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For a few seconds, he seemed unaware of it; he slid his hand down froers into her vagina As she jerked the knife out of him, he was stricken by pain His eyes ide, and he let out a high-pitched yelp Hilary stuck the blade into hih and toward the side this tireasy looking as lard He howled, let go of her, stumbled backwards until he collided with the other wall and knocked an oil painting to the floor

A violent spash Hilary as she realized what she had done

But she did not drop the knife, and she was fully prepared to stab hiain if he attacked her

Bruno Frye looked down at himself in astonishment The blade had sunk deep A thin strea his sweater and pants

Hilary did not wait for his expression of aer She turned and hurried into the guest room, threw the door shut and locked it For half a roans and curses and cluth left to s down the hall toward the stairs, but she couldn’t be sure She ran to the telephone With bloodless and palsied hands, she picked up the receiver and dialed the operator She asked for the police

The bitch! The rotten bitch!

Frye slipped one hand under the yelloeater and gripped the lower of the tounds, the gut puncture, for that was the one doing the ether as best he could, trying to stop the life froh the stitching of the gloves, onto his fingers

He was suffering very little pain A dull burning in his sto his left side A e timed to his heartbeat That was the extent of it

Nevertheless, he knew that he had been badly hurt and was getting worse by the second He was pathetically weak His great strength had gushed out of hi his belly with one hand, clutching the bannister with the other, he descended to the first floor on steps as treacherous as those in a carnival funhouse; they seemed to tip and pitch and roll By the ti sweat

Outside, the sun stung his eyes It was brighter than he had ever seen it, a monstrous sun that filled the sky and beat h his eyes and starting tiny fires on the surface of his brain

Bending over his wounds, cursing, he shuffled south along the sidewalk until he caray van He pulled himself up into the driver’s seat, drew the door shut as if it weighed ten thousand pounds

He drove with one hand to Wilshire Boulevard, turned right, went to Sepulveda,for a public telephone that offered a lot of privacy Every bump in the road was like a blow to his solar plexus At times, the automobiles around him appeared to stretch and flex and balloon, as if they were constructed of a ical elastic metal, and he had to concentrate to force them back into more familiar shapes

Blood continued to trickle out of hi in his stoe became a sharp pinch But the catastrophic pain that he kneas co had not yet arrived

He drove an interminable distance on Sepulveda before he finally located a pay phone that suited his needs It was in a back corner of a superhty or a hundred yards fro the phone fro on Sepulveda It was not a booth, just one of those plastic windscreens that were supposed to provide excellent sound-proofing but which had no effect at all on background noise; but at least it appeared to be in service, and it was private enough A high ce the super tract On the right, a cluster of shrubs and two s off Sepulveda No one was likely to see hih to realize he was hurt; he didn’t want anyone nosing around

He slid across the seat to the passenger’s side and got out that door When he looked down at the thick red ers that were clamped over the worse wound, he felt dizzy, and he looked quickly away He only had to take three steps to reach the phone, but each of them seemed like a mile

He could not remember his telephone credit card number, which had been as familiar to him as his birthdate, so he called collect to Napa Valley

The operator rang it six times

"Hello?"

"I have a collect call for anyone froes?"

"Go ahead, operator"

There was a soft click as she went off the line

"I’," Frye told the man in Napa County

"Oh, Jesus, no No!"

"I’ll have tocall an ambulance," Frye said "And theyeveryone will know the truth"

They spoke for a htened and confused

Suddenly, Frye felt so of water bursting He screamed in pain

The man in Napa County cried out in syet an a up

Blood had run all the way down his pants to his shoes, and noas dribbling onto the pavement

He lifted the receiver off the hook and put it down on the metal shelf beside the phone box He picked up a die, but his fingers weren’t working properly; he dropped it and looked down stupidly as it rolled across the htly as he could He lifted the di as an automobile tire, finally put it in the proper slot He tried to dial 0 He didn’t even have enough energy to perfor shoulders, his gigantic chest, his powerful back, his hard rippled belly, and his hs all failed him He couldn’t er He fell, rolled over once, and lay face-down on the macadam

He couldn’t move

He couldn’t see He was blind

It was a very black darkness

He was scared

He tried to tell himself that he would come back froet her, he thought I’ll come back But he really didn’t believe it

As he lay there getting increasingly light-headed, he had a surprisingly lucidabout Katherine coination? Had he just been killing women who resembled her? Innocent wohts away and forced hi darkness in which he lay

He felt thingson his ar on his face

He tried to scream Couldn’t

He heard the whispers

No!