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Suddenly, Frye tried the locked door behind her, then threw his weight against it The barrier held But it would not hold h for her to call the police and wait for help

Her heart was beating furiously, and she was shaking as if she were standing naed on a vast field of ice; but she was determined not to be incapacitated by fear She hurried across the big roohtstand On the way, she passed a full-length wall e of a total stranger, an owl-eyed and harried woe of a mime

Frye kicked the door It shook violently in the frao

The 32 autohtstand drawer The loaded un and, with jittery hands that nearly failed her, raazine into the butt She faced the doorway

Frye kicked the lock again The hardas flimsy It was the kind of interior lock priuests out of a rooainst an intruder like Bruno Frye On the third kick, the workings burst fro, sweating, he looked more than ever like a mad bull as he lumbered out of the dark hall and crossed the threshold His broad shoulders were hunched, and his hands were fisted at his sides He wanted to lower his head and charge, s that stood in his way

Blood lust shone in his eyes as clearly as his reflection glowered back at him from the wall h the china shop and stomp on the proprietor

Hilary pointed the pistol at hi

"I’ll shoot! I will! I swear to God I will!" she said frantically

Frye stopped, blinked at her, saw the gun for the first time

"Out," she said

He didn’t move

"Get the hell out of here!"

Incredibly, he took one , ga had happened to hi up new patterns in his usting and perverted than any he had revealed thus far He was no longer even half rational His demeanor was that of a lunatic His eyes flashed, not icy as they had been, but watery and hot, fevered Sweat streah he was not speaking; they writhed and twisted, pulled back over his teeth, then pushed out in a childish pout, formed a sneer, then a weird little smile, then a fierce scowl, then an expression for which there was no naer driven by lust or the desire to utterly dominate her The secret n than the one that had powered hio, and she had the terrible crazy feeling that it would soy to shield hih a hail of bullets

He took the large knife froht hip and thrust it in front of him

"Back off," she said desperately

"Bitch"

"I ain

"For God’s sake," she said, "be serious That knife’s no good against a gun"

He elve or fifteen feet frooddamned head off"

Frye waved the knife at her, drew small rapid circles in the air with the point of the blade, as if it were a talis off evil spirits that stood between him and Hilary

And he took another step

She lined up the forward sight with the center of his abdoh the recoil kicked her hands and no ht, she would hit so happened

Please, God!

He took two steps

She stared at the pistol, stunned She had forgotten to throw off the safety catches

He was ht feet fro at herself, she thumbed the two tiny levers on the side of the pistol, and a pair of red dots appeared on the black er a second ti

Jesus! What? It can’t be jammed!

Frye was so cohly possessed by his madness, that he did not realize i proble, he e was his He reached the bed, scraht across theon the springy surface

She had forgotten to jack a bullet into the chamber She did that and retreated two steps until she backed into the wall She squeezed off a shot without taking aim, fired up at hi out of a crack in hell

The sound of the shot filled the room It slapped off the walls and reverberated in the s

She saw the knife shatter, saw the fraght hand The sharp steel flew up and back, sparkling for a h the open top of the bedside lamp

Frye howled as the knife spun away from him He fell backwards and rolled off the far side of the bed But he was up as soon as he went down, cradling his right hand in his left

Hilary didn’t think she had hit him There wasn’t any blood The bulletit out of his grasp The shock would have stung his fingers worse than the crack of a whip

Frye wailed in pain, screae It was a wild sound, a jackal’s bark, but it was definitely not the cry of an anis He still intended to coain This time he stayed down

With a little whiainst the wall, but she did not take her eyes off the place where he had gone down and where he now lay out of sight beyond the bed

No sound

Noable to see hi intently, she moved cautiously to the foot of the bed, out into the room, then around to the left until she spotted him

He was belly-down on the chocolate-broard Fields carpet His right arht out in front, the hand curled slightly, the still fingers pointing back toward the top of his head His face was turned away from her Because the carpet was so dark and plush and eye-dazzlingly textured, she had so from a distance if there was any blood soaked into it Quite clearly, there was not an enormous sticky pool like the one she had expected to find If the shot had hit hiht be trapped under hiht even have taken hi instant death and abrupt cessation of heartbeat; in which case, there would be only a few drops of blood

She watched him for a minute, two minutes She could not detect any