It was too late to turn back now, though. She was already out and halfway there, so she might as well go through with it. She sprinted between a tree and a manzanita bush-or came as close to sprinting as she could with her arms full-and saw the creek just ahead. Reaching it, she knelt down, scooped up a bucket of the fresh clear water.
And a shadow fell upon her.
She looked up, startled, heart pounding crazily.
It was Chrissie, but it was not Chrissie. She was a man instead of a woman, and she was standing on the opposite side of the creek dressed in some sort of gray uniform that looked familiar but that Angela could not quite place. There was a striped hat and overalls ...
An engineer.
The man who was Chrissie was a train engineer.
With a vicious snarl, the man stepped into the water, drew from behind his back a lantern and swung it at Angela's head. Angela put up her hands to ward off the blow, but her baby was in her hands, and the metal edge of the lantern struck the monkey full in the face, causing it to cry out once, shrilly, before a splatter of blood erupted from the back of its shattered skull, spraying all over Angela. The drops that landed in her open mouth tasted salty, sickening.
Then Angela was running over train tracks, over soft ground covered with dry leaves, over hard dirt roads, toward town, never looking back, knowing she was being chased but afraid to see how close her pursuer was getting.
Once in town, she ducked into a shop. She'd never seen the shop before, but she knew its layout perfectly and ran through a doorway hung with beaded curtains, down a narrow flight of steps and into-
The tunnel.
It was crammed not with dead bodies but with living people, and they were all hiding there, the same way she was. She knew instantly that it was the engineer from whom they were seeking sanctuary.
Footsteps sounded on the floor above their heads. The slow deliberate knocking of boots on wood.
Engineer's boots.
Around her, women started sobbing; men whimpered; a child cried. Angela tried to push her way through the densely packed crowd, wanting to get as far away from the entrance as possible, knowing that this time the engineer would ignore all of the others, that this time he had come for her. But the wall of bodies held fast, no one willing to give up space or pass his or her advantage to Angela.
The boot steps started down the stairs.
Someone screamed, and then the man who was Chrissie was standing in the doorway, larger than life, bloody lantern in his hand. He looked in on them and laughed, a deep echoing basso profundo, but made no effort to enter the tunnel. Instead, he withdrew, and seconds later the door was shut.
Sealed.
And as the boot steps retreated up the stairs, and in the darkness the air became thicker, warmer, harder to breathe, she knew with a certainty that went all the way to the core of her being that they were going to die.
Angela awoke gasping, as though she really had been trapped in that airless tunnel and had just now escaped. She was in her own room, in her own bed, and through the wall she could hear Chrissie opening and closing the drawers of her dresser.
It sounded like boot steps on stairs.
Angela shivered and remained in bed. Whether because of her dream or that last encounter with her roommate, she was afraid to face Chrissie, and she remained safely in bed, hiding, until she heard the sound of the shower, whereupon she quickly kicked off the blanket and jumped up.
Instinctively, she looked down at her bed. She'd thrown out the moldy sheets and the clothes she'd been wearing when the corpse had grabbed her-she'd tied everything up in a Hefty garbage sack and tossed the whole thing in a Dumpster in back of a gas station on her way to school yesterday-but the mold on her bed was back, and this time it covered a much larger area. Beneath the strange thick hairiness, the bottom half of her sheet resembled skin, human skin that had been pulled tight enough to reveal the capillaries within. She backed away, disgusted but unable to take her eyes off the sight. She'd been sleeping on that. With horror, she recalled that her feet under the blanket had felt warm and comfortable, as though resting on velvet, and she nearly gagged when she thought of her toes touching that terrible corpse-spawned mold.
What was going on here? What kind of alternate universe had she entered?
She quickly glanced down at her bare feet, at the legs of her pajama bottoms, grateful to see that there were no black spots, no mold, nothing out of the ordinary. Inwardly, she breathed a sigh of relief, but she knew that she'd be checking on herself every ten minutes for the rest of the day just to make sure there was no sign of unusual growth on her skin.
Should she go to the student health center and get herself examined? Probably. She'd almost done so twenty times yesterday, deciding against it only out of fear of what she might learn. Which was no doubt what she'd end up doing today.
There was a clunk in the pipes as someone in another apartment turned on a faucet. Angela listened. The shower was still on but would not be for long. An ardent environmentalist, Chrissie took short showers in order to conserve water, and Angela wanted to «be out of the Babbitt House before her roommate emerged from the bathroom. She slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slid into some sandals, tied her hair back with a scrunchie, grabbed her books and purse and sped out of the bedroom, through the sitting room and into the hall.
Where she didn't breathe a whole lot easier.
The second-floor hallway was empty, but the atmosphere was heavy, oppressive, what she imagined it must feel like to be in a haunted house. She was hoping that her own perceptions were simply skewed, that there'd been no objectively verifiable change to the house itself. But after what she'd experienced, she could not be sure that that was true, and she knew she wouldn't be able to relax until she was outside and in the open air.
She thought of the mold on her bed, the sheet that looked like skin.
Angela hurried downstairs, grateful not to run into anyone. On the first floor, she passed by the open entrance to Winston and Brock's apartment. Neither of them was visible, but through the doorway, she saw a large black spot on their usually immaculate white couch. She sped past, feeling cold, her chest tight as she held her breath.
"Angela!"
She heard Winston calling from behind her, and though she didn't want to, she stopped, turned around. He was coming out of the apartment, and he moved next to her, arms outstretched.
"Chrissie told us what happened," he said sympathetically. She was focused on a stain that darkened Winston's collar: black mold. She glanced up at his face and saw his look of concern slide into a sly gleeful grin. "Serves you right, you stupid brown bitch!"
From inside the doorway came the sound of Brock's derisive laughter.
Stupid brown bitch.
Those were the same exact words Chrissie had used.
She ran out the front door, onto the lawn, tears stinging her eyes. There was silence behind her, but in her mind she heard everyone in the building laughing, saw all of them lined up at the windows, pointing at her, the tips of their fingers covered with black mold.
Her hands were shaking as she withdrew the ke\ chain from her purse, her fingers fumbling as she tried to find the right one. Not wanting to encounter Chris-sie, she'd come home late last night after hiding in the university library until it closed, so her usual parking spot had been taken and she'd been forced to park up the street. Fortunately. She did not want to be anywhere near Babbitt House right now.
She got in, took off. She was crying as she drove down the street and circled back toward the highway, and she was still crying when she finally made it through the center of town to school.