'I'll bet it plays h.e.l.l on your insides, though,' Howard said. He found he didn't mind being in the bathroom very much at all, as long as Vi was in here with him.

'Don't care,' she said, more drearily still. She flushed the toilet. 'How are you this morning?'

'Not great,' he said truthfully.

'You got one, too?'

'A hangover? No. I think it's that flu-bug I told you about. My throat's sore, and I think I'm running a finger.'

'What?'

'Fever,' he said. 'Fever's what I meant to say.'

'Well, you better stay home.' She went to the sink, selected her toothbrush from the holder, and began to brush vigorously.

'Maybe you better, too,' he said. He did not want Vi to stay home, however; he wanted her right by Dr. Stone's side while Dr. Stone filled cavities and did root ca.n.a.ls, but it would have been unfeeling not to have said something.

She glanced up at him in the mirror. Already a little color was returning to her cheeks, a little sparkle to her eye. Vi also recovered con brio. 'The day I call in sick at work because I've got a hangover will be the day I quit drinking altogether,' she said. 'Besides, the doc's gonna need me. We're pulling a complete set of uppers. Dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.'

She spat directly into the drain and Howard thought, fascinated: The next time it pops up, it'll have toothpaste on it. Jesus!

'You stay home and keep warm and drink plenty of fluids,' Vi said. She had adopted her Head Nurse Tone now, the tone which said If you're not taking all this down, be it on your own head. 'Catch up on your reading. And, by the bye, show that Mr. Hot s.h.i.t Lathrop what he's missing when you don't come in. Make him think twice.'

'That's not a bad idea at all,' Howard said.

She kissed him on the way by and dropped him a wink. 'Your Shrinking Violet knows a few of the answers, too,' she said. By the time she left to catch her bus half an hour later, she was singing l.u.s.tily, her hangover forgotten.

The first thing Howard did following Vi's departure was to haul the step-stool over to the kitchen sink and whiz into the drain again. It was easier with Vi out of the house; he had barely reached twenty-three, the ninth prime number, before getting down to business.

With that problem squared away - at least for the next few hours - he walked back into the hall and poked his head through the bathroom door. He saw the finger at once, and that was wrong. It was impossible, because he was way over here, and the basin should have cut off his view. But it didn't and that meant - 'What are you doing, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d?' Howard croaked, and the finger, which had been twisting back and forth as if to test the wind, turned toward him. There was toothpaste on it, just as he had known there would be. It bent in his direction . . . only now it bent in three places, and that was impossible, too, quite impossible, because when you got to the third knuckle of any given finger, you were up to the back of the hand.

It's getting longer, his mind gibbered. I don't know how that can happen, but it is - if I can see it over the top of the basin from here, it must be at least three inches long . . . maybe more!

He closed the bathroom door gently and staggered back into the living room. His legs had once again turned into malfunctioning pogo-sticks. His mental ice-breaker was gone, flattened under a great white weight of panic and bewilderment. No iceberg this; it was a whole glacier.

Howard Mitla sat down in his chair and closed his eyes. He had never felt more alone, more disoriented, or more utterly powerless in his entire life. He sat that way for quite some time, and at last his fingers began to relax on the arms of his chair. He had spent most of the previous night wide-awake. Now he simply drifted off to sleep while the lengthening finger in his bathroom drain tapped and circled, circled and tapped.

He dreamed he was a contestant on Jeopardy - not the new, big-money version but the original daytime show. Instead of computer screens, a stagehand behind the game-board simply pulled up a card when a contestant called for a particular answer. Art Fleming had replaced Alex Trebek, with his slicked-back hair and somehow prissy poor-boy-at-the-party smile. The woman in the middle was still Mildred, and she still had a satellite downlink in her ear, but her hair was teased up into a Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant and a pair of cat's-eye frames had replaced her wire-rimmed gla.s.ses.

And everyone was in black and white, him included.

'Okay, Howard,' Art said, and pointed at him. His index finger was a grotesque thing, easily a foot long; it stuck out of his loosely curled fist like a pedagogue's pointer. There was dried toothpaste on the nail. 'It's your turn to select.'

Howard looked at the board and said, 'I'd like Pests and Vipers for one hundred, Art.'

The square with $100 on it was removed, revealing an answer which Art now read: 'The best way to get rid of those troublesome fingers in your bathroom drain.'

