Walter found a well-stocked first-aid box in a bedside drawer and brought it to back to Nina. Bell appeared seconds later with a stack of clean towels. He handed the towels to Nina, and then followed the cord to the tipped over telephone.
As he dialed 911, Walter brought a pot of hot water from the kitchen, then squatted alongside Nina and tried to help her dress and bind Mrs. Baumgartner’s wounds. The old woman moaned and flinched at their touch. Walter took her cold hand and squeezed it.
“Please try to calm down, Mrs. Baumgartner,” he said. “I realize that you have experienced an awful shock, but it’s vitally important that you tell us what happened. Who attacked you?”
Mrs. Baumgartner started sobbing again.
“I...” She clutched at Walter’s shirtfront. “I don’t know! There was no one! No one!” The tone of her voice was swiftly ratcheting up into hysteria. Walter squeezed her hand again, firmly but gently.
“Please, Mrs. Baumgartner. Slow down and start from the beginning. Think it through. Do you mean you were attacked from behind?”
The old woman stifled another sob and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I mean there was no one. I was sitting on the couch, watching The Match Game, you know? And then... then I got dizzy. Like maybe I was going to faint. Then something... something hit me! In my face! This thing, it kept on hitting me! Cutting me! But I couldn’t see it! There was no one there! No one!” She looked up at Walter as if it was all his fault. “Who was hitting me? Who?”
A sob came from behind them. Walter looked up. There were tears running down the old man’s face. He was staring at Walter.
“It’s me,” he said again. “It’s my dream. Don’t you see. My dream, it got out!”
Walter turned to him as Nina continued to work.
“What dream?” Walter asked. “Did you see what happened?”
“Try to think,” Bell said, hanging up the phone and sitting on the arm of the couch beside the man. “Did you see who did this?”
“It’s me,” the old man said again. “Me! I did it. It’s me!”
“He’s obviously not in his right mind,” Nina snapped. “Can’t you see that?”
The old man pulled his hands out from under the blanket. Only there were no hands. Just old, long-healed stumps.
One stump was slightly longer than the other, and seemed to contain a functioning wrist joint so that its tapered tip curled and straightened as he held them out to Walter.
“It’s me!” he shouted. “ME!”
Nina let out a derisive snort.
“See,” she said. “He couldn’t have done this.”
The old man squinted at Nina, suddenly canny.
“In my dream I can,” he said. “In my dream, I have hands. With claws.”
Walter stared at the old man, a flock of terrifying thoughts suddenly crowding into his head unbidden. Sweat prickled his brow.
He turned to Bell.
“Belly?” he said. “Do you think...?”
“I don’t know a goddamn thing.” Bell turned to the door, showy anger like a stripper’s feather fan not quite covering his underlying fear. “Anyway, it’s not our job to figure out what happened. That’s for the police. I’m going to go outside and wait for the ambulance.”
Walter watched as he went out the front entryway and up the shadowed stone stairs to the street, leaving the door wide open. Walter turned back to Nina. She looked up from binding a wound on Mrs. Baumgartner’s arm.
“What?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to say it out loud. I...” Walter shook his head. “I want to be wrong. I want this all to have a reasonable...”
Footsteps brought his head up again. Bell was coming back down the stairs, his pace slow and measured. He stopped in the door. His face was a cold mask.
“Walter,” he said. “You’d better come up and have a look at this.”
15
Walter rose from the old woman’s side, frowning.
“What is it?” he asked.
“You’d better come and look,” Bell repeated.
Walter looked down at Nina. She waved him on.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ve got it here. There isn’t much more to do for her at this point anyway.”
He nodded, then crossed to the door and followed Bell up the stone steps. At the top, Bell stood aside and spread his hands at a scene of chaos and destruction.
“I believe this is the source of the smashing sounds we were hearing earlier.”
Walter stared, stunned. All around in the glow of the street lamps lay scattered and smashed pieces of furniture, kitchen appliances, record albums, books, shoes, clothes. A broken TV had caved in the roof of a white Mustang. An upright piano lay on its back in the middle of the street, split open like a dead whale and blocking traffic in both directions. A painting in a gilded frame was impaled on the spikes of the iron fence of the building next to Nina’s place. And in the midst of it all stood a middle-aged man and woman in their bedclothes, arguing violently.
He was a large, portly man with a thick crown of blond curls and a meaty, square-jawed face that had probably been handsome twenty years and way too many three-martini lunches ago. A high-school quarterback gone to seed. His cheap, gaudy robe had been haphazardly tied and was gaping open to show his bare chest and hairy belly.
She was an aging model type, strawberry blond with a rail-thin, cocaine physique under a floaty sheer tangerine baby-doll negligee. She wore heeled gold mules with marabou on the toes and her long, horsey face was shiny with night-cream.
“No problem,” he was saying. “We’re gonna be okay. We’re insured.”
“We are not okay!” the woman screeched at him. “What exactly are you planning to put on the claim? Act of God?”
“Would you shut up for one second and let me think?”
Just then a young man in blue jeans and a western shirt ran out of a building across the street and jolted to a stop beside the caved-in Mustang, his jaw hanging open.
“Who did this?” he shouted. “Who the hell did this to my car?” He looked up at the man in the pajamas, who was pointlessly trying to match up jagged fragments of shattered records. “Is this your stuff? Is this your TV? Did you drop your goddamn TV on my brand new car?”
The older man backed up as the car owner advanced menacingly toward him.
“I didn’t do anything!” the older man said, empty hands held out like a peace offering. “It just happened! My wife and I were just getting ready for bed, and all of a sudden, everything in the room starts shaking and flying around, smashing through the windows and dropping to the street. It must have been some kind of an earthquake.”
“There was no earthquake!” The angry young car owner looked around at the gathering crowd. “Did anybody feel an earthquake? No. Did you?” He shook his head. “You’re talking out of your ass, pal!”
“So what are you suggesting?” the wife said, getting fearlessly in the young man’s face, stabbing his chest with a pointy red fingernail. “Do I look like I could have thrown a goddamn piano out a window?” She waved her hand. “Does he?”
Walter turned away as the argument continued, and looked up at the building. On the third floor, the floor directly adjacent to the room in which Bell and he had just taken their trip, all of the tall, elegant Victorian bay windows had been smashed out, casements splintered, sills shattered, revealing the insides of an apartment that now looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.
Furniture was upended, draperies sagged off broken curtain rods and flapped in the wind, pictures hung crooked on the walls. And standing in the middle of it, his hands in tight fists at his sides, was a staring, teenaged boy, sharp-featured, mop-haired, dark-eyed, and utterly and absolutely terrified.