The Cipher Read Online Free PDF Page B

disgust: "Take it easy," she said, dropping the hand a little lower, "it's not like I cut it off anybody, or anything. I got it from Useless."
    In my terror the name meant nothing, then all of a sudden it did and I laughed a little, breathless with relief. Useless was her name for Eustlce, a photographer friend of ours who lived with a postgrad pathologist who was pursuing her internship at "U of G morgue," fishing it lower, "it's not like they're gonna miss it or anything. I mean, what's one less hand? They get 'em off the streets all the time. Useless takes pictures of them."
    "Hands?" I leaned over her shoulder, studying with pale interest the hand's Caucasian skin gone muddy yellow, its regulation wrinkles, the marks where it had been separated from its host body. It pressed against the bag in a way that made me glad I hadn't eaten.
    "Vags. Vagrants," delicate eyebrows drawn in a studious slant, faint radiation of beginner's crow's-feet around those eyes, I gazed at them, now, as I leaned closer still. "They die, nobody cares, his stupid girlfriend cuts them up and studies them or something." She swung the bag gently, side to side, strange pendulum, and I caught at her coat, tugged it.
    "Be careful," I said, "you're awful close."
    She shifted, not actually changing position. "I wanted to take pictures, before and after, you know? But Useless wouldn't let me borrow his camera unless I told him what I wanted it for."
    "But he gave you the hand okay."
    "It's just a hand."
    A dead hand, I thought, and had to smile, it was all so weird that it was actually funny. Relaxing back, or as relaxed as I could be around the Funhole, taking my weight on my haunches and looking at Nakota, the lines of concentration around her lips, her touch on the fishing line so sure, fingernails bitten past the skin line. For as long as I'd known her she'd bitten her nails, chewing them the way a child sucks a blanket, dull-eyed intensity. These days she must really be gnawing them, and I wondered if the hand had bitten nails too. I'd read that nails kept growing, after death, a little while. "Who bites the nails of the dead?" I said, silly sonorous voice, and was rewarded with one of Nakota's rarest smiles, a grin of genuine amusement.
    "I do," she said, and went on fishing.
    The hand was down far enough that it seemed small to me, tunnel-vision gaze into the black, Nakota paying out the line as smoothly as a reel. The hand's skin looked whiter against the dark, the plastic bag translucent, its one visible aspect the green closure line at the top. Down and down. Write when you get work.
    Then Nakota started, smiled a very different smile: "Something's happening," she said, and I saw her fingers tighten around the line, saw its visible sway in her grasp. Her face was suddenly grim, a businesslike frown, she must have thought she was losing it; her knees braced more firmly against the floor, I straightened too, quick nervous anticipation of possible need; like a fire extinguisher, in case of emergency break glass. Emergency, that was certainly the right—
    A smell like a giant's rot came like a train from the Funhole, so amazingly foul that even Nakota gasped, grip slackened on the fishing line, face folding like a fist in self-defense and I sank back, shirt fumbling-pressed to my nose and mouth, as the hand came crawling jauntily up the line, some fluid beading lightly on the stub of its wrist, and I screamed into my shirt and grabbed Nakota's arm; her control of the line wavered, the hand swung in drunken ovals over the abyss, then quickly corrected with the 61an of a circus acrobat and climbed higher, nearing the lip of the Funhole and I yelled, "Nakota, get rid of it!" and she swore at me, no words but a sound like an animal and refused to let go of the line.
    "Let it go!" I shouted again and gave her forearm a stiff downward slap, causing the hand to grip more tightly to the line as if the motion had frightened it. I slapped her again and the