                                  Snatcher

                           from STRANGE HIGHWAYS

                               by Dean Koontz

             --------------------------------------------------

     Billy Neeks had a flexible philosophy regarding property rights.
     He believed in the proletarian ideal of shared wealth -- as long
     as the wealth belonged to someone else. On the other hand, if the
     property belonged to him, Billy was prepared to defend it to the
     death. This was a simple, workable philosophy for a thief --
     which Billy was.

     Billy Neeks's occupation was reflected in his grooming: he looked
     slippery. His thick black hair was slicked back with enough
     scented oil to fill a crankcase. His coarse skin was perpetually
     pinguid, as if he suffered continuously from malaria. He moved
     cat-quick on well-lubricated joints, and his hands had the
     buttery grace of a magician's hands. His eyes resembled twin
     pools of Texas crude, wet and black and deep -- and utterly
     untouched by any human warmth or feeling. If the route to Hell
     were an inclined ramp requiring a hideous grease to facilitate
     descent, Billy Neeks would be the devil's choice to pass eternity
     in the application of that noxious, oleaginous substance.

     In action, Billy could bump into an unsuspecting woman, separate
     her from her purse, and be ten yards away and moving fast by the
     time she realized that she'd been victimized. Single-strap
     purses, double-strap purses, clutch purses, purses carried over
     the shoulder, purses carried in the hand -- all meant easy money
     to Billy Neeks. Whether his target was cautious or careless was
     of no consequence. Virtually no precautions could foil him.

     That Wednesday in April, pretending to be drunk, he jostled a
     well-dressed elderly woman on Broad Street, just past Bartram's
     Department Store. As she recoiled in disgust from that oily
     contact, Billy slipped her purse off her shoulder, down her arm,
     and into the plastic shopping bag that he carried. He reeled away
     from her and took six or eight steps in an exaggerated stagger
     before she realized that the collision had not been as accidental
     as it seemed. Even as the victim shrieked, "police," Billy had
     begun to run, and by the time she added, "help, police, help,"
     Billy was nearly out of earshot.

     He raced through a series of alleyways, dodged around garbage
     cans and dumpsters, and leaped across the splayed legs of a
     sleeping wino. He sprinted across a parking lot and fled into
     another alley.

     Blocks from Bartram's, Billy slowed to a walk. He was breathing
     only slightly harder than usual. Grinning.

     Stepping out of the alley onto Forty-sixth Street, he spotted a
     young mother carrying a baby, a shopping bag, and a purse. She
     looked so defenseless that Billy couldn't resist the opportunity,
     so he flicked open his switchblade and, in a wink, cut the thin
     straps on her bag, a stylish blue-leather number. Then he dashed
     off again, across the street, where drivers braked sharply and
     blew their horns at him, into another network of alleyways, all
     familiar to him.

     As he ran, he giggled. His giggle was neither shrill nor
     engaging, but more like the sound of ointment squirting from a
     tube.

     When he slid on spilled garbage -- orange peels, rotting lettuce,
     mounds of molding and soggy bread -- he was not tripped up or
     even slowed down. The disgusting muck seemed to facilitate his
     flight, and he came out of the slide moving faster than he had
     gone into it.

     He slowed to a normal pace when he reached Prospect Boulevard.
     The switchblade was in his pocket again. Both stolen purses were
     concealed in the plastic shopping bag. He projected what he
     believed to be an air of nonchalance, and although his calculated
     expression of innocence was actually a dismal failure, it was the
     best that he could do.

     He strolled to his car, which he had parked at a meter along
     Prospect. The Pontiac, unwashed for at least two years, left oil
     drippings wherever it went, just as a wolf in the wilds marked
     its territory with dribbles of urine. Billy put the stolen purses
     in the trunk of the car and, whistling happily, drove away from
     that part of the city, toward yet untouched prowling grounds in
     other neighborhoods.

