Lightning by Dean Koontz Page B

don’t run.
    From one flight below, the Eel said, “Look at the big Tootsie Roll I have in my hand now, Laura. It’s lots bigger than those others.”
    On the third floor Laura hurried directly to the bathroom where she vigorously scrubbed her hands. She felt filthy after taking hold of Sheener’s hand in order to remove it from her shoulder.
    Later, when she and the Ackerson twins convened their nightly powwow on the floor of their room, Thelma howled with laughter when she heard about the Eel wanting Laura to look at his “big Tootsie Roll.” She said, “He’s priceless, isn’t he? Where do you think he gets these lines of his? Does Doubleday publish the Perverts’ Book of Classic Come-ons or something?”
    “The point is,” Ruth said worriedly, “he wasn’t turned off when Laura stood up to him. I don’t think he’s going to give up on her as quickly as he gives up on other girls who resist him.”
    That night Laura had difficulty sleeping. She thought about her special guardian, and she wondered if he would appear as miraculously as before and if he would deal with Willy Sheener. Somehow she didn’t think she could count on him this time.
     
During the following ten days, as August waned, the Eel shadowed Laura as reliably as the moon shadowed the earth. When she and the Ackerson twins went to the game room to play cards or Monopoly, Sheener arrived within ten minutes and set to work ostensibly washing windows or polishing furniture or repairing a drapery rod, though in fact his attention was primarily focused on Laura. If the girls sought refuge in a corner of the playground behind the mansion, either to talk or play a game of their own devising, Sheener entered the yard shortly thereafter, having suddenly found shrubbery that had to be pruned or fertilized. And although the third floor was for girls only, it was open to male staff members for the purpose of maintenance between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon on weekdays, so Laura could not escape to her room during those hours with any degree of safety.
    Worse than the Eel’s diligence was the frightening rate at which his dark passion for her grew, a sick need revealed by the steadily increasing intensity of his gaze and the sour sweat that burst from him when he was in the same room with her for more than a few minutes.
    Laura, Ruth, and Thelma tried to convince themselves that the threat from the Eel lessened with every day he did not act, that his hesitation revealed his awareness of Laura as unsuitable prey. At heart they knew they were hoping to slay the dragon with a wish, but they were unable to face the full extent of the danger till a Saturday afternoon late in August, when they returned to their room and found Tammy destroying Laura’s book collection in a fit of twisted jealousy.
    The library of fifty paperbacks—her favorite books, which she had brought with her from the apartment above the grocery—were kept under Laura’s bed. Tammy had brought them out into the middle of the room and in a hateful frenzy had ripped apart two-thirds of them.
    Laura was too shocked to act, but Ruth and Thelma pulled the girl away from the books and restrained her.
    Because those were her favorite books, because her father bought them for her and they were therefore a link to him, but most of all because she owned so little, Laura was pained by the destruction. Her possessions were so meager, of no value, but she suddenly realized that they formed ramparts against the worst cruelties of life.
    Tammy lost interest in the books now that the true object of her rage stood before her. “I hate you, I hate you!” Her pale, drawn face was alive for the first time since Laura had known her, flushed and contorted with emotion. The bruiselike circles around her eyes hadn’t vanished, but they no longer made her appear weak or broken; instead she looked wild, savage. “I hate you, Laura, I hate you!”
    “Tammy, honey,” Thelma said, struggling