She looked up at her silent witnesses. "Yes, I know," she said. "Hurry up. I know."
She picked up the knife again, and moved left. Long strips of splinters had already come out of the wood at that end, so some of the work was done. And now she had a technique. She ferreted around with the knifepoint close to the metal, looking for a weakness; then she dug out a few large pieces of wood, and went in for the kill. The third one was the easiest so far, except for the pain, which was excruciating. It ran all the way up to her shoulder joint, and into her neck. Her hand was beginning to feel stupid with numbness. Still, there were only two icons left to move. Surely they weren't beyond her capabilities.
Some instinct made her go back to the middle icon, thinking that she might get lucky. But it was a waste of time. The damn thing was as immovable as it had been previously. She went on to the right of it, and dug around the second of the remaining pair. The wood was just as vulnerable as it had been on the other side, but her numbed muscles were nowhere near as strong now as they'd been a minute ago. She took both hands to the blade, but she wasn't as smart with her left hand as she was with her right, and it added little by way of leverage. Her breath was coming in short gasps, her frustration mounting.
She glanced up at the ghosts, as though the fierceness of their need to be inside would lend her some strength. To her surprise she found that one of them had come forward and crouched down to examine one of the icons. It apparently carried no power now that it was out of its place in line, like a letter lifted from a curse-word, and rendered harmless. The man was so close to her she could have touched him if she'd raised her hand.
Very quietly, the dead man spoke.
"The bitch is coming," he said.
Tammy glanced over her shoulder. There was nobody in the passageway behind her, yet; nor was there any sound from the kitchen. Still she didn't doubt that what the man had said was true.
She willed her hands to grasp the knife a little harder, and they seemed to oblige her, just a little. She pushed the blade deeper into the wood and the icon shifted. She twisted and felt what was by now a familiar jolt of power from the metalwork. This time it passed through both hands. The icon was spat from the wood, and fell, spinning, on the tiles.
But she had no reason to celebrate. Her hand was now so weak that the knife fell from her grip and clattered on the floor between her knees. There was no feeling remaining in her right hand; and her left was not going to be much use to her on the remaining icon.
Still, what choice did she have? She picked the knife up in her left hand anyway, and using the numbed wrist of her right, guided it to the hole she'd dug around the central icon. Perhaps if she just wriggled the point of the blade around for long enough, she'd locate a weak spot. She leaned forward, to put the weight of her body into the calculation.
"Come on," she murmured to it, "you sonofabitch . . . move for Momma."
There was a sound behind her. A soft sound. A groan.
She looked back, fearing the worst, and the worst it was.
Todd had swung around the doorjamb coming from the kitchen, his hand clutching his lower belly. There was blood running between his fingers; and blood on his trousers, a lot of it.
"She stabbed me," he said, his tone one of near-disbelief. He kept his eyes fixed on Tammy, as though he couldn't bear to inspect the damage. "Oh Jesus, she stabbed me."
He leaned forward, and for a moment Tammy thought he was simply going to fall over. But he reached out and caught hold of the lips of one of the four alcoves carved into the walls of the passageway.
"You have to get out of here," he said to Tammy.
She got to her feet, ready to help him, but he waved her away.
"Just go! Before she—"
Comes, he would have said. But it was academic. Katya was there already, coming round the corner, the knife in her hand, his blood on it. Todd turned back to look at her.
She was moving at her old, leisurely pace, as though they had all the time in the world to play out the last reel of this tragedy.
Todd reached into the alcove and found an antique pitcher there. His body blocked what he was doing from Katya's view, but even if she'd seen what he was up to, Tammy thought, she would still have kept coming. She had the knife, after all. And more than that, she had the certainty that Todd had nowhere else to go; nowhere to fall, finally, except into her arms; into her knife. That was what the pace of her approach announced: that she expected him to die in her embrace.
Todd grasped the pitcher and swung it round. It caught Katya's shoulder, and shattered, shards of ceramic flying up into her face.
The impact was sufficient to throw her back against the wall, and the knife dropped from her hand, but the effort had used up a significant part of what was left of Todd's energies. He stumbled across the passageway, his arms outstretched, and fell against the opposite wall.
His face was ashen, his teeth clenched—his eyelids lazy with pain.
"Let them in," he murmured to Tammy. "What are you waiting for? Let. Them. In!"
At the other end of the passageway, Tammy felt Katya's gaze fix on her. A ceramic chip had nicked the skin beneath her eye; a single drop of blood ran down over her flawless cheek. She didn't trouble herself to wipe it away. She simply dropped to her haunches and casually picked up the knife.
Even in the chaos of her thoughts, the symmetry of all this was not lost on Tammy. Two women, each with a knife. And dying between them, the man they'd both loved; or imagined they had.
As Tammy's mother had been fond of saying, when the subject of love had come up in conversation, as it would from time to time: it'll all end in tears.
Well, so it had. And more to come, no doubt. Plenty more to come.
She tore her gaze from Katya, picked up the knife with her left hand and guided it with her right back to the assaulted wood around the middle icon.
Again, she leaned into the task, put every pound to work. She twisted the knife to the left. A few small splinters came away. She twisted again, this time to the right, wanting nothing in the world as much as she wanted that sickening jolt through her bones. She could see more of the icon's depth now, embedded in the wood. It went far deeper than the others, she saw. That was why it refused to budge. It wasn't just wider, it was longer.
She glanced up at the ghosts. They'd missed nothing of what was going on in the passageway. Eyes like slits, they'd all come a little closer to the threshold, daring its consequences.
Behind her, Todd said: "Tammy?"
He was sliding down the wall, his gaze fixed on her. Katya had apparently used the knife on him again, but hadn't lingered to finish him off. She was moving past him, her eyes on Tammy.
"It'll all end in tears . . ." Tammy murmured to herself, and then turned one more time to the challenge of the central icon.
For the last time, she threw her weight down upon it, using her weakened left hand and her benumbed right to twist the knife-blade in the groove beneath the metal ridge.
Another two or three small splinters came away.
"Come on," she begged. "Please, God. Move."
Katya was right behind her now. She could feel her presence at her back. And of course Tammy was a perfect target, right now, but there wasn't a thing in Hell she could do about that, not if she wanted to keep going, keep pushing, keep hoping the damn thing would—
It moved!
She looked down at the icon, and yes, God love it, the thing had lifted out of the wood a little. Scarcely at all, in truth, but movement was movement.