Nightmares and Dreamscapes Page 29

  Maybe, the voice in his head suggested cautiously, you'll get used to the damned thing.

  No. The idea was insane. He had been married to Vi for twenty-one years, and he still found it impossible to go to the bathroom when she was in there with him. Those circuits just overloaded and shut down. She could sit there cheerily on the john, peeing and talking to him about her day at Dr. Stone's while he shaved, but he could not do the same. He just wasn't built that way.

  If that finger doesn't go away on its own, you better be prepared to make some changes in the way you're built, then, the voice told him, because I think you're going to have to make some modifications in the basic structure.

  He turned his head and glanced at the clock on the bed-table. It was quarter to two in the morning . . . and, he realized dolefully, he had to pee again.

  He got up carefully, stole from the bedroom, passed the closed bathroom door with the ceaseless scratching, tapping sounds still coming from behind it, and went into the kitchen. He moved the step-stool in front of the kitchen sink, mounted it, and aimed carefully into the drain, ears cocked all the while for the sound of Vi getting out of bed.

  He finally managed . . . but not until he had reached three hundred and forty-seven in his catalogue of prime numbers. It was an all-time record. He replaced the step-stool and shuffled back to bed, thinking: I can't go on like this. Not for long. I just can't.

  He bared his teeth at the bathroom door as he passed it.

  *

  When the alarm went off at six-thirty the next morning, he stumbled out of bed, shuffled down to the bathroom, and went inside.

  The drain was empty.

  "Thank God," he said in a low, trembling voice. A sublime gust of relief--relief so great it felt like some sort of sacred revelation--blew through him. "Oh, thank G--"

  The finger popped up like a Jack popping out of a Jack-in-the-box, as if the sound of his voice had called it. It spun around three times, fast, and then bent as stiffly as an Irish setter on point. And it was pointing straight at him.

  Howard retreated, his upper lip rising and falling rapidly in an unconscious snarl.

  Now the tip of the finger curled up and down, up and down. . . as if it were waving at him. Good morning, Howard, so nice to be here.

  "Fuck you," he muttered. He turned and faced the toilet. He tried resolutely to pass water . . . and nothing. He felt a sudden lurid rush of rage . . . an urge to simply whirl and pounce on the nasty intruder in the sink, to rip it out of its cave, throw it on the floor, and stamp on it in his bare feet.

  "Howard?" Vi asked blearily. She knocked on the door. "Almost done?"

  "Yes," he said, trying his best to make his voice normal. He flushed the toilet.

  It was clear that Vi would not have known or much cared if he sounded normal or not, and she took very little interest in how he looked. She was suffering from an unplanned hangover.

  "Not the worst one I ever had, but still pretty bad," she mumbled as she brushed past him, hiked her nightdress, and plopped onto the jakes. She propped her forehead in one hand. "No more of that stuff, please and thank you. American Grain, my rosy red ass. Someone should have told those babies you put the fertilizer on the hops before you grow em, not after. A headache on three lousy beers! Gosh! Well--you buy cheap, you get cheap. Especially when it's those creepy Lahs doing the selling. Be a dollface and get me some aspirin, will you, Howie?"

  "Sure," he said, and approached the sink carefully. The finger was gone again. Vi, it seemed, had once more frightened it off. He got the aspirin out of the medicine cabinet and removed two. When he reached to put the bottle back, he saw the tip of the finger protrude momentarily from the drain. It came out no more than a quarter of an inch. Again it seemed to execute that miniature wave before diving back out of sight.

  I'm going to get rid of you, my friend, he thought suddenly. The feeling that accompanied the thought was anger--pure, simple anger--and it delighted him. The emotion cruised into his battered, bewildered mind like one of those huge Soviet ice-breakers that crush and slice their way through masses of pack-ice with almost casual ease. I am going to get you. I don't know how yet, but I will.

  He handed Vi the aspirin and said, "Just a minute--I'll get you a glass of water."

  "Don't bother," Vi said drearily, and crunched both tablets between her teeth. "Works faster this way."

  "I'll bet it plays hell on your insides, though," Howard said. He found he didn't mind being in the bathroom very much at all, as long as Vi was in here with him.

