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BlinAI
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Testo

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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“Hold off a bit on Dayna’s cycle,” he said. “We still have a matter to”—he looked at her, and his eyes glimmered speculatively—“to thrash out in here,” he finished.
“Okay.”
The intercom clicked off. Flagg looked at her, smiling, hands folded. He looked for a very long time. Dayna began to sweat. His eyes seemed to grow larger and darker. Looking into them was like looking into wells which were very old and very deep. This time when she tried to drag her gaze away, she couldn’t.
“Tell me,” he said, very softly. “Let’s not have any unpleasantness, dear.”
From far off, she heard her voice say, “This whole thing was a script, wasn’t it? A little one-act play.”
“Dear, I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. The mistake was having Lloyd answer so fast. When you say frog around here, they jump. He should have been halfway down the Strip with my cycle. Except you told him to stay put because you never intended to let me go.”
“Dear, you’ve got a terrible case of unfounded paranoia. It was your experience with those men, I suspect. The ones with the traveling zoo. It must have been a terrible thing. This could be a terrible thing, too, and we don’t want that, do we?”
Her strength was draining away; it seemed to be flowing down her legs in perfect lines of force. With the last of her will, she turned her numb right hand into a fist and struck herself above the right eye. There was an airburst of pain inside her skull and her vision went wavery. Her head rocked back and struck the do...
“Oh, you’re good,” she said raggedly.
“You know who it is,” he said. He got off the desk and began to walk toward her. “You know and you’re going to tell me. Punching yourself in the head won’t help, dear.”
“How come you don’t know?” she cried at him. “You knew about the Judge and you knew about me! How come you don’t know about—”
His hands descended on her shoulders with terrible power, and they were cold, as cold as marble. “Who?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook her like a ragdoll, his face grinning and fierce and terrible. His hands were cold, but his face gave off the baking oven heat of the desert. “You know. Tell me. Who?”
“Why don’t you know? ”
“Because I can’t see it! ” he roared, and flung her across the room. She went in a boneless, rolling heap, and when she saw the searchlight of his face bearing down upon her in the gloom, her bladder let go, spreading warmth down her legs. The soft and helpful face of reason was gone. Randy Flagg was gone. She was with...
“You’ll tell,” he said. “You’ll tell me what I want to know.”
She gazed at him, and then slowly got to her feet. She felt the weight of the knife lying against her forearm.
“Yes, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Come closer.”
He took a step toward her, grinning.
“No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear.”
He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.
“Closer,” she whispered huskily.
He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand.
“Here! ” she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor.
“Oh, my dear!” he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter.
She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a sickly yellow grin, miming Flagg’s own.
“You’ll tell,” he whispered. “Oh yes indeed you will.”
And Dayna knew he was right.
She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those black hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk.
Dayna leaped at the window-wall.
“No! ” he screamed, and she could feel him after her like a black wind.
She drove with her lower legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees’ parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried h...
She felt his hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough.
It was Tom I saw, and you can’t feel him or whatever it is you do because he’s different, he’s —
He was dragging her back in.
She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a...
She had gone, perhaps in triumph.
Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a bat...
Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney—they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.
Only Lloyd waited—not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.
He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd’s head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.
Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape.
“Get rid of that,” Flagg said.
“Okay.” His voice fell to a husky whisper. “Should I take the head?”
“Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the fucking thing! ”
“All right.”
“Yes.” Flagg smiled benignly.