She fumbled the ax down from its brackets, lugged it into the kitchen—marveling ruefully at how heavy it now seemed, how much arm-strength she’d lost in only five or six years—and set it down near Jennifer’s cot, handle up, leaning against the wall.
It wasn’t enough. The ax might make for a secondary, last-ditch line of defense if the thing got into the kitchen, but she was too weak and stiff and arthritic to wield it with any real vigor or competence anymore, and the idea of taking slow, clumsy strokes at a creature that moved as fast as this one did, in a half-darkened room that was dancing with shadows anyway, made her mouth dry with terror. That wasn’t good enough. She had to figure out some way to keep it out of the kitchen in the first place.
How to do that? How to keep it out of here, keep it away from Jennifer? Think, damn it, think!
The only thing she knew it feared was Desmond’s pocket calculator.
That was a start, then. She darted into the darkened parlor and snagged a long, white taper from the candelabra on the mantelpiece. With a shiver, she retreated back to the kitchen. She wrapped several paper napkins around its base to protect her hand against the drippings. Desmond would have more calculators among his effects—he was simply that kind of person. There might even be one among Jennifer’s things. And for that matter, there was her own, tucked away in the upstairs china cabinet, which she used periodically for taxes and bills.
The candle shed very little light; it seemed to blind her more than illumine the way. She hesitated in the doorway and the shadows flickered and waved about her like living things. She did not want to go into the dark.
Holding herself straight, she stepped forward, fighting against panic.
Desmond had brought along two more calculators, and Jennifer one, a child’s calculator in the shape of an owl, the readout part of its big round eyes. Among the child’s things, too, she had found a pocket computer game—Meteor Defense, or some such nonsense—and estimating it similar enough to be of use, that brought the total up to six. Five, if you didn’t count it.
It had been a harrowing expedition. She had started at every creak of the joists or scream of stairway tread underfoot. She had felt the Dark Angel upon her twice, as the shadow in an empty doorway had shifted toward her, and when the darkness behind a cabinet gathered itself up to leap. As she returned downstairs and into the parlor, her pace quickened. The kitchen beckoned.
It so heartened her to reach safe haven that she began to hum a snatch of Mozart. She was alive! She blew out the candle and dumped the calculators onto the kitchen table. For the moment, she didn’t even notice the thing crouching in the hallway.
A sudden sense of foreboding, a prickling, crawling sensation, made her spin about. Something moved just outside the kitchen door. Black crawled within black, shadow in shadow.
It yearned forward slightly, then retreated, bobbing up and down in indecision, torn between flight and attack. Mrs. Kingsley couldn’t even see it clearly, but she felt it studying the sleeping child.
More from panic than courage, then, she ran at the thing wildly. She slashed her arm as if the calculator in it were an ax, and she could use it to chop the thing into bloody bits, its black ichor steaming onto the floor, eating through the carpet.
It hesitated fractionally, then flowed into darkness and was gone.
Mrs. Kingsley sobbed in the doorway, weak and despairing. It was a victory, but a minor one. The thing was still loose, and with every encounter it was losing fear. She set calculators by the doors to the pantry, hallway, and parlor. The fourth she put by the window, and the little computer game was laid at the foot of Jennifer’s cot as a second line of defense. They all glowed gently.
The oil lamp was running low. Mrs. Kingsley blew it out, to conserve what little fuel remained, and twisted on two of the range burners. She felt oddly secure, surrounded by the arcane little devices, with their crisp little lights. She felt safe, protected. It was probably unwarranted, mere blind faith in technology, but…
The calculator by the parlor door began blinking. The numbers had disappeared and there was a single dot tracking its way across the readout. She remembered Desmond bragging about the thing, when he first showed it to her, explaining that if it weren’t used for some number of minutes—five? twenty? ten?—the numbers disappeared from the readout, though the memory still held them, and it went into an energy-conserving mode. And then, if more time went by and nobody used it, it simply turned itself off.
Hastily, she punched some figures at random, and hit a function button. The numbers came back on, with that funny little symbol that meant that an error had been made. She ignored it.
It wasn’t long before she realized that the calculators were not going to do. Three of them kept blinking off, and one of the others was failing, its batteries low. She couldn’t keep punching the things through the night—sleep would take her long before the snowplow came.
Think! she told herself fiercely. She had to kill the thing, to electrocute it somehow…She remembered a story Stephanie used to tell, about the summer camp she’d stayed at as a child, a place with an old-fashioned crank phone system.
The girls used to hook up a phone with one wire connected to a metal bed frame, then the other to a wad of aluminum foil. When the victim sat down on the bed frame, one girl would toss her the ball of foil and yell “Catch!” while her accomplice gave the phone a vicious crank.
She didn’t have a crank phone, of course, but she sensed she was on the right track. She’d found a trap that wouldn’t require much mechanical skill to set up. All she needed was a power source. Something like…
Something like an automobile battery.
She dressed hurriedly, making plans all the while.
First, she got the jumper cables out of the El Dorado’s trunk, leaving it up and open behind her as she hurried them through the snow to the kitchen. Jennifer was still asleep, and this time Mrs. Kingsley didn’t try to keep from stroking her hair. The simple act seemed to fill her with resolve. The creature would not get the child. This she swore.
Again she stepped out into the storm. The car’s front door balked at first, frozen with the cold. She yanked harder and it popped open.
Candy stared up at her accusingly. The dead girl’s face was grotesquely shrunken in upon itself, and the tightening skin had pulled the eyes wide open. Mrs. Kingsley gasped involuntarily. She had forgotten the macabre thing was there, stretched out across the front seat.
But there was no time for squeamishness. She leaned over the corpse, and fumbled under the steering wheel for the hood release. With a bing, the hood unlatched and she went around to the front—slamming the door shut behind her—to raise it up and confront the battery.
She was fiddling with the cables—they were cold, of course, and frozen to the terminals, and corroded over as well—when her hands seized up with arthritis again. Vainly she tried to force her mittened hands to close about a cable. Pain shot up her arms, but still her hands did not respond. Frustrated, she slammed them against the cables again and again.
The lines wouldn’t budge.
Tears built at the corners of her eyes, but sternly she suppressed them, blinking them down, thinking harsh thoughts at herself. There had to be a way—the trunk! She’d left it open, hadn’t she? She hurried around back and it was true, the trunk still gaped wide. She rummaged about with her useless arms, pushing things to one side or another as if they were long sticks she was using to poke with, and at last she found what she was looking for. A tire iron.