Part 24 (1/2)

'I'll bet it plays h.e.l.l on your insides, though,' Howard said. He found he didn't mind being in the bathroom very much at all, as long as Vi was in here with him.

'Don't care,' she said, more drearily still. She flushed the toilet. 'How are you this morning?'

'Not great,' he said truthfully.

'You got one, too?'

'A hangover? No. I think it's that flu-bug I told you about. My throat's sore, and I think I'm running a finger.'

'What?'

'Fever,' he said. 'Fever's what I meant to say.'

'Well, you better stay home.' She went to the sink, selected her toothbrush from the holder, and began to brush vigorously.

'Maybe you better, too,' he said. He did not want Vi to stay home, however; he wanted her right by Dr. Stone's side while Dr. Stone filled cavities and did root ca.n.a.ls, but it would have been unfeeling not to have said something.

She glanced up at him in the mirror. Already a little color was returning to her cheeks, a little sparkle to her eye. Vi also recovered con brio. 'The day I call in sick at work because I've got a hangover will be the day I quit drinking altogether,' she said. 'Besides, the doc's gonna need me. We're pulling a complete set of uppers. Dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.'

She spat directly into the drain and Howard thought, fascinated: The next time it pops up, it'll have toothpaste on it. Jesus!

'You stay home and keep warm and drink plenty of fluids,' Vi said. She had adopted her Head Nurse Tone now, the tone which said If you're not taking all this down, be it on your own head. 'Catch up on your reading. And, by the bye, show that Mr. Hot s.h.i.+t Lathrop what he's missing when you don't come in. Make him think twice.'

'That's not a bad idea at all,' Howard said.

She kissed him on the way by and dropped him a wink. 'Your Shrinking Violet knows a few of the answers, too,' she said. By the time she left to catch her bus half an hour later, she was singing l.u.s.tily, her hangover forgotten.

The first thing Howard did following Vi's departure was to haul the step-stool over to the kitchen sink and whiz into the drain again. It was easier with Vi out of the house; he had barely reached twenty-three, the ninth prime number, before getting down to business.

With that problem squared away - at least for the next few hours - he walked back into the hall and poked his head through the bathroom door. He saw the finger at once, and that was wrong. It was impossible, because he was way over here, and the basin should have cut off his view. But it didn't and that meant - 'What are you doing, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d?' Howard croaked, and the finger, which had been twisting back and forth as if to test the wind, turned toward him. There was toothpaste on it, just as he had known there would be. It bent in his direction . . . only now it bent in three places, and that was impossible, too, quite impossible, because when you got to the third knuckle of any given finger, you were up to the back of the hand.

It's getting longer, his mind gibbered. I don't know how that can happen, but it is - if I can see it over the top of the basin from here, it must be at least three inches long . . . maybe more!

He closed the bathroom door gently and staggered back into the living room. His legs had once again turned into malfunctioning pogo-sticks. His mental ice-breaker was gone, flattened under a great white weight of panic and bewilderment. No iceberg this; it was a whole glacier.

Howard Mitla sat down in his chair and closed his eyes. He had never felt more alone, more disoriented, or more utterly powerless in his entire life. He sat that way for quite some time, and at last his fingers began to relax on the arms of his chair. He had spent most of the previous night wide-awake. Now he simply drifted off to sleep while the lengthening finger in his bathroom drain tapped and circled, circled and tapped.

He dreamed he was a contestant on Jeopardy - not the new, big-money version but the original daytime show. Instead of computer screens, a stagehand behind the game-board simply pulled up a card when a contestant called for a particular answer. Art Fleming had replaced Alex Trebek, with his slicked-back hair and somehow prissy poor-boy-at-the-party smile. The woman in the middle was still Mildred, and she still had a satellite downlink in her ear, but her hair was teased up into a Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant and a pair of cat's-eye frames had replaced her wire-rimmed gla.s.ses.

And everyone was in black and white, him included.

'Okay, Howard,' Art said, and pointed at him. His index finger was a grotesque thing, easily a foot long; it stuck out of his loosely curled fist like a pedagogue's pointer. There was dried toothpaste on the nail. 'It's your turn to select.'

Howard looked at the board and said, 'I'd like Pests and Vipers for one hundred, Art.'

The square with $100 on it was removed, revealing an answer which Art now read: 'The best way to get rid of those troublesome fingers in your bathroom drain.'

