“Can tah!” she screamed. “Can tah, can tak, kill the boy, kill him now, kill him!”
Johnny took a step backward, meaning to do just that. Audrey reached into the pocket of her dress as he did and brought it out curled around a fistful of something. She stared at him—only at him, now, John Edward Marinville, Distinguished Novelist and Extraordinary Thinker—with her snarling beast’s eyes. She held her hand out, wrist up. “Can tah!” she cried . . . laughed. “Can tah, can tak! What you take is what you are! Of course! Can tah, can tak, mi tow! Take this! So tah!”
When she opened her hand and showed him her offering, the emotional weather inside his head changed at once . . . and yet he still saw everything and sequenced it, just as he had when Sean Hutter’s goddamned Partymobile had rolled over. He had kept on recording everything then, when he had been sure he was going to die, and he went on recording everything now, when he was suddenly consumed with hate for the boy in his arms and overwhelmed by a desire to put something—his motorcycle key would do nicely—into the interfering little prayboy’s throat and open him like a can of beer.
He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying on her open palm—the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets. But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bulging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient.
“Can tah!” she screamed. “Can tah, can tak, kill the boy, kill him now, kill him!”
Steve stepped forward. With her attention and concentration fully fixed on Johnny, she saw him only at the last instant. He slapped the stones from her hand and they flew into the corner of the room. One—it was the snake—broke in two. Audrey screamed with horror and vexation.
