind the van as it shot forward, the house bouncing bigger in the windshield. The van slid sideways into the yard and Dolarhyde was out of it, running.

Inside, not looking left or right, pounding down the basement stairs, fumbling at the padlocked trunk in the basement, looking at his keys.

The trunk keys were upstairs. He didn’t give himself time to think. A high humming through his nose as loud as he could to numb thought, drown out voices as he climbed the stairs at a run.

At the bureau now, fumbling in the drawer for the keys, not looking at the picture of the Dragon at the foot of the bed.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Where were the keys, where were the keys?

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? STOP. I’VE NEVER SEEN A CHILD AS DISGUSTING AND DIRTY AS YOU. STOP.”

His searching hands slowed.

“LOOK . . . LOOK AT ME.”

He gripped the edge of the bureau - tried not to turn to the wall. He cut his eyes painfully away as his head turned in spite of him.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“nothing.”

The telephone was ringing, telephone ringing, telephone ringing. He picked it up, his back to the picture.

“Hey, D., how are you feeling?” Reba MeClane’s voice.

He cleared his throat. “Okay” - hardly a whisper.

“I tried to call you down here. Your office said you were sick - you sound terrible.”

“Talk to me.”

“Of course I’ll talk to you. What do you think I called you for? What’s wrong?”

“Flu,” he said.

“Are you going to the doctor? . . . Hello? I said, are you going to the doctor?”

“Talk loud.” He scrabbled in the drawer, tried the drawer next to it.

“Have we got a bad connection? D., you shouldn’t be there sick by yourself.”

“TELL HER TO COME OVER TONIGHT AND TAKE CARE OF YOU.”

Dolarhyde almost got his hand over the mouthpiece in time.

“My God, what was that? Is somebody with you?”

“The radio, I grabbed the wrong knob.”

“Hey, D., do you want me to send somebody? You don’t sound so hot. I’ll come myself. I’ll get Marcia to bring me at lunch.” “No.” The keys were under a belt coiled in the drawer. He had them now. He backed into the hall, carrying the telephone. “I’m okay. I’ll see you soon.” The /s/s nearly foundered him. He ran down the stairs. The phone cord jerked out of the wall and the telephone tumbled down the stafrs behind him.

A scream of savage rage. “COME HERE CUNT FACE.”

Down to the basement. In the trunk beside his case of dynamite was a small valise packed with cash, credit cards and driver’s licenses in various names, his pistol, knife, and blackjack.

He grabbed the valise and ran up to the ground floor, quickly past the stairs, ready to fight if the Dragon came down them. Into the van and driving hard, fishtailing in the gravel lane.

He slowed on the highway and pulled over to the shoulder to heave yellow bile. Some of the fear went away.

Proceeding at legal speed, using his flashers well ahead of turns, carefully he drove to the airport.