  "Don't care," she said, more drearily still. She flushed the toilet. "How are you this morning?"

  "Not great," he said truthfully.

  "You got one, too?"

  "A hangover? No. I think it's that flu-bug I told you about. My throat's sore, and I think I'm running a finger."

  "What?"

  "Fever," he said. "Fever's what I meant to say."

  "Well, you better stay home." She went to the sink, selected her toothbrush from the holder, and began to brush vigorously.

  "Maybe you better, too," he said. He did not want Vi to stay home, however; he wanted her right by Dr. Stone's side while Dr. Stone filled cavities and did root canals, but it would have been unfeeling not to have said something.

  She glanced up at him in the mirror. Already a little color was returning to her cheeks, a little sparkle to her eye. Vi also recovered con brio. "The day I call in sick at work because I've got a hangover will be the day I quit drinking altogether," she said. "Besides, the doc's gonna need me. We're pulling a complete set of uppers. Dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it."

  She spat directly into the drain and Howard thought, fascinated: The next time it pops up, it'll have toothpaste on it. Jesus!

  "You stay home and keep warm and drink plenty of fluids," Vi said. She had adopted her Head Nurse Tone now, the tone which said If you're not taking all this down, be it on your own head. "Catch up on your reading. And, by the bye, show that Mr. Hot Shit Lathrop what he's missing when you don't come in. Make him think twice."

  "That's not a bad idea at all," Howard said.

  She kissed him on the way by and dropped him a wink. "Your Shrinking Violet knows a few of the answers, too," she said. By the time she left to catch her bus half an hour later, she was singing lustily, her hangover forgotten.

  *

  The first thing Howard did following Vi's departure was to haul the step-stool over to the kitchen sink and whiz into the drain again. It was easier with Vi out of the house; he had barely reached twenty-three, the ninth prime number, before getting down to business.

  With that problem squared away--at least for the next few hours--he walked back into the hall and poked his head through the bathroom door. He saw the finger at once, and that was wrong. It was impossible, because he was way over here, and the basin should have cut off his view. But it didn't and that meant--

  "What are you doing, you bastard?" Howard croaked, and the finger, which had been twisting back and forth as if to test the wind, turned toward him. There was toothpaste on it, just as he had known there would be. It bent in his direction . . . only now it bent in three places, and that was impossible, too, quite impossible, because when you got to the third knuckle of any given finger, you were up to the back of the hand.

  It's getting longer, his mind gibbered. I don't know how that can happen, but it is--if I can see it over the top of the basin from here, it must be at least three inches long . . . maybe more!

  He closed the bathroom door gently and staggered back into the living room. His legs had once again turned into malfunctioning pogo-sticks. His mental ice-breaker was gone, flattened under a great white weight of panic and bewilderment. No iceberg this; it was a whole glacier.

  Howard Mitla sat down in his chair and closed his eyes. He had never felt more alone, more disoriented, or more utterly powerless in his entire life. He sat that way for quite some time, and at last his fingers began to relax on the arms of his chair. He had
spent most of the previous night wide awake. Now he simply drifted off to sleep while the lengthening finger in his bathroom drain tapped and circled, circled and tapped.

  *

  He dreamed he was a contestant on Jeopardy--not the new, big-money version but the original daytime show. Instead of computer screens, a stagehand behind the game-board simply pulled up a card when a contestant called for a particular answer. Alex Trebek had been replaced by Art Fleming with his slicked-back hair and somehow prissy poor-boy-at-the-party smile. The woman in the middle was still Mildred, and she still had a satellite downlink in her ear, but her hair was teased up into a Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant and her wire-rimmed glasses had been replaced by a pair of cat's-eye frames.

  And everyone was in black and white, him included.

  "Okay, Howard," Art said, and pointed at him. His index finger was a grotesque thing, easily a foot long; it stuck out of his loosely curled fist like a pedagogue's pointer. There was dried toothpaste on the nail. "It's your turn to select."

  Howard looked at the board and said, "I'd like Pests and Vipers for one hundred, Art."

