“Now here’s Mary Chapin Carpenter to tell us why she feels lucky today,” the radio announcer said, emerging gamely from another blast of static. “Maybe she’s been to Whalen’s in Austin. Let’s find out.”
Mary Chapin Carpenter began to tell the hanging dead men and women in the lab of the Desperation Mining Corporation about her lucky day, how she’d won the lot-tery and all, and Steve let go of Cynthia. He took a step into the lab and sniffed the air. No gunsmoke that he could smell, and maybe that didn’t mean much-the air conditioners probably turned over the air in here pretty fast-but the blood was dry on the corpses which had been eviscerated, and that probably meant whoever had done this was long gone.
“Let’s go!” Cynthia hissed, tugging his arm.
“Okay,” he said. “Just-”
He broke off as something caught his eye. It was sitting on the end of the computer table, to the right of the screen with the Goofy-flasher on it. Not a rock, or not just a rock, anyway. Some kind of stone artifact. He walked over and looked down at it.
The girl scurried after him and yanked his arm again. “What’s the matter with you. This isn’t a guided tour! What if-” Then she saw what he was looking at-really saw it-and broke off. She reached out a tentative finger and touched it. She gasped and drew her finger back. At the same moment her hips jerked forward as if she’d gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of the table. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “I think I just-” And there she stopped.
“Just what.”
“Nothing.” But she looked as if she was blushing, so Steve guessed maybe it was something, at that. “There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary.”
It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast’s head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body-almost the snout of an alligator-and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that was what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery in places, too, like the rocks col-lected in one of the Dandux baskets. Beside it, anchored by a plastic box of pushpins, was a note: Jim-What the hell is this. Any idea. Barbie.
“Look at its tongue,” Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.
“What about it.”
“It’s a snake.”
Yes, he saw, it was. A rattler, maybe. Something with fangs, anyway.
Cynthia’s head snapped up. Her eyes were wide and alarmed. She grabbed his shirt again and pulled it. “What are we doing.” she asked, “This isn’t art-appreciation class, for Christ’s sake-we’ve got to get out of here!”
Yeah, we do, Steve thought. The question is, where do we go.
They’d worry about it when they got to the truck. Not in here. He had an idea it would be impossible to do any productive thinking in here.
“Hey, what happened to the radio.” she asked.
“Huh.” He listened, but the music was gone. “I don’t know.”
With a strange, set expression on her face, Cynthia reached out to the crumbling fragment on the table again. This time she touched it between the ears. She gasped. The hanging lights flickered-Steve saw them flicker—and the radio came back on. “Hey Dwight, hey Lyle, boys, you don ‘t need to fight,” Mary Chapin Carpenter sang through the static, “hot dog, I feel lucky tonight!”
“Christ,” Steve said. “Why’d you do that.”
Cynthia looked at Steve. Her eyes looked oddly hazy. She shrugged, touched her tongue to the middle of her upper lip. “I don’t know.” Suddenly she put her hand to her forehead and squeezed her temples, hard. When she took it away, her eyes were clear again, but frightened. “What the hell.” she said, more to herself than to him.
Steve reached out to touch the thing himself. She grabbed his wrist before he could.
“Don’t. It feels nasty.”
He shook her off and put his finger on the wolf’s back (all at once he was sure that was what it was, not a coyote but a wolf). The radio went dead again. At the same time there was a cough of broken glass from somewhere be-hind them. Cynthia yelped.
Steve had already taken his finger off the rock; he would have done that even if nothing at all had happened, because she was right: it felt nasty. But for a moment, something did happen. It felt as if one of the more vital circuits in his head had shorted out, for one thing. Except… hadn’t he been thinking about the girl. Doing some-thing to the girl, with the girl. The kind of thing both of you might like to try but would never talk about to your friends. A kind of experiment.
Even as he was mulling this over, trying to remember what the experiment might have been, he was reaching out for the stone again with his finger. He didn’t make a conscious decision to do this, but now that he was, it seemed like a good idea. Just let that old finger go where it wants, he thought, bemused. Let it touch whatever it—She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from the piece of stone Just as he was about to put his finger on the wolf’s back. “Hey, sport, read my lips: I want to get out of here! Right now!”
He took a deep breath, let it out. Repeated the process. His head began to feel like familiar territory again, but he was suddenly more frightened than ever. Of exactly what he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Holding her hand, he led her back into the hallway. He glanced over his shoulder once, at the crumbled gray bit of carving. Twisted, predatory head. Bulging eyes. Too—long snout. Snake tongue. And beyond it, something else. Both the helix and the exhibitionist Goofy were gone. Those screens were dark, as if some power-surge had shorted them out.
Water was pouring through the open door of the office with the aquarium in it. There was a molly stranded on the edge of the hallway carpet, flopping its last. Well, Steve thought, now we know what broke, no need to wonder about that.
“Don’t look when we go by,” he said. “Just-”
“Did you hear something just then.” she asked. “Bangs or booms or something like that.”
He listened, heard only the wind… then thought he heard a stealthy shuffling from behind him.
He wheeled around quickly. Nothing there. Of course there wasn’t, what had he been thinking. That one of the corpses had wriggled down off its hook and was coming after them. Dumb. Even under these stressful circum-stances, that was plumb loco, Wild Bill.
But there was something else, something he couldn’t dismiss, dumb or not: that statue. It was like a physical presence in his head, a thumb poking rudely into the actual tissue of his brain. He wished he hadn’t looked at it. Even more, he wished he hadn’t touched it.
“Steve. Did you hear anything. It could have been gun-shots. There! There’s another one!”
The wind screamed along the side of the building and something else fell over out there, making them cry out and grab for each other like kids in the dark. The thing that had fallen over went scraping along the ground outside.
“I don’t hear anything but the wind. Probably what you heard was a door banging shut somewhere. If you heard anything.”
“There were at least three of them,” she said. “Maybe they weren’t gunshots, more like thuds, but-”
“Could have been something flying in the wind, too. Come on, cookie, let’s shake some tailfeathers.”
“Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake,” she said faintly, not looking when they passed the office with the water still draining out of it.