But his ordeal was not over. He was pulled to his feet once more and was propelled headlong through the aisle between craps tables and blackjack games, toward the forest of brightly glowing slot machines. His clothes were ragged, blood-soaked, and blood flew from him as he plunged involuntarily across the casino. He was no longer conscious and might even have been dead, hardly more than a limp sack of broken bones and ruptured flesh, supernaturally animated. The crowd's morbid curiosity ceased to be more powerful than its terror. People ran, pushing, shoving, some heading toward the front doors, some toward the showroom or the coffee shop or the stairs to the mezzanine leveclass="underline" in any direction that put distance between them and the shattered, shambling nightmare man who, among these dedicated escapists in this adult Disneyland, was a most unwelcome reminder of death and of the mystery and the perversity of the universe.
In a daze, in the grip of a dark thrill that she could not have defined but that was no less powerful for its lack of definition, Regine followed Eddie on his macabre pilgrimage toward the banks of slot machines. She remained fifteen feet behind him and was aware of the casino's security guards following in her wake.
One of them said, 'Lady, stop. Stop where you are!'
She glanced at them. Three big uniformed men. They had their guns drawn. They were all pale and bewildered.
'Get out of the way,' one of them said, and another one was pointing a revolver at her.
She realized that they might think she was somehow responsible for the impossible things that had just happened to Eddie. But what exactly did they think? That she was gifted with psychic powers and now in the grip of homicidal mania?
She stopped as they directed, but she turned to Eddie again. He was now only ten feet from the slot machines. Immediately in front of Eddie, twenty chrome-plated, one-armed bandits — one entire bank of them — were magically activated. Twenty sets of cylinders spun at once. In the display windows, blurred processions of cherries and bells and limes and other symbols moved so fast that they flowed together in formless bands of color. The cylinders whirled for a few seconds, and then all twenty sets stopped simultaneously, and in every window of every machine, lemons were visible.
Eddie bolted forward, tucking his head down — or, rather, the unseen thing tucked his head down for him — and ran straight into a glowing slot machine, ramming it with his skull hard enough to crack thick bone. He collapsed. But he was instantly picked up, hustled backward, then rushed forward a second time, brutally slammed into the machine again. Collapsed. Was picked up. Pulled back. Was thrown forward. This time he hit the machine with such force that he cracked its Plexiglas window and dislodged it from its mountings.
The dead man dropped to the floor.
He lay there, demolished, still.
The air remained freezing cold for a moment.
Regine hugged herself.
She had the feeling that something was watching her.
Then the air grew warm, and Regine sensed that the thing, whatever it had been, had now departed.
She looked at Eddie. He was an unrecognizable mess. In her heart, Regine found a small measure of pity for him, but mostly she was thinking about what his death must have been like, how it must have felt to live through those final brutal minutes of unimaginably intense pain, all-encompassing pain, excruciating and sweetly fulfilling pain.
* * *
Melanie had been quiet and at rest for a few minutes, long enough for Laura to have decided that the worst had passed and for Dan to put away his revolver. As they were returning to the small table by the window, the girl began to writhe and moan again. The room grew cold. Heart racing, Laura went to the bed again.
Melanie's features were grotesquely distorted — not by pain, but (it seemed) by horror. At the moment, she didn't resemble a child at all. She looked… not old, exactly… but wizened, possessed of some hideous and hurtful knowledge far beyond her years, a knowledge that caused anxiety and anguish, a knowledge of dark things best left unknown.
It was coming or was already present. By primitive, instinctive means that she could not understand, Laura sensed a malevolent force bearing down on them. The fine hairs on her arms prickled, and along the nape of her neck too. It.
Laura looked desperately around the room. No demonic creature. No Hell-born shape.
Show yourself, damn you, she thought angrily. Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you come from, give us something to focus on, something to strike at or shoot.
But it remained beyond the reach of her senses, and the only thing about the creature that could be apprehended was the chill in which it always cloaked itself.
The air temperature sank impossibly fast, lower than ever, until their breath gushed out in visible roiling plumes. Condensation appeared on the windows and on the mirror, crystallized into frost, then hardened into ice. But after only thirty or forty seconds, the air began to warm again. The child stopped groaning, and once more the unseen enemy departed without harming her.
Melanie's eyes popped open, but she still seemed to be staring at something in a dream. 'It'll get them.'
Dan Haldane bent over her, put one hand on her small shoulder. 'What is it, Melanie?'
'It. It'll get them,' the girl repeated, not to him as much as to herself.
'What is the damned thing?' Dan asked.
'It'll get them,' the girl said, and shuddered.
'Easy, honey,' Laura said.
'And then,' Melanie said, 'it'll get me too.'
'No,' Laura said. 'We'll take care of you, Mellie. I swear we will.'
The girl said, 'It'll come up… from… inside… and eat me… eat me all up….'
'No,' Laura said. 'No.'
'Inside?' Dan said. 'From inside what?'
'Eat me all up,' the girl said forlornly.
Dan said, 'Where does it come from?'
The child issued a long, slowly fading whimper that seemed more a sigh of resignation than an expression of fear.
'Was something here just a moment ago, Melanie?' Dan asked. 'The thing you're so afraid of… was it here in this room?'
'It wants me,' the girl said.
'If it wants you,' he said, 'then why didn't it take you while it was here?'
The girl wasn't hearing him. Softly, thickly, she said, 'The door…'
'What door?'
'The door to December.'
'What's that mean, Melanie?'
'The door…'
The girl closed her eyes. Her breathing changed. She slipped into sleep.
Looking across the bed at Dan, Laura said, 'It wants the others first, the people involved with the experiments in that gray room.'
'Eddie Koliknikov, Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, Albert Uhlander, and maybe more we don't know about yet.'
'Yes. As soon as they're all dead, then it… It will come for Melanie. That's what she said earlier tonight, at the house, after the radio was… possessed.'
'But how does she know this?'
Laura shrugged.
They stared at the slumbering girl.
At last Dan said, 'We've got to break through this… this trance she's in, so she can tell us what we need to know.'
'I tried earlier today. Hypnotic-regression therapy. But it wasn't terribly successful.'
'Can you try again?'