But suppose someone else, hearing the clatter, stepped from the shadows? She silently cautioned herself, recalling how earlier she'd almost killed the hobo and how she had placed three slugs into Leon Fouintenac's lifeless corpse.
In the middle of her recall, all hell broke loose. Another enormous grating noise like an elephant suddenly gone on a rampage was followed by more sinister, lurching figures overhead on yet a second metal track. The ghostly, suspended Mardi Gras people began their dead and levitated parade, the lifeless forms of animals both imaginary and real in conception, of clowns and nebbishes, gnomes and giants, began, all to the sound of carousel music, to fly peacefully by, all suspended on great wires, hooks and pulleys, alternately bobbing upward and downward. It was an enormous contraption, this second and larger, circular-shaped pulley device, reminding her of the sort of mechanical arm used in a Laundromat to locate the proper ticketed clothing item.
Obviously Matisak was enjoying his new role as puppet-master, and clearly he thoroughly knew the building, its infrastructure and its inner workings, all to her disadvantage. He was manning the controls, and now the Mardi Gras was spinning slowly overhead, in a controlled maneuver designed to unnerve her, and it was working… had the desired effect… created a nightmare of images passing by what little light came in from the street lamps at the windows, some twelve feet overhead. Matisak churned up the speed, and so too the atrocious racket accompanying it. Images passed by her in a blur of blinding color and tawdry tassels, a Grateful Dead circus of clowns awakened from long sleep. She watched carefully from her crouched position, her gun pointed and ready, the madness of the moment creeping slowly into her brain, dripping an acidic, bitter hatred for her prey. She was sick to death of his endless mind games.
She could stand the noise and the chaos no longer.
She began to fire indiscriminately at the now-ugly, satanic figures which flirted past her, in and out of the light. She fired nonstop, emptying the clip to her Browning automatic, which she'd felt would be more easily controlled and deadlier than her. 38, still in place at her ankle.
She now reached for a new clip, and as she did so, the mannequins continued their wild dance along the struts and metal hooks which held them, an occasional large hook, empty of any contents, flashing its metal smile and claw as it whizzed by. The pace of the march of this madman's Mardi Gras had increased in steady increments, so Matisak obviously had the controls near at hand-or was it on some sort of automatic timer?
If she could only find the control box, then she would find him, she reasoned.
As she fought to place in the second clip, however, the wind from outside shattered several of the huge windows above, sending down a rain of glass, tiles and spray. She instinctively reacted, covering herself with a tarp, listening to the raining shards of glass thud against the protecting envelope she'd created for herself, knowing that she would otherwise have been struck and badly injured.
When it was over, she slowly extricated herself from the tarp and heavy debris, rain still pattering down on the canvas.
When she clawed her way out, she stood stark still; she saw an eye was trained on her, that he was looking directly at her. She could see the single eye even if he, in the shadows, thought she could not. It was a silver-blue iris, only half open as if meaning to wink closed at any moment. She wanted to close her own eyes, wish it away, afraid to accept it as his human eye. Must be one of the dummies… But staring into it, she realized that this eye in the dark beamed a cold, alien intelligence back at her, mirroring her own dark iris now filling with the tears of vengeance and malice she'd carried for so long with her.
She moved in slow motion to position the gun to fire into the eye of evil across from her. She fired, shattering only a mirror, and he suddenly swept at her on an overhanging cable. He was so suddenly upon her, blocking out what little light the fallen flashlight had afforded her, that he became her sky and his powerful legs kicked her square in the midsection, knocking the air from her and sending her cascading into some cardboard boxes. As her body arched over the pile of boxes, she lost control of the clip, her gun useless without it-and he, the Devil, was hovering and coming nearer.
She was dazed by the blow, unable to think clearly, unable to make her hands work to locate the remaining gun strapped to her ankle, hidden below her pants leg. She struggled for the strength and clarity of thought required.
He came ever closer while her eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness in which he stood. He was wearing a costume that had successfully camouflaged him here, looking like he was stepping from a Shakespearean ball in Venice, his smile curling like a snake along each cheek.
“ So, my sweet, my precious, my dear Jessica… at last… together again at long last… As they say, the play's the thing, and it's time for our eternal play to begin. Oh, precious one, how now does my cup runneth over…”
She was trapped with no way out, her back to the wall, and if she made a move for the gun too soon, he'd discover it, overpower her and render her powerless. She stuttered even as she formed the words to reply to him. “This time, Teach, you're going to die before we part.”
“ As I am prepared to do. The question is, dear one, are you?”
Concentrate… concentrate. Kim repeated the mantra where she stood beside Alex's car, trying desperately to calm herself for Jessica's sake. She clutched a scarf belonging to Jessica tightly in her hand. Jess had left the scarf in Kim's room the night before.
Alex had left her in the car while he fought a battle with a phone book locked into a metal straitjacket below a phone outside a convenience store. Finally, he'd given up and gone inside, flashed his badge and ordered up the store's book, following the clerk to the rear office.
Kim took in a deep breath, the electric hum of the New Orleans night and a gale-force wind vying for her attention. The wind was ripping now in powerful gusts as the hurricane all of New Orleans was talking about neared, a beast on drunken paws. New Orleans herself could be the point of landfall for the killing might. And somewhere out there, alone, Jess stood against a power more sinister and evil than anything in nature.
Kim closed her mind to the store, its light flooding her, to the storm threatening her as more rain began to patter over her; she closed her sense of smell, touch, sound, taste and sight down, allowing her own inner power to surface.
She found herself in a cold, unfamiliar fog, knowing that she was searching and lost. She wandered a water-stained, water-soaked boardwalk, fearing she might any moment slip over the side and be lost forever. She heard the soft tinkle of lilting ropes against mastiffs become insistent, blaring as if an orchestra were prepared now to render an opera that would blast away the audience in an orgy of sound. It was the storm smashing against boats moored at a wharf somewhere nearby.
She sensed the odor of ancient, rotting wood and the remains of dead fish that littered this place. All was wet now, dank, eerily so, like the bottom of a casket. The salt air brought in by the storm mingled with the ancient odors of the river wharf. Yes, she told herself, this place was somewhere along the Mississippi.
Parting the wall of mists, searching the effluvium, Kim was suddenly startled by two huge, penetrating green eyes-something ugly and grotesque waiting just beyond reach, something larger than life with the ridiculous features found on a horror-novel cover. She wanted to back away from the image, but she couldn't. She must reach out toward the monster eyes, to understand their intent, to decipher their symbolic meaning, if they possessed any.
She found herself adrift in the haze and fog, however, blown by the winds threatening to take her over the side of this bizarre world created from the ether. Still, with one hand and foot firmly in the world where Alex raced through the Yellow Pages, and where her body was supported by the tangible metal of Alex's car, Kim's mind struggled to relocate the foreboding, giant's eyes-the ones which had been watching her progress through the dense nebula surrounding her in the place where she believed Jessica had gone.