Last Call (Last Call 1)

Oh, he thought. Right. Rubbing alcohol and a sterile pad and a roll of sterile gauze bandage. He replaced his artificial eye, yawned again, then began groping through the darkness. He didn't seem able to take a deep breath.

I bet they cut it, he thought now, crawling across the living-room floor and blinking the excess solution out of his eye. I bet they did. He was dragging along the bandages and the bottle of rubbing alcohol, wrapped in a shirt from the laundry hamper.

He lifted the telephone down from the table and picked up the receiver and then took a deep breath and let it out slowly when he heard the dial tone. They had not cut the phone line. Well, he thought. He replaced the receiver carefully.

He ran trembling fingers through his hair and glanced around. All his telephone books, he saw, were gone—not only the ragged spiral-bound notebook with inked entries, but the big Pacific Bell white pages and yellow pages, too. I guess people write numbers in those as well, he thought, in the margins and back pages, and maybe draw asterisks by some of the printed ones, like to distinguish one particular Jones from among a column of them. I wonder what sort of calls all my old friends are going to get.

He peeled a couple of yards off the roll of sterile gauze and tucked the long strip under his leg.

He leaned back, and for nearly a minute he looked up through the window glass at the dark, shaggy head of the palm tree out front swaying in the night breeze. He didn't dare raise his head high enough to be seen from outside, but he could crouch here and watch the palm tree. It's outside the hole I'm in, he thought. All it has to do is suck up nutrients and get ready for tomorrow's photosynthesis session, like every other day.

At last he sighed and pulled Arky's Schrade lock-back knife out of his pocket and opened it. Smoke marks mottled the broad four-inch blade, from Arky's having held it over a lit burner on his stove, but Arky had said to use rubbing alcohol, too, if possible.

Crane twisted the cap off the plastic bottle and poured alcohol over both sides of the blade. The stuff reeked sharply, and it chilled his thigh when he shook a couple of liberal splashes of it onto the left leg of his jeans. He was shivering, and his heart was thudding coldly in his hollow chest.

He had to keep reminding himself that he had thought this out a hundred times during these last eighteen hours, and had not been able to see any other way out.

With his right hand he held the knife upright on his left thigh, the point pricking him an inch or two to the outside of where he figured the femur was; his left hand, open, hovered over his head as he gathered his courage.

He was panting, and after a few seconds his nose caught a new depth and mellowness in the alcohol reek. He glanced away from the knife—

—and then stared at the opened bottle of Laphroaig scotch that was standing on the carpet, with a half-full Old Fashioned glass beside it. They had certainly not been there when he had crawled across the floor three or four minutes ago.

"Scott," came Susan's voice softly from the shadows beyond the bottle. He looked up, and he thought he could see her. The diffuse, spotty light made camouflage of the patterns on her clothing, and her face was turned away, but he was sure he could see the fall of her black hair and the contour of one shoulder and leg.

"Don't, Scott," she said. "Why hurt yourself to get her when you can have a drink and get me?"

Crane's face was dewed with chilly sweat. "Is that what you are?" he asked tightly. "Drink? Delirium tremens? Did I bring that bottle out? Am I talking to myself here?"

"Scott, she's not worth this, have a drink and let me—"

No, he thought, this can't be a hallucination. Arky saw it twice yesterday, this figure, this creature.

"Come into the bedroom. Bring the bottle."

He could hear a chitinous rustling as the vague figure in the corner stood up. Would it go into the bedroom, or would it come toward him?

It's not Susan, he reminded himself nervously. Susan's dead. This thing has nothing to do with Susan, or nearly nothing. At most it's a psychic fossil of her, in her shape and with some of her memories but made of something else.

It was coming toward him. The light climbed the approaching figure—slim legs, hips, breasts. In a moment he would see its face, the face of his dead wife.

As if he were slamming a door against something dreadful, he slammed his hand down with all his strength onto the butt end of the upright knife.