"You don't," he said to Bate, and looked under the seats. His axe lay out of reach.
"Don't?"
"You don't live forever."
"We live much longer than you," Bate said, and the civilized veneer of his voice cracked open to reveal the violence beneath it. Don backed toward Peter, looking not at Bate's eyes but at his mouth.
"You won't live another minute," Bate said, and took a step forward.
"Peter-" Don said, and looked over his shoulder at the boy.
Peter was holding the Bowie knife above Fenny's writhing body.
"Do it," Don shouted, and Peter brought the knife down into Fenny's chest. Something white and foul exploded upward, a reeking geyser, from Fenny's ribcage.
Gregory Bate launched himself toward Peter, howling, and knocked Don savagely over the first row of seats.
Ricky Hawthorne at first thought he was dead, the pain in his back was so bad that he thought only death or dying could account for it, and then he saw the worn carpet under his face, the loops of thread seeming inches high and heard Don shouting: so he was alive. He moved his head: the last thing he could remember was cutting open the back of Fenny Bate's neck. Then a locomotive had run into him.
Something beside him moved. When he lifted his head to see what it was, Fenny's bare streaming chest leaped-seeming six feet long-a yard into the air. Small white worms swam across the white skin. Ricky recoiled, and though his back felt as though it were broken, forced himself to sit up.
To his side, Gregory Bate was lifting Peter Barnes off the floor, howling as if his chest were a cave of winds. A section of the beam from the projector caught Gregory's arms and Peter's body, and swarming blotches of black and white moved over them for a second. Still howling, Bate threw Peter into the screen.
Ricky could not see his knife, and went on his knees to scrabble for it. His fingers closed around a bone handle, and a long blade reflected a line of gray light. Fenny thrashed beside him, rolling over onto his hand, and uttered a thin eee, dead air rushing out. Ricky snatched the knife from under Fenny's back, feeling his hand come away wet, and made himself stand.
Gregory Bate was just scrambling up onto the stage to leap through the rip in the screen after Peter, and Ricky threw out his free hand and grasped the thick collar of his pea jacket. Bate suddenly went rigid, his reflexes as good as a cat's, and Ricky knew in terror that he would kill him, spinning around with pulverizing hands and slashing teeth, if he did not do the only possible thing.
Before Bate could move, Ricky slammed the Bowie knife into his back.
Now he could hear nothing, not the noises on the soundtrack, not the cry that must have come from Bate: he stood still gripping the bone handle, deafened by the enormity of what he had done. Bate fell back down and turned around and showed Ricky Hawthorne a face to carry with him all his life: eyes full of tearing wind and blizzard and a black mouth open as wide as a cavern.
"Filth," Ricky said, almost sobbing.
Bate fell toward him.
Don climbed over the seats carrying the axe, in a desperate hurry to get to Bate before he could tear open Ricky's throat; then he saw the muscular body slump and Ricky, gasping, pushing him off. Bate fell back into the front of the stage and went to his knees. Fluid dribbled from his mouth.
"Get away, Ricky," Don said, but the old lawyer was unable to move. Bate began to crawl toward him.
He stepped beside Ricky and Bate tilted back his head and looked straight into his eyes.
-live forever
Don hurriedly raised the axe over his head and brought the sharpened blade down into Bate's neck, cutting down deeply into the chest. With the next blow he severed the head.
Peter Barnes crawled back out through the screen, dazzled by pain and the beam from the projector. He made himself move across the few feet of bare wood to the edge of the stage, hearing a wild shrieking of voices, thinking that if he could get to the Bowie knife before Gregory Bate saw him, he might at least be able to save Don. Ricky had been killed by the first blow, he knew: he had seen its force. Then the beam of light slipped over his head and he saw what Don was doing. Gregory Bate, headless, squirmed under the blows of the axe; beside him Fenny rolled helplessly back and forth, covered in moving white pulp.
"Let me," he said, and both Ricky and Don stared up at him with white faces.
When Peter was down on the floor of the theater beside them, he took the axe from Don and brought it weakly, glancingly down, his hysteria and loathing spoiling the blow; then he felt suddenly stronger, as strong as a logger, felt as if he were glowing, filled with light, and raised it effortlessly, all the pain leaving him, and brought the axe down again; and again; and again; and then moved to Fenny.
When they were only shreds of skin and smashed bones a zero breeze lifted off their ruined bodies and swirled up into the beam from the projector, passing Peter with such force that it knocked him aside.
Peter bent down into the mess and picked up the Bowie knife.
"By God," Ricky said, and tottered into one of the seats.
When they left the theater, limping, their minds numb, they felt an impatient, hurrying wind even in the lobby-a wind that seemed to swirl through the empty space, rattling posters and the bag of potato chips on the candy counter, searching the way out- and when they broke open the doors, it streamed over them to join the worst blizzard of the season.
15
Don and Peter half-carried Ricky Hawthorne home through the storm; and now there were two convalescents in the Hawthorne home. Peter explained it to his father like this: "I'm staying with Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne, dad-I'm stuck at their house. Don Wanderley and I had to practically bring Mr. Hawthorne home on a stretcher. He's in bed and so is she, because she feels bad after a little accident in her car-"
"There'll be a lot of accidents on the roads this afternoon," his father said.
"And we finally got a doctor to come give her a sedative, and Mr. Hawthorne has a terrible cold the doctor said could turn into pneumonia if he doesn't rest, so Don Wanderley and I are taking care of them both."
"Let me get this straight, Pete. You were with this Wanderley and Mr. Hawthorne?"
"That's right," Peter said.
"Well, I wish you'd thought of calling before this. I was worried half to death. You're all I have, you know."
"I'm sorry, Dad."
"Well, at least you're with good people. Try to get home when you can, but don't take any chances in the storm."
"Okay, Dad," Peter said and hung up, grateful that his father had sounded sober, and even more grateful that he had asked no more questions.
He and Don made soup for Ricky, and brought it up to the guest-room where the old man was resting while his wife slept undisturbed in their bedroom.
"Don't know what happened to me," Ricky said. "I just couldn't move another step. If I'd been alone, I would have frozen to death out there."
"If any of us had been alone," Don said, and did not have to finish the sentence.
"Or if there had been only two of us," Peter said. "We'd be dead. He could have killed us easily."
"Yes, well he didn't," Ricky said briskly. "Don was right about them. And now two-thirds of what we have to do is accomplished."
"You mean we have to find her," Peter said. "Do you think we can do it?"
"We'll do it," Don said. "Stella might be able to tell us something. She might have learned something- heard something. I don't think there's any doubt that the man in the blue car was the same man who was after you. We should be able to talk to her tonight."