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brown eyes that demand the truth and nothing but the truth.
"It's that little finger. The one that's gone. That thing is driving me
wild ... it feels as if mice with saber teeth are gnawing it to rags."
"Ghost pains," she said, nodding. "They told me you'd have them,
but I don't think they realize how bad it is for you. They're used to
people losing arms and legs, and I think they didn't expect a small part
like a finger to give you so much trouble."
Ardath Mayhar The Crystal Skull 97
There was nothing to do about it, so she sympathized, and that
helped a little. When it got so I was trying to turn off the TV with
thought waves, she read to me or told me funny stories about her
classmates and professors, her boss and the technicians at the lab
where she worked. It helped.
But when she was gone! After dark, when the hospital quieted
down to its nightly routine, there was nothing left in the world but that
little finger on my right hand.
Rog, the foreman on the crew, came in to see me, when they took
the sign off my doors. I felt funny about asking him the question I'd
been saving up, but I finally found the nerve.
"Rog, that house. The one that fell on me. Is it all the way down,
yet?"
He looked at me sort of funny. "Not yet. They got the contractor
out there and some engineers. It's a funny set-up. If had had any idea
of the problems we'd find, we would have done that first and never
begun demolition the way we did. Might have used a wrecking ball.
"The whole building is so unstable it stinks. It looked solid as
Gibraltar, remember? It's still sitting there with only the one wall
down. They can't figure out why it fell and the rest didn't. All you
did was to chip an anchor-point for a towline. Whammo! Down she
came, right on top of you. I never was so scared in my life, let me tell
you. We thought you'd bought it for certain."
Hmmm. That brought me to my second question. "Did anybody
ever look around for the finger I lost? I guess they couldn't have
spotted it in all the mess, though."
He shook his head. "They won't let us near the thing, any more.
Once you were out, they put up a fence with padlocks and all the
trimmings. Why?"
That was the question I didn't want to answer. "Just wondered," I
said. "After all, it isn't every day you lose a piece of yourself." I
turned it aside as a joke. That didn't help, either. I thought of that bit
of flesh and bone lying in all the rubble, and felt that mice were
probably stripping it down to the bone. Someway, I could feel it
happening. The thought preyed on my mind.
Ardath Mayhar The Crystal Skull 98
Then I remembered the movement I had seen, back in the first floor
corner where I had to anchor the towline. Something a lot bigger than
a mouse or even a rat had been in that room. I'd thought it was a
cat, at the time, and I hadn't thought of it again. But I had heard the
ghost of a growl. And now I thought I recalled the glint of sharp
teeth.
"Hamp Carstairs," I said aloud, "you will drive yourself round the
bend, if you lie here making up stories. Go to sleep!"
With the help of a nurse with a shot, I did just that. But the next day
I was all raw nerves. Sedatives made me worse, until it seemed the
skin would crawl right out from under the casts and bandages and
make off down the hall.
Lola was beside herself. She tried talking, reading, but I lay there
in a cold sweat, trying to keep from screaming. She could see it in my
eyes, which was just about all of my face she could see.
"Hamp!"
I had closed my eyes, so she could get some rest. I opened them to
see her bending over me.
"Hamp, it's that damned finger, isn't it? I am going down to that
brownstone and dig around until I find it. I'm going to bring it back
and put it in a jar of formaldehyde, right on that table, so you can see
that nothing's chewing on it. It may not help you, but then again it
might."
It was hard to talk well through all the bandages, but I almost
yelled, "Lo, listen! That place is a deathtrap. Rog says they have
locked it up, it's so dangerous. It's not going to help either of us if
you get smashed up, too. I want all your parts in working order, when
I get out of this cast!"
She didn't listen, of course. I should have kept my trap shut and
never hinted at the problem the finger was giving me. She left, and I
could see determination coming out of her pores. And before I could
have somebody call the company, the nurse gave me a shot that
zonked me out entirely.
Lola didn't come back that afternoon. At bedtime, there still hadn't
been a call. I began to sweat. I had the nurse call Rog at home, but he
Ardath Mayhar The Crystal Skull 99
didn't know of any trouble out at the work site. They were working
on the second house down in the row on the other side of the street,
and there had been no trouble at the unstable one.
I knew Lola had an early morning class, before her shift at the lab.
I had no hope of seeing her before noon, and she had no phone. I kept
right on sweating, which at least had taken my mind off that finger.
At ten o'clock, the door of my room opened and she came in,
though she should have been at work. There was a bandage on her
hand ... the left hand. In her right, she carried a small jar.
She set it on the table with a thump, and I could see something
bobbing around in the liquid it contained. I cut my gaze around and
stared. It had been, I thought, a finger. All the flesh was gone, and the
bone was scored with gnaw marks.
I looked up and couldn't even raise my eyebrows, not so it would
show.
"Have you been bothered by your finger, this morning?" she asked.
I thought about it. I'd been so worried that I hadn't thought about
the finger at all. I felt for it now, but there wasn't a twinge, nor even
the faintest tickle.
"No." I sounded puzzled, even to me.
She grunted. "Something had it, back in that half-wrecked room.
Something furry and bright-eyed and mean. I beat it off with my
purse and got the finger bone away. But it ... got even. She held out
her hand. "It got mine, in exchange."
"Lo, I told you not to go in there. You might have been killed. The
thing could be rabid ... anything might happen."
She looked at me. I saw deeply into her eyes for the first time since
she had arrived. I recognized the pain there. Oh, did I ever recognize
it!"
"You? Now? It got yours in place of mine?"
She nodded. "But, Hamp, I'm in a lot better shape to cope with it
than you are. I can move around and stay busy. I'm not trapped in a
cast, wrapped up in ninety yards of gauze. It's ... it's not such a bad
swap, you know. Not really." She smiled.
Ardath Mayhar The Crystal Skull 100
I could see the tiny lines at the corners of her mouth. I knew ... but,
God! what a girl!
She didn't stay long. She was due at the lab ... had swapped out
with another girl so she could come in and relieve my mind. Once she
left, I was alone again to think about the thing that lived in that
abandoned brownstone. And about what Lola was going through. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]