“I don’t know.”
Melanie was death-pale.
Because she was wearing a dress that bared her shoulders, Regine felt the change in the air before Eddie did. They were standing at a craps table, watching the action, and Eddie was deciding whether or not to put a bet down and go with the shooter. People were crowding in on every side, and the casino was warm, so warm that Regine wished that she had something with which to fan herself. Then, abruptly, there was a change of atmosphere. Regine shivered and saw gooseflesh on her arms. For an instant she thought that the management had overreacted to the heat and had turned the air-conditioning too high, but then she realized that the temperature had plummeted too quickly and too steeply to be explained merely by the air-conditioning.
A couple other women noticed the change, and then Eddie became aware of it, and the effect on him was astonishing. He turned from the craps table, hugging himself, shaking, a look of horror on his face. His skin was bloodless alabaster, and his eyes were bleak. He looked wildly left and right, then pushed through the crowd that had formed around the table, shoving and elbowing toward the broad aisle between rows of gaming tables, moving away from Regine, a desperate jerkiness to his movements.
“Eddie?” she called after him.
He didn’t glance back.
“Eddie!”
It was bitterly cold now, at least immediately around the craps tables, and people were commenting on this sudden and inexplicable frigidity.
Regine pushed through the crowd, following Eddie. He shouldered into the main aisle and reached a clear space. He was turning in a circle, his arms raised, as if expecting to be attacked and preparing to ward off the assailant. But no assailant was in sight, and Regine wondered if he had cracked up or something. She continued to make her way toward him, and now she saw that a security guard had noticed Eddie’s strange behavior and was heading in his direction too.
She called to Eddie again, but even if he heard her, he had no opportunity to answer, for at that moment he was struck so hard that he stumbled sideways. He collided with people streaming past the blackjack tables, and he went to his knees.
But who had struck him?
For that brief moment, he had been in an island of open space between surging rivers of people. No one had been closer to him than six or eight feet. But he had been hit. His hair was in disarray, and his face was covered with blood.
Jesus, so much blood.
He began to scream.
A torrent of sound had been pouring through the busy casino—the happy shouts and squeals of winning craps shooters, the age-old litany of blackjack dealers and players, the snap of cards, the click of dice, the ticka-ticka-ticka of the wheel of fortune, the clack and rattle of the ball in the roulette wheel, laughter, groans of dismay at the wrong turn of a card, stridently ringing bells and wailing sirens from those slot machines that were making payoffs, pounding music from the quartet playing in the lounge—but it all ground to a silence when Eddie began to scream. His cries were as bone-shaking, as marrow-piercing as the shrieks of any creature in a nightmare. Alone, this shocking series of screeches and ululations would have been enough to turn heads, but now unseen amplifiers—or some strange sound-enhancing quality inherent in the cold and smoky air—seemed to take up his scream, echo and reecho it, double and triple the volume. It was as if some invisible and monstrous presence were mocking him by rebroadcasting his screams at an even more hysterical pitch. All conversation ceased, and then all gambling, and then even the band stopped playing, and the only sound—other than Eddie’s tortured cries of pain and terror—was the ringing of a slot machine in some far corner of that vast chamber.
People fell back from Eddie, giving him even more space.
Regine stopped too, when she got a closer look at him. His right ear was limp and mangled, half ripped off, streaming blood. That entire side of his face was abraded and bleeding, and some of the hair had been torn out of his head. He appeared to have been clubbed by someone damned strong and in a rage, but he wasn’t yet unconscious. He spat blood and broken teeth, started to get up from his knees, and was struck again so hard that his screaming was cut off. He was lifted from the floor and thrown into a crowd of onlookers who stood by one of the craps tables. People scattered, and the brief preternatural silence was broken by their shouts and screams, and now even the security guard, who had been approaching Eddie, stopped in perplexity and fear.
Eddie collapsed in a bloody heap but, in an instant, sprang to his feet again, though not of his own accord. He was jerked erect, as though he were a marionette controlled by a mysterious puppeteer. He took several ungainly, bouncing steps away from the craps table, twisted, turned, stumbled, staggered sideways, leaped, whirled, as if terrible bolts of lightning were striking the unseen puppeteer overhead and then were passing through the strings into this bloody marionette, causing it to cavort spastically.