     Of the several reasons for his success as a purse snatcher,
     mobility was perhaps the most important. Many snatchers were kids
     seeking a few fast bucks, young hoods without wheels. Billy Neeks
     was twenty-five, no kid, and possessed reliable transportation.
     He usually robbed two or three women in one neighborhood and then
     quickly moved on to another territory where no one was looking
     for him and where more business waited to be done.

     To him, this was not small-time thievery committed either by
     impulse or out of desperation. Instead, Billy saw it as a
     business, and he was a businessman, and like other businessmen he
     planned his work carefully, weighed the risks and benefits of any
     opportunity, and acted only as a result of careful, responsible
     analysis.

     Other snatchers -- amateurs and punks, every one of them --
     paused on the street or in an alley to hastily search purses for
     valuables, risking arrest because of their inadvisable delays, at
     the very least creating a host of additional witnesses to their
     crimes. Billy, on the other hand, stashed the stolen purses in
     the trunk of his car to be retrieved later for more leisurely
     inspection in the privacy of his home.

     He prided himself on his methodicalness and caution.

     That cloudy and humid Wednesday in late April, he crossed and
     recrossed the city, visiting three widely separated districts and
     snatching six purses in addition to those that he had taken from
     the elderly woman outside Bartram's and from the young mother on
     Forty-sixth Street. The last of the eight also came from an old
     woman. At first he thought that it was going to be an easy hit,
     and then he thought that it was going to get messy, and finally
     it just turned out to be weird.

     When Billy spotted her, she was coming out of a butcher's shop on
     Westend Avenue, clutching a package of meat to her breast. She
     was old. Her brittle white hair stirred in the spring breeze, and
     Billy had the curious notion that he could hear those dry locks
     rustling against one another. Her crumpled-parchment face, her
     slumped shoulders, her pale withered hands, and her shuffling
     step combined to convey the impression not only of extreme age
     but of frailty and vulnerability -- which drew Billy Neeks as if
     he were an iron filing and she a magnet. Her purse was big,
     almost a satchel, and the weight of it -- in addition to the
     package of meat -- seemed to bother her, because she was
     shrugging the straps farther up on her shoulder and wincing in
     pain, as if suffering from a flare-up of arthritis.

     Although it was spring, she was dressed in black: black shoes,
     black stockings, black skirt, dark gray blouse, even a heavy
     black cardigan sweater unsuited to the mild day.

     Billy looked up and down the street, saw no one else nearby, and
     quickly made his move. He did his drunk trick: staggering,
     jostling the old biddy. But as he pulled the purse down her arm,
     she dropped the package of meat, seized the bag with both hands,
     and for a moment they were locked in an unexpectedly fierce
     struggle. Ancient as she was, she possessed surprising strength.
     He tugged at the purse, wrenched and twisted it, desperately
     attempted to rock her backward off her feet, but she stood her
     ground and held on with the tenacity of a deeply rooted tree
     resisting a storm wind.

     He said, "Give it up, you stupid old bitch, or I'll bust your
     face."

     And then a strange thing happened:

     She changed before Billy's eyes. She no longer appeared frail but
     steely, no longer weak but darkly energized. Her bony, arthritic
     hands suddenly looked like the dangerous talons of a powerful
     bird of prey. That singular face -- pale yet jaundiced, nearly
     fleshless, all wrinkles and sharp pointy lines -- was still
     ancient, but it no longer seemed quite human to Billy Neeks. And
     her eyes. God, her eyes. At first glance, Billy saw only the
     watery, myopic gaze of a doddering crone, but abruptly they were
     eyes of tremendous power, eyes of fire and ice, simultaneously
     boiling his blood and freezing his heart, eyes that saw into him
     and through him, not the eyes of a helpless old granny but those
     of a murderous beast that had the desire and ability to devour
     him alive.

     He gasped in fear, and he almost let go of the purse, almost ran.
     In a blink, however, she was transformed into a defenseless
     old-woman again. Abruptly she capitulated. Like pop beads, the
     swollen knuckles of her twisted hands seemed to come apart, and
     her finger joints went slack. She lost her grip, releasing the
     purse with a small cry of despair.

