Bill dropped the knife. He popped both of his sweat-slick hands out of their cocoons, and fought the urge to laugh in triumph.

He grabbed the edges of the hole and pulled. The meat came apart with surprising ease; though it still spasmed, much of its strength seemed to have fled. For a couple of minutes he struggled with it, until most of it lay in chunks on the carpet.

Bill stood as soon as he was able. He gave the nearest piece a savage kick.

"Fuckin' shit," he said. "Take fuckin' that."

He used one of the pillows on the bed to wipe off his sweat-drenched face. "What the fuck, Constance?" he said again. "What the fuck were you thinking?"

Bill took another drink of beer. He took a deep breath and tried to calm his heart.

"All right," he said. "All right."

And he walked to the door.

On the left, he saw the bathroom open. The sight of the toilet reminded him, jarringly, of another sore spot deep in his abdomen: his bladder. He hadn't taken a piss in God knew how long.

"All right," he muttered. "First things first.

He pissed for a full two minutes. When he was done he felt like he'd been punched in the gut. And his dick felt cold, nerveless. He wondered briefly when he saw it if he'd ever be using it for sex ever again. After the last two days of gore and fright, would it be possible to get sexually aroused ever again?

He zipped up and went to the sink. He ripped open one of the bars of soap, and part of his mind urged him to get out of there, to stop his wifea*he'd wasted enough time already.

"Damn," he said.

Bill bypassed washing his hands. He strode directly to the door.

He grabbed the doorknob, and felt his hand shaking violently.

"There's nothing that I can do," he said. "Do your best and forget the rest. Do your best and forget the rest. Do your best..."

With that platitude dying on his lips, he jerked the door open.

Twenty-Three.

Everything was quiet.

Bill closed the door behind him. The sound of the latch engaging echoed through the hallway. And he heard his breath scraping through his throat, and the rush of blood into his ears.

"Okay," he told himself. "Okay, okay."

He looked up and down the hallway. The corridor was maybe sixty or seventy feet on either side. The carpet had a jarring pattern of red and gold chevrons.

"All right," he said, feeling very exposed there in the middle of the hallway. The spot between his shoulder blades itched.

Bill looked both ways, like a kid crossing the street, before choosing the right. He took another Zen-master deep breath, and started off down the hallway in a jog.

"What the fuck am I going to do?" he asked himself.

He realized he had no idea. No plan. Flying blind.

Toward the end of the hallway, he saw the elevator sign. The elevators had golden doors, shiny as mirrors.

Bill stopped, his heart beating too hard. He jabbed the button marked CASINO.

"Come on, come on," he told the elevator, as he heard its motors whine, and the ratchet of tightening cables.

For another minute, the elevator hummed through the shaft. He found himself chewing his lips and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Finally, the elevator stopped.

"All right all right," he said, wiping the sweat off of his face. Sweating a lot. Too much. "Let's do this. Do your best, and forget the rest. Do your best, forget..."

A faint chime, and the e doors rolled open.

In some part of his brain, he expected what came next. It made perfect horror-movie sense. It was the next logical step. The cherry on the shit sundae.

The first thing he saw was his wife's face, floating in the middle of the elevator like a ghost.

Then blood.

Blood on every wall. Sprays and trails and spatters.

"Darling!" she shouted, her voice wild. "I'm so glad that you're here! Beat the muscles, I see!"

She wasn't alone.

Accompanying her was a man. He was fat and short, with white pants and white shoes. He wore a shirt with vertical rainbow stripes, that gave him the appearance of a walking beach ball.

A red line marked his throat where Constance had sliced it open.

"I named him Bruiser!" shouted his wife.

She raised her knife for Bill to admire. Blood obscured the blue glass, turning the blade a lurid red.

"It's all done," said his wife. "Now to get that truck..."

Bill's body reacted before he could think.

He grabbed the guy with the beach-ball shirt by the shouldersa*

a*and braced himself against a flood of information.

Immediately Bill knew that the guy's name was John Costa, and he lived in Warwick, Rhode Island. The guy owned a bakery located next to a liquor store in some cheesy strip-mall plaza. Three children, all grown, all living in California, who never wrote him as much as he would have likeda*

The flow of information stopped as he jerked the man towards Constance. The dead man moved easily despite his massive bulk.