  The square with $100 on it was removed, revealing an answer which Art now read: "The best way to get rid of those troublesome fingers in your bathroom drain."

  "What is . . ." Howard said, and then came up blank. A black-and-white studio audience stared silently at him. A black-and-white camera man dollied in for a close-up of his sweat-streaked black-and-white face. "What is . . . um . . ."

  "Hurry up, Howard, you're almost out of time," Art Fleming cajoled, waving his grotesquely elongated finger at Howard, but Howard was a total blank. He was going to miss the question, the hundred bucks would be deducted from his score, he was going to go into the minus column, he was going to be a complete loser, they probably wouldn't even give him the lousy set of encyclopedias . . .

  *

  A delivery truck on the street below backfired loudly. Howard sat up with a jerk which almost pitched him out of his chair.

  "What is liquid drain-cleaner?" he screamed. "What is liquid drain-cleaner?"

  It was, of course, the answer. The correct answer.

  He began to laugh. He was still laughing five minutes later, as he shrugged into his topcoat and stepped out the door.

  *

  Howard picked up the plastic bottle the toothpick-chewing clerk in the Queens Boulevard Happy Handyman Hardware Store had just set down on the counter. There was a cartoon woman in an apron on the front. She stood with one hand on her hip while she used the other hand to pour a gush of drain-cleaner into something that was either an industrial sink or Orson Welles's bidet. DRAIN-EYE the label proclaimed. TWICE the strength of most leading brands! Opens bathroom sinks, showers, and drains IN MINUTES! Dissolves hair and organic matter!

  "Organic matter," Howard said. "Just what does that mean?"

  The clerk, a bald man with a lot of warts on his forehead, shrugged. The toothpick poking out between his lips rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. "Food, I guess. But I wouldn't stand the bottle next to the liquid soap, if you know what I mean."

  "Would it eat holes in your hands?" Howard asked, hoping he sounded properly horrified.

  The clerk shrugged again. "I guess it ain't as powerful as the stuff we used to sell--the stuff with lye in it--but that stuff ain't legal anymore. At least I don't think it is. But you see that, don'tcha?" He tapped the skull-and-crossbones poison logo with one short, stubby finger. Howard got a good look at that finger. He had found himself noticing a lot of fingers on his walk down to the Happy Handyman.

  "Yes," Howard said. "I see it."

  "Well, they don't put that on just because it looks, you know, sporty. If you got kids, keep it out of their reach. And don't gargle with it." He burst out laughing, the toothpick riding up and down on his lower lip.

  "I won't," Howard said. He turned the bottle and read the fine print. Contains sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide. Causes severe burns on contact. Well, that was pretty good. He didn't know if it was good enough, but there was a way to find out, wasn't there?

  The voice in his head spoke up dubiously. What if you only make it mad, Howard? What then?

  Well. . . so what? It was in the drain, wasn't it?

  Yes. . . but it appears to be growing.

  Still--what choice did he have? On this subject the little voice was silent.

  "I hate to hurry you over such an important purchase," the clerk said, "but I'm by myself this morning and I have some invoices to go over, so--"

  "I'll take it," Howard said, reaching for his wallet. As he did so, his eye caught something else--a display below a sign which read FALL CLEARANCE SALE. "What are those?" he asked. "Over there?"

  "Those?" the clerk asked. "Electric hedgeclippers. We got two dozen of em last June, but they didn't move worth a damn."

  "I'll take a pair," said Howard Mitla. He began to smile, and the clerk later told police he didn't like that smile. Not one little bit.

  *

  Howard put his new purchases on the kitchen counter when he got home, pushing the box containing the electric hedgeclippers over to one side, hoping it would not come to those. Surely it wouldn't. Then he carefully read the instructions on the bottle of Drain-Eze.

  Slowly pour 1/4 bottle into drain . . . let stand fifteen minutes. Repeat application if necessary.

  But surely it wouldn't come to that, either . . . would it?

  To make sure it wouldn't, Howard decided he would pour half the bottle into the drain. Maybe a little bit more.

  He struggled with the safety cap and finally managed to get it off. He then walked through the living room and into the hall with the white plastic bottle held out in front of him and a grim expression--the expression of a soldier who knows he will be ordered over the top of the trench at any moment--on his usually mild face.

