Now.

He lunged up into empty air and slapped his arms across the end of the tabletop. A broad vista of huge, piled-up objects met his eyes. Then he began slipping, and he clutched at the wood, digging his nails into it. He kept sliding toward the edge, his body moving into space, dragging him.

"No," he whimpered in a strangled voice.

He managed to lurch forward again, fingertips scraping at the wood surface, arms pressing down tightly, desperately.

He saw the curving metal rod.

He was hanging a quarter of an inch from his fingers. He had to reach it or he'd fall. Leaving one hand down, splinters gouging under its nails, he raised the other hand toward the rod.

Look out!

His raised hand slapped down again and clawed frantically at the wood. He began slipping back again.

With a last, frenzied lunge, he grabbed for the curving rod and his hands clamped over its icy thickness.

He dragged himself, kicking and struggling, over the edge of the tabletop. Then his hands dropped from the metal- which was the hanging handle of a paint can and he collapsed heavily on his chest and stomach.

He lay there for a long time, unable to move, shaking with the remains of dread and exertion, sucking in lungfuls of the cold air. I made it, he thought. It was all he could think. I made it, I made it!

As exhausted as he was, it gave him a warming pride to think it.

Chapter Five

After a while he got up shakily and looked around.

The tabletop's expanse was littered with massive paint cans, bottles and jars. Scott walked along their mammoth shapes, stepping over the jagged-toothed edge of a saw blade and racing across its icy surface to the tabletop again.

Orange paint. He strode past the luridly streaked can, the top of his head barely as high as the bottom edge of the can's label. He remembered painting the lawn chairs during one of the many hours he'd spent in the cellar before his last, irrevocable snow-caked plunge into it.

Head back, he gazed up at an orange-spotted brush handle sticking out of an elephantine jar. One day, not so long ago he'd held that handle in his fingers. Now it was ten times as long as he was; a huge, knife pointed length of glossy yellow wood.

There was a loud clicking noise and then the ocean like roar of the oil burner filled the air again. His heartbeat raced, then slowed once more. No, he'd never get used to its thundering suddenness. Well, there'd be only four more days of it, anyway, he thought.

His feet were getting cold; there was no time to waste. Between the barren hulks of paint cans he walked until he'd reached the body-thick rope that hung down in twisted loops from the top of the refrigerator.