“What did they look like?” Ricky fairly screamed.
Her eyes were very large, surrounded by white. Her breathing was labored; someone had sunk fangs into her throat.
“Oh, they was tall, and they was very polite, y’know, and they just asked if I rented out rooms ’cause they heard I’d taken in a girl, and I told them no, I didn’t, and it was my basement I’d rented out.”
Ricky was trapped inside Ricky’s skull, screaming, beating at the walls of bone, howling at the stupidity of the old woman, who had damned her, doomed her.
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner,why? ” Ricky pleaded with the old woman. Her face was ruined, desecrated by hobnailed boots of terror.
“Well, honey, I swear! I mean, neither of ’em looked anything like what you said your husband looked like; they was real nice gentlemen, and I answered ’em the way I would … what’re you doing?”
Ricky had risen hurriedly from the chair, was now throwing what few possessions were clean into the leather beach bag. It took no more than a minute.
“I’m leaving, Mrs. Prokosh. I’m getting out of here.” She started past the old woman. A meaty hand wrapped around her forearm.
“Now just a minute, Mrs. Darwin. You ate nine meals here this week that you ain’t paid for, and that’s fifty cents a meal, so that’s four-fifty.” She stuck out her free hand.
Ricky pulled open the beach bag, reached in to find her wallet, and drew out the sheaf of bills, so thin now. She whispered free a five-dollar bill and gave it to the old woman, started to move away.
“You got half a buck comin’ back,” Mrs. Prokosh said.
“Keep it,” Ricky threw back, over her shoulder. Change!
“Well, sorry to see you go, honey; I was gettin’ to think you might stay on …” But she was talking to herself; Ricky Darwin was on the dark evening street, moving away from the target house and its English basement coffin as quickly as possible.
It might all be imagination. It might have been a couple of Northwestern students needing rooms. Or a zoning action by the rent commission … if they still had those things. It might have been nothing.
The headlights erupted out of the bushes.
So it hadn’t been her imagination.
It had been Marshall’s men. They had found her.
The four headlights bathed her, limning her sharply, poised with mouth open, legs apart ready to spring, the black leather beach bag hanging down like a millstone weight in her hand, the copper hair tangled and dirty after two weeks in the basement.
And the car started up.
She ran, then.
She ran through the bushes at the other side of the street, into a yard, and around the back, through a short alley between garages and down another street. Then she was gasping for breath, and her chest hurt terribly as she ran and ran and looked for a wall to lean over so they could not see her, and then another street, down another street, there’s got to be another street. She was hopelessly lost, but ahead the main through street showed cars zipping past occasionally, and she headed for it, hoping to flag someone down.
It was night, the lights were bright and the streetlights were not. She was on the road, and because Chance is what it is, every car that went past her had a man and his wife in it, or a guy and his girl, or two women … but no single men, and everybody knows that a lone girl on a highway is picked up by single or hungry men.
And that night, that time, the hungry ones were elsewhere.
All save Ricky Darwin.
And she could smell the melting stench of acid-eaten flesh. She began running hysterically up the highway, crying, dry-heaving. An outside phone booth. A big red and aluminum phone booth, with a light and a phone and a way to call the police.
Police who could not have helped her before, but were able to help her now … at least to save her from immediate danger … and she ran up to the booth, threw herself into it, slammed the door … and opened her beach bag.
Where her symbols lay waiting.
Her symbols of making it to the top, hungrier than the rest.
She slumped back against the glass wall of the phone booth, too tired to run. It was over, it had to be over now. She might have called the police, then stayed in the area, somehow managed to avoid Marshall’s men till help arrived. She might have, if she hadn’t wanted to make it so big.
If she hadn’t wanted to get to the top — so hungry for the good things, the big things — where success was measured by how much money you had. How much money. Not how much small change, just how many bills.
She stared helplessly at the wallet, knowing they would come. Knowing there were worse things than Appleton, Wisconsin, and empty faces. Faces empty, but not burned out.
She stared into the wallet.
Filled with bills. Symbols of hunger.
But the phone took small change.