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“I can walk,” Bill said suddenly. His voice was pinched and small, but she was grateful to hear it just the same.
“I can walk, Rosie, let’s get to your room. The crazy bastard is coming again.” Bill started coughing. Below them-but not much below-Norman laughed.
“That’s right, Su
“It won’t go in!” she panted at Bill.
“It’s the right key but it won’t go in!”
“Turn it over. You’re probably trying it upside-down.” “say, what’s going on down there?” This was a new voice, farther down the hall and above them. Probably on the third-floor landing. It was followed by the fruitless dick-dick-dick of a light switch.
“And why’re the lights out?” “stay-” Bill shouted, and immediately started coughing again. He made a terrific grinding sound in his throat, trying to clear his voice. “stay where you are! Don’t come down here! Call the p-”
“I am the police, fuckstick,” a soft, strangely muffled voice said from the darkness right beside them. There was a low, thick grunt, a sound that was both eager and satisfied. Bill was jerked away from her just as she finally managed to run her room key into its slot.
“No!” she screamed, flailing in the dark with her left hand. On her upper arm, the circlet was hotter than ever.
“No, leave him alone! LEA VE HIM ALONE!” She grasped smooth leather-Bill’s jacket-and then it slipped away. The horrible choking sounds, the sounds of someone whose throat is being packed tight with fine sand, began again. Norman laughed. This sound was also muffled. Rosie stepped toward it, arms in front of her, hands splayed and questing. She touched the shoulder of Bill’s jacket, reached over it, and touched something gruesome-it felt like dead flesh that was also somehow alive. It was lumpy… rubbery… Rubbery. He’s wearing a mask, Rosie thought. Some kind of mask. Then her left hand was seized and pulled into a humid dampness that she had just time to recognize as his mouth before his teeth clamped down on her fingers and she was bitten all the way to the bone. The pain was terrific, but once again her reaction to it was not fear and the helpless urge to give in, to let Norman have his way as Norman had always had his way, but a rage so great it was like insanity. Instead of trying to pull free of his grinding, baleful teeth, she folded her ringers at the second knuckle, pressing the pads of her fingers against the gumline inside his front teeth. Then she set the heel of her preternaturally strong left hand against his chin and pulled. There was a strange creaking sensation under her hand, the sound a board under a man or woman’s knee might make just before it snapped. She felt Norman jerk, heard him make a hollow interrogative sound which seemed to consist solely of vowels-Aaaoouuuu?-and then his lower face slid forward like a bureau drawer, coming dislocated from the hinges of his jaw. He screamed in agony and Rosie pulled her bleeding hand free, thinking That’s what you get for biting, you bastard, try to do it now. She heard him go reeling backward, tracking him by his screams and the sound of his shirt sliding along the wall. Now he’ll use the gun, she thought as she turned back to Bill. He leaned against the wall, a darker shape in the darkness, coughing desperately again.
“Hey, you guys, come on, a joke’s a joke and enough’s enough.” It was the man from upstairs, sounding petulant and put-out, only now he sounded as if he was downstairs, at the far end of this hallway, and Rosie’s heart filled with foreknowing even as she twisted the key in the lock and shoved her door open. She didn’t sound like herself at all when she screamed, she sounded like the other one.
“Get out of here, you fool! He’ll kill you! Don’t-” The gun went off. She was looking to her left and had a nightmarish glimpse of Norman, sitting on the floor with his legs folded under him. There wasn’t enough time in that flash for her to recognize what he was wearing on his head, but she did, just the same: it was a bullmask with a vapidly gri