Regine stepped out of the way as Eddie lurched past her. He was berserk, arms swinging and flapping as if the control strings were tangled. His right eye was smashed shut, but his left was blinking and rolling and searching frantically for his ghostly assailant. He crashed into the untenanted stools of a blackjack table, knocking one over, and the dealer, who had been watching in astonishment, scurried away.
As the pit boss shouted into a phone, demanding additional guards from the security office, Eddie clutched at the blackjack table the way a drowning man might cling to a raft in a storm-tossed sea, trying to resist the unknown entity or force that was pulling at him. But it was far stronger than he, and it lifted him off the floor. He hung above the blackjack table, kicking and squirming in midair, sorcerously suspended there, a sight that elicited from the crowd a babble and then a roar of bewilderment, shock, and terror. Suddenly Eddie was thrown down hard onto the top of the blackjack table, scattering cards and casino chips and half-finished drinks that had been abandoned by the players who had fled from him a moment ago. And he was picked up and thrown down onto the table again, so hard this time that the table collapsed under him; his back surely must have been broken.
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 level: 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 acti
vated. 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?”
Laura nodded. “In the morning, when she’s rested a little.”
“We shouldn’t waste time—”
“She needs her rest.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly.
She knew what he was thinking: If we wait until morning, let’s hope we’re not too late.
chapter thirty-two
Laura slept with Melanie in the second bed, and Dan lay in the first bed because it was nearer the door, which was the most likely source of trouble. He was wearing his shirt, trousers, shoes, and socks; he was ready to move fast. They had left a single lamp lit because, after the events of the past day, they distrusted the dark. Dan listened to their deep and even breathing.
He could not sleep. He was thinking about Joseph Scaldone’s battered body, about all the dead people in that Studio City house, and about Regine Savannah Hoffritz, who was physically and mentally alive but whose soul had been murdered. And as always, when he thought too long about murder in its myriad forms and wondered about humanity’s capacity for it, his thoughts led inexorably to his dead brother and sister.
He had never known them. Not alive. They had been dead by the time that he had learned their names and had gone in search of them. As far as his own name was concerned, he had been born with neither “Dan” nor “Haldane.” Pete and Elsie Haldane had adopted him when he’d been less than a month old. His real parents had been Loretta and Frank Detwiler, two Okies who had come to California in search of their fortune but who had never found it. Instead, when Loretta had been carrying her third child, Frank had been killed in a traffic accident; and Loretta, whose pregnancy had been plagued by serious complications, died two days after giving birth to Dan. She had named him James. James Detwiler. But because there had been no relatives, no one to take custody of the three Detwiler children, they had been separated and put up for adoption.
Peter and Elsie Haldane had never concealed the fact that they weren’t Dan’s actual parents. He loved them and was proud to carry their name, for they were good people to whom he owed everything. At the same time, however, he had always wondered about his natural parents and had longed to know about them.
Because of the rules that governed adoption agencies in those days, Elsie and Pete had been told nothing about their baby’s real parents, other than the fact that both the natural mother and father were dead. That single fact made Dan more
eager to learn what kind of people they had been, for they had not abandoned him by choice but had been taken from him by a whim of fate.
By the time he got to college, Dan had started wrestling with the child-placement bureaucracy in order to obtain copies of their records. The search took time, but after considerable effort and some expense, he learned his real name and the names of his blood parents, and he was startled to discover that he had a brother and a sister. The brother, Delmar, had been four when Loretta Detwiler died, and the sister, Carrie, had been six.
Through the adoption agency’s records, which had been partially damaged in a fire and which were not as complete as Dan would have hoped, he began an even more ardent search for his lost siblings. Pete and Elsie Haldane always gave him a deep and abiding sense of family; he thought of their brothers and sisters as his true aunts and uncles, thought of their parents as his grandparents, and felt that he belonged with them. Nevertheless . . . well, he was plagued by a peculiar emptiness, a vague and uneasy sense of being adrift, that he knew would be with him until he had found and embraced his kin. A thousand times since then, he wished that he’d never gone looking for them.
