She struck at it and it burst, filling her eye with her own blood, making it sting. Trisha managed not to scream, but a wavery sound of revulsion - mmmmmmhh - escaped her tightly pressed lips. She looked unbelievingly at the blood on her fingers. That one mosquito could hold so much! No one would believe it!
She dipped her cupped hands into the water and washed her face. She didn't drink any, vaguely remembering some-one saying that woods-water could make you sick, but the feel of it on her hot and lumpy skin was wonderful - like cold satin. She dipped up more, wetting her neck and soak-ing her arms to the elbow. Then she scooped up mud and began to apply it - not just on the bites this time but all over, from the round collar of her 36 GORDON shirt right up to the roots of her hair. As she did it she thought of an I Love Lucy episode she'd seen on Nick at Nite, Lucy and Ethel at the beauty parlor, both of them wearing these funky 1958 mudpacks, and Desi had come in and looked from one woman to the other and he had said, "Hey Loocy, jwich one are jew?" and the audience had howled. She probably looked like that, but Trisha didn't care. There was no audi-ence out here, no laugh-track, either, and she couldn't stand to be bitten anymore. It would drive her crazy if she was.
CHAPTER 6
She applied mud for five minutes, finishing with a couple of careful dabs to the eyelids, then bent over to look at her reflection. What she saw in the relatively still water by the bank was a minstrel-show mudgirl by moonlight. Her face was a pasty gray, like a face on a vase pulled out of some archeological dig. Above it her hair stood up in a filthy spout. Her eyes were white and wet and frightened. She didn't look funny, like Lucy and Ethel getting their beauty treatments. She looked dead. Dead and badly inbarned, or whatever they called it.
Speaking to the face in the water, Trisha intoned: "Then Little Black Sambo said, 'Please, tigers, do not take my fine new clothes. ' "
But that wasn't funny, either. She smeared mud up her lumpy, itchy arms, then lowered her hands toward the water, meaning to wash them off. But that was stupid. The gosh-damn old bugs would just bite her there.
The pins and needles had mostly worked out of her arm and leg; Trisha was able to squat and pee without falling over. She was also able to stand up and walk, although she grimaced with pain each time she moved her head more than a little to the right or left. She supposed she had a kind of whiplash injury, like the one Mrs. Chetwynd from up the block had gotten when some old man had rammed her car from behind as she waited for a traffic light to change. The old man hadn't been hurt a bit, but poor Mrs. Chetwynd had been in a neck brace for six weeks. Maybe they would put her in a neck brace when she got out of this. Maybe they would take her to a hospital in a helicopter with a red cross on the belly like in M*A*S*H, and - Forget it, Trisha. It was the scary cold voice. No neck brace for you. No helicopter ride, either.
"Shut up," she muttered, but the voice wouldn't.
You won't even get inbarned because they're never going to find you. You'll die out here, just wander around in these woods until you die, and the animals will come and eat your rotting body and some day some hunter will come along and find your bones.
There was something so terribly plausible about this last - she had heard similar stories on the TV news not just once but several times, it seemed - that she began to cry again. She could actually see the hunter, a man in a bright red woolen jacket and an orange cap, a man who needed a shave. Looking for a place to lie up and wait for a deer or maybe just wanting to take a leak. He sees something white and thinks at first, Just a stone, but as he gets closer he sees that the stone has eyesockets.
"Stop it," she whispered, walking back to the fallen tree and the wrinkled spread remains of the poncho under it (she hated the poncho now; she didn't know why, but it seemed to symbolize everything that had gone wrong). "Stop it, please."
The cold voice would not. The cold voice had one more thing to say. One more thing, at least.
Or maybe you won't just die. Maybe the thing out there will kill you and eat you.
Trisha stopped by the fallen tree - one hand reached out and grasped the dead jut of a small branch - and looked around nervously. From the moment of waking all she'd really been able to think about was how badly she itched.
The mud had now soothed the worst of the itching and the residual throb of the wasp-stings, and she again realized where she was: in the woods alone and at night.
"At least there's a moon," she said, standing by the tree and looking nervously around her little crescent of clearing.
It looked even smaller now, as if the trees and underbrush had crept in closer while she was sleeping. Crept in slyly.
The moonlight wasn't as good a thing as she'd thought, either. It was bright in the clearing, true, but it was a decep-tive brightness that made everything look simultaneously too real and not real at all. Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.
Something twitted in the woods, seemed to choke, twit-ted again, and was silent.
An owl hooted, far off.