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his broad, sweat-greased face. His eyes were blue-gray chips of ice, and the frigid passion that shone in them was surely too monstrous to have been concealed when she last saw him.
    Then she saw the knife, and the sight of it was like a blast of furnace heat that turned her doubts to steam and blew them away. He meant to kill her. The knife was fixed to his belt, over his right hip. It was in an open sheath, and he could free it simply by popping the metal snap on a single narrow leather strap. In one second, the blade could be slipped from the holder and wrapped tightly in his fist; in two seconds, it could be jammed deep into her soft belly, slicing through warm meat and jelly organs, letting loose the precious store of blood.
    “I’ve wanted you since I first saw you,” Frye said. “Just wanted to get at you.”
    Time seemed to stop for her.
    “You’re going to be a good little piece,” he said. “Real good.”
    Abruptly, the world was a slow-motion movie. Each second seemed like a minute. She watched him approach as if he were a creature in a nightmare, as if the atmosphere had suddenly become as thick as syrup.
    The instant that she spotted the knife, Hilary froze. She stopped backing away from him, even though he continued to approach. A knife will do that. It chokes you up, freezes your heart, brings an uncontrollable tremor to your guts. Surprisingly few people have the stomach to use a knife against another living thing. More than any other weapon, it makes you aware of the delicacy of flesh, the terrible fragility of human life; in the damage that he wreaks, the attacker can see all too clearly the nature of his own mortality. A gun, a draught of poison, a firebomb, a blunt instrument, a strangler’s piece of rope—all can be used relatively cleanly, most of them at a distance. But the man with a knife must be prepared to get dirty, and he must get in close, so close that he can feel the heat escaping from the wounds as he makes them. It takes a special courage, or insanity, to slash at another person and not be repelled by the warm blood spurting over your hand.
    Frye was upon her. He placed one large hand on her breasts, rubbed and squeezed them roughly through the silky fabric of her dress.
    That rude contact snapped her out of the trance into which she’d fallen. She knocked his hand away, twisted out of his grasp, and ran behind the couch.
    His laugh was hearty, disconcertingly pleasant, but his hard eyes glinted with a macabre amusement. It was a demon joke, the mad humor of hell. He wanted her to fight back, for he enjoyed the chase.
    “Get out!” she said. “Get out!”
    “Don’t want to get out,” Frye said, smiling, shaking his head. “I want to get in . Oh yeah. That’s it. I want to get in you, little lady. I want to rip that dress off your back, get you naked, and get right up in there. All the way up, all the way inside where it’s warm and wet and dark and soft.”
    For a moment, the fear that made her legs rubbery and turned her insides to water was supplanted by more powerful emotions: hate, anger, fury. Hers was not the reasoned anger of a woman toward an arrogant man’s usurpation of her dignity and rights; not an intellectual anger based on the social and biological injustices of the situation; it was more fundamental than that. He had entered her private space uninvited, had pushed his way into her modern cave, and she was possessed by a primitive rage that blurred her vision and made her heart race. She bared her teeth at him, growled in the back of her throat; she was reduced to an almost unconscious animal response as she faced him and looked for a way out of the trap.
    A low, narrow, glass-topped display table stood flush against the back of the sofa. Two eighteen-inch-high pieces of fine porcelain statuary rested upon it. She grabbed one of the statues and hurled it at Frye.
    He ducked with a primitive, instinctual quickness of his own. The porcelain struck the stone