     Emitting a menacing snarl that served not only to frighten the
     old woman but also to chase away Billy's own irrational terror,
     he shoved her backward into a curbside trash container, and he
     bolted past her with the satchel-size purse under his arm. He
     glanced back after several steps, half expecting to see that she
     had fully assumed the form of a great dark bird of prey, flying
     at him, eyes aflame, teeth bared, talon-hands spread and hooked
     to tear him to bits. But she was clutching at the trash container
     to keep her balance, as age-broken and helpless as she had been
     when he had first seen her.

     The only odd thing: She was looking after him with a smile. No
     mistaking it. A wide, stained-tooth smile. Almost a lunatic grin.

     Senile old fool, Billy thought. Has to be senile if she finds
     anything funny about having her purse snatched.

     He could not imagine why he had ever been afraid of her.

     He ran, dodging from one alleyway to another, down side streets,
     across a sun-splashed parking lot, along a shadowy service
     passage between two tenements, and onto a street far removed from
     the scene of his latest theft. At a stroll, he returned to his
     parked car and put the old woman's black purse in the trunk with
     the others taken elsewhere in the city. At last, a hard day's
     work behind him, he drove home, looking forward to counting his
     take, having a few icy beers, and watching some TV.

     Once, stopped at a red traffic light, Billy thought he heard
     something moving in the car trunk. A few hollow thumps. A brief
     but curious scraping. When he cocked his head and listened
     closer, however, he heard nothing more, and he decided that the
     noise had only been the pile of stolen purses shifting under
     their own weight.

                -------------------------------------------

     Billy Neeks lived in a ramshackle four-room bungalow between a
     vacant lot and a transmission shop, two blocks from the river.
     The place had belonged to his mother, and it had been clean and
     in good repair when she had lived there. Two years ago, Billy had
     convinced her to transfer ownership to him "for tax reasons,"
     then had shipped her off to a nursing home to be tended at the
     expense of the state. He supposed she was still there; he didn't
     know for sure because he never visited.

     That evening in April, Billy arranged the eight purses side by
     side in two rows on the kitchen table and stared at them for a
     while in sweet anticipation of the treasure hunt to come. He
     popped the tab on a Budweiser. He tore open a bag of Doritos. He
     pulled up a chair, sat down, and sighed contentedly.

     Finally, he opened the purse that he had taken off the woman
     outside Bartram's and began to calculate his "earnings." She had
     looked well-to-do, and the contents of her wallet did not
     disappoint Billy Neeks: four hundred and nine dollars in folding
     money, plus another three dollars and ten cents in change. She
     also carried a stack of credit cards, which Billy would be able
     to fence through Jake Barcelli, the pawnshop owner, who would
     also give him a few bucks for whatever other worthwhile loot he
     found in the purses. In the first bag, those miscellaneous
     fenceable items included a gold-plated Tiffany pen, a matching
     gold-plated Tiffany compact and lipstick tube, and a fine though
     not extraordinarily expensive opal ring.

     The young mother's purse contained only eleven dollars and
     forty-two cents. Nothing else of value. Billy had expected as
     much, but this meager profit did not diminish the thrill he got
     from going through the contents of the bag. He regarded snatching
     as a business, yes, and thought of himself as a good businessman,
     but he also took considerable pleasure simply from examining and
     touching his victims' possessions. The violation of a woman's
     personal property was a violation of her too, and when his quick
     hands explored the young mother's purse, it was almost as if he
     were exploring her body. Sometimes, Billy took unfenceable items
     -- cheap compacts, inexpensive tubes of lipstick, eyeglasses --
     and put them on the floor and stomped them, because crushing them
     beneath his heel was curiously almost like crushing the woman
     herself. Easy money made his work worthwhile, but he was equally
     motivated by the tremendous sense of power that he got from the
     job; it stimulated him, it really did, stimulated and satisfied.

