Then suddenly, the ghost-like figure started to turn toward him. "Looookkk, Paawwall," Susan's voice cried, "Looouuk aatt meeee! Loookk whhaaauttt muuurrdderr hassss dounne touu meeee!" From within a fog of uncomprehending astonishment, Paul watched the body pivot with aching slowness to face him. When she was finally turned, he saw the torn bloodstained blouse. He watched the figure pull her gnarled, crippled hand away from the features it covered. And in spite of all his intentions, in spite of making every effort not to react, Paul found himself gasping in shock, the half-filled glass of liquor falling from his hand to the floor. What he saw was not just unrecognizable as Susan; it was hardly recognizable as a face at all. One cheek and eye were missing completely, a lacerated gaping opening lined with ragged loose hanging pieces of severed bloody flesh surrounding it, a cheekbone protruding out of the opening at a bizarre angle. The mouth had also been almost destroyed, the lips sliced completely in half diagonally across the middle, all the center teeth except for one lower incisor now gone. Long open cuts were everywhere across the remaining flesh of the face and down into what remained of the neck, dried hunks of caked blood hanging from the edges of the lacerations, the worst being a huge gaping cavity where the center of the neck should have been. The loose skin that surrounded the opening flapped back and forth as the figure breathed. But the worst part of what he saw was the shape of the head. The entire forehead where Susan must have smashed against the windshield was crushed inward from the eyebrows to above the hairline, the indented area now sunken, the top of the head forced upward, distorting the shape of the skull's front to that of a pinhead. At the center of the indentation was an opening in the bone where worm-like twists of gray brain matter protruded, intermixed with matted, blood-soaked patches of hair that had been plastered against the front of the broken skull.
