Shadowfires (61 page)

She continued to edge backward.

It moved toward her with slow, easy steps.

“Raysheeeel . . .”

Convinced that a dying wife lay in an intensive-care ward waiting for her husband, Amos Tate wanted to drive Ben all the way to Sunrise Hospital, which would have taken him too far away from the Golden Sand Inn. Ben had to insist strenuously on being dropped at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana. And as there was no good reason to refuse Amos’s generous offer, Ben was reduced to admitting that he had lied about the wife, though he offered no explanation. He flung off the blanket, threw open the cab door, jumped down to the street, and ran east on Tropicana, past the Tropicana Hotel, leaving the startled trucker staring after him in puzzlement.

The Golden Sand Inn was approximately a mile ahead, a distance he could ordinarily cover in six minutes or less. But in the heavy rain, he did not want to risk sprinting at top speed, for if he fell and broke an arm or leg, he would not be in any condition to help Rachael if, in fact, she needed help. (God, please, let her be warm and safe and sound and in need of no help at all!) He ran along the shoulder of the broad boulevard, the revolver digging into his flesh where it was tucked under his waistband. He splashed through puddles that filled every depression in the macadam. Only a few cars passed him; several of the drivers slowed to stare, but none offered him a lift. He did not bother trying to hitch a ride, for he sensed that he had no time to waste.

A mile was not a great distance, but tonight it seemed like a journey to the far end of the world.

 

Julio and Reese had been able to board the plane in Orange County with their service revolvers holstered under their coats because they had presented their police credentials to the attendant at the metal-detecting security gate. Now, having landed at McCarran International in Las Vegas, they used their ID again to obtain swift service from the clerk at the rental-car desk, an attractive brunette named Ruth. Instead of just handing them the keys and sending them out to the lot to locate their designated rental on their own, she telephoned a night-duty mechanic to pick it up and drive it around to the front entrance of the terminal.

Since they had not come dressed for rain, they stood inside the terminal at a set of glass doors until they saw the Dodge pull up at the curb, then went out into the storm. The mechanic, more suitably dressed for the foul weather in a vinyl raincoat with a vinyl hood, quickly checked their rental papers and turned the car over to them.

Although clouds had claimed the sky late in the day in Orange County, Reese had not realized things would be worse to the east and had not bargained for a landing in a rainstorm. Though their descent and touchdown had been as smooth as glass, he had gripped the arms of his seat so tightly that his hands were still slightly stiff and achy.

Safely on the ground, he should have been relieved, but he could not forget Teddy Bertlesman, the tall pink lady, and he could also not forget little Esther waiting at home for him. This morning, he’d had only his Esther to live for, just that one small blessing, which was not a sufficient abundance to tempt the cruelty of fate. But now there was also the glorious real-estate saleswoman, and Reese was acutely aware that when a man had more reason to live he was more likely to die.

Superstitious nonsense, perhaps.

But the rain, when he had expected a clear desert night, seemed like a bad omen, and he was uneasy.

As Julio drove away from the terminal, Reese wiped the rain off his face and said, “What about all those TV commercials for Vegas on the L.A. stations?”

“What about them?”

“Where’s the sunshine? Where’re all those girls in tiny little bikinis?”

“What do you care about girls in bikinis when you have a date with Teddy Bertlesman on Saturday?”

Don’t talk about that, Reese thought superstitiously.

He said, “Hell, this doesn’t look like Vegas. This looks more like Seattle.”

Rachael slammed the bedroom door and thumbed in the button to engage the flimsy lock. She ran to the only window, pulled open the rotting drapes, found it had jalousie panes, and realized that, because of those metal cross-ribs, there was no easy exit.

Looking around for something that could be used as a weapon, she saw only the bed, two nightstands, one lamp, and a chair.

She expected the door to crash inward, but it did not.

She heard nothing from the creature in the living room, and its silence, while welcome, was also unnerving. What was it up to?