     By the time he'd gone slowly through seven of the eight purses,
     savoring their contents, it was seven-fifteen in the evening, and
     Billy was euphoric. He breathed fast and occasionally shuddered
     ecstatically. His oily hair looked oilier than usual, for it was
     damp with sweat and hung in clumps and tangles. Perspiration
     glimmered on his face. During his exploration of the purses, he
     knocked the open Doritos off the kitchen table but didn't notice.
     He opened a second beer, but he never took a taste of it; now it
     stood warm and forgotten. His world had shrunk to the dimensions
     of a woman's purse.

     Billy had saved the crazy old woman's bag for last because he had
     a hunch that it was going to provide the greatest treasure of the
     day.

     The hag's purse was big, almost a satchel, made of supple black
     leather, with long straps and with a single main compartment that
     was zippered shut. He pulled it in front of him and stared at it
     for a while, letting sweet anticipation build.

     He remembered how the crone had resisted him, holding fast to the
     bag until he thought that he might have to flick open his
     switchblade and cut her. He had cut a few women before, not many,
     but enough to know that he liked cutting them.

     That was the problem. Billy was smart enough to realize that,
     liking knife play so much, he must deny himself the pure pleasure
     of cutting people, resorting to violence only when absolutely
     necessary. If he used the knife too often, he would be unable to
     stop using it, would be compelled to use it -- and then he would
     be lost. Although the police expended no energy in the search for
     mere purse snatchers, they would be a lot more aggressive and
     relentless in the pursuit of a slasher.

     Still, he had not cut anyone for several months, and by such
     admirable self-control, he should have earned the right to have
     some fun. He would have taken enormous pleasure in separating the
     old woman's withered meat from her bones. Now he wondered why he
     had not ripped her up the moment that she had given him trouble.

     He had virtually forgotten how she'd briefly terrified him, how
     she'd looked less human than avian, how her bony hands had seemed
     to metamorphose into wicked talons, and how her eyes had blazed.
     Deeply confirmed in his macho self-image, he had no capacity for
     any memory that had the potential for humiliation.

     With a growing certainty that he was about to find a surprising
     treasure, he put his hands on the purse and lightly squeezed. It
     was crammed full, straining at the seams, the mother of all
     purses, and Billy told himself that the forms he felt through the
     leather were wads of money, banded stacks of hundred-dollar
     bills.

     His heart thumped with excitement.

     He pulled open the zipper, looked in, and frowned.

     The inside of the purse was . . . dark.

     Billy peered closer.

     Very dark.

     Impossibly dark.

     Squinting, he could see nothing in there at all: not a wallet or
     a compact or a comb or a packet of Kleenex, not even the lining
     of the purse itself, only a flawless and deep darkness, as if he
     were peering into a well. "Deep" was the word, all right, for he
     had a sense that he was staring down into unplumbable and
     mysterious depths, as if the bottom of the purse were not just a
     few inches away but thousands of feet down -- even farther --
     countless miles below him. Suddenly he realized that the glow
     from the overhead fluorescents fell into the open purse but
     illuminated nothing; the bag seemed to swallow every ray of light
     and digest it.

     Billy Neeks's warm sweat of quasi-erotic pleasure turned icy, and
     his skin dimpled with gooseflesh. He knew that he should pull the
     zipper shut, cautiously carry the purse blocks away from his own
     house, and dispose of it in someone else's trash bin. But he saw
     his right hand slipping toward the gaping maw of the bag. When he
     tried to pull his hand back, he could not, as though it were a
     stranger's hand over which he had no control. His fingers
     disappeared into the darkness, and the rest of his hand followed.
     He shook his head -- no, no -- but still he could not stop
     himself. He was compelled to reach into the bag. And now his hand
     was in all the way to the wrist, and he felt nothing in there,
     nothing but a terrible cold that made his teeth chatter, and
     still he reached in and down until his arm was shoved all the way
     in to the elbow. He should have felt the bottom of the purse long
     before this, but there was just a vast emptiness in it, so he
     reached down farther, until he was in almost to his shoulder,
     feeling around with splayed fingers, searching in that impossible
     void for something, anything.

