Tears fill her eyes and she looks away, but hands push her face back, and there’s terrible fright in her eyes. I hear Avrum’s voice from somewhere overhead—only its sound, not the words—and Pinky lifts her hand. She’s holding the long, thin knife above my head. I scream, and she drops it. Something presses into my throat and stays there.
I close my eyes and wait. A door slams, leaving the room silent. Time passes, and I know they’ve gone.
When I open my eyes again, the room is empty. Above me, on the ceiling, a crack like a giant spider leg runs from one corner to the clouded plastic light fixture in the center. The ordinariness of it comforts me. I’m still not in pain, but I’m so weak that it takes a great effort to lift my head, and when I do I see my body oozing blood. The knowledge that I’m dying comes to me calmly, with a touch of disappointment that the ultimate of life’s actions should come in a thought not unlike any other thought.
The calmness is brief and quickly changes to anger, then desperation and then rage. I’ve got to stop them! Erase them from my computer . . . obliterate them . . . rip up their pages . . . kill them as they killed me!
I force myself up high enough to reach out and grab hold of the table leg. My mouth is filled with blood too thick to swallow. It gushes over my lips and runs down my chin. I drag myself up and claw at the paper piling up under the printer. The blood has clogged my eyes but I can feel the paper. I grab fistfuls and twist and turn and rip at them, but there are too many to get to. I reach up and drag the computer down to the floor and start typing. My bloody fingers slide over the keys. I must warn David. . . .
A heavy blood-blackness begins to flow over my mind and ease my body. It rolls in from a great distance, thickly and slowly blackening to tar as it moves nearer, smoothing and soothing the rawness of my terror and blanketing everything until there is only the tiniest dot of me, nothing more than a pinprick, left in the miles and miles of black stillness . . . I am alone . . . only the darkness and me . . . only the darkness and me . . . only the darkness . . .
Copyright
Copyright ©1981 by Francine Pascal
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any form. For information, address Writers House LLC at 21 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 9780786752973
Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services
Save Johanna! Page 24
