“They could have stayed out there in the Desatoya foothills practically forever, I guess, but they were all Tak had, and Tak is always hungry. It sent them into town, because there w—s nothing else it could do. One of them, Shih, was killed right there in the Lady Day. Ch’an was hung two days later, right about where those three bikes were turned upside down in the street… remember those. He raved in Tak’s language, the language of the unformed, right up until the end. He tore the hood right off his head, so they hung him barefaced.”
“Boy, that God of yours, what a guy!” Marinville said cheerfully. “Really knows how to repay a favor, doesn’t he, David.”
“God is cruel,” David said in a voice almost too low to hear.
“What.” Marinville asked. “What did you say.”
“You know. But life is more than just steering a course around pain. That’s something you used to know, Mr. Marinville. Didn’t you.”
Marinville looked off into the corner of the truck and said nothing.
The first thing Mary was aware of was a smell—sweetish, rank, nauseating. Oh Peter, dammit to hell, she thought groggily. It’s the freezer, everything’s spoiled!
Except that wasn’t right; the freezer had gone off during their trip to Majorca, and that had been a long time ago, before the miscarriage. A lot had happened since then. A lot had happened just recently, in fact. Most of it bad. But what.
Central Nevada’s full of intense people.
Who said that. Marielle. In her head it certainly sounded like Marielle.
Doesn’t matter, if it’s true. And it is, isn’t it.
She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. What she mostly wanted was to go back into the darkness part of her was trying to come out of. Because there were voices (they’re a dastardly bunch) and sounds (reek-reek-reek) that she didn’t want to consider. Better to just lie here and—Something scuttered across her face. It felt both light and hairy. She sat up, pawing her cheeks with both hands. An enormous bolt of pain went through her head, bright dots flashed across her vision in sync with her suddenly elevated heartrate, and she had a similarly bright flash of recall, one even Johnny Marinville would have admired.
Ibumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on.
Hold on, you’ll be inside in a jiffy.
And then she had been grabbed. By Ellen. No; by the thing (Tak) that had been wearing Ellen. That thing had slugged her and then boom, boom, out go the lights.
And in a very literal sense, they were still out. She had to flutter her lids several times simply to assure herself that her eyes were open.
Oh, they’re open, all right. Maybe it’s just dark in this place… but maybe you’re blind.
How about that for a lovely thought. Mare. Maybe she hit you hard enough to blind y—Something was on the back of her hand. It ran halfway across and then paused, seeming to throb on her skin. Mary made a sound of revulsion with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth and flapped her hand madly in the air, like a woman waving off some annoying person. The throbbing disappeared; the thing on the back of her hand was gone.
Mary got to her feet, provoking another cymbal-crash of pain in her head which she barely noticed. There were things in here, and she had no time for a mere headache.
She turned slowly around, breathing that sickish-sweet aroma that was so similar to the stench that had greeted her and Pete when they had returned home from their mini—vacation in the Balearic Islands. Pete’s parents had given them the trip as a Christmas present the year after they had been married, and how great it had been… until they’d walked back in, bags in hand, and the stench had hit them like a fist. They had lost everything: two chickens, the chops and roasts she’d gotten at the good discount meat—cutter’s she’d found in Brooklyn, the venison-steaks Peter’s friend Don had given them, the pints of strawberries they’d picked at the Mohonk Mountain House the previous summer.
This smell… so similar…
Something that felt the size of a walnut dropped into her hair.
She screamed, at first beating at it with the flat of her hand. That did no good, so she slid her fingers into her hair and got hold of whatever it was. It squirmed, then burst between her fingers. Thick fluid squirted into her palm. She raked the bristly, deflating body out of her hair and shook it of f her palm. She heard it hit something… splat. Her palm felt hot and itchy, as if she had reached into poison ivy. She rubbed it against her jeans.
Please God don ‘t let me be next, she thought. Whatever happens don’t let me end up like the cop. Like Ellen.
She fought the urge to simply bolt into the black surrounding her. If she did that she might brain herself, disembowel herself, or impale herself, like an expendable character in a horror movie, on some grotesque piece of mining equipment. But even that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that there might be something besides the scut-tering things in here with her. Something that was just waiting for her to panic and run.
Waiting with its arms held out.
Now she had a sense-perhaps it was only her imagina-tion, but she didn’t think so-of stealthy movement all around her. A rustling sound from the left. A slithering from the right. There was a sudden low squalling from behind her, there and gone before she could scream.
That last one wasn’t anything alive, she told herself. At least I don’t think so. I think it was a tumbleweed hit-ting metal and scraping along it. I think I’m in a little building somewhere. She put me in a little building for safekeeping and the fridge is out, just like the lights, and the stuff inside has spoiled.
But if Ellen was Entragian in a new body, why hadn’t he/she just put her back in the cell where he’d put her to start with. Because he/she was afraid the others would find her there and let her out again. It was as plausible a reason as any other she could think up, and there was a thread of hope in it, as well. Holding onto it, Mary began to shuffle slowly forward with her hands held out.
It seemed she walked that way for a very long time—years. She kept expecting something else to touch her, and at last something did. It ran across her shoe. Mary froze. Finally it went about its business. But what fol-lowed it was even worse: a low, dry rattle coming out of the darkness at roughly ten o’clock. So far as she knew, there was only one thing that rattled like that. The sound didn’t really stop but seemed to die away, like the whine of a cicada on a hot August afternoon. The low squalling returned. This time she was positive it was a tumbleweed sliding along metal.
She was in a mining building, maybe the Quonset where Steve and the girl with the wild hair, Cynthia, had seen the little stone statue that had fright-ened them so badly.
Get moving.
Ican ‘t. There ’s a rattlesnake in here. Maybe more than one. Probably more than one.
That’s not all that’s in here, though. Better get moving, Mary.
Her palm throbbed angrily where the thing in her hair had burst open. Her heart thudded in her ears. As slowly as she could, she began inching forward again, hands out. Terrible ideas and images went with her. She saw a snake as thick as a powerline dangling from a rafter just ahead of her, fanged jaws hinged wide, forked tongue dancing. She would walk right into it and wouldn’t know until it battened on her face, injecting its poison straight into her eyes. She saw the closet-demon of her childhood, a bogey she had for some reason called Apple Jack, slumped in the corner with his brown fruit-face all pulled in on itself, grinning, waiting for her to wander into his deadly embrace; the last thing she’d smell would be his cidery aroma, which was for the time being masked by the stench of spoilage, as he hugged her to death, all the time covering her face with wet avid uncle—kisses. She saw a cougar, like the one that had killed poor old Tom Billingsley, crouched in a corner with its tail switching. She saw Ellen, holding a baling hook in one hand and smiling a thin waiting smile which was like a hook itself, simply marking time until Mary got close enough to skewer.