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The panes shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty falling on the sash. Jack had been planning
to reglaze all the windows this fall, she remembered, and then thought,Maybe that s what he came back
for. That was crazy, he was on the bottom of the ocean, but&
She sat with her head cocked to one side, her knitting now motionless in her hands. A little pink bootie.
She had already made a blue set. All of a sudden it seemed she could hear somuch. The wind. The faint
thunder of surf on Cricket Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making
herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hallway.
 Jack? she asked the silent night that was now no longer silent.  Is it you, dear? Then the living-room
window burst inward and what came through was not really Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering
strings of flesh hanging from it.
His compass was still around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.
The wind flapped the curtains in a cloud above him as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees
and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.
He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was hungry&
but this time chicken noodle soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the can.
Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those dark barnacle-encrusted holes, and she realized she was
looking at whatever remained of Jack s brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up and came
toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms. His
hands stretched. His teeth chomped mechanically up and down. Maddie saw he was wearing the remains
of the black-and-red-checked shirt she had bought him at L.L. Bean s last Christmas. It had cost the
earth, but he had said again and again how warm it was, and look how well it had lasted, how much of it
was left even after being under water all this time.
The cold cobwebs of bone which were all that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the
baby kicked in her stomach for the first time and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be
calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing s eye.
Page 15
Making horrid thick choking noises that sounded like the suck of a swill pump, he staggered backward,
clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootie swung in front of the cavity where his nose had
been. She watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootie, leaving a trail of
slime behind it.
Jack fell over the end table she d gotten at a yard sale just after they had been married she hadn t
been able to make her mind up about it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack finally said either she was
going to buy it for their living room or he was going to give the biddy running the sale twice what she was
asking for the goddam thing and then bust it up into firewood with
 with the
He struck the floor and there was a brittle, cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in two. The
right hand tore the knitting needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eye-socket and tossed it
aside. His top half crawled toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together.
She thought he was trying to grin, and then the baby kicked again and she remembered how
uncharacteristically tired and out of sorts he d sounded at Mabel Hanratty s yard-sale that day:Buy it,
Maddie, for Chrissake! I m tired! Want to go home and get m dinner! If you don t get a move on,
I ll give the old bat twice what she wants and bust it up for firewood with my
Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; polluted teeth poised to bite. To kill her and kill the baby. She tore
loose, leaving him with only her slipper, which he chewed on and then spat out.
When she came back from the entry, he was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen at least the top half of
him was with the compass dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of her, and there seemed to
be some idiot question in those black eye-sockets before she brought the ax whistling down, cleaving his
skull as he had threatened to cleave the end table.
His head fell in two pieces, brains dribbling across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that squirmed with
slugs and gelatinous sea worms, brains that smelled like a woodchuck exploded with gassy decay in a
high-summer meadow.
Still his hands clashed and clittered on the kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles.
She chopped& chopped& chopped.
At last there was no more movement.
A sharp pain rippled across her midsection and for a moment she was gripped by terrible panic:Is it a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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