     That was when something found him.

     Down deep in the bag, something brushed his hand.

     Billy jerked in surprise.

     Something bit him.

     Billy screamed and finally found the will to resist the siren
     call of the darkness in the purse. He tore his hand out and
     leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair. He stared in
     astonishment at the bloody punctures on the meaty portion of his
     palm. Tooth marks. Five small holes, neat and round, welling
     blood.

     At first numb with shock, he at last let out a wail and grabbed
     for the zipper on the purse to close it. Even as Billy's
     blood-slick fingers touched the pull tab, the creature climbed
     out of the bag, ascending from a lightless place, and Billy
     snatched his hand back in terror.

     The beast was small, only about a foot tall, not too big to crawl
     out through the open mouth of the purse. It was gnarly and
     darkish, like a man in form -- two arms, two legs -- but not like
     a man in any other way at all. If its tissues had not once been
     inanimate lumps of stinking sewage, then they had been a sludge
     of mysterious though equally noxious origins. Its muscles and
     sinews appeared to be formed from human waste, all tangled with
     human hair and decaying human entrails and desiccated human
     veins. Its feet were twice as large as they should have been and
     terminated in razor-edged black claws that put as much fear into
     Billy Neeks as his own switchblade had put into others. A hooked
     and pointed spur curved up from the back of each heel. The arms
     were proportionately as long as those of an ape, with six or
     maybe seven fingers -- Billy could not be sure how many because
     the thing kept working its hands ceaselessly as it crawled out of
     the purse and stood up on the table -- and each finger ended in
     an ebony claw.

     As the creature rose to its feet and emitted a fierce hiss, Billy
     stumbled backward until he came up against the refrigerator. Over
     the sink was a window, locked and covered with greasy curtains.
     The door to the dining room was on the other side of the kitchen
     table. To get to another door that opened onto the back porch, he
     would have to go past the table as well. He was effectively
     trapped.

     The thing's head was asymmetrical, lumpy, pocked, as if crudely
     modeled by a sculptor with an imperfect sense of human form,
     crafted from sewage and scraps of rotten tissue, as was its body.
     A pair of eyes were set high on that portion of the face that
     would have been the forehead, and a second pair blinked below
     them. Two more eyes, making six in all, were located at the sides
     of the skull, where ears should have been, and all these organs
     of vision were entirely white, without iris or pupil, so the
     beast appeared to be blinded by cataracts.

     But it could see. Most definitely, it could see, for it was
     looking straight at Billy.

     Trembling violently, making strangled sounds of fear, Billy
     reached to one side with his bitten right hand, and he pulled
     open a drawer in the cabinet next to the refrigerator. Never
     taking his eyes off the thing that had come out of the purse, he
     fumbled for the knives that he knew were there, found them, and
     extracted the butcher's knife.

     On the table, the six-eyed demon opened its ragged mouth,
     revealing rows of pointed yellow teeth. It hissed again.

     "Oh, G-G-God," Billy said, pronouncing the second word as if it
     were in a foreign language, its meaning not quite clear to him.

     Twisting its deformed mouth into what might have been a grin, the
     demon kicked the open can of beer off the table and let out a
     hideous dry sound halfway between a snarl and a giggle.

     Suddenly lunging forward and swinging the big butcher's knife as
     if it were a mighty Samurai sword, Billy slashed at the creature,
     intending to lop off its head, chop it in half. The blade
     connected with its disgusting flesh, sank less than an inch into
     its darkly glistening torso, above its knobby hips, but would not
     go any deeper, certainly not all the way through. Billy felt as
     if he had taken a hack at a slab of steel, for the aborted power
     of the blow coursed back through the handle of the knife and
     shivered painfully through his hands and arms like the vibrations
     that would have rebounded upon him if he had grabbed a crowbar
     and, with all his strength, slammed it into a solid iron post.

