Yes, and missing the phone had been a lapse, some thing right in the front of Marinville’s mind that it should have picked up easily, but it didn’t hold that against itself At that point its main goals had been to get the old fool jugged and replace Entragian’s body before it could fall apart completely. It had been sorry to lose Entragian, too Entragian had been strong.
If it meant to take Mary, there would never be a better time than now. And perhaps while it did that, Audrey would find the boy and kill him. That would be wonderful. No worries then. No sneaking around. It could replace Ellen with Mary and pick the rest off at its leisure And later? When its current (and limited) supply of bodies ran out? Snatch more travelers from the highway7 Perhaps. And when people, curious people, came to town to see what the hell was going on in Desperation, what then? It would cross that bridge when it got to the river it had little memory and even less interest in the future. For now, getting Mary up to China Pit would be enough.
Tak went down the steps of theMunicipalBuilding , glanced at the police-car, then crossed the street on foot. No driving, not for this errand. Once it reached the far sidewalk, it began to run in long strides, sand spurting up from beneath sneakers which had been sprung out to the sides by feet which were now too big for them.
Onstage, Audrey could hear them still calling David’s name … and hers. Soon they would spread out and begin to search. They had guns, which made them dangerous. The idea of being killed didn’t bother her- not much, anyway, not as it had at first-but the idea that it might happen before she was able to kill the boy did. To the cougar, the voice of the thing from the earth had been like a fishhook; in Audrey Wyler’s mind it was like an acid-coated snake, winding its way into her, melting the personality of the woman who had been here before it even as it enfolded her. This melting sensation was extremely pleasant, like eating some sweet soft food. It hadn’t been at first, at first it had been dismaying, like being overwhelmed by a fever, but as she collected more of the cantahs (like a child participating in a scavenger hunt), that feeling had passed. Now she only cared about finding the boy. Tak, the unformed one, did not dare approach him, so she must do it in Tak’s place.
At the top of the stairs, the woman who had been five- feet-seven on the day Tom Billingsley had first glimpsed her stopped, looking around. She should have been able to see nothing-there was only one window, and the only light that fell through its filthy panes came from the blinker and a single weak streetlamp in front of Bud’s Suds-but her vision had improved greatly with each can tah she had found or been given. Now she had almost the vision of a cat, and the littered hallway was no mystery to her.
The people who had hung out in this part of the building had been far less neatness minded than Billingsley and his crew. They had smashed their bottles in the corners instead of collecting them, and instead of fantasy fish or smoke-breathing horses, the walls were decorated with broad Magic Marker pictographs. One of these, as primitive as any cave-drawing, showed a horned and misshapen child hanging from a gigantic breast. Beneath it was scrawled a little couplet: LITTLE BITTY BABY
SMITTY, I SEEN YOU BITE YOUR MOMMY’ S TITTY. Paper trash-fast- food sacks, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags, empty cigarette packs and condom envelopes-had drifted along both sides of the hail. A used rubber hung from the knob of the door marked MANAGER, pasted there in its own long-dried fluids like a dead snail.
The door to the manager’s office was on her right. Across from it was one marked JANITOR. Up ahead on the left was another door, this one unmarked, and then an arch with a word written on it in ancient black paint half flaked away. Even her eyes couldn’t make out what the word was, at least from this distance, but a step or two closer and it came clear: BALCONY. The archway had been boarded up, but at some point the boards had been pulled away and heaped to either side of it. Hanging from the top of the arch was a mostly deflated sex-doll with blond Arnel hair, a red-ringed hole of a mouth, and a bald rudimentary vagina. There was a noose around its neck, the coils dark with age.
Also around its neck, hanging against the doll’s sagging plastic bosom, was a hand lettered sign which looked as if it might have been made by a hard-working first-grader.
It was decorated with a red-eyed skull and crossbones at the top. DONT COME OUT HERE, it said.
REDY TO FALL DOWN. IM SERIAS. Across from the balcony was an alcove which had once probably held a snackbar. At the far end of the hall were more steps going up into darkness. To the projectionist’s booth, she assumed.
Audrey went to the door marked MANAGER, grasped the knob, and leaned her brow against the wood. Outside, the wind moaned like a dying thing.
“David?” she asked gently. She paused, listened. “David, do you hear me? It’s Audrey, David. Audrey Wyler. I want to help you.”
No answer. She opened the door and saw an empty room with an ancient poster for Bonnie andClyde on the wall and a torn mattress on the floor. In the same Magic Marker, someone had written I’M
AMIDNIGHT CREEPER, ALL-DAY SLEEPER below the poster.
She tried the janitor’s cubby next. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet and completely empty. The unmarked door gave on a room that had probably once been a supply closet.
Her nose (keener now, like her eyesight) picked up the aroma of long-ago popcorn. There were a lot of dead flies and a fair scattering of mouseshit, but nothing else.
She went to the archway, swept aside the dangling dolly with her forearm, and peered out. She couldn’t see the stage from back here, just the top half of the screen. The skinny girl was still yelling for David, but the others were silent. That might not mean anything, but she didn’t like not knowing where they were.
Audrey decided that the sign around the dolly’s neck was probably a true warning. The seats had been taken out, making it easy to see the way the balcony floor heaved and twisted; it made her think of a poem she’d read in college, something about a painted ship on a painted ocean. If the brat wasn’t out on the balcony, he was somewhere else.
Somewhere close. He couldn’t have gone far. And he wasn’t on the balcony, that much was for sure.
With the seats gone, there was nowhere to hide, not so much as a drape or a velvet swag on the wall.
Audrey dropped the arm which had been holding the half-deflated doll aside. It swung back and forth, the noose around its neck making a slow rubbing sound. Its blank eyes stared at Audrey. Its hole of a mouth, a mouth with only one purpose, seemed to leer at her, to laugh at her. Look at what you’re doing, Frieda Fuckdolly seemed to be saying.
You were going to become the most highly paid woman geologist in the country, own your own consulting firm by the time you were thirty-five, maybe win the Nobel Prize by the time you were fifty …
weren’t those the dreams? The Devonian Era scholar, the summa cum laude whose paper on tectonic plates was published in Geology Review, is chasing after little boys in crumbling old movie theaters. And no ordinary little boy, either. He’s special, the way you always assumed you were special. And if you do find him, Aud, what then? He’s strong.
She grabbed the hangman’s noose and yanked hard, snapping the old rope and pulling out a pretty country-fair bunch of Arnel hair at the same time. The doll landed face-down at Audrey’s feet, and she drop-kicked it onto the balcony. It floated high, then settled. Not stronger than Tak, she thought. I don’t care what he is, he’s not stronger than Tak. Not stronger than the can tahs, either. It’s our town, now.
Never mind the past and the dreams of the past; this is the present, and it’s sweet. Sweet to kill, to take, to own. Sweet to rule, even in the desert. The boy is just a boy. The others are only food. Tak is here now, and he speaks with the voice of the older age; with the voice of the unformed.
She looked up the hail toward the stairs. She nodded, her right hand slipping into the pocket of her dress to touch the things that were there, to fondle them against her thigh.