Or a potential danger.
Since the strange death of the auguring bird and the passing of the old woman, Baron Tourment had been uneasy.
Outsiders had come into his demesne. He still believed in his heart that the strangers must be mercies hired guns from outside the ville. Maybe from the north or farther east. Mercenaries! Brought in by the young boy in West Lowellton.
“Should have purged ’em,” he muttered, his voice thickened by the jolt.
How could they have afforded it? Mercies, to go against him! It must have been his generosity in leaving them with a little in previous years. That was his mistake, and they used it to hire blasters.
Now the jolt was cartwheeling through the ridges of his skull. He lay flat on the floor, which was the only safe place to be after snorting several lines of jolt. The eyes were open, staring wide and blind, the hands so contracted that the nails drew half moons of blood from his pale palms.
“Ten thousand doors to death,” he whispered, his sibilant voice dying against the velvet drapes that covered the doors and windows.
He was in the bayous. Naked and alone, beneath a sky that was slashed with green clouds. The mud rose to his groin. He tried to run but without his prosthetic aids he kept falling. His face was vanishing beneath warm, clinging mud that filled his ears and nose and eyes and open mouth. He tried to scream, but the slime choked him.
Someone was pursuing him, someone who always dodged aside when the baron tried to look behind him into the gathering darkness.
As he rose from the wallowing sludge, he glanced down. Saw that his penis was covered with big scaly leeches, drawing a million specks of bright blood that dappled his thighs and matted in his pubic hair.
On the floor of the Best Western Snowy Egret, the huge roan arched his back; openmouthed, he silently screamed his terror. Sweat burst from his forehead; sweat soaked his shirt.
The person behind him was approaching. He could almost feel his hot breath on his naked back. His ears caught the scraping sounds of horns and claws against the branches as his pursuer pushed through, struggling toward
Toward?
The jolt was bringing him to a violent mental climax. The vision was nearly there, as he’d hoped. The truth about the strangers might be revealed to him in a moment of vivid revelation.
He was exhausted, panting for breath, his whole body now coated with the blood-sucking leeches. The experience was so appalling that he wanted to fall to his knees and vomit. But then he might get caught by by what was closing in on him.
It was near.
The sec guards outside the suite heard moaning and panting through the thick door. Then an agonized scream of chilling horror, and Baron Tourment’s voice, shrill and gained, barely recognizable. The same phrase, over and over.
The one-eyed man kills me! The one-eyed man kills me! The one-eyed man kills me!
Chapter Fifteen
RYAN’S SUSPICION THAT others had been in the Holiday Inn within the past few months were reinforced when it became apparent that the slogan painter had been at work. The white letters were dry, but from their condition it was obvious they hadn’t been there long.
They were on a wall that ran from the back of the restaurant toward the abandoned swimming pool, with its crust of dried leaves and moss.
The message was simple.
“COME HERE AND YOU DIE.”
Ryan picked the best place he could find from which to mount a defense. It had once been a games room with all manner of vids and pinball machines decorated by archaic and oddly beautiful artwork and names like Red-zapper and Wackamole. There was also the yawning maw of a cracked, dust-filled Jacuzzi.
The room had only two doors, one of which had strips of reinforced steel across it, and could be locked and bolted. J.B. studied it, puzzled about the necessity for that kind of security in a games room. He liked the fact that since the room overlooked a deep waterway, there was no way an attacker could sneak through a window. From the swirling disturbances in the gray water, it looked like it was well-stocked with piranhas.