"Wha?" his insane wife said as she was thrown into the wall, her small frame folding underneath the weight of Mr. John Costa. Her knife pierced John's right arm at the elbow, and the blade stuck out from the joint like a broken bone. Both of them ended up on the elevator floor, with John flopping as if he was humping Constance, the knife sticking out like an antennae. She squirmed underneath him, her arms and legs sticking out at comical angles Bill forced himself to be calm. He swallowed his heart before he spoke.

"No," he said. "I'm getting you away from here."

"Too late," said Constance, calmly.

Then, slowly, John Guy rose off of his wife.

"That's good," she said, as the dead man got to his knees. Blood gushed from the wound in his arm. It hung at his side, a useless slab of fat and muscle. John guy wore little John Lennon glasses, Bill noticed, the lenses now tinted a bright red like two lollipops. "Go and get him for me."

Bill met his wife's eyes.

She smiled. Blood stained her teeth.

In the dim light of the elevator, her violet eyes had changed to black.

Bill stepped back from the elevator, his stomach flopping.

"Bill," she said. "Come willingly. Come on."

John lurched for him, holding out his fat hands, blood running down his neck onto his loud shirt. Bill sidestepped him. The dead man overbalanced, and gurgled as he fell to the floor. His weight made the floorboards pop and creak.

"Constance," said Bill.

He took one last look at the thing that looked like his wife. She still smiled ear-to-ear. A dribble of blood ran down the side of her face, dripping onto the elevator's carpet. She held up the awful knife.

"Don't make this difficult, Bill," she said.

"You have no idea," he said. "How difficult this is."

John grunted, the blood bubbling around the gash in his throat.

"He had kids," said Bill.

"So fucking what?" said Constance. "Come with me. We'll get the truck..."

"No," said Bill.

He turned and ran.

Twenty-Four.

"Come back, fucker!" shouted his wife.

As Bill sprinted through the quiet hallway, every one of his steps jarred him, the shock traveling from his feet through his knees to land like an hammer blow to his spine.

As he reached the end of the hallway, he half-expected his wife to use some kind of spell to get him to turn around, to run back to her. It was within her power. Like she'd told him, she could do pretty much whatever she wanted.

Perhaps she was letting him go.

Bill reached a metal door at the end of the hallway, marked STAIRS. He tore the door open and vaulted himself into the plain stairway. The walls in there were and industrial white, in sterile contrast to the blood red and shining gold of the elevator.

He mounted the steps, wiping his face as he hustled downward.

He lost count of the number of flights he'd tripped down before he reached the ground floor. He staggered across the last landing and slapped open the white metal door.

He stepped out onto a casino floor, blinking to adjust to the darkness.

"Stop," said a hoarse voice beside him. "Back upstairs."

Bill had only a moment to register where he wasa*in a bank of slot machines, their neon lights blue and reda*before he turned around again to the wall and faced the person who had accosted him.

It was a woman. A cocktail waitress, from her uniform, which had a low-cut blue blouse and black short skirt. Red hair was up tight around her head, and her right eye had been put out.

"Terris says come back to me," said the woman, and lurched for him.

Bill sidestepped her easily. She fell into the wall, her head bouncing off the dark plaster. She recovered quickly and spun back around, clutching her forehead.

"Ow," she said.

"You're dead," said Bill.

"No," said the woman. "Come on and come back with me. We've got a lot to discuss. Don't we...?"

He stared at her for a moment. She was shambling toward him again, her arms outstretched, like an extra from one of Constance's beloved zombie movies.

"No," he said again. "Don't want to."

And once again, he turned and ran.

"Come back, lover!" shrieked the dead waitress.

He had no idea where he was going in the maze of neon machines, but he knew he had to leave this place. Leave his wife and all of the revenants or dead boys and dead girls behind. Back to the quiet of his former life; all nineteen years of it.

He ran past a series of windows, covered with bars and bristling with security cameras. It was probably where people went to cash in their chips and get money for the machines. His dad had talked about casinos before; going not only to this one but to Las Vegas, where you could have your pick of sin. There were nobody behind the windows; only glimpses of various counting machines and general office equipment.

He continued onto the casino floor, and realized that there was nobody out there.

He stopped for a moment, and looked out over the banks of machines. Nobody sat at them. In the middle distance there was a roped-off area of blackjack tables, their green tops like patches of grass growing indoors. Nobody at them. No mid-day drunks slouched over a bad hand, or tourists giggling over watered-down drinks.