She ran to the closet, slid the door open, and looked inside. Nothing of use. Just a tier of empty shelves in one corner and then a rod and empty hangers. She could not fashion a weapon out of a few wire hangers.

The doorknob rattled.

“Raysheeeel,” the thing hissed tauntingly.

A fragment of Eric’s consciousness evidently did remain within the mutant, for it was that Eric-part that wanted to make her sweat and wanted her to have plenty of time to contemplate what he was going to do to her.

She would die here, and it would be a slow and terrible death.

In frustration, she started to turn away from the empty clothes rod and hangers, but noticed a trap in the closet ceiling, an access to the attic.

The creature thumped a heavy hand against the door, then again and again. “Raysheeeel . . .”

She slipped inside the closet and tugged on the shelves to test their sturdiness. To her relief, they were built in, screwed to the wall studs, so she was able to climb them as if they were a ladder. She stood on the fourth tier, her head only a foot below the ceiling. Holding the adjacent rod with one hand, she reached out and up to one side with her free hand, beyond the shelves, and quietly pushed up the hinged trap.

“Raysheeeel, Raysheeeel,” it crooned, dragging its claws down the outside of the locked bedroom door, then throwing itself lightly—almost teasingly—against that barrier.

In the closet, Rachael climbed one more step, got a grip on two edges of the overhead opening, swung off the shelves, dangled for a moment with the rod against her breasts, then muscled herself up and into the attic. There was no flooring, just two-by-four beams sixteen inches apart, with sheathed pads of Fiberglas insulation laid between those supports. In the wan yellow light that rose through the open trap, she saw the attic ceiling was very low, providing only a four-foot-high space, with roofing nails poking through in a lot of places, and with larger exposed rafter nails lancing out here and there. To her surprise, the attic was not limited to the area over the office and the manager’s apartment, but led off across the ceilings of all the rooms in that long wing.

Below, something crashed so hard that she felt the reverberation through the bedroom-ceiling beams on which she knelt. Another crash was accompanied by the dry splintering of wood and the hard sharp snap of breaking metal.

She quickly closed the trap, plunging the attic into perfect darkness. She crawled as silently as possible along a parallel pair of two-by-fours, one hand and one knee on each of them, until she was about eight feet from the trap. There she stopped and waited in the high lightless chamber.

Anxiously she listened for movement in the room below. With the trap closed, she could not easily hear what was happening down there, for the heavy rain was hammering on the motel’s roof only inches above her head.

She prayed that, in his degenerate state, with an IQ closer to that of an animal than a man, the Eric-thing would be unable to puzzle out her route of escape.

 

With only one arm and one leg, Whitney Gavis had first dragged himself toward the garage in dogged pursuit of the departing creature that had torn off his artificial leg. But by the time he reached the open door, he knew that he was fooling himself: with his handicaps, he could do nothing to help Rachael. Handicaps—that’s what they were. Earlier, he had jokingly called his amputations “peculiarities” and had told Rachael that he refused to use the word “handicaps.” In the current situation, however, there was no room for self-delusion; the painful truth had to be faced. Handicaps. He was furious with himself for his limitations, furious with the long-ago war and the Vietcong and life in general, and for a moment he was almost overcome by tears.

But being angry did no good, and Whit Gavis did not waste time and energy on either fruitless activities or self-pity. “Put a lid on it, Whit,” he said aloud. He turned away from the garage and began to haul himself laboriously along the muddy ground toward the paved alley, intending to crawl all the way out to Tropicana and into the middle of that boulevard, where the sight of him would surely stop even the most unsympathetic motorist.

He had gone only six or eight yards when his face, which had been numbed by a blow from the beast’s club-hard hand, suddenly began to burn and sting. He flopped on his back, face turned up into the cold rain, raised his good hand, and felt his disfigured cheek. He found deep lacerations cutting through the scar tissue that was part of his Vietnam legacy.

