Cruddy - Lynda Barry [45]
The phone rang six times before a man picked it up and started coughing. He didn’t say hello. He just started coughing. I got scared and hung up.
I waited a little bit and then I dialed the number again. Six rings, same man. Hack-coughing violently. This time he talks. In an accent. He says “Goddamn!” which scares me and I hang up again.
“Roberta!” says Julie. “Who are you calling?”
“Nobody.”
I dialed out the number again. This time the man picks up on the second ring. He says, “Goddamn TO YOU!” and then a sound like he’s trying to hang up but instead he drops the phone and I hear another voice yelling in the background. A girl’s voice. The phone gets picked up off the floor and Vicky Tallusoj says, “Hello?” and I hang up again.
I don’t know why I hang up. I didn’t expect to hang up. My finger just automatically pushed the hang-up button when I heard her voice.
Julie said, “Hoooooooo, Roberta?”
I jumped and then yelled at her. “Don’t EVER do that to me!”
“Do what?”
“Say that to me.”
“Say what?” asked Julie. “Who you calling? That?”
“Shut up.”
“Who you calling, Roberta?”
I said, “The time lady.”
“Suck,” said Julie. Her mouth flattened. “Lie.”
For a while I sat on the couch with Julie, sticking napkins with ice cubes in them against my nose, it had to be Vicky, it sounded just like her. I wondered if her nose was also bleeding. If she was also sitting in front of Nightmare Theater with blood on her shirt.
“Come ON, Roberta. Your turn.” Julie had been talking but I hadn’t really been listening. Something about how I would kill the unkillable hand. She said she would light it on fire. Many squirts of lighter fluid and then a match and then, “Whooooooosh!” she said. “Whooooooosh!” Incinerated. “You, Roberta. Your turn. How would you do it?”
“Stab it. Stab it and pound the knife in with a rock.”
Julie scratched her nose and looked at me hard. Could she tell? Was it obvious that a second wave of Creeper was starting to wash over me? She said, “You could stab it, but it would still be alive though.”
I said, “It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be going anyplace.”
“But it could still escape and come back after you.”
“Not the way I’d do it, it wouldn’t.”
“I still think burning it.”
I said, “But the bones, Julie. Bones crawl after everybody.”
I was dialing the phone again, sitting on the kitchen floor with the cord stretched down and I was facing the wall and I was making little fingerprint dots on the wall with smears of blood. I counted the rings. I said, “Come on, Vicky. Answer. Answer.”
I did not expect such a hard kick. The back of my eyes tilted out in red explosions from the sudden crack to my back. Julie was standing over me and screaming, “YOU ARE CALLING SOMEBODY! YOU ARE GOING TO LEAVE ME HERE!”
“Hello? Hello? Hello?” said the midget voice from the dropped telephone.
Julie and me were on the floor. She was yanking out chunks of my hair and I was bashing her into the table legs and punching her hard. She started screaming and screaming. I let her go.
She picked up the telephone and shouted, “YOU DIE!” and threw it. She yanked open a drawer and then there was this very weird moment. A weird stretched-out second where everything in the room just expanded. Time expanded. Molecules and the spaces between the molecules expanded. I saw every cell of Julie’s arm making the graceful slow-motion arc, and I had time to notice the mother’s meat knife cutting through the air, every glinting particle of every single molecule coming straight at my face, and I had time to calmly lean to the side and watch it pass my head and tong into the wall.
Julie. Do you know what the father would have said? He would have said you were a natural. He would have said, “Give that girl a Lucky Strike!” He would have pushed his whole pack of cigs at you and passed you his USN lighter.
Watch out for Creeper. Because just when you think it has all drained out of you, just when you are sure your Creeper experience is over, you will suddenly feel the incredible white explosion shoot up your back, and your fingers will stretch