Save Johanna! (23 page)

I cover my head with my hands and kick out barefooted. The blows aren’t strong enough to stop her and the knife cuts across my fingers, and then I feel the thump of blows in my breasts and I take my hands away from my face to protect my body. My blood is smearing all of us. I can’t stop her! Help me!

I feel the table behind me and dive under it, clinging to the metal legs. They pull at my feet, but their hands are slippery with blood and my legs slide through. I’m awash in blood, but I don’t know where it’s coming from. Nothing hurts me. I don’t know why. My tears blind me. They’re killing me, and I don’t want to die. “David . . . David . . . help me! Daddy, please, Daddy, stop. . .”

One of them gets behind my head and pushes while other hands pull at my feet. Still, I hang on. Then something starts to grind at my fingers. My God, they’re trying to cut them off! I let go in horror and bury my cut and bleeding hands tight against my chest. Now, with no resistance, they drag me out from under the table. For an instant I break loose and scramble to my knees, but someone’s hands still hold my feet and jerk me back hard, and I collapse. Other hands flip me over, and I roll up into a ball to protect myself from their slicing and stabbing.

A numbness starts to creep over me, and it’s hard to tell where the blows are coming from. A heavy exhaustion envelops me, unfolding my arms and legs. I lie there, open and unprotected against their blows, but the weight of them seems to grow lighter. Through the blood I see Pinky’s face and feel relief, safety. My friend Pinky will stop them. Our eyes meet, and I move my lips, “Save me, please save me.”

Tears fill her eyes and she looks away, but hands push her face back, and there’s terrible fright in her eyes. I hear Avrum’s voice from somewhere overhead—only its sound, not the words—and Pinky lifts her hand. She’s holding the long, thin knife above my head. I scream, and she drops it. Something presses into my throat and stays there.

I close my eyes and wait. A door slams, leaving the room silent. Time passes, and I know they’ve gone.

When I open my eyes again, the room is empty. Above me, on the ceiling, a crack like a giant spider leg runs from one corner to the clouded plastic light fixture in the center. The ordinariness of it comforts me. I’m still not in pain, but I’m so weak that it takes a great effort to lift my head, and when I do I see my body oozing blood. The knowledge that I’m dying comes to me calmly, with a touch of disappointment that the ultimate of life’s actions should come in a thought not unlike any other thought.

The calmness is brief and quickly changes to anger, then desperation and then rage. I’ve got to stop them! Erase them from my computer . . . obliterate them . . . rip up their pages . . . kill them as they killed me!

I force myself up high enough to reach out and grab hold of the table leg. My mouth is filled with blood too thick to swallow. It gushes over my lips and runs down my chin. I drag myself up and claw at the paper piling up under the printer. The blood has clogged my eyes but I can feel the paper. I grab fistfuls and twist and turn and rip at them, but there are too many to get to. I reach up and drag the computer down to the floor and start typing. My bloody fingers slide over the keys. I must warn David. . . .

A heavy blood-blackness begins to flow over my mind and ease my body. It rolls in from a great distance, thickly and slowly blackening to tar as it moves nearer, smoothing and soothing the rawness of my terror and blanketing everything until there is only the tiniest dot of me, nothing more than a pinprick, left in the miles and miles of black stillness . . . I am alone . . . only the darkness and me . . . only the darkness and me . . . only the darkness . . .

Copyright ©1981 by Francine Pascal

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 9780786752973

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