Lebenwas disgusted and repelled, and he repressed those grim
recollections, aware that he would lose his already tenuous grip on
sanity if he dwelt on them.
He moved rapidly toward an unknown place, propelled by instinct.
Mostly he ran fully erect, more or less like a man, but sometimes he
loped and shambled, with his shoulders hunched forward and his body bent
in an apelike posture. Occasionally he was overcome with the urge to
drop forward on all fours and scuttle across the wet sand on his belly,
however, that queer compulsion frightened him, and he successfully
resisted it.
Shadowfires burned here and there upon the desert floor, but he was not
drawn toward them as he had been before. They were not as mysterious
and intriguing as they had been previously, for he now suspected that
they were gateways to hell. Previously, when he had seen those phantom
flames, he had also seen his long-dead uncle Barry, which probably meant
that Uncle Barry had come out of the fire. Eric was sure that Barry
Hampstead resided in hell, so he figured the doors were portals to
damnation. When Eric had died in Santa Ana yesterday, he had become
Satan’s property, doomed to spend eternity with Barry Hampstead, but at
the penultimate moment he had thrown off the claims of the grave and had
rescued his own soul from the pit. Now Satan was opening these doors
around him, in hopes he would be impelled by curiosity to investigate
one gate or another and, on stepping through, would deliver himself to
the sulfurous cell reserved for him. His parents had warned him that he
was in danger of going to hell, that his surrender to his uncle’s
desires-and, later, the murder of his tormentor-had damned his soul. Now
he knew they were right. Hell was close. He dared not look into its
flames, where something beckoned and smiled.
He raced on through the desert scrub. The storm, like clashing armies,
blasted the day with bright bursts and rolling cannonades.
His unknown destination proved to be the comfort station at the roadside
rest area where he had first confronted Rachael. Activated by solenoids
that had misinterpreted the storm as nightfall, banks of fluorescent
lights had blinked on at the front of the structure and over the doors
on each side. In the parking lot, a few mercury-vapor arc lamps cast a
bluish light on the puddled pavement.
When he saw the squat concrete-block building in the rain-swept murk
ahead, Eric’s muddy thoughts cleared, and suddenly he remembered
everything Rachael had done to him. His encounter with the garbage
truck on Main Street was her doing. And because the violent shock of
death was what had triggered his malignant growth, he blamed his
monstrous mutation on her as well. He’d almost gotten his hands on her,
had almost torn her to pieces, but she’d slipped away from him when he’d
been overcome by hunger, by a desperate need to provide fuel for his
out-of-control metabolism. Now, thinking of her, he felt that cold
reptilian rage well up in him again, and he loosed a thin bleat of fury
that was lost in the noise of the storm.
Rpunding the side of the building, he sensed someone near. A thrill
coursed through him. He dropped to all fours and crouched against the
block wall, in a pool of shadow just beyond the reach of the nearest
fluorescent light.
He listened-head cocked, breath held. A jalousie window was open above
his head, high in the men’sroom wall. Movement inside. A man coughed.
Then Eric heard soft, sweet whistling, “All Alone in the Moonlight,”
from the musical Cats. The scrape and click of footsteps on concrete.
The door opened outward onto the walk, eight or ten feet from where Eric
crouched, and a man appeared.
The guy was in his late twenties, solidly built, ruggedlooking, wearing
boots, jeans, cowboy shirt, and a tan Stetson. He stood for a moment
beneath the sheltering overhang, looking out at the falling rain.
Suddenly he became aware of Eric, turned, stopped whistling, and stared
in disbelief and horror.
As the other turned toward him, Eric moved so fast he seemed to be a