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He needed to think. He couldn’t go home. He checked into the motel, called his office and reported himself sick. The room he got was bland and quiet. The only decorations were bad steamboat prints. Nothing glowed from the walls.

Dolarhyde lay down in his clothes. The ceiling had sparkling flecks in the plaster. Every few minutes he had to get up and urinate. He shivered, then he sweated. An hour passed.

He did not want to give Reba McClane to the Dragon. He thought about what the Dragon would do to him if he didn’t serve her up.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can’t stand it for long at a time. In the heavy calm between the waves, Dolarhyde could think.

How could he keep from giving her to the Dragon? One way kept nudging him. He got up.

The light switch clacked loud in the tiled bathroom. Dolarhyde looked at the shower-curtain rod, a solid piece of one-inch pipe bolted to the bathroom walls. He took down the shower curtain and hung it over the mirror.

Grasping the pipe, he chinned himself with one arm, his toes dragging up the side of the bathtub. It was stout enough. His belt was stout enough too. He could make himself do it. He wasn’t afraid of that.

He tied the end of his belt around the pipe in a bowline knot. The buckle end formed a noose. The thick belt didn’t swing, it hung down in a stiff noose.

He sat on the toilet lid and looked at it. He wouldn’t get any drop, but he could stand it. He could keep his hands off the noose until he was too weak to raise his arms.

But how could he be positive that his death would affect the Dragon, now that he and the Dragon were Two? Maybe it wouldn’t. How could he be sure the Dragon then would leave her alone?

It might be days before they found his body. She would wonder where he was. In that time would she go to his house and feel around for him? Go upstairs and feel around for him and get a surprise?

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bsp; The Great Red Dragon would take an hour spitting her down the stairs.

Should he call her and warn her? What could she do against Him, even warned? Nothing. She could hope to die quickly, hope that in His rage He would quickly bite deep enough.

Upstairs in Dolarhyde’s house, the Dragon waited in pictures he had framed with his own hands. The Dragon waited in art books and magazines beyond number, reborn every time a photographer . . . did what?

Dolarhyde could hear in his mind the Dragon’s powerful voice cursing Reba. He would curse her first, before he bit. He would curse Dolarhyde too—tell her he was nothing.

“Don’t do that. Don’t . . . do that,” Dolarhyde said to the echoing tile. He listened to his voice, the voice of Francis Dolarhyde, the voice that Reba McClane understood easily, his own voice. He had been ashamed of it all his life, had said bitter and vicious things to others with it.

But he had never heard the voice of Francis Dolarhyde curse him.

“Don’t do that.”

The voice he heard now had never, ever cursed him. It had repeated the Dragon’s abuse. The memory shamed him.

He probably was not much of a man, he thought. It occurred to him that he had never really found out about that, and now he was curious.

He had one rag of pride that Reba McClane had given him. It told him dying in a bathroom was a sorry end.

What else? What other way was there?

There was a way and when it came to him it was blasphemy, he knew. But it was a way.

He paced the motel room, paced between the beds and from the door to the windows. As he walked he practiced speaking. The words came out all right if he breathed deep between the sentences and didn’t hurry.

He could talk very well between the rushes of fear. Now he had a bad one, he had one that made him retch. A calm was coming after. He waited for it and when it came he hurried to the telephone and placed a call to Brooklyn.

A junior high school band was getting on the bus in the motel parking lot. The children saw Dolarhyde coming. He had to go through them to get to his van.

A fat, round-faced boy with his Sam Browne belt all crooked put on a scowl, puffed up his chest and flexed his biceps after Dolarhyde passed. Two girls giggled. The tuba blatted out the bus window as Dolarhyde went by, and he never heard the laughter behind him.

In twenty minutes he stopped the van in the lane three hundred yards from Grandmother’s house.

He mopped his face, inhaled deeply three or four times. He gripped his house key in his left hand, the steering wheel with his right.