She wished Eddie was here. Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff: jokes and riddles and... an...
Her breath stopped. An expression of wide-eyed comprehension started to dawn her face, and on the face of her twin in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of mental rearrangements that she now had to-
Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned over the waisthigh washstand and blew on the mirror, fogging it. She printed
0W? IANE-Looked at it with growing understanding and dismay.
In the other room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what she should have seen thirty valuable seconds ago: that laughter wasn't merry. It was jagged and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland was laughing the way the folken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The way folken laughed in hell.
Below 0W? ?AA/? she used the tip of her finger to print t)N?lt)?LO, the anagram Eddie might have seen right away, and surely once he realized the apostrophe-S on the sign had been added to distract them.
In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming a sound that was alarming instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and Roland-
Roland was choking.
Chapter VI:PATRICK DANVILLE
ONE
She wasn't wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the La-ZBoy recliner when they'd returned to the living room after dinner, and she'd put the revolver on the magazine-littered endtable beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing the shells.
The shells were in her pocket.
Susannah tore open the bathroom door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland was lying on the floor between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color. He was scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing.
Their host was standing over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hair-that baby-fine, shoulder-length white hair-was now almost entirely black. The lines around his eyes and mouth had been erased. Instead often years younger, Joe Collins now looked twenty or even thirty years younger.
The son of a bitch.
The vampire son of a bitch.
Oy leaped at him and seized Joe's left leg just above the knee. "Twenny-five, sissy-four, nineteen, hiker Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOfJSJseS amp;OaRtiOMe to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland.
"What I think," he said, "is that women need a reason to have sex." Joe put one foot on Roland's chest-like a big-game hunter with his trophy, Susannah thought. "Men, on the other hand, only need a place\ Bing!" He popped his eyes. "The thing about sex is that God gives men a brain and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a-"
He never heard her approach or lift herself into the La-ZBoy in order to gain the necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was doing. Susannah laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all the force she could manage. The fist struck the side of Joe's head hard enough to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone, however, and the pain in her hands was excruciating.
Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teeth-perfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn't the sort of vampire who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was changing: darkening, contracting, turning into somediing that was no longer human. It was die face of a psychotic clown.
"You," he said, but before he could say anydiing else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy crouched behind the thing's ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing abrupdy when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily.
Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out.
Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelo's shadow fell over them.
"You bitch, I'll teach you to interrupt a man when he's on a-"