It was as far as she was willing to go right now. Maybe in a hundred years she’d be so bored that sawing her arms off with a dull butter knife would sound amusing.
Stay as long as she could. Leave whenever she was willing. She got it now.
She went back to bed. The clock radio on the nightstand counted the minutes. She turned the bright red numbers toward the wall and tried not to think about it. If she really was immortal she had all the time in the universe. It seemed pointless to obsess over every second. Dana turned the clock toward her and frowned. Twenty-two minutes had passed.
Twenty-two minutes.
She put the pillow over her face and reflected on infinity, breaking it up into twenty-two-minute chunks. Endless bits of twenty-two, one right after the other after the other.
The crawl of eternity indeed.
She got up and turned on the television. Nothing was on. Or maybe she just wasn’t in the mood.
“Can’t sleep either, huh?” asked the closet monster. “I hate that. Of course I only sleep seven minutes every other century. And believe me, that’s annoying. I have a lot of time to kill and a nap now and then might help.”
She turned up the volume.
“We’re the only company we’re going to have for a long, long while,” Vom said. “We can at least try and be civil.”
She stared at the TV, not really watching it, just thinking about the passage of time, listening to the tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall. Where had that clock even come from, anyway? It hadn’t been there before. She was certain of that. She’d been over every inch of this place.
Diana muted the television.
“This isn’t fair,” she said. “All I wanted was an apartment.”
“You seem like a decent lady,” said Vom. “I’m really sorry that I have to eat you.”
She walked over to the closet. “You keep saying that, but if you were really sorry you wouldn’t. Then I could open this closet, and we could both get out of here.”
“Sounds like a good deal to me.”
“So you agree then?”
“Sure. No eating. I promise.”
She reached for the knob but stopped short of touching it.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t. And I’ll admit I’m not trustworthy. I did promise not to eat all the others. And I really meant it when I said it. But it just sort of happens. Not always though. There was this Spanish guy who I didn’t eat. Good guy, too. Lot of fun. I miss him.”
“What made him different?”
“He had the stuff.”
“The stuff?”
“You know what I’m talking about. The stuff. The goods. The mojo.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means what it means,” said Vom. “When someone has the stuff, you just know it.”
“That’s not very helpful at all.”
“There are mysteries beyond even my ken. Listen. I’ve done this plenty of times. I know how this game goes. Some people open the closet right away. Others hold out for a while. One guy made it a whole century. But you are going to open this door one day. So why don’t we just cut the suspense and jump to the inevitable conclusion?”
Diana wanted to argue, but if what West and Vom had told her was true, then it really was unavoidable. The question wasn’t if she would open the closet. The question was when.
It took her four days to get bored enough to think about finally opening the door. Four days of watching television, of staring at the ticks of the clock, of obsessively searching every nook and cranny of the apartment for some form of escape, of waiting for the phone to ring and for West to tell her that he’d changed his mind and she was free to go.
No one would be coming for her because no one knew she was here. If she was going to get out she’d have to do it herself. And four days of steady rumination on the subject always led back to that damn closet.
She went to the refrigerator and demanded another turkey sandwich. Then another. Then another. Then she stopped thinking small and demanded a turkey. Then she just started demanding “Food” and left it up to the refrigerator to supply whatever it felt like. She piled the sandwiches and turkeys and cakes and hamburgers and buckets of apples and haggis and everything else in the living room. When she ran out of room on the coffee table she started putting stuff on the floor. She threw everything in a huge messy heap. She didn’t stop until the mound of food filled half the room and was nearly to the ceiling.
She didn’t know if it would be enough to satisfy his appetite, but she was already tired of waiting. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life in this cage, dreading the inevitable. Better to just get it over with.
She threw open the closet door.
Bright green fur covered Vom the Hungering. His flat, wide head had no eyes or ears or nose. Just one huge mouth. Another maw split his potbelly. He was simultaneously lanky and pudgy. Her first instinct was that he was an old puppet, rejected from Sesame Street and banished to a limbo alongside moldy raincoats and wingtip shoes. It was only when he lurched toward her, both of his mouths licking their lips, arms raised, that she realized he was alive.
She smacked him across the head with a rolled-up magazine.
“No!” She scolded him gently, but firmly.
Vom snarled and reached toward her again.
“No!” She hit him again. “Not for you!”
He frowned, rubbing his snout.
She pointed at the pile of food. “That’s yours.”
Vom pounced on the meal, gleefully shoving down everything. She was revolted and hypnotized by the sight and watched him goras imself for several minutes. He wasn’t slowing down, and she doubted he would be full once he finished—in another two or three minutes at most.
The front door was back. She tiptoed out into the hall and shut the door quietly behind her.
The puppy in front of Number Two wasn’t a puppy anymore. It was something else. Something vaguely puppyshaped, but with a malformed skull, giant black eyes, and a sucker-like mouth.
The creature looked up at her with its three huge eyes, wagged the tentacle sticking out of its backside, and whimpered.
Diana waited until she had slunk past the hideous creature before she ran screaming into the streets.
CHAPTER THREE
She stopped shrieking after a minute.
It wasn’t the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn’t managed to repair itself. She’d left something behind in that apartment. Something she’d always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning, the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud sproing.
No, she eventually stopped screaming because she discovered that running and freaking out at the same time was exhausting. She doubted even an Olympic athlete could do it for very long. Also, she got stuck at a crosswalk, and it was hard to keep the momentum while standing there waiting for the light to change.
She sat on a bench and caught her breath. A glance back the way she’d come showed neither Vom nor West following her. She’d escaped. Too bad she’d lost her stuff, but there was no way she was going back for it. Her first thought was that it was just more crappy luck, but then she remembered that she’d avoided being trapped for eternity or being eaten by a gangly furry monster and decided it was the opposite. Things were starting to turn around. If she could escape unhurt from Vom the Hungering, everything else should be easy.