“It was probably just a shadow.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Steve. You okay.”
“No. I feel like I did when we came into town.”
She looked at him, alarmed. “Okay. But we don’t have a gun—“Fuck that.” He grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. “Now. Christ, something is really wrong. Can’t you feel it.”
“I… might feel something. Should I get Mary. She’s back with Billingsley-”
“No time. Come or stay here. Suit yourself.”
He shrugged up the sides of the coverall, jumped off the stage, stumbled, grabbed a seat in the front row to steady himself, then ran up the center aisle. When he got to its head, Cynthia was right behind him, once again not even out of breath. The chick could motor, you had to give her that.
The boss was just coming out of the box office, Ralph Carver behind him. “We’ve been looking out at the street,” Johnny said. “The storm is definitely… Steve. What’s wrong.”
Without answering, Steve looked around, spotted the stairs, and pelted up them. Part of him was still amazed at the speed with which this feeling of urgency had grabbed hold.
Most of him was just scared.
“David! David, answer if you hear me!”
Nothing. A grim, trash-lined hallway leading past what were probably the old balcony and a snackbar alcove Narrow stairs going farther up at the far end. No one here Yet he had a clear sense that there had been, and only a short time ago.
“David!” he shouted.
“Steve. Mr. Ames.” It was Carver. He sounded almost as scared as Steve felt. “What’s wrong. Has something happened to my son.”
“I don’t know.”
Cynthia ducked under Steve’s arm and hurried down the hallway to the balcony entrance.
Steve went after her A frayed length of rope was hanging down from the top of the arch, still swaying a little.
“Look!” Cynthia pointed. At first Steve thought the thing lying out there was a corpse, then registered the hair for what it was-some kind of synthetic. A doll. One with a noose around its neck.
“Is that what you saw.” he asked her.
“Yes. Someone could have ripped it down and then maybe drop-kicked it.” The face she turned up to his was drawn and tense. In a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “God, Steve, I don’t like this.”
Steve took a step back, glanced left (the boss and David’s father looked at him anxiously, clutching their weapons against their chests), then looked right. There his heart whispered… or perhaps it was his nose, picking up some lingering residue of Opium, that whispered. Up there. Must be the projection-booth.
He ran for it, Cynthia once more on his heels. He went up the narrow flight of stairs and was groping for the knob in the dimness when she grabbed the back of his pants to hold him where he was.
“The kid had a pistol. If she’s in there with him, she could have it now. Be careful, Steve.”
“David!” Carver bawled. “David, are you okay.”
Steve thought of telling Cynthia there was no time to be careful, that that time had passed when they lost track of David in the first place… but there was no time to talk, either.
He turned the knob and shoved the door hard with his shoulder, expecting to encounter either a lock or some other resistance, but there was none. The door flew open; he flew into the room after it.
Across from him, against the wall with the projection—slots cut into it, were David and Audrey. David’s eyes were half-open, but only their bulging whites showed. His face was a horrid corpse-color, still greenish from the soap but mostly gray. There were growing lavender patches beneath his eyes and high up on his cheekbones. His hands drummed spastically on the thighs of his jeans. He was making a soft choking sound. Audrey’s right hand was clamped around his throat, her thumb buried deep in the soft flesh beneath his jaw on the right, the fingers dig-ging in on the left. Her formerly pretty face was contorted in an expression of hate and rage beyond anything Steve had ever seen in his life-it seemed to have actually dark-ened her skin, somehow. In her left hand she held the.45 revolver David had used to shoot the coyote. She fired it three times, and then it clicked empty.
The two-step drop into the projection-booth almost cer-tainly saved Steve at least one more hole in his already perforated hide and might have saved his life. He fell for-ward like a man who has misjudged the number of stairs in a flight, and all three bullets went over his head. One thudded into the doorjamb to Cynthia’s right and show-ered splinters into her exotic hair.
Audrey voiced a ululating scream of frustration. She threw the empty gun at Steve, who simultaneously ducked and raised one hand to bat it away. Then she turned back to the slumping boy and began to throttle him with both hands again, shaking him viciously back and forth like a doll. David’s hands abruptly quit thrumming and simply lay on the legs of his jeans, as limp as dead starfish.
5 “Scared,” Bi LLingstey croaked. It was, so far as Mary could tell, the last word he ever managed to say His eyes looked up at her, both frantic and somehow con—fused. He tried to say something else and produced only a weak gargling noise.
“Don’t be scared, Tom. I’m right here.”
“Ah. Ah.” His eyes shifted from side to side, then came back to her face and seemed to freeze there. He took a deep breath, let it out, took a shallower one, let it out.
and didn’t take another.
“Tom.”
Nothing but a gust of wind and a hard rattle of sand from outside.
“Tom!”
She shook him. His head rolled limply from side to side, but his eyes remained fixed on hers in a way that gave her a chill; it was the way the eyes in some painted portraits seemed to stay on you no matter where you were in the room. Somewhere-in this building but sounding very far away, just the same-she could hear Marinville s roadie yelling for David. The hippie-girl was yelling, too Mary supposed she should join them, help them search for David and Audrey if they were really lost, but she was reluctant to leave Tom until she was positive he was dead She was pretty sure he was, yes, but it surely wasn’t like it was on TV, when you knew—“Help.”
The voice, questioning and almost too weak to be heard over the slackening wind, still made Mary jump and cup a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry.
“Help. Is anyone there. Please help me m hurt.’ Awoman’s voice. Ellen Carver’s voice. Christ, was it9 Although she had been in the company of David’s mother for only a short time, Mary was sure she was right almost as soon as the idea occurred to her. She got to her feet sparing another quick glance at poor Tom Billingsley s contorted face and staring eyes. Her legs had stiffened up on her and she staggered for balance.
“Please,” the voice outside moaned. It was in the alley which ran behind the theater.
“Ellen.” she asked, suddenly wishing she could throw her voice like a ventriloquist. It seemed she could trust nothing now, not even a hurt, scared woman. “Ellen, is that you.”
“Mary!” Closer now. “Yes, it’s me, Ellen. Is that Mary.”
Mary opened her mouth, then closed it again. That was Ellen Carver out there, she knew it, but…
“Is David all right.” the woman out there in the dark asked, then swallowed back a sob.
“Please say that he is.”
“So far as I know, yes.” Mary walked over to the broken window, skirting the pooi of the cougar’s blood, and looked out. It was Ellen Carver out there, and she didn’t look good.
She was slumped over her left arm, which she was holding against her breasts with her right. What Mary could see of her face was chalky white. Blood was trickling from her lower lip and from one nostril. She looked up at Mary with eyes so dark and desperate they seemed hardly human.