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How? To pigs only to find hi a brick wall that surely hadn’t been there a ht, and there was another wall When he faced forward again, the stranger was once ht He was stripped to the waist, and To skin, the tattoos like brands, crawling across the man’s flesh and underneath it as well, as if his skin were a false one and the thing underneath aiting to come out

"You lose, Thorowls filled the warehouse The darkness swirled behind the stranger, blotting out the walls and any hope of escape

" ‘I aon of Old And all will look upon , but To dark and the unspeakable things inside it, on the changing forer who loomed above him

"P-please…" he croaked

The stranger only smiled

"Such perfect hands," he said as the darkness descended

AND DEATH SHALL FLEE

Evie sat in the tub, two fat cucu in conte head "We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too… I had Manhattan, all right," Evie mumbled "And it… had… me" She slipped under the water and let it carry her until a fierce pounding ," she yelled

"Will you be long?" Jericho answered

Evie let a prune-ish toe play at the hot-water tap "Hard to say"

"I need the… the, ah…"

"Oh, applesauce," Evie said on a sigh "Okay, okay I don’t want you to die of peritonitis like Valentino Just a minute" Evie rinsed the cucumber slices under the tap and popped the and let the water swirl down the drain while she slipped on her robe and opened the door with a flourish "All yours," she said as Jericho pushed past her

In the kitchen, Evie squeezed an orange into a glass, fished out the seeds, and gulped down the precious juice along with two aspirin "Oh, sweet Mary"