     In that same instant, one of the creature's hands moved
     flash-quick, slashed Billy, revealing two of his knuckle bones.

     With a cry of surprise and pain, Billy let go of the weapon. He
     staggered back against. the refrigerator, holding his gouged
     hand.

     The creature on the table stood unfazed, the knife embedded in
     its side, neither bleeding nor exhibiting any signs of pain. With
     its small black gnarled hands, the beast gripped the handle and
     pulled the weapon from its flesh. Turning six scintillant, milky
     eyes on Billy, it raised the knife, which was nearly as big as
     the beast itself, and snapped it in two. It threw the blade in
     one direction and the handle in another.

     Billy ran.

     He had to go around the table, past the creature, too close, but
     he did not care, did not hesitate, because his only alternative
     was to stand at the refrigerator and be torn to bits. Dashing out
     of the kitchen into the bungalow's dining room, he heard a thump
     behind him as the demon leaped off the table. Worse: He heard the
     click-tick-clack of itschitinous feet and horny claws as it
     scrambled across the linoleum, hurrying after him.

     As a purse snatcher, Billy had to keep in shape and had to be
     able to run as fast as a deer. Now, his conditioning was the only
     advantage he had.

     Was it possible to outrun the devil?

     He bounded out of the dining room, jumped over a footstool in the
     living room, and fled toward the front door. His bungalow was
     isolated between an empty lot and a transmission repair shop that
     was closed at this hour of the evening. A few houses stood across
     the street, however, and at the corner was a 7-Eleven market that
     was usually busy. He figured that he would be safe if he was with
     other people, even strangers. He sensed that the demon would not
     want to be seen by anyone else.

     Expecting the beast to leap on him and sink its teeth into his
     neck, Billy tore open the front door and almost plunged out of
     the house -- then stopped abruptly when he saw what lay outside.
     Nothing. No front walk. No lawn, no trees. No street. No other
     houses across the way, no 7-Eleven on the corner. Nothing,
     nothing. No light whatsoever. The night beyond the house was
     unnaturally dark, as utterly lightless as the bottom of a mine
     shaft -- or as the inside of the old hag's purse, from which the
     beast had clambered. Although it should have been a warm
     late-April evening, the velvet-black night was icy,
     bone-numbingly cold, just as the inside of the big black leather
     purse had been.

     Billy stood on the threshold, swaying, breathless, shaken by his
     jackhammer heart, and he was seized by the mad idea that his
     entire bungalow was now inside the crazy old woman's purse. Which
     made no sense. The bottomless purse was back there in the
     kitchen, on the table. The purse could not be inside the house at
     the same time that the house was inside the purse. Could it?

     He felt dizzy, confused, nauseous.

     He had always known everything worth knowing. Or thought he did.
     Now he knew better.

     He didn't dare venture out of the bungalow into the unremitting
     blackness. He sensed no haven within that coaly gloom. And he
     knew instinctively that, if he took one step into the frigid
     darkness, he would not be able to turn back. One step, and he
     would fall into the same terrible void that he had felt within
     the hag's purse: down and down, forever down.

     A hiss.

     The beast was behind him.

     Whimpering wordlessly, Billy Neeks turned from the horrifying
     emptiness beyond his house, looked back into the living room,
     where the demon was waiting for him, and cried out when he saw
     that it had grown bigger than it had been a moment ago. Much
     bigger. Three feet tall instead of one. Broader in the shoulders.
     More muscular arms. Thicker legs. Bigger hands and longer claws.
     The repulsive creature was not as close as he had expected, not
     on top of him, but standing in the middle of the small living
     room, watching him with predatory interest, grinning, taunting
     him merely by choosing not to end the confrontation quickly.

