She had been lying in bed this morning after her husband left, naked except for her garter-belt (The King had been very clear in his desire for Myra to leave that on), the picture clasped tightly in her hands, moaning and writhing slowly on the sheets. And then, suddenly, the double bed was gone. The whisper-drone of the Lisa Marie's engines was gone. The smell of The King's English Leather was gone.
In the place of these wonderful things was Mr. Gaunt's face... only he no longer looked as he did in his shop. The skin on his face looked blistered, seared with some fabulous secret heat. It pulsed and writhed, as if there were things beneath, struggling to get out. And when he smiled, his big square teeth had become a double row of fangs.
"It's time, Myra," Mr. Gaunt had said. "I want to be with Elvis," she whined. "I'll do it, but not right now-please, not right now."
"Yes, right now. You promised, and you're going to make good on your promise. You'll be very sorry if you don't, Myra."
She had heard a brittle cracking. She looked down and saw with horror that a 'agged crack now split the glass over The King's face.
"No!" she cried. "No, don't do that!"
"I'm not doing it," Mr. Gaunt had responded with a laugh.
"You're doing it. You're doing it by being a silly, lazy little cuntThis is America, Myra, where only whores do business in bed. In America respectable people have to get out of bed and earn the things they need, or lose them forever. I think you forgot that. Of course, I can always find somebody else to play that little trick on Mr. Beaufort, but as for your beautiful affaire de coeur with The King-" Another crack raced like a silver lightning-bolt across the glass covering the picture. And the face beneath it, she observed with mounting horror, was growing old and wrinkled and raddled as the corrupting air seeped in and went to work on it.
"No! I'll do it! I'll do it right now! I'm getting up right now, see?
Only make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!"
Myra had leaped to the floor with the speed of a woman who has discovered she is sharing her bed with a nest of scorpions.
"When you keep your promise, Myra," Mr. Gaunt said. Now he was speaking from some deep sunken hollow in her mind. "You know what to do, don't you?"
"Yes, I know!" Myra looked despairingly at the picture-the image of an old, ill man, his face puffy from years of excess and indulgence.
The hand which held the microphone was a vulture's talon.
"When you come back with your mission accomplished," Mr.
Gaunt said, "the picture will be fine. Only don't let anyone see you, Myra. If anyone sees you, you'll never see him again."
"I won't!" she babbled. "I swear I won't!"
And now, as she reached Henry Beaufort's house, she remembered that admonition. She looked around to make sure no one was coming along the road. It was deserted in both directions. A crow cawed somnolently in someone's October-barren field. There was no other sound. The day seemed to throb like a living thing, and the land lay stunned within the slow beat of its unseasonable heart.
Myra walked up the driveway, pulling up the tail of the blue shirt, feeling to make sure of the scabbard and the bayonet inside it.
Sweat ran, trickling and itching, down the center of her back and under her bra. Although she didn't know it and wouldn't have believed it if told, she had achieved a momentary beauty in the rural stillness.
Her vague, unthoughtful face had filled, at least during these moments, with a deep purpose and determination which had never been there before. Her cheekbones were clearly defined for the first time since high school, when she had decided her mission in life was to eat every Yodel and Ding-Dong and Hoodsie Rocket in the world. During the last four days or so, she had been much too busy having progressively weirder and weirder sex with The King to think much about eating. Her hair, which usually hung around her face in a lank, floppy rug, was tied back in a tight little horsetail, exposing her brow. Perhaps shocked by the sudden overdose of hormones and the equally sudden cutback in sugar consumption after years of daily overdoses, most of the pimples that had flared on her face like uneasy volcanoes ever since she was twelve had gone into remission. Even more remarkable were her eyes-wide, blue, almost feral. They were not the eyes of Myra Evans, but of some jungle beast that might turn vicious at any moment.
She reached Henry's car. Now something was coming along 117-an old, rattling farm-truck headed for town. Myra slipped around to the front of the T-Bird and crouched behind its grille until the truck was gone. Then she stood up again. From the breast pocket of her shirt she took a folded sheet of paper. She opened it, smoothed it carefully, and then stuck it under one of the Bird's windshield wipers so the brief message written there showed clearly.
DON'T YOU EVER CUT ME OFF AND THEN KEEP MY CAR KEYS YOU DAMNED FROG IT READ. it was time for the bayonet.