wder. For three nights, now, I'd corked off solid until
seven ack emma and I'd come alive in the morning fine, fit, and fresh.

But on the following morning, Mr. Mullaney was missing. I never saw him
again.

At noon, or thereabouts, the end of the ring finger on my left hand was
as solid as a rock. I could squeeze it in a door or burn it with a
cigarette; I got into a little habit of scratching kitchen matches on it
as I tried to dig into the solid flesh with my perception. I growled a
bit at my fate, but not much.

It was about this time, too, that the slight itch began to change. You
know how a deep-felt itch is. It can sometimes be pleasant. Like the
itch that comes after a fast swim in the salty sea and a dry-out in the
bright sun, when the drying salt water makes your skin itch with the
vibrant pleasure of just being alive. This is not like the bite of any
bug, but the kind that makes you want to take another dive into the
ocean instead of trying to scratch it with your claws. Well, the itch in
my finger had been one of the pleasant kinds. I could sort of scratch it
away by taking the steel-hard part of my finger in my other hand and
wiggle, briskly. But now the itch turned into a deep burning pain.

My perception, never good enough to dig the finer structure clearly, was
good enough to tell me that my crawling horror had come to the boundary
line of the first joint.

It was this pause that was causing the burning pain.

According to what I'd been told, if someone didn't do something about me
right now, I'd lose the end joint of my finger.

Nobody came to ease my pain, nor to ease my mind. They left me strictly
alone. I spent the time from noon until three o'clock examining my
fingertip as I'd not examined it before. It was rock hard, but strangely
flexible if I could exert enough pressure on the flesh. It still moved
with the flexing of my hands. The fingernail itself was like a chip of
chilled steel. I could flex the nail neither with my other hand nor by
biting it; between my teeth it had the uncomfortable solidity of a sheet
of metal that conveyed to my brain that the old teeth should not try to
bite too hard. I tried prying on a bit of metal with the fingernail;
inserting the nail in the crack where a metal cylinder had been formed
to make a table leg. I might have been able to pry the crack wider, but
the rest of my body did not have the power nor the rigidity necessary to
drive the tiny lever that was