     The disparity between the warm air in the house and the freezing
     air outside generated a draft that sucked the door shut behind
     Billy. It closed with a bang.

     Hissing, the demon took a step forward. When it moved, Billy
     could hear its gnarly skeleton and oozing flesh work one against
     the other like the parts of a grease-clogged machine in ill
     repair.

     He backed away from it, heading around the room toward the short
     hall that led to the bedroom.

     The repugnant apparition followed, casting a hellish shadow that
     was somehow even more grotesque than it should have been, as if
     it were thrown not by the monster's malformed body but by its
     more hideously malformed soul. Perhaps aware that its shadow was
     wrong, perhaps unwilling to consider the meaning of its twisted
     silhouette, the beast purposefully knocked over the floor lamp as
     it stalked Billy, and in the influx of shadows, it proceeded more
     confidently and more eagerly, as if darkness greased its way.

     At the entrance to the hallway, Billy stopped edging sideways,
     bolted flat-out for his bedroom, reached it, and slammed the door
     behind him. He twisted the latch with no illusions of having
     found sanctuary. The creature would smash through that flimsy
     barrier with no difficulty. Billy only hoped to reach the
     nightstand where he kept a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, and indeed
     he got it with time to spare.

     The gun was smaller than he remembered. He told himself that it
     seemed inadequate only because the enemy was so formidable. The
     weapon would prove plenty big enough when he squeezed the
     trigger. But it still seemed small. Virtually a toy.

     With the loaded .357 held in both hands and aimed at the door, he
     wondered if he should fire through the barrier or wait until the
     beast burst inside.

     The demon resolved the issue by exploding through the locked door
     in a shower of splinters and mangled hinges.

     It was bigger still, more than six feet tall, bigger than Billy,
     a gigantic and loathsome creature that, more than ever, appeared
     to be constructed of filth, wads of mucus, tangled hair, fungus,
     and the putrescent bits and pieces of cadavers. Redolent of
     rotten eggs, with its multiplicitous white eyes now as radiant as
     incandescent bulbs, it lurched inexorably toward Billy, not even
     hesitating when he pulled the trigger of the .357 and pumped six
     rounds into it.

     Who or what had that old crone been, for God's sake? She was no
     ordinary senior citizen, living on Social Security, paying a
     visit to her butcher's shop, looking forward to bingo on Saturday
     night. Hell no. No way. What kind of crazy woman carried such a
     strange purse and kept such a thing as this at her command? What
     kind of bitch, what kind of bitch? A witch?

     Of course, a witch.

     At last, backed into a corner, with the creature looming over
     him, the empty gun still clutched in his left hand, the scratches
     and bites burning in his right hand, Billy really knew for the
     first time what it meant to be a defenseless victim. When the
     hulking, unnameable entity put its massive saber-clawed hands
     upon him -- one on his shoulder, one on his chest -- Billy peed
     in his pants and was at once reduced to the pitiable condition of
     a weak, helpless, and frightened child.

     He was sure that the demon was going to tear him apart, crack his
     spine, decapitate him, and suck the marrow out of his bones, but
     instead it lowered its malformed face to his throat and put its
     gummy lips against his throbbing carotid artery. For one wild
     moment, Billy thought it was kissing him. Then he felt its cold
     tongue lick his throat from collarbone to jawline, and he felt as
     if he'd been stung by a hundred needles. Sudden and complete
     paralysis ensued.

     The creature lifted its head and studied his face. Its breath
     stank worse than the graveyard odor exuded by its repellent
     flesh. Unable to close his eyes, in the grip of a paralysis so
     complete that he could not even blink, Billy stared into the
     demon's maw and saw its moon-white, prickled tongue.

     The beast stepped back. Unsupported, Billy dropped limply to the
     floor. Though he strained, he could not move a single finger.

     Grabbing a handful of Billy's well-oiled hair, the beast began to
     drag him out of the bedroom. He could not resist. He could not
     even protest, because his voice was as frozen as the rest of him.

