Billy turned and stopped. “Get up.”
“No. I’m hurting too much. It’s too hot.” He sucked in a lungful of searing air, and the pain in his side flared. He watched as Billy stepped back toward him. “Want me to heal you?” he asked, and grinned. “Want me to lay my hands on you and make you all right? Take a number.”
“We don’t have much farther to go. Come on.”
He shook his head. “I’m burned out. There’s nothing left.” Wayne’s eyes closed. “The snake’s won,” he said. “It’s killed the eagle…”
“What? What snake and eagle?”
“I see them in a dream, fighting. The snake bit the eagle, bit it right in the heart, and pulled it down from the sky.”
Billy remembered how his eagle had clamped its beak down on the snake’s head, how in his dream it seemed to be winning. “The eagle’s smoke?” he said. “And the snake’s fire?”
Wayne’s eyes snapped open, his head cocked to one side. “How’d you know that?”
“What I told you on the plane, about your mother,” Billy said, “was true. You have to believe me. There’s still time for you to be strong; there’s still time for the eagle to win.”
Sweat dripped off Wayne’s chin, making a dark puddle on the ground. “I always wanted to fly. But somehow I…always ended up crawling. I wish I’d known more about her. And about you, too. Maybe things would’ve been different. Go on, now. Leave me alone.”
But Billy was looking out across the desert, toward the haze of black smoke where the Challenger lay. He saw the figure approaching, now about a hundred yards away. The mottled, bloated body waddled toward them, legs pumping in a frantic hurry.
Wayne peered over his shoulder, his vision blurring in and out. “Krepsin,” he said hoarsely. “He’s not dead…”
The body was moving in a jerky pantomime of life; with each step, the head joggled from side to side as if the neck had been snapped. Its shoes stirred up puffs of dust. The shattered left shoulder made the arm swing like a fleshy pendulum.
No, Billy thought; that’s not Krepsin. That’s something wearing Krepsin’s flesh, something hurrying now to catch them before they reached the foothills.
“Wait for me, boys!” the thing roared, a rasping voice forced through Krepsin’s dead vocal cords. “I’ve got a present for you! Look, it’s something shiny!” The thing bellowed and snorted, and swung its right hand in a quick arc. Billy saw sunlight glint off a metal object. “Wayne? Billy? Wait for me right there! I’m coming!”
The shape changer, Billy knew. Only now it wasn’t playing games, wasn’t shifting masks to confuse him and Wayne. It was wearing human flesh, muscle, and sinew; it was tracking them down, gobbling and snorting with glee. And in that form, Billy realized, no mental tricks were needed; it would tear them to pieces. “Get up, Wayne. Hurry.”
Wayne rose to his feet, wincing from the pain. Then he and Billy were hobbling away, trying to put distance between them and the thing. It shouted, “YOU CAN’T RUN! THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE!” It tried to break into a run too, but the lumbering unwieldy legs collapsed and the shape changer fell to the ground. Sputtering with rage, it forced itself up again and moved onward.
The heat quickly slowed Billy and Wayne down. The behemoth stalked after them, keeping a steady pace.
“WAYNE!” the shape changer shouted. “He’s trying to trick you! He’s a demon, the son of Satan! He’s trying to mix up your head! Can’t you see me? I’m alive!”
“No,” Wayne whispered, “you’re dead…you’re dead…you’re…”
The voice changed, became feminine and softly seductive. “Wayne? I’m waiting for you at the lake! Want to go swimmin’? Don’t run away, Wayne! Wait for me!” And then, thunderously, “I’LL KILL YOU, YOU LITTLE FUCK!”
“Don’t listen!” Billy said.
“Billy?” the thing called out. “Do you know who you’re trying to help? He had them kill your mother; Billy. Know how it was done? They cut her throat. They cut it right to the spine. Then your pretty little Hawthorne house was set on fire so everything would be ashes! He wanted to have you killed, too! Oh, he dreamed of killing you! GO ON, ASK HIM!”
“Don’t look back,” Billy told Wayne; his voice was choked with conflicting emotions.
