Larry moaned.
“What’s wrong?”
“How can you touchit?”
“No big deal. Try it. Feels like shoe leather.” He drew his finger across a blond eyebrow.
Larry imagined Pete’s finger sliding down the ridge of the eye socket, touching the lid, denting it, sinking in to the second knuckle.
“Go on and touch it,” Pete urged him. “How you going to write about this stuff if you don’t experience it?”
“Thanks, anyway. I’ll rely on my imagi...”
“We changed our minds.”
He flinched at the sound of Barbara’s voice. So did Pete. Pete’s head slammed the underside of a stair. He cried, “Ah!” ducked down close to the face of the corpse and grabbed the back of his head. “Shit! Damn it, Barb!”
“Sorry.”
Larry looked over his shoulder at the women and smiled. Though his startled heart was drumming, he was gladthey were here.
He felt as if some of the real world had come back.
“Guess you weren’t kidding,” Barbara whispered. “Jesus, look at that thing.”
“Yuck,” was all Jean said.
Barbara crouched over the end of the coffin. Jean stayed behind her and peered over her head.
“Didn’t want us to have all the fun?” Larry asked.
“That’s about the size of it,” Jean said, her voice hushed.
“Curiosity got the best of us,” Barbara added. Then she reached into the coffin and touched the foot of the corpse.
She’s just like Pete, Larry thought. Whatever their differences, they’re sure a set.
“I think I’m bleeding,” Pete muttered.
“That makes two of us,” Barbara said, still rubbing the dead foot. “It’s like the skin on a salami.”
“Salami’s oily,” Pete told her. “This is more like leather.”
“Okay, we’ve seen it,” Jean said. “Everyone ready to go?”
“Yeah, just about.” Pete stopped rubbing his head, reached one arm down over the covered torso and snatched off the blanket. Larry lurched backward on his knees, wishing to God he’d known this was coming. He’d already seen too much.
Now the corpse was stretched in front of his face.
It was naked.
It was female.
It had a wooden stake in its chest.
“Holy shit,” Barbara whispered.
“Let’s get out of here!” Jean gasped in a high, tight voice. She didn’t wait for a consensus. She bolted.
Pete threw the blanket down. It landed in a pile, covering the blunt top of the stake, the corpse’s flat breasts and the slats of its ribs. Barbara leaned forward, grabbed a bit of the blanket and jerked it down to cover the groin.
Blond pubic hair.
Larry groaned.
Then he was scurrying after Barbara. The white seat of her shorts was still smudged with yellow from the rock where she’d rested in the creek bed.
Seemed like a century ago.
Why did we do this?
Larry followed her through the open section of paneling. Jean was still in the lobby. Her fists were clenched at her sides and she was prancing as if she had to pee. “Let’s go, let’s go!” she gasped.
Larry waited for Pete.
Together they pushed the slab of wood into place.
Shutting the door of the tomb.
Pete backed away as if afraid to take his eyes off it.
In the beam of his flashlight the crucified body of Jesus gleamed.
Five
Pete floored it out of Sagebrush Flat, and Barbara didn’t say a word about the speed.
Nobody said a word about anything.
Larry slouched in the passenger seat, feeling dazed and exhausted. Though he stared out the windshield at the sun-bright road and desert, he kept seeing the corpse. And the stake in its chest. And the crucifix.
It’s behind us now, he told himself. We got away. We’re all right.
His body felt leaden. There was a shaky tightness in his chest and throat that seemed like a peculiar mix of terror — subsiding terror — and elation. He remembered experiencing similar sensations a few years earlier. On a flight to New York the 747 had hit an air pocket and dropped straight down for a couple of seconds. Some of the passengers struck the ceiling. He and Jean and Lane, strapped in their seats, had been unharmed. But he’d felt this way afterward.
Probably shock, he thought. Shock, combined with great relief.
He sensed that if he didn’t keep tight control of himself, he might start weeping or giggling.
This must be where they get the expression “scared silly.”
“How’s everybody doing?” Pete asked, breaking the long silence.
“I want a drink,” Barbara said.
“There’s more beer in the ice chest.”
“Not beer, a drink.”
“Yeah, I could go for one myself. Or three or four. We should be home in less than an hour.” He glanced at Larry. “You believethat back there? That was like right out of one of your books.”
“He hasn’t written any vampire books,” Barbara said. “You’d know that, if you ever read them.”
“Bet you will now, right?”
“I think I’d rather forget about it.”
“Same here,” Jean said. “God.”
“That babe had a stakein her heart.”
“We all saw it,” Barbara reminded him.
“And how about that crucifix? I’ll bet they put it there to keep her from getting out.” He nodded, squinting at the road. “You know? In case the stake fell out, or something. To keep her from breaking through the wall.”
“How would the damn stake fall out?” Barbara asked, sounding a little bit annoyed by his musings.
“Well, you know, a rat could get in there. A rat might pull it loose. Something like that.”
“Give me a break.”
“There’s no such thing as vampires,” Jean said. “Tell them, Larry.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Well, there’s plenty of legends about them. It goes way back. Back in the Middle Ages a lot of poor jerks wound up buried at crossroads with their heads cut off and garlic stuffed in their mouths.”
“Guess ours got off lucky, huh?” Pete grinned at him. “All she got was the ol‘ stake-in-the-heart routine.”
“She’s not any vampire,” Jean insisted.
“Somebody sure wasted her, though,” Barbara said.
“That’s right,” Jean said. “Has it occurred to anyone that we found a dead body?”
Pete raised his hand like a school kid. “Me,” he said. “I caught that right off the bat.” He chuckled. “No pun intended.”
“No, I mean shouldn’t we tell the police?”
“She’s got a point,” Barbara admitted.
“So does our babe under the stairs,” Pete said, laughing some more. “A point right in her chest.”
“Give it a rest, would you? This is serious business. We can’t just find a body and pretend it never happened.”
“Right. We’ll just tell the cops we broke into a locked hotel.”
“Youbroke into a locked hotel.”
“Hey, you want to be married to a jailbird?”
“We could make an anonymous call,” Jean suggested. “Just explain where the body is, so they can go out and get it. Really. I mean, whoever she is, she deserves a decent burial.”
“I wouldn’t want it on my conscience,” Pete said.
“What do you mean?”
“They won’t bury her with that stake in her chest. Some poor slob’ll pluck it right out. Next thing you know, he’s a vampire cocktail.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jean muttered.
“Is it?” Making an evil laugh, he grinned over his shoulder at her.
“Watch where you’re driving,” Barbara said.
“I don’t think we should call the cops,” Larry said. “Even if we do it anonymously, there’s still a chance we might get dragged into the situation.”
“I don’t see how,” Jean told him.
“How do we know we weren’t seen? Somebody might’ve driven through town and spotted the van while we were admiring the jukebox.”
“Or the vampire,” Pete added.