Part 38 (1/2)

Though apparently still asleep, Melanie writhed and kicked her legs beneath the covers. She gasped and whimpered softly and said, 'The ... door ... the door the door ...' ...'

Dan went to the door, checked the lock, because the girl seemed to sense that something was coming.

'... keep it shut shut!'

The door was locked. The air temperature dropped even lower.

Softly but urgently: 'Don't ... don't ... don't let it out!'

In, Laura thought. She should be afraid of it getting in in.

Melanie thrashed, gasped, shuddered violently, but didn't wake.

Oppressed by a feeling of utter helplessness, Laura surveyed the small room, wondering which inanimate objects, like the radio in her kitchen, might abruptly come to life.

Dan Haldane had drawn his revolver.

Laura turned, expecting the window to explode, expecting the door to burst into splinters, expecting the chairs or the television to be infused with sudden malevolent life.

Dan stayed near the door, as if antic.i.p.ating trouble from that quarter.

But then, as abruptly as the disturbance had begun, it ended. The air grew warm again. Melanie stopped whimpering and gasping, ceased speaking. She was also utterly motionless on the bed, and her breathing was unusually slow and deep.

'What happened?' Dan asked.

Laura said, 'I don't know.'

The room was now as warm as it had been before the disturbance.

'Is it over?' Dan asked.

'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 c.r.a.ps 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 astonis.h.i.+ng. He turned from the c.r.a.ps 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 c.r.a.ps 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 s.p.a.ce. He was turning in a circle, his arms raised, as if expecting to be attacked and preparing to ward off the a.s.sailant. But no a.s.sailant 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 s.p.a.ce 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 c.r.a.ps shooters, the age-old litany of blackjack dealers and players, the snap of cards, the click of dice, the ticka-ticka-ticka 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. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 d.a.m.ned 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 c.r.a.ps 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 c.r.a.ps table, twisted, turned, stumbled, staggered sideways, leaped, whirled, as if terrible bolts of lightning were striking the unseen puppeteer overhead and then were pa.s.sing through the strings into this b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sailant. 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 ent.i.ty 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 c.r.a.ps 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, pus.h.i.+ng, 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 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.