They reached the foothills and began climbing. The terrain grew rockier and steeper. Behind them, the shape changer muttered and shouted and babbled, swinging its weapon back and forth with malicious glee. They climbed over sharp-edged boulders, the breath of pain hissing from between their teeth. They were slowing down as their strength burned away, but the shape changer was gaining ground. Black, stomach-wrenching pain hit Billy as his injured arm grazed an outcrop of rock, but he clenched his teeth to contain the scream. In another few moments their progress was slowed to a crawl; they left sweat stains wherever they touched, and bloody prints where Billy’s feet had gripped rock. The caves were above them, less than fifty feet away over a torturous trail of jagged stone. Wayne looked back, saw the bloated thing grinning thirty feet or so beneath them as it clambered up. He recognized the weapon on its right hand.
“Running out of steam, boys?” the walking corpse called out, showing its mangled teeth.
Billy reached up with his good hand to climb onto a ledge. His feet slipped on loose stones, and he almost tumbled down, but then Wayne was pushing him up from below. He crawled upward, onto the ledge about six feet wide and exposed to burning sunlight. A large cave was twenty feet above, but his strength was gone. He lay panting with pain as Wayne crawled up beside him.
Wayne tried to drag Billy the rest of the way, but he was too weak to go more than a few feet. Sweat burned into his eye, blinding him for a few seconds; when he cleared his vision, Krepsin’s dead face was rising over the ledge.
Wayne let go of Billy and kicked out at the thing. Bone cracked in the corpse’s neck, and watery blood gushed from the nose, but it was still pulling itself onto the ledge. Wayne kicked out again, but the shape changer’s arm swung to stop the blow. The razored weapon slashed into Wayne’s ankle, scraping the bone. Wayne fell onto his injured ribs, curled up, and lay still with blood pooling under his leg.
“Two very naughty boys,” the shape changer whispered as it rose on Krepsin’s legs. “They must be punished.”
Billy was transfixed with fear, too weak to even try to crawl away. The shape changer had them now. His Mystery Walk—and Wayne’s, too—would end here, on a scorched slab of rock a hundred feet above the Mexican desert.
“You won’t steal the food from my table anymore, you whelp.” It lumbered forward, bloodied head lolling. “I’m going to take my time with you, I’m going to enjoy this. You remember what I told you, a long time ago? In that bitch’s smokehouse? I said I’d be seeing you again. Oh, it’s worked out just fine, hasn’t it? The little ghost boy is about to see what Death is like from the other side; and I’ll keep you screaming for a long, long time…” It grinned, ready to feast on more agony, already drawing on Billy’s fear to make itself stronger. It swelled with the terror and evil it had drawn from the dead men in the jet.
The shape changer gripped Billy’s hair and thrust his head back, glaring into the boy’s eyes. “First, a scalp,” it whispered, raising its arm. “A scalp from an Indian.”
And then Wayne grabbed the corpse’s chin from behind, wrenching its head backward.
Jagged edges of bone ripped through the throat with a noise like tearing cloth. The immense football-shaped head was jammed backward, the shape changer’s eyes were blinded by the sun. The head, now separated from the spine, hung back like a sack of flesh; the shape changer couldn’t see. It turned upon Wayne, flailing blindly with the razored knuckles.
Wayne ducked the first blow, trying to balance on his good leg, but a backhanded swipe laid his cheek open and he staggered toward the edge. The shape changer danced with rage, striking at empty air, coming closer and closer to Wayne. Then Krepsin’s corpse found him and they grappled, Wayne’s hand closin
g around the thing’s right wrist, trying with the last of his strength to hold back the razors. They were balanced on the edge, the shape changer unable to see forward, the ruined head hanging back over the corpse’s shoulder.
Wayne lost his grip. The razors glinted, the swollen hand burying itself in Wayne’s stomach.
Wayne caught his breath, felt warmth oozing down his legs. His vision hazed, but his brain was clear and for the first time in his life he knew what had to be done. The shape changer was making croaking sounds of triumph through Krepsin’s ripped throat. Its hand twisted, driving the razors deeper into Wayne’s stomach.
