Nor was that all. In the course of the last week, she had contracted pneumonia.
In her wasted condition she was, of course, a prime candidate for that or any other respiratory disease. It might have come under the best of circumstances . . . and these were definitely not those. The radiators in the Alhambra had ceased their nightly clankings some time ago. She wasn't sure just how long - time had become as fuzzy and indefinable to her as it had been for Jack in the El Dorado. She only knew the heat had gone out on the same night she had punched her fist through the window, making the gull that had looked like Sloat fly away.
In the time since that night the Alhambra had become a deserted coldbox. A crypt in which she would soon die.
If Sloat was responsible for what had happened at the Alhambra, he had done one hell of a good job. Everyone was gone. Everyone. No more maids in the halls trundling their squeaky carts. No more whistling maintenance man. No more mealy-mouthed desk clerk. Sloat had put them all in his pocket and taken them away.
Four days ago - when she could not find enough in the room to satisfy even her birdlike appetite - she had gotten out of bed and had worked her way slowly down the hall to the elevator. She brought a chair with her on this expedition, alternately sitting on it, her head hanging in exhaustion, and using it as a walker. It took her forty minutes to traverse forty feet of corridor to the elevator shaft.
She had pushed the button for the car repeatedly, but the car did not come. The buttons did not even light.
'Fuck a duck,' Lily muttered hoarsely, and then slowly worked herself another twenty feet down the hall to the stairwell.
'Hey!' she shouted downstairs, and then broke into a fit of coughing, bent over the back of the chair.
Maybe they couldn't hear the yell but they sure as shit must have been able to hear me coughing out whatever's left of my lungs, she thought.
But no one came.
She yelled again, twice, had another coughing fit, and then started back down the hallway, which looked as long as a stretch of Nebraska turnpike on a clear day. She didn't dare go down those stairs. She would never get back up them. And there was no one down there; not in the lobby, not in The Saddle of Lamb, not in the coffee shop, not anywhere. And the phones were out. At least, the phone in her room was out, and she hadn't heard a single ring anywhere else in this old mausoleum. Not worth it. A bad gamble. She didn't want to freeze to death in the lobby.
'Jack-O,' she muttered, 'where the hell are y - '
Then she began to cough again and this one was really bad and in the middle of it she collapsed to one side in a faint, pulling the ugly sitting-room chair over on top of her, and she lay there on the cold floor for nearly an hour, and that was probably when the pneumonia moved into the rapidly declining neighborhood that was Lily Cavanaugh's body. Hey there, big C! I'm the new kid on the block! You can call me big P! Race you to the finish line!
Somehow she had made it back to her room, and since then she had existed in a deepening spiral of fever, listening to her respiration grow louder and louder until her fevered mind began to imagine her lungs as two organic aquariums in which a number of submerged chains were rattling. And yet she held on - held on because part of her mind insisted with crazy, failing certainty that Jack was on his way back from wherever he had been.
7
The beginning of her final coma had been like a dimple in the sand - a dimple that begins to spin like a whirlpool. The sound of submerged chains in her chest became a long, dry exhalation - Hahhhhhhhh . . .
Then something had brought her out of that deepening spiral and started her feeling along the wall in the cold darkness for the light-switch. She got out of bed. She did not have strength enough left to do this; a doctor would have laughed at the idea. And yet she did. She fell back twice, then finally made it to her feet, mouth turned down in a snarl of effort. She groped for the chair, found it, and began to lurch her way across the room to the window.
Lily Cavanaugh, Queen of the Bs, was gone. This was a walking horror, eaten by cancer, burned by rising fever.
She reached the window and looked out.
'Jack!' she tried to scream. Nothing came out but a gravelly whisper. She raised a hand, tried to wave. Faintness
(Haahhhhhhhhh . . . )
washed over her. She clutched at the windowsill.
'Jack!'
Suddenly the lighted ball in the figure's hands flashed up brightly, illuminating his face, and it was Jack's face, it was Jack, oh thank God, it was Jack. Jack had come home.
The figure broke into a run.
Jack!
Those sunken, dying eyes grew yet more brilliant. Tears spilled down her yellow, stretched cheeks.
8
'Mom!'
Jack ran across the lobby, seeing that the old-fashioned telephone switchboard was fused and blackened, as if from an electrical fire, and instantly dismissing it. He had seen her and she looked awful - it had been like looking at the silhouette of a scarecrow propped in the window.