Entering the concrete tunnel, the predator peered forward into the gloom. Its eyes shone softly amber-green, not as bright here as in moonlight, dimmer than glow-in-the-dark paint, but vaguely radiant.
Chrissie wondered how well it could see in absolute darkness. Surely its gaze could not penetrate eighty or a hundred feet of lightless pipe to the place where she crouched. Vision of that caliber would be SUPERNATURAL.
It stared straight at her.
Then again, who was to say that what she was dealing with here was not SUPERNATURAL? Perhaps her parents had become …
werewolves.
She was soaked in sour sweat. She hoped the stench of the dead animal would screen her body odor.
Rising from all fours into a crouch, blocking most of the silvery moonlight at the drain entrance, the stalker slowly came forward.
Its heavy breathing was amplified by the curved concrete walls of the culvert. Chrissie breathed shallowly through her open mouth lest she reveal her presence.
Suddenly, only ten feet into the tunnel, the stalker spoke in a raspy, whispery voice and with such urgency that the words were almost run together in a single long string of syllables: "Chrissie, you there, you, you? Come me, Chrissie, come me, come, want you, want, want, need, my Chrissie, my Chrissie."
That bizarre, frantic voice gave rise in Chrissie's mind to a terrifying image of a creature that was part lizard, part wolf, part human, part something unidentifiable. Yet she suspected that its actual appearance was even worse than anything she could imagine.
"Help you, want help you, help, now, come me, come, come. You there, there, you there?"
The worst thing about the voice was that, in spite of its cold hoarse note and whispery tone, in spite of its alienness, it was familiar. Chrissie recognized it as her mother's. Changed, yes, but her mother's voice just the same.
Chrissie's stomach was cramped with fear, but she was filled with another pain, too, that for a moment she could not identify. Then she realized that she ached with loss; she missed her mother, wanted her mother back, her real mother. If she'd had one of those ornate silver crucifixes like they always used in the fright films, she probably would have revealed herself, advanced on this hateful thing, and demanded that it surrender possession of her mother. A crucifix probably would not work because nothing in real life was as easy as in the movies; besides, whatever had happened to her parents was far stranger than vampires and werewolves and demons jumped up from hell. But if she'd had a crucifix, she would have tried it anyway.
"Death, death, smell death, stink, death …"
The mother-thing quickly advanced into the tunnel until it came to the place where Chrissie had stepped in a slippery, putrefying mass. The brightness of the shining eyes was directly related to the nearness of moonlight, for now they dimmed. Then the creature lowered its gaze to the dead animal on the culvert floor.
From beyond the mouth of the drain came the sound of something descending into the ditch. Footfalls and the clatter of stones were followed by another voice, equally as fearsome as that of the others the stalker now hunched over the dead animal. Calling into the pipe, it said, "She there, there, she? Whatfound, what, what?"
"… raccoon …"
"What, what it, what?"
"Dead raccoon, rotten, maggots, maggots," the first one said.
Chrissie was stricken by the macabre fear that she had left a tennis-shoe imprint in the rotting muck of the dead raccoon.
"Chrissie?" the second asked as it ventured into the culvert Tucker's voice. Evidently her father was searching for her across the meadow or in the next section of the forest Both stalkers were fidgeting constantly. Chrissie could hear them scraping — claws? — against the concrete floor of the pipe. Both sounded panicky, too. No, not panicky, really, because no fear was audible in their voices. Frantic. Frenzied. It was as if an engine in each of them was racing faster, faster, almost out of control.
"Chrissie there, she there, she?" Tucker asked.
The mother-thing raised its gaze from the dead raccoon and peered straight at Chrissie through the lightless tunnel.
You can't see me, Chrissie thought-prayed. I'm invisible.
The radiance of the stalker's eyes had faded to twin spots of finished silver.
Chrissie held her breath.
Tucker said, "Got to eat, eat, want eat."
The creature that had been her mother said, "Find girl, girl, find her first, then eat, then."
They sounded as if they were wild animals magically gifted with crude speech.
"Now, now, burning it up, eat now, now, burning," Tucker said urgently, insistently.
Chrissie was shaking so badly that she was half afraid they would hear the shudders that rattled her.
Tucker said, "Burning it up, little animals in meadow, hear them, smell them, track, eat, eat, now."
Chrissie held her breath.
"Nothing here," the mother-thing said. "Only maggots, stink, go, eat, then find her, eat, eat, then find her, go."
Both stalkers retreated from the culvert and vanished.
Chrissie dared to breathe.
After waiting a minute to be sure they were really gone, she turned and troll-walked deeper into the upsloping culvert, blindly feeling the walls as she went, hunting a side passage. She must have gone two hundred yards before she found what she wanted a tributary drain, half the size of the main line. She slid into it, feetfirst and on her back, then squirmed onto her belly and faced out toward the bigger tunnel. That was where she would spend the night. If they returned to the culvert to see if they could detect her scent in the cleaner air beyond the decomposing raccoon, she would be out of the downdraught that swept the main line, and they might not smell her.
She was heartened because their failure to probe deeper into the culvert was proof that they were not possessed of supernatural powers, neither all-seeing nor all-knowing. They were abnormally strong and quick, strange and terrifying, but they could make mistakes too. She began to think that when daylight came she had a fifty-fifty chance of getting out of the woods and finding help before she was caught.
14
In the lights outside of the Perez Family Restaurant, Sam Booker checked his watch. Only 7:10.
He went for a walk along Ocean Avenue, building up the courage to call Scott in Los Angeles. The prospect of that conversation with his son soon preoccupied him and drove all thoughts of the mannerless, gluttonous diners out of his mind.
At 7:30, he stopped at a telephone booth near a Shell service station at the corner of Juniper Lane and Ocean Avenue. He used his credit card to make a long-distance call to his house in Sherman Oaks.
At sixteen Scott thought he was mature enough to be home alone when his father was away on an assignment. Sam did not entirely agree and preferred that the boy stay with his Aunt Edna. But Scott won his way by making life pure hell for Edna, so Sam was reluctant to put her through that ordeal.
He had repeatedly drilled the boy in safety procedures — keep all doors and windows locked; know where the fire extinguishers are; know how to get out of the house from any room in an earthquake or other emergency — and had taught him how to use a handgun. In Sam's judgment Scott was still too immature to be home alone for days at a time; but at least the boy was well prepared for every contingency.