“NO!” Billy shouted, and tried to rise. He’d seen the death aura flare around Wayne; it undulated, shimmering a deep purplish black. Blood was streaming from Wayne’s stomach, his face quickly bleaching.
But there was no fear in his unswollen eye. It caught Billy’s gaze, locked, and then quickly shifted back to the struggling shape changer. This was the thing that had taunted him all along, that had tricked him by taking his daddy’s form…and the form of a young brunette girl who’d never really existed at all, except in his own head. The hot pain that shot through his body was thawing rusted, cobwebbed gears in his brain. He wasn’t afraid.
He could still learn to fly, he realized. Yes. There was still time to kill the snake!
Now! he thought. Do it now!
And he twisted himself off the ledge, taking Krepsin’s corpse with him.
Billy heard the shape changer’s mangled roar, and then they were gone.
The air was bright and blue and whistled around Wayne’s ears. He was falling toward the surface of water, there in the Fayette Public Swimming Pool, and everything was all right. He had finally gathered the courage to soar from the Tower, and no one was laughing at him anymore. The water shimmered beneath him, coming up fast. He closed his eyes and saw the fighting shapes, the smoke-eagle and the fire-serpent. The eagle was mortally wounded, but it was still strong; it dug its claws into the reptile and gripped the burning spade-shaped head in its beak. With a triumphant cry, the eagle beat its tattered wings toward the sky and lifted the writhing snake up…higher, and higher and higher, until the snake crisped into ashes and whirled away on the bright currents of air.
He would be all right now. He’d done the best he could, and he was ready to soar.
Billy heard them hit. Rocks cascaded down the mountainside, and then there was a long silence but for the noise of sliding grit. He crawled painfully toward the edge and peered over.
Wayne lay on his stomach forty feet below, his arms outstretched. Fifteen feet beyond him, Krepsin’s corpse had exploded like a gasbag on impact with a truck-sized boulder.
Something dark and leprous rose like a mist from Krepsin, moving slowly toward Wayne’s body.
“Get away from him!” Billy shouted. “GET AWAY!”
The wraith picked and probed at Wayne. But Billy had seen the twisted angle of Wayne’s head, the torn ankle and a protrusion of bone through the other leg. For the shape changer, the body was useless. The mist rose, took on the murky appearance of the huge boarlike beast. Its red eyes blinked; it was stunned and confused, unable to strike physically at Billy again. Within it, Billy saw roiling ectoplasm—a spectral hand clawing at the air, a football-shaped head with an open, silently screaming mouth, another face that might have been Niles’s mirroring shock and agony. The forms churned, slowly losing their clarity—as if they were being digested in the belly of the beast.
“You’ve lost,” Billy said. “Now run. Hide. RUN!”
The thing glowered at him for a moment, clutching its clawed arms around its stomach; the souls it had snatched writhed in soundless pain.
It looked down at Wayne’s broken body, and its hideous face rippled with a snarl of hatred and frustration. The boy had escaped, was now far beyond the shape changer’s control. The thing began to fade, taking its prizes with it. Before it had drifted away completely it glared up toward Billy and said, “There’ll be a next time.” But the voice—a mixture of Krepsin’s, Niles’s and Dora’s—was weaker, and carried an undercurrent of what might have been fear.
“I’ll be ready,” he replied, but the thing had already gone, leaving a slight turbulence of dust and grit.
The air settled. The sun baked down, and the vultures began to gather.
Billy waited, his head bowed with concentration. He was certain that Wayne was gone. Wayne had found the tunnel, and was now on a different kind of Mystery Walk. He wanted to bury the body, but the rocks that had slid down over it would keep the vultures away for a while, and he knew he was too weak to climb down and then back again. He said a silent prayer for Wayne. The air was clear and untroubled. After another few minutes Billy crawled away and painfully climbed to the large cave just above.
