Surrounding her with a prickly ring of electricity and malice.
I retreated a block, though the transformer fire apparently hid me from theCorpsegrinder, for it stayed where it was, eyelessly staring inward. Three timesI circled the house from a distance, looking for a way in. An unguarded cable, awrought-iron fence, any unbroken stretch of metal too high or too low for theCorpsegrinder to reach.
Nothing.
Finally, because there was no alternative, I entered the house across the streetfrom the Widow's, the one that was best shielded from the spouting andstuttering transformer. A power line took me into the attic crawlspace. Fromthere I scaled the electrical system down through the second and first floorsand so to the basement. I had a brief glimpse of a man asleep on a couch beforethe television. The set was off but it still held a residual charge. It satquiescent, Smug, bloated with stolen energies. If the poor bastard on the couchcould have seen what I saw, he'd've never turned on the TV again. In thebasement I hand-over-handed myself from the washing machine to the main waterinlet. Straddling the pipe, I summoned all my courage and plunged my headunderground.
It was black as pitch. I inched forward on the pipe in a kind of panic. I couldsee nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing. All I could feel wasthe iron pipe beneath my hands. Just beyond the wall the pipe ended in a T-jointwhere it hooked into a branch line under the drive. I followed it to the street.
It was awful: like suffocation infinitely prolonged. Like being wrapped in blackcloth. Like being drowned in ink. Like strangling noiselessly in the voidbetween the stars. To distract myself, I thought about my old man.