Needful Things - Stephen King [132]
At first she tried to tell herself she wasn't seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing-wasn't, wasn't, wasn't. That wasn't Raider on the floor with something sticking out of his chest-how could it be?
She closed the door and beat frantically at the wall-switch with one hand. At last the hall light jumped on and she saw. Raider was lying on the floor. He was lying on his back the way he did when he wanted to be scratched, and there was something red jutting out of him, something that looked like looked like
Nettle uttered a high, wailing scream-it was so high it sounded like the whine of some huge mosquito-and fell on her knees beside her dog.
"Raider! Oh jesus Savior meek and mild! Oh my God, Raider, you ain't dead, are you? You ain't dead?"
Her hand-her cold, cold hand-beat at the red thing sticking out of Raider's chest the way it had beat at the light-switch a few seconds before. At last it caught hold and she tore it free, using a strength drawn from the deepest wells of her grief and horror. The corkscrew came out with a thick ripping sound, pulling chunks of flesh, small clots of blood, and tangles of hair with it. It left a ragged dark hole the size of a four-ten slug. Nettle shrieked. She dropped the gory corkscrew and gathered the small, stiff body in her arms.
"Raider!" she cried. "Oh my little doggy! No! Oh no!" She rocked him back and forth against her breast, trying to bring him back to life with her warmth, but it seemed she had no warmth to give.
She was cold. Cold.
Some time later she put his body down on the hall floor again and fumbled around with her hand until she found the Swiss Army knife with the murdering corkscrew jutting out of its handle. She picked it up dully, but some of that dullness left her when she saw that a note had been impaled upon the murder weapon. She pulled it off with numb fingers and held it up close in front of her. The paper was stiff with her poor little dog's blood, but she could still read the words scrawled on it:
NOBODY SLINGS MUD AT MY CLEAN SHEETS! I TOLD YOU I'D GET YOU!
The look of distracted grief and horror slowly left Nettle's eyes.
It was replaced with a gruesome sort of intelligence that sparkled there like tarnished silver. Her cheeks, which had gone as pale as milk when she finally understood what had happened here, began to fill with dark red color. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. She bared them at the note. Two harsh words slid out of her open mouth, hot and hoarse and rasping: "You bitch!"
She crumpled the paper in her fist and threw it against the wall.
It bounced back and landed near Raider's body. Nettle pounced upon it, picked it up, and spat on it. Then she threw it away again.
She got up and walked slowly down to the kitchen, her hands opening, snapping shut into fists, then springing open only to snap shut again.
14
Wilma jerzyck drove her little yellow Yugo into her driveway, got out, and walked briskly toward the front door, digging in her purse for her housekey. She was humming "Love Makes the World Go Round" under her breath. She found the key, put it in the lock and then paused as some random movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked to her right, and gaped at what she saw.
The living-room curtains were fluttering in the brisk afternoon wind. They were fluttering outside the house. And the reason they were fluttering outside the house was that the big picture window, which had cost the Clooneys four hundred dollars to replace when their idiot son had broken it with a baseball three years ago, was shattered.
Long arrows of glass pointed inward from the frame toward the central hole.
"What the fuck?" Wilma cried, and turned the key in the lock so hard she almost broke it off.
She rushed indoors, grabbing the door to slam it shut behind her, and then froze in place. For the first time in her adult life, Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck was shocked to complete immobility.
The living room was a shambles. The TV-their beautiful bigscreen TV on which they still owed eleven