He beat at the thought with agonized horror, the heat rolling and billowing in his head like a sandstorm. And suddenly his short, quick respiration stopped as a sound began to rise from somewhere beyond and below the closed bedroom door.
At first Bradenton thought it was a fire-siren, or a police-car siren. It rose and grew louder as it grew closer; beneath it he could hear the jagged pounding of footfalls clocking along his downstairs hall and then through his living room and then battering up the stairs in a Goth's stampede.
He pushed himself back against his pillow, his face drawing down in a rictus of terror even as his eyes widened to circles in his puffy, blackish face and the sound neared. Not a siren any more but a scream, high and ululating, a scream that no human throat could make or sustain, surely the scream of a banshee or of some black Charon, come to take him across the river that separates the land of the living from that of the dead.
Now the running footsteps clattered straight toward him along the upstairs hall, boards groaning and creaking and protesting under the weight of those merciless rundown bootheels and suddenly Kit Bradenton knew who it was and he shrieked as the door burst inward and the man in the faded jeans jacket ran in, his murderer's grin flashing on his face like a whirring white circle of knives, his face as jolly as that of a lunatic Santa Claus, carrying a galvanized steel bucket high over his right shoulder.
"HEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWW! "
"No!" Bradenton screamed, crossing his arms weakly across his face. "No! Noo - ! "
The bucket tipped forward and the water flew out, all of it seeming to hang suspended for a moment in the yellow lamplight like the largest uncut diamond in the universe, and he saw the dark man's face through it, reflected and refracted into the face of a supremely grinning troll who had just made its way up from hell's darkest shit-impacted bowels to rampage on the earth; then the water fell on him, so cold that his swelled throat sprang momentarily open again, squeezing blood from its walls in big beads, shocking breath into him and making him kick the covers all the way over the foot of the bed in one convulsive spasm so that his body would be free to jackknife and sunfish as bitter cramps from these involuntary struggles whipped through him like greyhounds biting on the run.
He screamed. He screamed again. Then lay trembling, his feverish body soaked from toe to crown, his head thumping, his eyes bulging. His throat closed to a raw slit and he began to struggle for breath miserably again. His body began to shake and shiver.
"I knew that'd cool you off!" the man he knew as Richard Fry cried cheerily. He set the bucket down with a clang. "Ah say, Ah say Ah knew dat wuz goan do de trick, Kingfish! Thanks are in order, my good man, thanks from you tendered to me. Do you thank me? Can't talk? No? Yet in your heart I know you do."
"Yeee-GAAAHHH! "
He sprang into the air like Bruce Lee in a Run Run Shaw kung-fu epic, knees spread, for a moment seeming to hang suspended directly over Kit Bradenton as the water had done, his shadow a blob on the chest of Bradenton's soaked pajamas, and Bradenton screamed weakly. Then one knee came down on either side of his ribcage and Richard Fry's bluejeaned groin was the crotch of a fork suspended above his chest by inches, and his face burned down at Bradenton's like a cellar torch in a gothic novel.
"Had to wake you up, man," Fry said. "I didn't want you to boogie off without a chance for us to talk a bit."
"... off... off... off me..."
"I'm not on you, man, come on. I'm just hanging suspended above you. Like the great invisible world."
Bradenton, in an agony of fear, could only pant and shake and roll his trapped eyeballs away from that jolly, fuming face.
"We got to talk about ships and seals and sailing wax, and whether bees have stings. Also about the papers you're supposed to have for me, and the car, and the keys to the car. Now all I see in your g*y-radge is a Chevy pickup, and I know that's yours, Kitty-Kitty, so how bout it?"
"... they... papers... can't... can't talk..." He gasped harshly for air. His teeth chittered together like small birds in a tree.
"You better be able to talk," Fry said, and stuck out his thumbs. They were both double-jointed (as were all his fingers), and he wiggled them back and forth at angles that seemed to deny biology and physics. "Cause if you aren't, I'm going to have your baby blues for my keychain and you're going to have to trot around hell with a seeing-eye dog." He jammed his thumbs at Bradenton's eyes and Bradenton jerked back against the pillow helplessly.
"You tell me," Fry said, "and I'll leave you the right pills. In fact, I'll hold you up so you can swallow them. Make you well, man. Pills to take care of everything."
Bradenton, now trembling with fear as much as with cold, forced the words out through his clacking teeth. "Papers... in the name of Randall Flagg. Welsh dresser downstairs. Under the... contact paper."