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  "Do what?"

  "Think of procreation during."

  She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep, he had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. "It's me," he said. "It's my fault."

  She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.

  "Don't be a stupid," she said. But her heart was beating fast--much too fast. It wasn't just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt--knew-- that he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn't her. It was him. Something in him.

  "Don't be such a klutz," she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid. The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.

  "I'm not a klutz and I'm not being stupid," he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, "and you know it. It's me. But I don't know why. "

  "You can't know any such thing." Her voice was harsh, scolding--her mother's voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.

  "Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, 'I know now. I know what's wrong.' Not just you not catching pregnant--everything. Everything that's wrong with my life."

  "Stanley, nothing's wrong with your life!"

  "I don't mean from inside," he said. "From inside is fine. I'm talking about outside. Something that should be over and isn't. I wake up from these dreams and think, 'My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don't understand.' I'm afraid. But then it just ... fades. The way dreams do."

  She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing: I can't remember. Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.

  No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985--the night of the bath--their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter's pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice-yearly trips back to New York. There were no more humorous remarks about whether or not they were taking their vitamin E. Stanley had also stopped mentioning babies, but sometimes, when she didn't know he was looking, she saw a shadow on his face. Some shadow. As if he were trying desperately to remember something.

  Other than that one cloud, their lives were pleasant enough until the phone rang during the middle of Family Feud on the night of May 28th. Patty had six of Stan's shirts, two of her blouses, her sewing kit, and her odd-button box; Stan had the new William Denbrough novel, not even out in paperback yet, in his hands. There was a snarling beast on the front of this book. On the back was a bald man wearing glasses.

  Stan was sitting nearer the phone. He picked it up and said, "Hello--Urisresidence."

  He listened, and a frown line delved between his eyebrows. "Who did you say?"

  Patty felt an instant of fright. Later, shame would cause her to lie and tell her parents that she had known something was wrong from the instant the telephone had rung, but in reality there had only been that one instant, that one quick look up from her sewing. But maybe that was all right. Maybe they had both suspected that something was coming long before that phone call, something that didn't fit with the nice house set tastefully back behind the low yew hedges, something so much a given that it really didn't need much of an acknowledgment ... that one sharp instant of fright, like the stab of a quickly withdrawn icepick, was enough.

  Is it Mom?she mouthed at him in that instant, thinking that perhaps her father, twenty pounds overweight and prone to what he called "the bellyache" since his early forties, had had a heart attack.

  Stan shook his head at her, and then smiled a bit at something the voice on the phone was saying. "You ... you! Well, I'll be goddamned! Mike! How did y--"

  He fell silent again, listening. As his smile faded she recognized--or thought she did--his analytic expression, the one which said someone was unfolding a problem or explaining a sudden change in an ongoing situation or telling him something strange and interesting. This last was probably the case, she gathered. A new client? An old friend? Perhaps. She turned her attention back to the TV, where a woman was flinging her arms around Richard Dawson and kissing him madly. She thought that Richard Dawson must get kissed even more than the Blarney stone. She also thought she wouldn't mind kissing him herself.

  As she began searching for a black button to match the ones on Stanley's blue denim shirt, Patty was vaguely aware that the conversation was settling into a smoother groove--Stanley grunted occasionally, and once he asked: "Are you sure, Mike?" Finally, after a very long pause, he said, "All right, I understand. Yes, I ... Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture. I ... what? ... No, I can't absolutely promise that, but I'll consider it carefully. You know that ... oh? ... He did? ... Well, you bet! Of course I do. Yes ... sure ... thank you ... yes. Bye-bye." He hung up.

  Patty glanced at him and saw him staring blankly into space over the TV set. On her show, the audience was applauding the Ryan family, which had just scored two hundred and eighty points, most of them by guessing that the audience survey would answer "math" in response to the question "What class will people say Junior hates most in school?" The Ryans were jumping up and down and screaming joyfully. Stanley, however, was frowning. She would later tell her parents she thought Stanley's face had looked a little off-color, and so she did, but she neglected to tell them she had dismissed it at the time as only a trick of the table-lamp, with its green glass shade.

  "Who was that, Stan?"

  "Hmmmm?" He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.

  "Who was that on the phone?"

  "No one," he said. "No one, really. I think I'll take a bath." He stood up.

  "What, at seven o'clock?"

  He didn't answer, only left the room. She might have asked him if something was wrong, might even have gone after him and asked him if he was sick to his stomach--he was sexually uninhibited, but he could be oddly prim about other things, and it wouldn't be at all unlike him to say he was going to take a bath when what he really had to do was whoops something which hadn't agreed with him. But now a new family, the Piscapos, were being introduced, and Patty just knew Richard Dawson would find something funny to say about that name, and besides, she was having the devil's own time finding a black button, although she knew there were loads of them in the button box. They hid, of course; that was the only explanation....

  So she let him go and did not think of him again until the credit-crawl, when she looked up and saw his empty chair. She had heard the water running into the tub upstairs and had heard it stop five or ten minutes later ... but now she realized she had never heard the fridge door open and close, and that meant he was up there without a can of beer. Someone had called him up
and dropped a big fat problem in his lap, and had she offered him a single word of commiseration ? No. Tried to draw him out a little about it? No. Even noticed that something was wrong? For the third time, no. All because of that stupid TV show--she couldn't even really blame the buttons; they were only an excuse.

  Okay--she'd take him up a can of Dixie, and sit beside him on the edge of the tub, scrub his back, play Geisha and wash his hair if he wanted her to, and find out just what the problem was ... or who it was.

  She got a can of beer out of the fridge and went upstairs with it. The first real disquiet stirred in her when she saw that the bathroom door was shut. Not just part-way closed but shut tight. Stanley never closed the door when he was taking a bath. It was something of a joke between them--the closed door meant he was doing something his mother had taught him, the open door meant he would not be averse to doing something the teaching of which his mother had quite properly left to others.

  Patty tapped on the door with her nails, suddenly aware, too aware, of the reptilian clicking sound they made on the wood. And surely tapping on the bathroom door, knocking like a guest, was something she had never done before in her married life--not here, not on any other door in the house.

  The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub ... but then you'd hit a cold pocket that would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now--as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager's legs in the black depths of Carson Lake.

  This one was around her heart.

  "Stanley? Stan?"

  This time she did more than tap with her nails. She rapped on the door. When there was still no answer, she hammered on it.

  "Stanley?"

  Her heart. Her heart wasn't in her chest anymore. It was beating in her throat, making it hard to breathe.

  "Stanley!"

  In the silence following her shout (and just the sound of herself shouting up here, less than thirty feet from the place where she laid her head down and went to sleep each night, frightened her even more), she heard a sound which brought panic up from the belowstairs part of her mind like an unwelcome guest. Such a small sound, really. It was only the sound of dripping water. Plink ... pause. Plink ... pause. Plink ... pause. Plink ...

  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--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 a
s 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.