He looked up, perhaps to see if the moon in the sky looked as much like a skull as the one in the water, and instead saw Rose. The stone boy was grinning, and as Norman watched, it stuck out its marble tongue and waggled it at Rosie suggestively. Rosie screamed and beat fruitlessly against its two-handed grip. Its arms came down and seized Rosie's right wrist. Rosie turned, feeling one of his outstretched fingers skate over the zat's single shoulder-strap, and bolted. Then she did something that brought him to a dead halt, momentarily too amazed to move.
She stood there for a moment, looking back, and this time it was clearly him she was looking at.
He hurried down to the stream, trampling the delicate prints of Rose's feet beneath Hump Peterson's square-toed boots, reaching the edge of the running water just as Rosie gained the top of the other bank. He thinks I'm playing hard to get, she thought. Once, when Norman growled at her to stop running and quit being such a cunt, she actually laughed. She looked up once and saw the moon racing with her, speeding through the starshot sky behind the branches of dead trees that stood here like the hands of giants who had been buried alive and had died struggling to disinter themselves. Mostly, though, what she was aware of was a mad exhilaration, of blood filling her head until she felt it must burst, but bursting would be ecstasy. She was aware of her own lighter breathing, and of the plait bouncing up and down and side to side on her back. She could hear him grunting and blowing even when he had fallen behind a little, and he sounded exactly as Erinyes had sounded in the maze. She was aware of Norman at her heels to begin with, less aware of his starting to slip back, at first by mere feet, then by yards. She went all out, in other words, with her head down and her fisted hands pumping at her sides. She ran as she had when she was a girl, before her practical, sensible mother had begun the weighty task of teaching Rose Diana McClendon what was ladylike and what was not (running, especially once you were at an age where you had breasts bouncing in front of you when you did it, was definitely not). 'You're not getting away that easy,' he breathed. He was going to get her, and then what? He'd bite her to pieces and she would die screaming, with the smell of his English Leather in her nostrils. For the first time since realizing it was Norman in the police car, she felt close to panic. He stumbled on the slick grass but did not fall. She looked over her shoulder and saw Norman leap onto the bank, the horns of the mask he had on digging at the night air. The hands clamping her wrist were all angles and squeezing, bitter weight. 'Want to do the dog with me?' the stone boy enquired of her in a grating, uninflected voice. He didn't know if you could be killed by things in a delusion, but this felt less like make-believe all the time.ĭid you see that, Norm old buddy? ze bool asked from its place inside his head.
STICK RPG 1 FULL
The damned brook might be full of those little South American fish with the big teeth, the ones that could strip a whole cow down to its skeleton on a good day. There was something about the water Rose hadn't liked, and he'd do well to be very careful to watch his step in the most literal sense. It was a bleached and grinning human skull.īut he had no intention of charging wildly across the stream, and maybe falling in. The moon reflected up at him in that black water wasn't the moon at all. The moonlight penetrated the water no more than it would have penetrated a flowing stream of mud, but that wasn't what took the breath out of him and brought him to a stop. He looked down at the water, at first just curious, then fascinated and horrified. When it came out again, it caught Norman halfway across the little stream. The moon sailed behind a cloud as he did. Norman wrinkled his lips back from his teeth, making a grisly expression that wasn't a grin, and put one of Hump's boots on the first white stone.
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