  Wait a minute! the voice in his head cried out as he reached for the doorknob, and his hand faltered. This is crazy! You KNOW it's crazy! You don't need drain-cleaner, you need a psychiatrist! You need to lie down on a couch somewhere and tell someone you imagine--that's right, that's the word, IMAGINE--there's a finger stuck in the bathroom sink, a finger that's growing!

  "Oh no," Howard said, shaking his head firmly back and forth. "No way."

  He could not--absolutely could not--visualize himself telling this story to a psychiatrist . . . to anyone, in fact. Suppose Mr. Lathrop got wind of it? He might, too, through Vi's father. Bill DeHorne had been a CPA in the firm of Dean, Green, and Lathrop for thirty years. He had gotten Howard his initial interview with Mr. Lathrop, had written him a glowing recommendation. . . had, in fact, done everything but give him the job himself. Mr. DeHorne was retired now, but he and John Lathrop still saw a lot of each other. If Vi found out her Howie was going to see a shrink (and how could he keep it from her, a thing like that?), she would tell her mother--Vi told her mother everything. Mrs. DeHorne would tell her husband, of course. And Mr. DeHorne--

  Howard found himself imagining the two men, his father-in-law and his boss, sitting in leather wingback chairs in some mythic club or other, the kind of wingback chairs that were studded with little gold nailheads. He saw them sipping sherry in this vision; the cut-glass decanter stood on the little table by Mr. Lathrop' s right hand. (Howard had never seen either man actually drink sherry, but this morbid fantasy seemed to demand it.) He saw Mr. DeHorne--who was now doddering into his late seventies and had all the discretion of a housefly--lean confidentially forward and say, You'll never believe what my son-in-law Howard's up to, John. He's going to see a psychiatrist! He thinks there's a finger in his bathroom sink, you see. Do you suppose he might be taking drugs of some sort?

  And maybe Howard didn't really think all that would happen. He thought there was a possibility it might--if not in just that way then in some other--but suppose it didn't? He still couldn't see himself going to a psychiatrist. Something in him--a close neighbor of that something that would not allow him to urinate in
a public bathroom if there was a line of men behind him, no doubt--simply refused the idea. He would not get on one of those couches and supply the answer--There's a finger sticking out of the bathroom sink--so that some goatee-wearing head-shrinker could pelt him with questions. It would be like Jeopardy in hell.

  He reached for the knob again.

  Call a plumber, then! the voice yelled desperately. At least do that much! You don't have to tell him what you see! Just tell him the pipe's clogged! Or tell him your wife lost her wedding ring down the drain! Tell him ANYTHING!

  But that idea was, in a way, even more useless than the idea of calling a shrink. This was New York, not Des Moines. You could lose the Hope Diamond down your bathroom sink and still wait a week for a plumber to make a housecall. He did not intend to spend the next seven days slinking around Queens, looking for gas stations where an attendant would accept five dollars for the privilege of allowing Howard Mitla to move his bowels in a dirty men's room underneath this year's Bardahl calendar.

  Then do it fast, the voice said, giving up. At least do it fast.

  On this Howard's two minds were united. He was, in truth, afraid that if he didn't act fast--and keep on acting--he would not act at all.

  And surprise it, if you can. Take off your shoes.

  Howard thought this was an extremely useful idea. He acted upon it at once, easing off first one loafer and then the other. He found himself wishing he had thought to put on some rubber gloves in case of backsplatter, and wondered if Vi still kept a pair under the kitchen sink. Never mind, though. He was screwed up to the sticking point. If he paused to go back for the rubber gloves now, he might lose his courage . . . maybe temporarily, maybe for good.

  He eased open the bathroom door and slipped inside.

  The Mitla bathroom was never what one would call a cheery place, but at this time of day, almost noon, it was at least fairly bright. Visibility wouldn't be a problem . . . and there was no sign of the finger. At least, not yet. Howard tiptoed across the room with the bottle of drain-cleaner clutched tightly in his right hand. He bent over the sink and looked into the round black hole in the center of the faded pink porcelain.