'What is . . . ' Howard said, and then came up blank. A black-and-white studio audience stared silently at him. A black-and-white camera man dollied in for a close-up of his sweat-streaked black-and-white face. 'What is . . . um . . . '

'Hurry up, Howard, you're almost out of time,' Art Fleming cajoled, waving his grotesquely elongated finger at Howard, but Howard was a total blank. He was going to miss the question, the hundred bucks would be deducted from his score, he was going to go into the minus column, he was going to be a complete loser, they probably wouldn't even given him the lousy set of encyclopedias . . .

A delivery truck on the street below backfired loudly. Howard sat up with a jerk, which almost pitched him out of his chair.

'What is liquid drain-cleaner?' he screamed. 'What is liquid drain-cleaner?''

It was, of course, the answer. The correct answer.

He began to laugh. He was still laughing five minutes later, as he shrugged into his topcoat and stepped out the door.

Howard picked up the plastic bottle the toothpick-chewing clerk in the Queens Boulevard Happy Handyman Hardware Store had just set down on the counter. There was a cartoon woman in an ap.r.o.n on the front. She stood with one hand on her hip while she used the other hand to pour a gush of drain-cleaner into something that was either an industrial sink or Orson Welles's bidet. DRAIN-EZE, the label proclaimed. TWICE the strength of most leading brands! Opens bathroom sinks, showers, and drains IN MINUTES! Dissolves hair and organic matter!

'Organic matter,' Howard said. 'Just what does that mean?'

The clerk, a bald man with a lot of warts on his forehead, shrugged. The toothpick poking out between his lips rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. 'Food, I guess. But I wouldn't stand the bottle next to the liquid soap, if you know what I mean.'

'Would it eat holes in your hands?' Howard asked, hoping he sounded properly horrified.

The clerk shrugged again. 'I guess it ain't as powerful as the stuff we used to sell - the stuff with lye in it - but that stuff ain't legal anymore. At least I don't think it is. But you see that, don'tcha?' He tapped the skull-and-crossbones POISON logo with one short, stubby finger. Howard got a good look at that finger. He had found himself noticing a lot of fingers on his walk down to the Happy Handyman.

'Yes,' Howard said. 'I see it.'

'Well, they don't put that on just because it looks, you know, sporty. If you got kids, keep it out of their reach. And don't gargle with it.' He burst out laughing, the toothpick riding up and down on his lower lip.

'I won't,' Howard said. He turned the bottle and read the fine print. Contains sodium hydroxide and pota.s.sium hydroxide. Causes severe burns on contact. Well, that was pretty good. He didn't know if it was good enough, but there was a way to find out, wasn't there?

The voice in his head spoke up dubiously. What if you only make it mad, Howard? What then?

Well . . . so what? It was in the drain, wasn't it?

Yes . . . but it appears to be growing.

Still - what choice did he have? On this subject the little voice was silent.

'I hate to hurry you over such an important purchase,' the clerk said, 'but I'm by myself this morning and I have some invoices to go over, so - '

'I'll take it,' Howard said, reaching for his wallet. As he did so, his eye caught something else - a display below a sign, which read FALL CLEARANCE SALE. 'What are those?' he asked. 'Over there?'

'Those?' the clerk asked. 'Electric hedge-clippers. We got two dozen of em last June, but they didn't move worth a d.a.m.n.'

'I'll take a pair,' said Howard Mitla. He began to smile, and the clerk later told police he didn't like that smile. Not one little bit.

Howard put his new purchases on the kitchen counter when he got home, pus.h.i.+ng the box containing the electric hedge-clippers over to one side, hoping it would not come to those. Surely it wouldn't. Then he carefully read the instructions on the bottle of Drain-Eze.

Slowly pour 1/4 bottle into drain . . . let stand fifteen minutes. Repeat application if necessary.

But surely it wouldn't come to that, either . . . would it?

To make sure it wouldn't, Howard decided he would pour half the bottle into the drain. Maybe a little bit more. I He struggled with the safety cap and finally managed to get it fff. He then walked through the living room and into the hall with the white plastic bottle held out in front of him and a grim Expression - the expression of a soldier who knows he will be ordered over the top of the trench at any moment - on his usually mild face.

Wait a minute! the voice in his head cried out as he reached for the doork.n.o.b, and his hand faltered. This is crazy! You KNOW it's crazy! You don't need drain-cleaner, you need a psychiatrist! You need to lie down on a couch somewhere and tell someone you imagine - that's right, that's the word, IMAGINE - there's a finger stuck in the bathroom sink, a finger that's growing!