There was no water, but the shade was deep and cool. Lizards scurried over the rocky floor, chasing small beetles. Billy crouched in a corner, ripped off the rags of his shirt, and fashioned a sling for his arm—not much, but it would serve to keep the bones from moving. He was full of fever, his head pounding with heat; if he didn’t find liquid soon, he knew, he was going to die. He could let go; it would be easy to curl up and die, and so much pain would be avoided, but he knew his mother wouldn’t want that. He didn’t want it. He and Wayne had come so far from Hawthorne, both over twisted and treacherous ground—their paths had split early, their Mystery Walks leading them in such different directions, but at the end they’d faced the shape changer together. And Wayne had been stronger than the evil thing that had toyed with him for so long.
The fever was burning Billy dry. He was getting chills now, and he knew that must be a bad sign. He closed his eyes, concentrating on Bonnie, waiting for him in Chicago. He tumbled into sleep, escaping fever and durst.
“Billy?” someone said quietly.
He stirred and forced his eyes open.
There was a figure standing in the cave entrance, silhouetted against harsh white sunlight. It was a little boy, Billy realized, but he couldn’t see the face. A little boy? he thought. Out here? No, no; he was dreaming—hallucinating. The little boy wore a clean shirt and trousers, not a spot of dust or drip of sweat on him.
“Who’s that?” Billy asked, his tongue so swollen he could hardly speak. “I can’t see what you look like.”
“It’s me! You remember, don’t you, Billy? It’s me from a long time ago! We used to play together! Remember?”
“Who? I don’t know you.” The shape changer, he thought, and went cold. “Get away from me.”
“I’m not trying to trick you. Honest. I want to help you, if I can. But you’ve got to help yourself, too. You can’t lie there too much longer. You’ll die.”
“Maybe I will.”
“But why? You’ve come a long way, Billy. You’ve…you’ve grown up. You helped me once, a long time ago.”
“I want to sleep. Whatever you are, leave me alone. You can’t hurt me anymore.”
“I don’t want to. I…know how bad it can be. It can be real bad here, but you can’t give up. You can never give up, and you’re not ready…not yet.” The little boy watched him for a moment, his head cocked to one side in a way that Billy thought was familiar. Was it…no, no not him…
“Leave here when it gets dark,” the little boy said. “But watch how the sun goes down, so you can figure out which way is due west. That’s the direction you’ve got to walk, right where the sun sets. There are others trying to help you, too, but sometimes it’s not easy. You still think I’m trying to fool you, don’t you? I’m not, I promise. You’ve got to start walking when it gets dark. It’s going to be hard, but you have to keep going. Okay?”
“No. I’m staying right here until someone finds me.”
“They won’t,” he said quickly. “You’re along way from where people are, Billy. You have to get out of here.”
“Go away. Leave me alone.”
“No; first you have to say you will. Okay?”
Billy closed his eyes. It was the shape changer, he knew, trying to make him lose himself in the desert. Trying to make him walk in the wrong direction and away from where the villages were.
“Do it, Billy. West, okay? Okay?”
The last plea hung in the air. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the cave entrance was empty. The fever was making him hear and see things. No, it was best to stay right here where he was cool and safe, where someone would eventually find the jet’s wreckage. Surely someone would see the smoke!
But there was something lying in the palm of his right hand. He stared at it, his heart beating rapidly.
It was a piece of coal that had been covered with shellac so that the black wouldn’t rub off.
He stood up, hobbling to the entrance. There were no prints but his own bloody ones in the dust. The fierce heat forced him back into the shadow, where he sat down again and clenched the coal tightly in his fist. Had he had the coal with him all the time? No, no; it had been left in Chicago, two thousand miles away. Hadn’t it? He couldn’t remember through the fire in his head. He put the coal in his pocket and waited for the sun to sink.
In deep blue twilight, Billy carefully descended over the rocks to where Wayne and Krepsin’s corpses lay sprawled. A flurry of vultures sailed away; they’d already feasted on much of Krepsin. They’d been working on Wayne’s back and legs, but hadn’t marked the face yet. Billy took Wayne’s shoes and squeezed his swollen feet into them. He sat for a few moments beside Wayne, then he arranged rocks over the body to keep the vultures away awhile longer.