     He could see nothing but what moved past his fixed gaze, for he
     could neither turn his head nor roll his eyes. He had glimpses of
     furniture past which he was dragged, and he could see the walls
     and the ceiling above, over which shadows cavorted. When he
     rolled onto his stomach, he felt no pain in his cruelly twisted
     hair, and thereafter he could see only the floor in front of his
     face and the demon's clawed black feet as it trod heavily toward
     the kitchen, where the chase had begun.

     Billy's vision blurred, cleared, blurred again, and he thought
     his failing sight was related to his paralysis. Then he
     understood that copious but unfelt tears were pouring from his
     eyes, streaming down his face. In all his mean and hateful life,
     he had no memory of having wept before.

     He knew what was going to happen to him.

     In his racing, fear-swollen heart, he knew.

     The stinking, oozing beast dragged him rudely through the dining
     room, banging him against the table and chairs. It took him into
     the kitchen, pulling him through spilled beer, over a carpet of
     scattered Doritos. The thing plucked the old woman's huge black
     purse from the table and put it on the floor within Billy's view.
     The unzippered mouth of the bag yawned wide.

     The demon was noticeably smaller now, at least in its legs and
     torso and head, although the arm -- with which it held fast to
     Billy -- remained enormous and powerful. With horror and
     amazement, but not with much surprise, Billy watched the creature
     crawl into the purse, shrinking as it went. Then it pulled him in
     after it.

     He didn't feel himself shrinking, but he must have grown smaller
     in order to fit through the mouth of the purse. Still paralyzed
     and still held by his hair, Billy looked back under his own arm
     and saw the kitchen light beyond the purse, saw his own hips
     balanced on the edge of the bag above him, tried to resist, saw
     his thighs coming in, then his knees, the bag was swallowing him,
     oh God, he could do nothing about it, the bag was swallowing him,
     and now only his feet were still outside, and he tried to dig his
     toes in, tried to resist, but could not.

     Billy Neeks had never believed in the existence of the soul, but
     now he knew that he possessed one -- and that it had just been
     claimed.

     His feet were in the purse now.

     All of him was in the purse.

     Still looking back under his arm as he was dragged down by his
     hair, Billy stared desperately at the oval of light above and
     behind him. It was growing smaller, smaller, not because the
     zipper was being drawn shut up there, but because the hateful
     beast was dragging him a long way down into the bag, which made
     the open end appear to dwindle the same way that the mouth of a
     turnpike tunnel dwindled in the rearview mirror as one drove
     toward the other end.

     The other end.

     Billy could not bear to think about what might be waiting for him
     at the other end, at the infinitely deep bottom of the purse and
     beyond it.

     He wished that he could go mad. Madness would be a welcome escape
     from the dread that filled him. Madness would provide sweet
     relief. But evidently part of his fate was that he should remain
     totally sane and acutely aware.

     The light above had shrunk to the size of a small, pale, oblate
     moon riding high in a night sky.

     It was like being born, Billy realized -- except that, this time,
     he was being born out of light and into darkness.

     The albescent moonform above shrank to the size of a small and
     distant star. The star winked out.

     In the perfect blackness, many strange voices hissed a welcome to
     Billy Neeks.

     That night in late April, the bungalow was filled with distant,
     echoey screams of terror from so far away that, although carrying
     through every room of the small house, they did not reach the
     quiet street beyond the walls and did not draw any attention from
     nearby residents. The screams continued for a few hours, faded
     gradually, and were replaced by licking-gnawing-chewing sounds of
     satisfied consumption.

     Then silence.

     Silence held dominion for many hours, until the middle of the
     following afternoon, when the stillness was broken by the sound
     of an opening door and footsteps.

     "Ah," the old woman said happily as she stepped through the
     kitchen door and saw her purse standing open on the floor. With
     arthritic slowness, she bent, picked up the bag, and stared into
     it for a moment.

     Smiling, she pulled the zipper shut.