'What is . . . ' Howard said, and then came up blank. A black-and-white studio audience stared silently at him. A black-and-white camera man dollied in for a close-up of his sweat-streaked black-and-white face. 'What is . . . um . . . '

'Hurry up, Howard, you're almost out of time,' Art Fleming cajoled, waving his grotesquely elongated finger at Howard, but Howard was a total blank. He was going to miss the question, the hundred bucks would be deducted from his score, he was going to go into the minus column, he was going to be a complete loser, they probably wouldn't even given him the lousy set of encyclopedias . . .

A delivery truck on the street below backfired loudly. Howard sat up with a jerk, which almost pitched him out of his chair.

'What is liquid drain-cleaner?' he screamed. 'What is liquid drain-cleaner?''

It was, of course, the answer. The correct answer.

He began to laugh. He was still laughing five minutes later, as he shrugged into his topcoat and stepped out the door.

Howard picked up the plastic bottle the toothpick-chewing clerk in the Queens Boulevard Happy Handyman Hardware Store had just set down on the counter. There was a cartoon woman in an ap.r.o.n on the front. She stood with one hand on her hip while she used the other hand to pour a gush of drain-cleaner into something that was either an industrial sink or Orson Welles's bidet. DRAIN-EZE, the label proclaimed. TWICE the strength of most leading brands! Opens bathroom sinks, showers, and drains IN MINUTES! Dissolves hair and organic matter!

'Organic matter,' Howard said. 'Just what does that mean?'

The clerk, a bald man with a lot of warts on his forehead, shrugged. The toothpick poking out between his lips rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. 'Food, I guess. But I wouldn't stand the bottle next to the liquid soap, if you know what I mean.'

'Would it eat holes in your hands?' Howard asked, hoping he sounded properly horrified.

The clerk shrugged again. 'I guess it ain't as powerful as the stuff we used to sell - the stuff with lye in it - but that stuff ain't legal anymore. At least I don't think it is. But you see that, don'tcha?' He tapped the skull-and-crossbones POISON logo with one short, stubby finger. Howard got a good look at that finger. He had found himself noticing a lot of fingers on his walk down to the Happy Handyman.

'Yes,' Howard said. 'I see it.'

'Well, they don't put that on just because it looks, you know, sporty. If you got kids, keep it out of their reach. And don't gargle with it.' He burst out laughing, the toothpick riding up and down on his lower lip.

'I won't,' Howard said. He turned the bottle and read the fine print. Contains sodium hydroxide and pota.s.sium hydroxide. Causes severe burns on contact. Well, that was pretty good. He didn't know if it was good enough, but there was a way to find out, wasn't there?

The voice in his head spoke up dubiously. What if you only make it mad, Howard? What then?

Well . . . so what? It was in the drain, wasn't it?

Yes . . . but it appears to be growing.

Still - what choice did he have? On this subject the little voice was silent.

'I hate to hurry you over such an important purchase,' the clerk said, 'but I'm by myself this morning and I have some invoices to go over, so - '

'I'll take it,' Howard said, reaching for his wallet. As he did so, his eye caught something else - a display below a sign, which read FALL CLEARANCE SALE. 'What are those?' he asked. 'Over there?'

'Those?' the clerk asked. 'Electric hedge-clippers. We got two dozen of em last June, but they didn't move worth a d.a.m.n.'

'I'll take a pair,' said Howard Mitla. He began to smile, and the clerk later told police he didn't like that smile. Not one little bit.

Howard put his new purchases on the kitchen counter when he got home, pushing the box containing the electric hedge-clippers over to one side, hoping it would not come to those. Surely it wouldn't. Then he carefully read the instructions on the bottle of Drain-Eze.

Slowly pour 1/4 bottle into drain . . . let stand fifteen minutes. Repeat application if necessary.

But surely it wouldn't come to that, either . . . would it?

To make sure it wouldn't, Howard decided he would pour half the bottle into the drain. Maybe a little bit more. I He struggled with the safety cap and finally managed to get it fff. He then walked through the living room and into the hall with the white plastic bottle held out in front of him and a grim Expression - the expression of a soldier who knows he will be ordered over the top of the trench at any moment - on his usually mild face.

