Shifting. Moving. Moving up there in the rafters.
She told herself she was imagining things, but by the time she was halfway along the tunnel, her animal instincts were screaming at her to get out, to run. Doctors weren't supposed to panic; equanimity was part of the training. She did pick up her pace a bit, but only a little, not much, not in panic; then after a few steps, she picked up the pace a bit more, and a bit more, until she was running in spite of herself.
She burst into the alley. It was gloomy there, too, but not as dark as the tunnel had been.
Lisa came out of the passageway in a stumbling run, slipped on a wet patch of blacktop, and nearly fell.
Jenny grabbed her and prevented her from going down.
They backed up, watching the exit from the lightless, covered passage. Jenny raised the revolver that she'd taken from the sheriff's substation.
“Did you feel it?” Lisa asked breathlessly.
“Something up under the roof. Probably just birds or maybe, at worst, several bats.”
Lisa shook her head. “No, no. N-not under the roof. It was c-crouched up against the w-wall.”
They kept watching the mouth of the tunnel.
“I saw something in the rafters,” Jenny said.
“No,” the girl insisted, shaking her head vigorously.
“What did you see then?”
“It was against the wall. On the left. About halfway through the tunnel. I almost stumbled into it.”
“What was it?”
“I… I don't know exactly. I couldn't actually see it.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“No,” Lisa said, eyes riveted on the passageway.
“Smell something?”
“No. But… the darkness was… Well, at one place there, the darkness was… different. I could sense something moving… or sort of moving… shifting…”
“That's like what I thought I saw — but up in the rafters.”
They waited. Nothing came out of the passageway.
Gradually, Jenny's heartbeat slowed from a wild gallop to a fast trot. She lowered the gun.
Their breathing grew quiet. The night silence poured back in like heavy oil.
Doubts surfaced. Jenny began to suspect that she and Lisa simply had succumbed to hysteria. She didn't like that explanation one damn bit, for it didn't fit the image she had of herself. But she was sufficiently honest with herself to face the unpleasant fact that, just this one time, she might have panicked.
“We're just jumpy,” she told Lisa, “If there were anything or anyone dangerous in there, they'd have come out after us by now — don't you think?”
“Maybe.”
“Hey, you know what it might have been?”
“What?” Lisa asked.
The cold wind stirred up again and soughed softly through the alleyway.
“It could have been cats,” she said, “A few cats. They like to hang out in those covered walkways.”
“I don't think it was cats.”
“Could be. A couple of cats up there in the rafters. And one or two down on the floor, along the wall, where you saw something.”
“It seemed bigger than a cat. It seemed a lot bigger than a cat,” Lisa said nervously.
“Okay, so maybe it wasn't cats. Most likely, it wasn't anything at all. We're keyed up. Our nerves are wound tight.” She sighed. “Let's go see if the rear door of the bakery is open. That's what we came back here to check out — remember?”
They headed toward the rear of Lieberman's Bakery, but they glanced repeatedly behind them, at the mouth of the covered passage.
The service door at the bakery was unlocked, and there was light and warmth beyond it. Jenny and Lisa stepped into a long, narrow storage room.
The inner door led from the storage room to the huge kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of cinnamon, flour, black walnuts, and orange extract. Jenny inhaled deeply. The appetizing fragrances that waited through the kitchen were so homey, so natural, so pungently and soothingly reminiscent of normal times and normal places that she felt some of her tension fading.
The bakery was well-equipped with double sinks, a walk-in refrigerator, several ovens, several immense white enamel storage cabinets, a dough-kneading machine, and a large array of other appliances. The middle of the room was occupied by a long, wide counter, the primary work area; one end of it had a shiny stainless-steel top, and the other end had a butcher's block surface. The stainless-steel portion — which was nearest the store-room door, where Jenny and Lisa had entered — was stacked high with pots, cupcake and cookie trays, baking racks, bundt pans, regular cake pans, and pie tins, all clean and bright. The entire kitchen gleamed.
“Nobody's here,” Lisa said.
“Looks that way,” Jenny said, her spirits rising as she walked farther into the room.
If the Santini family had escaped, and if Jakob and Aida had been spared, perhaps most of the town wasn't dead. Perhaps.
Oh, God.
On the other side of the piled cookware, in the middle of the butcher's-block counter, lay a large disk of pie dough. A wooden rolling pin rested on the dough. Two hands gripped the ends of the rolling pin. Two severed, human hands.
Lisa backed up against a metal cabinet with such force that the stuff inside rattled noisily. “What the hell is going on? What the hell?”
Drawn by morbid fascination and by an urgent need to understand what was happening here, Jenny moved closer to the counter and stared down at the disembodied hands, regarding them with equal measures of disgust and disbelief and with fear as sharp as razor blades. The hands were not bruised or swollen; they were pretty much flesh-colored, though gray-pale. Blood — the first blood she had seen so far — trailed wetly from the raggedly torn wrists and glistened in streaks and drops, midst a fine film of flour dust. The hands were strong; more precisely — they had once been strong. Blunt fingers. Large knuckles. Unquestionably a man's hands, with white hair curled crisply on the backs of them. Jakob Liebermann's hands.
“Jenny!”
Jenny looked up, startled.
Lisa's arm was raised, extended; she was pointing across the kitchen.
Beyond the butcher's-block counter, set in the long wall on the far side of the room, were three ovens. One of them was huge, with a pair of solid, over-and-under, stainless-steel doors. The other two ovens were smaller than the first, though still larger than the conventional models used in most homes; there was one door in each of these two, and each door had a glass portal in the center of it. None of the ovens was turned on at the moment, which was fortunate, for if the smaller ones had been in operation, the kitchen would have been filled with a sickening stench.
Each one contained a severed head.
Jesus.
Ghastly, dead faces gazed out into the room, noses pressed to the inside of the oven glass.
Jakob Liebermann. White hair spattered with blood. One eye half shut, the other glaring. Lips pressed together in a grimace of pain.
Aida Liebermann. Both eyes open. Mouth gaping as if her jaws had come unhinged.
For a moment Jenny couldn't believe the heads were real.
Too much. Too shocking. She thought of expensive, lifelike Halloween masks peering out of the cellophane windows in costume boxes, and she thought of the grisly novelties sold in joke shops — those wax heads with nylon hair and glass eyes, those gruesome things that young boys sometimes found wildly amusing (and surely that's what these were — and, crazily, she thought of a line from a TV commercial for cake mixes. Nothin' says lovin' like somethin' from the oven!
Her heart thudded.
She was feverish, dizzy.
On the butcher's-block counter, the severed hands were still poised on the rolling pin. She half-expected them to skitter suddenly across the counter as if they were two crabs.