Tracking back through the years, he eventually found Delmar, his brother. In a grave. The names on the tombstone weren’t Delmar or Detwiler. Rudy Kessman, it said. That was the name Delmar’s adoptive parents had given him.
Four years old when their mother died, Delmar had been eminently adoptable and had been placed quickly with a young couple—Perry and Janette Kessman—in Fullerton, California. But the adoption agency had not performed a sufficiently thorough investigation and had not discovered Mr. Kessman’s enthusiasm for new, dangerous, and sometimes even unlawful experiences. Perry Kessman drove stock cars, which was legal, of course. He was a motorcycle enthusiast, which was potentially dangerous but certainly not prohibited by law. On paper he was a Catholic, but he frequently experimented with new cults, even attended a pantheists’ church for several months, and was for a long while involved with a group that worshiped UFOS; but no one could fault a man who sought God, even if he sought Him in all the wrong places. Kessman also used marijuana, which had been more of an offense at that time than it was now, though it was still illegal. After a while he started using hashish, uppers, downers, and various other substances. One night, hallucinating in a drug-induced state of paranoia or perhaps making a blood offering to some new god, Perry Kessman had killed his wife, his adopted son, and then himself.
Rudy-Delmar Kessman-Detwiler was seven when he was murdered. He had been a Kessman less time than he had been a Detwiler.
Now, lying on the motel bed in the dim light that dispelled little of the darkness but draped every familiar object in mysterious shadows, Dan did not even have to close his eyes to see the cemetery in which he had, at last, found his older brother. The headstones had been all alike, set flat in the ground, so as not to spoil the lovely contours of the rolling land. Each stone was a rectangle of granite, and centered in each rectangle was a polished copper plate bearing the name of the deceased, date of birth, date of death, and in some instances a line of Scripture or a sentiment. In Delmar’s case, there had been no Scripture, no words of tribute, only his name and dates, cold and impersonal. Dan could recall that mild October day in the cemetery: the softness of the breeze, the birch and laurel shadows banding the lush green grass. But most of all he recalled what he had felt when he had dropped to his knees and had placed one hand on the copper plaque that marked his unmet brother’s resting place: a piercing, wrenching loss that drove the breath out of him.
Though many years had passed, though he had long ago resigned himself to having a brother forever unknowable, Dan felt his mouth go dry again. His throat tightened. A tightness filled his chest too. He might have wept quietly then, for he had wept other nights when that memory had come to him unbidden; he was so weary that tears would have risen easily. But Melanie murmured and made a small sound of fear in her sleep, and her distress brought him instantly off his own bed.
The girl writhed beneath the sheets, but not like before, not with her previous vitality. She groaned softly in terror, not loud enough to wake her mother. Melanie struggled as if fending off an attacker, but she seemed to lack the strength to resist effectively.
Dan wondered what nightmare monster stalked her.
Then the room suddenly grew cold, and he realized that the monster might be stalking her not in a nightmare but in reality.
He stepped quickly to his own bed and picked up the gun that lay on the nightstand.
The air was arctic. And getting colder.
The two men sat at a table by a large mullioned window, playing cards, drinking Scotch and milk, and pretending to be just a couple of guys baching it and having a good time.
Wind soughed in the eaves of the cabin.
The night was bitterly cold and blustery outside, as befitted February in the mountains, but there would be no new snow anytime soon. Beyond the window, a large moon drifted in a star-spattered sky, casting pearly luminescence on the snow-caked pines and firs and on the white-clad mountain meadow.
They were a long way from the busy streets and bright lights of the Big Orange.
Sheldon Tolbeck had fled from Los Angeles with Howard Renseveer in the desperate hope that distance would provide safety. They had told no one where they were going—in the equally desperate hope that the murderous psychogeist would be unable to follow them to a place that it did not know.
Yesterday afternoon, they had driven north and then northeast, into the high Sierras, to a ski chalet near Mammoth, where they had settled in a few hours ago. The place was owned by Howard’s brother, but Howard himself had never used it before, had no association with it, and could not be expected to go there.