Wait a minute! the voice in his head cried out as he reached for the doork.n.o.b, and his hand faltered. This is crazy! You KNOW it's crazy! You don't need drain-cleaner, you need a psychiatrist! You need to lie down on a couch somewhere and tell someone you imagine - that's right, that's the word, IMAGINE - there's a finger stuck in the bathroom sink, a finger that's growing!

'Oh no,' Howard said, shaking his head firmly back and forth. 'No way.'

He could not - absolutely could not - visualize himself telling this story to a psychiatrist . . . to anyone, in fact. Suppose Mr. Lathrop got wind of it? He might, too, through Vi's father. Bill DeHorne had been a CPA in the firm of Dean, Green, and Lathrop for thirty years. He had gotten Howard his initial interview with Mr. Lathrop, had written him a glowing recommendation . . . had, in fact, done everything but give him the job himself. Mr. DeHorne was retired now, but he and John Lathrop still saw a lot of each other. If Vi found out her Howie was going to see a shrink (and how could he keep it from her, a thing like that?), she would tell her mother - Vi told her mother everything. Mrs. DeHorne would tell her husband, of course. And Mr. DeHorne - Howard found himself imagining the two men, his father-in-law and his boss, sitting in leather wingback chairs in some mythic club or other, the kind of wingback chairs that were studded with little gold nailheads. He saw them sipping sherry in this vision; the cut-gla.s.s decanter stood on the little table by Mr. Lathrop's right hand. (Howard had never seen either man actually drink sherry, but this morbid fantasy seemed to demand it.) He saw Mr. DeHorne - who was now doddering into his late seventies and had all the discretion of a housefly - lean confidentially forward and say, You'll never believe what my son-in-law Howard's up to, John. He's going to see a psychiatrist! He thinks there's a finger in his bathroom sink, you see. Do you suppose he might be taking drugs of some son?

And maybe Howard didn't really think all that would happen. He thought there was a possibility it might - if not in just that way then in some other - but suppose it didn't? He still couldn't see himself going to a psychiatrist. Something in him - a close neighbor of that something that would not allow him to urinate in a public bathroom if there was a line of men behind him, no doubt - simply refused the idea. He would not get on one of those couches and supply the answer - There's a finger sticking out of the bathroom sink - so that some goatee-wearing head-shrinker could pelt him with questions. It would be like Jeopardy in h.e.l.l.

He reached for the k.n.o.b again.

Call a plumber, then! the voice yelled desperately. At least do that much! You don't have to tell him what you see! Just tell him the pipe's clogged! Or tell him your wife lost her wedding ring down the drain! Tell him ANYTHING!

But that idea was, in a way, even more useless than the idea of calling a shrink. This was New York, not Des Moines. You could lose the Hope Diamond down your bathroom sink and still wait a week for a plumber to make a housecall. He did not intend to spend the next seven days slinking around Queens, looking for gas stations where an attendant would accept five dollars for the privilege of allowing Howard Mitla to move his bowels in a dirty men's room underneath this year's Bardahl calendar.

Then do it fast, the voice said, giving up. At least do it fast.

On this Howard's two minds were united. He was, in truth, afraid that if he didn't act fast - and keep on acting - he would not act at all.

And surprise it, if you can. Take off your shoes.

Howard thought this was an extremely useful idea. He acted upon it at once, easing off first one loafer and then the other. He found himself wishing he had thought to put on some rubber gloves in case of backsplatter, and wondered if Vi still kept a pair under the kitchen sink. Never mind, though. He was screwed up to the sticking point. If he paused to go back for the rubber gloves now, he might lose his courage . . . maybe temporarily, maybe for good.

He eased open the bathroom door and slipped inside.

The Mitla bathroom was never what one would call a cheery place, but at this time of day, almost noon, it was at least fairly bright. Visibility wouldn't be a problem . . . and there was no sign of the finger. At least, not yet. Howard tiptoed across the room with the bottle of drain-cleaner clutched tightly in his right hand. He bent over the sink and looked into the round black hole in the center of the faded pink porcelain.

Except it wasn't dark. Something was rushing up through that blackness, hurrying up that small-bore, oozy pipe to greet him, to greet its good friend Howard Mitla.

'Take this!' Howard screamed, and tilted the bottle of Drain-Eze over the sink. Greenish-blue sludge spilled out and struck the drain just as the finger emerged.

