Salem's Lot - Stephen King [172]
She had been sick all day, sick and sleepy and nearly unable to get out of bed. And when she had fallen into a heavy slumber after noon, while her husband was off answering questions for a silly missing persons report, he had come to her in a dream. His face was handsome and commanding and arrogant and compelling. His nose was hawklike, his hair swept back from his brow, and his heavy, fascinating mouth masked strangely exciting white teeth that showed when he smiled. And his eyes… they were red and hypnotic. When he looked at you with those eyes, you could not look away… and you didn’t want to.
He had told her everything, and what she must do - and how she could be with her daughter when it was done, and with so many others… and with him. Despite Susan, it was him she wanted to please, so he would give her the thing she craved and needed: the touch; the penetration.
Her husband’s.38 was in her pocket.
She entered the lobby and looked toward the reception desk. If anyone tried to stop her, she would take care of them. Not by shooting, no. No shot must be fired until she was in Burke’s room. He had told her so. If they got to her and stopped her before she had done the job, he would not come to her, to give her burning kisses in the night.
There was a young girl at the desk in a white cap and uniform, working a crossword in the soft glow of the lamp over her main console. An orderly was just going down the hall, his back to them.
The duty nurse looked up with a trained smile when she heard Ann’s footsteps, but it faded when she saw the hollow-eyed woman who was approaching her in night clothes. Her eyes were blank yet oddly shiny, as if she were a wind-up toy someone had set in motion. A patient, perhaps, who had gone wandering.
‘Ma’am, if you-’
Ann Norton drew the.38 from the pocket of her wrapper like some creaky gunslinger from beyond time. She pointed it at the duty nurse’s head and told her, ‘Turn around.’ The nurse’s mouth worked silently. She drew in breath with a convulsive heave.
‘Don’t scream. I’ll kill you if you do.’
The air wheezed out. The nurse had gone very pale.
‘Turn around now.’
The nurse got up slowly and turned around. Ann Norton reversed the.38 and prepared to bring the butt down on the nurse’s head with all the strength she had.
At that precise moment, her feet were kicked out from under her.
22
The gun went flying.
The woman in the ragged yellow dressing gown did not scream but began to make a high whining noise in her throat, almost keening. She scrambled after it like a crab, and the man who was behind her, looking bewildered and frightened, also darted after it. When he saw that she would get to it first, he kicked it across the lobby rug.
‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Hey, help!’
Ann Norton looked over her shoulder and hissed at him, her faced pulled into a cheated scrawl of hate, and then scrambled after the gun again. The orderly had come back, on the run. He looked at the scene with blank amazement for a moment, and then picked up the gun that lay almost at his feet.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘This thing is load-’
She attacked him. Her hands, hooked into claws, pin-wheeled across his face, dragging red stripes across the surprised orderly’s forehead and right cheek. He held the gun up out of her reach. Still keening, she clawed for it.
The bewildered man came up from behind and grabbed her. He would say later that it was like grabbing a bag of snakes. The body beneath the dressing gown was hot and repulsive, every muscle twitching and writhing.
As she struggled to get free, the orderly popped her one flush on the jaw. Her eyes rolled up to the whites and she collapsed.
The orderly and the bewildered man looked at each other.
The nurse at the reception desk was screaming. Her hands were clapped to her mouth, giving the screams a unique foghorn effect.
‘What kind of