Skylar had stopped screaming. He didn't know when, didn't know why, but when he tried to yell again for help, he couldn't. His voice had disappeared. The only sound that came out was a parched croak.
But he shouldn't have to keep yelling. Someone should be here by now. Hadn't anyone heard him call? He'd been screaming at the top of his lungs.
The puppet drew closer.
Skylar backed up until he was against the metal wall of the first stall and could move no more. There was a shadow behind the light now. He could see an outline of the figure that was working the puppet. The light remained in place, the puppet moved out of it,, and the controlling figure stepped into the breach.
It was the old man he and his mom had seen that night at the bedroom window, and he realized now why the puppet's terrible face had looked so familiar. It was a smaller version of this one.
"Skylar," the man said with a strange accent.
It knew his name!
"Hey."
"No," was all he could get out.
"I have so much to show you," the old man said, and Skylar started whimpering.
The figure grinned at him.
And took his hand.
Eighteen
Flagstaff, Arizona
According to the tests, there was nothing there.
That was flat-out impossible.
Angela and Derek listened to Dr. Mathewson's exasperated description of the analyses performed on the black mold.
"I know it's there," the professor said. "I can see it. We all can see it. But when examined microscopically, analyzed spectrographically or tested for chemical interaction with various solutions, it's as if it doesn't even exist. It's as though,we're looking at"-he moved his fingers in a wispy motion above his head-"air."
Angela had no idea how such a thing could be true. But she believed it. As far as she was concerned, there'd been more magic than science involved here since the beginning. That still didn't tell them what they were dealing with, and she knew the lack of hard facts frustrated both the professor and Derek. She was frustrated, too, but for different reasons. She didn't necessarily require a rational explanation for all that was going on, but she still wanted to know what was happening and why.
Part of her felt guilty, as though she'd brought it on herself, as though this was some sort of cosmic punishment being meted out to her.
That was her parents' influence. And the church's.
She'd spent the previous night at Derek's house. At first, she'd declined his offer, worried about what his family might think, but he drove her there, introduced her, and gave his mom a thumbnail sketch of what was going on, and his mother insisted that Angela sleep in the guest room.
"Thank you," she said gratefully. "It's only for tonight. I promise."
"For as long as it takes to get your situation sorted out," his mother said.
"Derek has a girlfriend!" his brother, Steve, called in a singsong voice. "Derek has a girlfriend!"
"Shut up," Derek told him.
"Derek has a girlfriend!"
"He's my half brother," Derek told Angela, motioning toward a mantel where photographs of the family were displayed. She saw pictures of Mrs. Yount with two different husbands.
"Mom!" Steve whined.
"Derek!" his mother warned.
It felt good to be in a family environment once again. It had been nice to be on her own and in the adult universe, too, but when things got rough, having a family around made it much easier to face the world.
She'd used up nearly all of her anytime minutes calling her own family and her friends back in California, and they probably thought she was having some type of nervous breakdown. No doubt as a result of living away from home for the first time. She'd told them everything, and they believed none of it. Why would they? The story was ludicrous. She'd moved into a haunted house with a bunch of colorful characters; then she'd been grabbed by a living corpse in a tunnel full of corpses and after that, black mold had started growing on her sheets, black mold that her roommate touched and that turned her and everyone else in the apartment building into racist assholes? It sounded like the plot of a grade-Z horror movie.
Besides, her family and friends were too far away to help anyway.
At least Derek had turned out to be a stand-up guy.
She glanced over at him, talking to the professor. The two of them were looking over a series of printouts. She was not sure Derek understood any more of it than she did, but at least he was in there; at least he was trying.
Dr. Mathewson dropped the papers in defeat.
"So what now?" Derek asked.
The professor shook his head. "I'm going to speak to my colleagues here, confer with others at universities that have better and more sophisticated equipment, contact the CDC and ... keep on trying. We'll nail it eventually, but I'm afraid I have nothing to offer you at this time."
"Thanks anyway," Angela said. "For trying."
"Thank you," he told them. "This is a real challenge. At the very least, I'll get a paper out of it."
Once outside, Derek looked around at the stone buildings of the university. "There are a lot of smart minds hard at work behind those walls. You'd think we could find one that could crack this for us or at least come up with a usable theory."
"Right now, I just want to go back and get my stuff while everyone else is at school." They'd both decided to skip classes and take off work for the day, and Derek had agreed to help her load up everything of hers from Babbitt House and temporarily store it in his garage until she could find a new place to live.
"All right, then," he told her. "Let's go."
If, before, the ornate facade and rolling lawn of the Victorian residence had seemed charmingly bohemian for an apartment building, those features now seemed scary and threatening. The gingerbread on the structure gave it the appearance of a haunted house, and the vast lawn separated it from the rest of the street, keeping it isolated. Her clothes were in there, her PC, assorted books and CDs, but she was tempted to leave everything and give up her rights to it just to get away from this place. She did not want to go back in that building.
Derek had already started up the walk, however, and he turned around. "Come on. Let's get this over with."
He was right, and she hurried to catch up with him.
Stupid brown bitch.
She hoped Chrissie was not going to be here. Or Winston.
The front door was locked. Angela withdrew her key ring from her purse and was sorting through the keys to find the one for the front door when a water balloon burst on the cement of the walkway next to Derek's feet. The air was filled with the tart, sickening stench of urine. "Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin!" Randy yelled from above. Angela heard his window slam shut.
At precisely that instant, as though choreographed, Kelli and Yurica stuck their heads out of the window next to the front door-their living room window- and yelled in unison: "Go back to Mexico, slut!" Giggling, they ducked back inside.
"This place is a goddamn loony bin," Derek said.
"It's the mold," Angela told him. She paused. "At least I think it is." She opened the front door.
Derek cringed, ready to duck at the first sign of anything coming at them, but there was nothing. "Do you think this is happening to Dr. Welkes? And everyone else who went down in that tunnel?"
"I don't know," Angela admitted, and they walked inside.