The result was immediate and terrifying. The glop coated the nail and the tip of the finger. It went into a frenzy, whirling like a dervish around and around the limited circ.u.mference of the drain, spraying off small blue-green fans of Drain-Eze. Several droplets struck the light-blue cotton shirt Howard was wearing and immediately ate holes in it. These holes fizzed brown lace at the edges, but the shirt was rather too large for him, and none of the stuff got through to his chest or belly. Other drops stippled the skin of his right wrist and palm, but he did not feel these until later. His adrenaline was not just flowing; it was at flood tide.

The finger blurted up from the drain - joint after impossible joint of it. It was now smoking, and it smelled like a rubber boot sizzling on a hot barbecue grill.

'Take this! Lunch is served, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' Howard screamed, continuing to pour as the finger rose to a height of just over a foot, rising out of the drain like a cobra from a snake-charmer's basket. It had almost reached the mouth of the plastic bottle when it wavered, seemed to shudder, and suddenly reversed its field, zipping back down into the drain. Howard leaned farther over the basin to watch it go and saw just a retreating flash of white far down in the dark. Lazy tendrils of smoke drifted up.

He drew a deep breath, and this was a mistake. He inhaled a great double lungful of Drain-Eze fumes. He was suddenly, violently sick. He vomited forcefully into the basin and then staggered away, still gagging and trying to retch.

'I did it!' he shouted deliriously. His head swam with the combined stench of corrosive chemicals and burned flesh. Still, he felt almost exalted. He had met the enemy and the enemy, by G.o.d and all the saints, was his. His!

'Hidey-ho! Hidey-f.u.c.king-ho! I did it! I - '

His gorge rose again. He half-knelt, half-swooned in front of the toilet, the bottle of Drain-Eze still held stiffly out in his right hand, and realized too late that Vi had put both the ring and the lid down this morning when she vacated the throne. He vomited all over the fuzzy pink toilet-seat cover and then fell forward into his own gloop in a dead faint.

He could not have been unconscious for long, because the bathroom enjoyed full daylight for less than half an hour even in the middle of summer - then the other buildings cut off the direct sunlight and plunged the room into gloom again.

Howard raised his head slowly; aware he was coated from hairline to chin-line with sticky, foul-smelling stuff. He was even more aware of something else. A c.l.i.ttering sound. It was coming from behind him, and it was getting closer.

He turned his head, which felt like an overfilled sandbag, slowly to his left. His eyes slowly widened. He hitched in breath and tried to scream, but his throat locked.

The finger was coming for him.

It was easily seven feet long now, and getting longer all the time. It curved out of the sink in a stiff arc made by perhaps a dozen knuckles, descended to the floor, then curved again (Double-jointed! some distant commentator in his disintegrating mind reported with interest). Now it was tapping and feeling its way across the tile floor toward him. The last nine or ten inches were discolored and smoking. The nail had turned a greenish-black color. Howard thought he could see the whitish shine of bone just below the first of its knuckles. It was quite badly burned, but it was not by any stretch of the imagination dissolved.

''Get away,' Howard whispered, and for a moment the entire grotesque, jointed contraption came to a halt. It looked like a lunatic's conception of a New Year's Eve party-favor. Then it slithered straight toward him. The last half a dozen knuckles flexed and the tip of the finger wrapped itself around Howard Mitla's ankle.

'No!' he screamed as the smoking Hydroxide Twins - Sodium and Pota.s.sium - ate through his nylon sock and sizzled his skin. He gave his foot a tremendous yank. For a moment the finger held - it was very strong - and then he pulled free. He crawled toward the door with a huge clump of vomit-loaded hair hanging in his eyes. As he crawled he tried to look back over his shoulder, but he could see nothing through his coagulated hair. Now his chest had unlocked and he gave voice to a series of barking, frightful screams.

He could not see the finger, at least temporarily, but he could hear the finger, and now it was coming fast, tictictictictic right behind him. Still trying to look back over his shoulder, he ran into the wall to the left of the bathroom door with his shoulder. The towels fell off the shelf again. He went sprawling and at once the finger was around his other ankle, flexing tight with its charred and burning tip.

It began to pull him back toward the sink. It actually began to pull him back.

