But no, of course not, the scene was just part of the film, a man unlike him in a cellar unlike Anna's. The movie family had barricaded themselves in a basement, and the soundtrack boomed with the sounds of doors closing: maybe that's how you fight them, you just hole up until they go away… you bite down and close your eyes and hope they get your brother, your friend, anybody, before they get you… and that, he realized, was what the nightwatchers had done. He looked over the rows of seats, seeing them filled with Gregory's victims, and then saw Ricky and Peter looking curiously back at him. He was two rows behind. Don bent forward again, found himself staring stiffly with embarrassment at a flattened popcorn box, and moved hurriedly down the broad steps to catch up with the others.
When they reached the bottom row without finding anything, Don and Peter went toward the center aisle to join Ricky. "Nothing," Don said.
"They're here, though," Peter whispered. "They have to be."
"There's the projection booth," Don said. "The toilets. And Mulligan must have had some sort of office."
On the screen a door slammed: noise of life walled in, and of death walled in with it.
"Maybe the balcony," Peter said, and glanced up at the screen. "And what's behind there? How do you get there?"
Again, a door slammed. Inhuman voices matching the scale of the people on the screen, inflated with assumed emotions, fell toward them from the speakers.
The door clicked open with a flat, ticking noise-the sound made when a metal bar, depressed, lifts a catch; then it slammed shut again.
"Of course," Ricky said, "that's where they'd"-but the other two were not paying attention. They had recognized the sound, and were staring at the entrance to a lighted cavernous tunnel to the right of the screen. Above the tunnel a white sign read EXIT.
The soundtrack blared down on them, to their side giant forms enacted a pantomime romantic enough for the music, but what they listened to was a light, dry noise coming down the exit corridor toward the light: a noise like clapping hands. It was the sound of bare feet.
A child appeared at the end of the corridor and paused at the edge of the light. He looked toward them-an apparition from a thirties' study of rural poverty, a small boy with shivering sides and prominent ribs and a smudgy, shadowy face that would never be invaded by thought. He stood in the last traces of the corridor's light, drool forming on his lower lip. The boy raised his arms, holding his bunched hands level before him, and made the gesture of pumping up and down on an iron bar. Then he tilted back his head and giggled; and again made the gesture of closing a heavy door.
"My brother is telling you that the doors are locked," said a voice from above them. They whirled around, Don hefting the axe in his arms, and saw Gregory Bate standing on the stage beside the red curtains flanking the screen. "But three such brave adventurers wouldn't have it otherwise, would they? You have come for this, haven't you? Especially you, Mr. Wanderley-all the way from California. Fenny and I were sorry not to have been properly introduced there." He moved easily to the center of the stage, and the movie broke and flowed over the surface of his body. "And you really think that you can harm us with those medieval objects you carry? Why, gentlemen…" He flung out his arms, his eyes glowing. Every part of him was printed with gigantic forms-an open hand, a falling lamp, a splintering door.
And beneath all that, Don saw what Bate had demonstrated to Peter Barnes-that the gentlemanly diction and theatrical manner were insubstantial clothing over a terrible concentration, a purpose as implacable as a machine's. Bate was standing on the stage, smiling down at them. "Now," he said, his tone like a god's summoning light.
Don jumped sideways, hearing something rush past him, and saw Fenny's mad little body crashing into Peter Barnes. None of them had seen the child move; now he was already on top of Peter, forcing his arms to the floor of the theater, snarling, holding Peter's knife harmlessly away while he wriggled on top of him, making a squealing noise that got lost in the screams from the speakers.
Don raised his axe and felt a strong hand close over his wrist. (Immortal whispered up his arm, don't you want to be?)
"Wouldn't you like to live forever?" Gregory Bate said in his ear, blowing foulness toward his face. "Even if you must die first? It's a good Christian bargain, after all."
The hand spun him easily around, and Don felt his own strength draining out as if Bate's hand on his wrist drew it out of him like a magnet. Bate's other hand took his chin and tilted it up, forcing Don to look into his eyes. He remembered Peter telling him how Jim Hardie had died, how Bate had sucked him down into his eyes, but it was impossible not to look: and his feet seemed to be floating, his legs were water, at the bottom of the shining gold was a comprehensive wisdom and beneath that was total mindlessness, a rushing violence, pure cold, a killing winter wind through a forest.
"Watch this, you scum," he dimly heard Ricky saying. Then Bate's attention snapped away from him, and his legs seemed to be filled with sand, and the side of the werewolf's head moved past his face as slowly as a dream. Something was making an appalling racket, and Bate's profiled head slid past his own, marble skin and an ear as perfect as a statue's-Bate flung him away.
"Do you see this, you filth?" Ricky was shouting, and Don, lying all tumbled over his axe (now what was that for?), half-wedged beneath one of the front-row seats, looked dreamily up and saw Ricky Hawthorne sawing into the back of Fenny's neck.
"Bad," he whispered, and "no," and no longer sure that it was not really just a part of the giant shadowy action blazing on above them all, saw Gregory slap the old man down onto Peter Barnes's motionless body.
13
"There's no need to make trouble, is there, Mrs. Hawthorne?" said the man gripping her hair. "You hear me, don't you?" He tugged at her hair, pulling it painfully.
Stella nodded.
"And you heard what I said? No need to go to Montgomery Street-no need at all. Your husband isn't there anymore. He didn't find what he was looking for, so he went elsewhere."
"Who are you?"
"A friend of a friend. A good friend's good friend." Still holding her hair, the man reached across the wheel to move the automatic shift, and drove slowly off. "And my friend is very eager to meet you."
"Let me go," Stella said.
He yanked her toward him. "Enough, Mrs. Hawthorne. You have a very exciting time ahead of you. So-enough. No fighting. Or I'll kill you here. And that would be a terrible waste. Now promise me you'll be quiet. We are just going into the Hollow. Okay? You'll be quiet?"
Stella, terrified and fearful that the handful of hair was about to be ripped from her head, said, "Yes."
"Very intelligent." He let her hair fall slack and pressed his hand against the side of her head. "You're such a pretty woman, Stella."
She recoiled from his touch.
"Quiet?"
"Quiet," she breathed, and the driver went on slowly toward the high school. She looked back through the rear window and saw no other cars: her own, tilted against the fence, grew smaller behind her.
"You're going to kill me," she said.
"Not unless you force me to do it, Mrs. Hawthorne. I am quite a religious person in my present life. I would hate to have to take a human life. We're pacifists, you know."
"We?"
He pursed his lips at her in an ironic little smile, and gestured toward the back seat. She looked down and saw dozens of copies of The Watchtower scattered there.