He was afraid they would slither over his shoes, under a pants cuff, up and under one of the legs of his khakis. But he reached the hall safely.
The snakes were behind him and not pursuing. Two tarantulas had fallen out of the snack cabinet into the herpetological nightmare on the floor, and the snakes were fighting over them. Frantically kicking arachnid legs vanished under rippling scales.
Thump!
Ricky jumped in surprise.
Thump!
Until now he hadn’t associated the strange noise, which had plagued him earlier in the evening, with the spiders and snakes.
Thump!
Thump!
Someone had been playing games with him then, but this was not a game any more. This was deadly serious. Impossible, as fantastic as anything in a dream, but serious.
Thump!
Ricky couldn’t pinpoint the source of the pounding or even tell for sure if it came from above or below him. Windows reverberated, and echoes of each blow vibrated hollowly in the walls. He sensed that something was coming, worse than spiders or snakes, something he did not want to encounter.
Gasping, with the head of the blacksnake still dangling from his left hand, Ricky turned away from the kitchen toward the front door at the end of the hall.
His twice-bitten arm throbbed horribly with each beat of his trip-hammering heart. No good, dear Jesus, a racing heart spread the poison faster, if there was any poison. What he had to do was calm down, take deep slow breaths, walk instead of run, go to a neighbor’s house, call 911, and get emergency medical attention. THUMP!
He could have used the telephone in his bedroom, but he didn’t want to go in there. He didn’t trust his own house any more, which was nuts, yes, crazy, but he felt the place had come alive and turned against him. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!
The house shook as if riding the back of a bucking earthquake, almost knocking him down. He staggered sideways, bounced against the wall.
The ceramic statue of the Holy Virgin toppled off the hall table that he had set up as a shrine like all of the shrines his mother had kept in her home. Since being gutshot, he had been reduced by fear to his mother’s choice of armor against the cruelties of the world. The statue crashed to the floor, shattered at his feet.
The heavy red-glass container with the votive candle bounced on the table, causing goblin shadows to dance across the wall and ceiling.
THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP!
Ricky was two steps from the front door when the oak flooring creaked ominously, pushed upward, and cracked almost as loudly as a thunderclap. He stumbled backward.
Something smashed out of the crawlspace under the bungalow, shattering the floor as if it were an eggshell. For a moment the blizzard of dust and splinters and jagged boards made it impossible to glimpse what had been born into the hallway.
Then Ricky saw a man in the hole, feet planted in the earth about eighteen inches under the floor of the house. In spite of standing below Ricky, the guy loomed, immense and threatening. His untamed hair and beard were tangled and dirty, and the visible portions of his face were grossly scarred. His black raincoat billowed like a cape around him as a draft whistled out of the crawlspace and up through the broken boards.
Ricky knew he was looking at the vagrant who had appeared to Harry out of a whirlwind. Everything about him fit the description — except his eyes.
When he glimpsed those grotesque eyes, Ricky froze midst the fragments of the Holy Virgin, paralyzed by fear and by the certainty that he had gone mad. Even if he had kept backing away or had turned and tried to run for the rear door, he would not have escaped, for the vagrant clambered out of the hole and into the hall as lightning-quick as any striking serpent. He seized Ricky, swept him off the floor with such unhuman power that any resistance was pointless, and slammed him against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and his spine.
Face to face, washed by the vagrant’s foul breath, Ricky gazed into those eyes and was too terrified to scream. They were not the pools of blood that Harry had described. They were not really eyes at all. Nestled in the deep sockets were two snake heads, two small yellow eyes in each, forked tongues fluttering.
Why me? Ricky wondered.
As if they were a pair of jack-in-the-box fright figures, the snakes sprang from the vagrant’s sockets and bit Ricky’s face.
7
Between Laguna Beach and Dana Point, Harry drove so fast that even Connie, lover of speed and risk-taking, braced herself and made wordless noises of dismay when he took some of the turns too sharply. They were in his own car, not a department sedan, so he didn’t have a detachable emergency beacon to stick on the roof. He didn’t have a siren either; however, the coast highway was not heavily used at ten-thirty on a Tuesday night, and by pounding the horn and flashing the headlights, he was able to clear a way through what little obstructive traffic he encountered.
“Maybe we should call Ricky, warn him,” she said, when they were still in south Laguna.
“Don’t have a car phone.”
“Stop at a service station, convenience store, somewhere.”
“Can’t waste the time. I figure his phone won’t work anyway.”
“Why won’t it?”
“Not unless Ticktock wants it to work.”
They shot up a hill, rounded a curve too fast. The rear tires dug up gravel from the shoulder of the highway, sprayed it against the undercarriage and fuel tank. The right rear bumper kissed a metal guardrail, and then they were back on the pavement, rocketing onward without having braked.
“So let’s call Dana Point Police,” she said.
“The way we’re moving, if we don’t stop to call, we’ll be there before they could make it.”
“We might be able to use the backup.”
“Won’t need backup if we’re too damned late and Ricky’s dead when we get there.”
Harry was sick with apprehension and furious with himself. He had endangered Ricky by going to him earlier in the day. He couldn’t have known the heap of trouble he was bringing down on his old friend at the time, but later he should have realized Ricky was a target when Ticktock had promised first everything and everyone you love.
Sometimes it was hard for a man to admit he loved another man, even in a brotherly way. He and Ricky Estefan had been partners, through some tight scrapes together. They were still friends, and Harry loved him. It was that simple. But the American tradition of macho self-reliance mitigated against admitting as much.
Bullshit, Harry thought angrily.
The truth was, he found it difficult to admit he loved anyone, male or female, even his parents, because love was so damned messy. It entailed obligations, commitments, entanglements, the sharing of emotions. When you admitted to loving people, you had to let them into your life in a more major way, and they brought with them all of their untidy habits, indiscriminate tastes, muddled opinions, and disorganized attitudes.
As they roared across the Dana Point city line, the muffler clanging against a bump in the road, Harry said, “Jesus, sometimes I’m an idiot.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Connie said.
“A really screwed-up specimen.”
“We’re still in familiar territory.”
He had only one excuse for not realizing that Ricky would become a target: since the fire at his condo less than three hours ago, he had been reacting instead of acting. He’d had no other option. Events had moved so fast, and were so weird, one piece of strangeness piled atop another, that he hadn’t time to think. A poor excuse, but he clung to it.