route of escape.
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 her 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 her, 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, 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 electrocutionshe 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.
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.