Howard uttered a deep and primitive howl - a sound such ashad never before escaped his polite set of CPA vocal cords - and flailed at the edge of the door. He caught it with his right hand and gave a huge, panicky yank. His shirttail pulled free all the way around and the seam under his right arm tore loose with a low purring sound, but he managed to get free, losing only the ragged lower half of one sock.

He stumbled to his feet, turned, and saw the finger feeling its way toward him again. The nail at the end was now deeply split and bleeding.

Need a manicure, bud, Howard thought, and uttered an anguished laugh. Then he ran for the kitchen.

Someone was pounding on the door. Hard.

'Mitla! Hey, Mitla! What's going on in there?' Feeney, from down the hall. A big loud Irish drunk. Correction: a big loud nosy Irish drunk.

'Nothing I can't handle, my bog-trotting friend!' Howard shouted as he went into the kitchen. He laughed again and tossed his hair off his forehead. It went, but fell back in exactly the same jellied clump a second later. ' 'Nothing I can't handle, you better believe that! You can take that right to the bank and put it in your NOW account!'

'What did you call me?' Feeney responded. His voice, which had been truculent, now became ominous as well. 'Shut up!' Howard yelled. 'I'm busy!' 'I want the yelling to stop or I'm calling the cops!'

'f.u.c.k off!'' Howard screamed at him. Another first. He tossed his hair off his forehead, and clump! Back down it fell.

'I don't have to listen to your s.h.i.t, you little four-eyes creep!'

Howard raked his hands through his vomit-loaded hair and then flung them out in front of him in a curiously Gallic gesture - Et voila! it seemed to say. Warm juice and shapeless gobbets splattered across Vi's white kitchen cabinets. Howard didn't even notice. The hideous finger had seized each of his ankles once, and they burned as if they were wearing circlets of fire. Howard didn't care about that, either. He seized the box containing the electric hedge-clippers. On the front, a smiling dad with a pipe parked in his gob was tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the hedge in front of an estate-sized home.

'You having a little drug-party in there?' Feeney inquired from the hall.

'You better get out of here, Feeney, or I'll introduce you to a friend of mine!' Howard yelled back. This struck him as incredibly witty. He threw his head back and yodeled at the kitchen ceiling, his hair standing up in strange jags and quills and glistening with stomach juices. He looked like a man who has embarked upon a violent love affair with a tube of Brylcreem.

'Okay, that's it,' Feeney said. 'That's it. I'm callin the cops.'

Howard barely heard him. Dennis Feeney would have to wait; he had bigger fish to fry. He had ripped the electric hedge-clippers from the box, examined them feverishly, saw the battery compartment, and pried it open.

'C-cells,' he muttered, laughing. 'Good! That's good! No problem there!'

He yanked open one of the drawers to the left of the sink, pulling with such force that the stop broke off and the drawer flew all the way across the kitchen, striking the stove and landing upside down on the linoleum floor with a bang and a clatter. Amid the general rick-rack - tongs, peelers, graters, paring knives, and garbage-bag ties - was a small treasure-trove of batteries, mostly C-cells and square nine-volts. Still laughing - it seemed he could no longer stop laughing - Howard fell on his knees and grubbed through the litter. He succeeded in cutting the pad of his right palm quite badly on the blade of a paring knife before seizing two of the C-cells, but he felt this no more than he felt the burns he had sustained when he had been backsplashed. Now that Feeney had at last shut his braying Irish donkey's mouth, Howard could hear the tapping again. Not coming from the sink now, though - huh-uh, no way. The ragged nail was tapping on the bathroom door . . . or maybe the hall floor. He had neglected to close the door, he now remembered.

'Who gives a f.u.c.k?' Howard asked, and then he screamed: 'WHO GIVES A f.u.c.k, I SAID! I'M READY FOR YOU, MY FRIEND! I'M COMING TO KICK a.s.s AND CHEW BUBBLEGUM, AND I'M ALL OUT OF BUBBLEGUM! YOU'LL WISH YOU'D STAYED DOWN THE DRAIN!'

He slammed the batteries into the compartment set into the handle of the hedge-clippers and tried the power switch. Nothing.

'Bite my crank!' Howard muttered. He pulled one of the batteries out, reversed it, and put it back in. This time the blades buzzed to life when he pushed the switch, snicking back and forth so rapidly they were only a blur.