He was sure that Leben had not clawed him, that the blow that knocked him down was delivered with the back of the immense, bony hand. But he was undeniably cut in four or five places, and he was bleeding freely, especially from one laceration that extended up into his left temple. Did that damn fugitive from a Halloween party have spurs on its knuckles or something? His probing fingers set off little detonations of pain in his face, and he immediately dropped his hand.

Rolling onto his belly again, he continued dragging himself toward the street.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “That side of your face is never going to win you any beauty contests, anyway.”

He refused to think about the thick, swift stream of blood that he had felt flowing down from his temple.

 

Crouching in the lightless attic, Rachael began to believe that she had fooled the Eric-thing. Its degeneration was apparently mental as well as physical, just as she had suspected, and it did not possess sufficient intellectual capacity to figure out what had happened to her. Her heart continued to pound wildly, and she was still shaking, but she dared to hope.

Then the plyboard trapdoor in the closet ceiling swung upward, and light from below speared into the attic. The mutant’s hideous hands reached through the opening. Then its head came into view, and it pulled itself into the upper chamber, turning its mad eyes upon her as it came.

She scuttled across the attic as fast as she dared go. She was acutely aware of the nails lancing down just inches above her head. She also knew that she must not put her weight down on the insulated hollows between the two-by-fours because there was no flooring; if she misstepped, shifting her weight off the beams for even a second, she would crash through the Sheetrock that formed the ceilings of the rooms below, tumbling into one of those chambers. Even if she did not tear loose electrical wires and fixtures in the fall—and thus escaped electrocution—she might break a leg or even snap her spine when she hit the floor below. Then she would be able only to lie immobile while the beast descended and took its sweet time with her.

She went about thirty feet, with at least another hundred and fifty feet of the motel attic ahead of her, before she glanced back. The thing had clambered all the way through the trap and was staring after her.

“Rayeeshuuuul,” it said, the quality of its speech declining by the minute.

It slammed the trapdoor shut, plunging them into total darkness, where it had all the advantages.

Ben’s soggy Adidas running shoes were so thoroughly saturated that they began to slip on his feet. He felt the mild irritation of an incipient blister on his left heel.

When at last he came within sight of the Golden Sand Inn, where lights shone in the office windows, he slowed down long enough to shove one hand under his rain-soaked shirt and pull the Combat Magnum out of the waistband at the hollow of his back.

He wished he had the Remington shotgun that he had left behind in the disabled Merkur.

As he reached the motel’s entrance drive, he saw a man crawling away from the place, toward Tropicana. An instant later he realized it was Whit Gavis without the artificial leg and, apparently, injured.

 

He had become something that loved the dark. He did not know what he was, did not clearly remember what—or who—he had once been, did not know where he was ultimately bound or for what purpose he existed, but he knew that his rightful place was now in darkness, where he not only thrived but ruled.

Ahead, the prey made her way cautiously through the blackness, effectively blinded and moving too slowly to stay out of his reach much longer. Unlike her, he was not hampered by the lack of light. He could see her clearly, and he could see most details of the place through which they crept.

He was, however, slightly confused as to his whereabouts. He knew that he had climbed up into this long tunnel, and from the smell of it he also knew its walls were made of wood, yet he felt as if he should be deep under the earth. The place was similar to moist dark burrows which he vaguely remembered from another age and which he found appealing for reasons he did not entirely comprehend.

Around him, shadowfires sprang to life, flourished for a moment, then faded away. He knew that he had once been afraid of them, but he could not recall the reason for his fear. Now the phantom flames seemed of no consequence to him, harmless as long as he ignored them.

The prey’s female scent was pungent, and it inflamed him. Lust made him reckless, and he had to struggle against the urge to rush forward and throw himself upon her. He sensed that the footing here was perilous, yet caution had far less appeal than the prospect of sexual release.

Somehow he knew that it was dangerous to stray off the beams and into the hollow spaces, though he did not know why. Keeping to those safe tracks was easier for him than for the prey, because in spite of his size he was more agile than she. Besides, he could see where he was going, and she could not.