“Tak ah lah!”
The woman spoke in a voice that was both frightening and powerful, nothing like her earlier one, her storytelling voice-that one had been low and often hesitant. To Johnny, this one seemed only a step or two above a dog’s bark. And was she laughing? He thought that at least part of her was. And what of that strange, swimming darkness just below the surface of her skin? Was he really seeing that?
“Mm! Mm! Mm en tow!”
Cynthia cast a bewildered glance at Steve. “What’s she saying?” Steve shook his head.
She looked at Johnny.
“It’s the cop’s language,” he said. He cast his peculiarly efficient recollection back to the moment when
the cop had apparently sicced a buzzard on him. “Timoh!” he snapped at Audrey Wyler. “Candy-latch!”
That wasn’t quite right, but it must have at least been close; Audrey recoiled, and for a moment there was a very human look of surprise on her face. Then the lip lifted again, and the lunatic smile reappeared in her eyes.
“What did you say to her?” Cynthia asked Johnny.
“I have no idea.”
“Boss, you gotta get the kid out. Now.”
Johnny took a step backward, meaning to do just that Audrey reached into the pocket of her dress as he did and brought it out curled around a fistful of something. She stared at him-only at him, now, John Edward Marinville, Distinguished Novelist and Extraordinary Thinker-with her snarling beast’s eyes. She held her hand out, wrist up “Can tah!” she cried … laughed. “Can tah, can tak’ What you take is what you are! Of course! Can tah, can tak, mi tow! Take this! So tah!”
When she opened her hand and showed him her offering, the emotional weather inside his head changed at once . . . and yet he still saw everything and sequenced it, just as he had when Sean Hutter’s goddamned Party- mobile had rolled over. He had kept on recording every-thing then, when he had been sure he was going to die, and he went on recording everything now, when he was suddenly consumed with hate for the boy in his arms and overwhelmed by a desire to put something-his motor-cycle key would do nicely-into the interfering little prayboy’s throat and open him like a can of beer.
He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying on her open palm-the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets-~ But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bulging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient.
“Can tah!” she screamed. “Can tah, can tak, kill the boy, kill him now, kill him!”
Steve stepped forward. With her attention and concentration fully fixed on Johnny, she saw him only at the last instant. He slapped the stones from her hand and they flew into the corner of the room. One-it was the snake- broke in two. Audrey screamed with horror and vexation.
The murderous fury which had come over Johnny’s mind dissipated but didn’t depart completely. He could feel his eyes wanting to turn toward the corner, where the carvings lay. Waiting for him. All he had to do was pick them up.
“Get him the fuck out of here!” Steve yelled. Audrey lunged for the carvings. Steve seized her arm and yanked her back. Her skin was darkening and sagging. Johnny thought that the process which had changed her was now trying to reverse itself.., without much success. She was what? Shrinking’? Diminishing? He didn’t know the right word, but- “GET HIM OUT!”
Steve yelled again, and smacked Johnny on the shoulder. That woke him up. He began to turn and then Ralph was there.
He had snatched David from Johnny’s arms almost before Johnny knew it was happening. Ralph bounded up the stairs, clumsy but powerful, and was gone from the projection-booth without a single look back.
Audrey saw him go. She howled-it was despair Johnny heard in that howl now-and lunged for the stones again. Steve yanked her back. There was a peculiar ripping sound as Audrey’s right arm pulled off at the shoulder. Steve was left holding it in his hand like the drumstick of an overcooked chicken.
Audrey seemed unaware of what had happened to her. One-armed, the right side of her dress now darkening with blood, she made for the carvings, gibbering in that strange language. Steve was frozen in place, looking at what he held-a lightly freckled human arm with a Casio watch on the wrist. The boss was equally frozen. If it hadn’t been for Cynthia, Steve later thought, Audrey would have gotten to the carvings again. God knew what would have happened if she had; even when she had been obviously focusing the power of the stones on the boss, Steve had felt the backwash. There had been nothing sexual about it this time. This time it had been about murder and nothing else.
Before Audrey could fall on her knees in the corner and grab her toys, Cynthia kicked them deftly away,
sending them skittering along the wall with the cutouts in it. Audrey howled again, and this time a spray of blood came out of her mouth along with the sound.
She turned her head to them, and Steve staggered backward, actually raising a hand, as if to block the sight of her from his vision.
Audrey’s formerly pretty face now drooped from the front of her skull in sweating wrinkles. Her staring eye-balls hung from widening sockets. Her skin was blackening and splitting. Yet none of this was the worst; the worst came as Steve dropped the hideously warm thing he was holding and she lurched to her feet.
“I’m very sorry,” she said, and in her choked and failing voice Steve heard a real woman, not this decaying monstrosity. “I never meant to hurt anyone. Don’t touch the can tahs. Whatever else you do, don’t touch the can tabs!”
Steve looked at Cynthia. She stared back, and he could read her mind in her wide eyes: I touched one.
Twice. How lucky was that? Very, Steve thought. I think you were very lucky. I think we both were.
Audrey staggered toward them and away from the pitted gray stones. Steve could smell a rich odor of blood and decay. He reached out but couldn’t bring himself to actually put a restraining hand on her shoulder, even though she was headed for the stairs and the hallway headed in the direction Ralph had taken his boy. He couldn’t bring himself to do it because he knew his fingers would sink in.
Now he could hear a plopping, pattering sound as parts of her began to liquefy and fall off in a kind of flesh rain. She mounted the steps and lurched out through the door.
Cynthia looked up at Steve for a moment, her faced pinched and white. He put his arm around her waist and followed Johnny up the stairs.
Audrey made it about halfway down the short but steep flight of stairs leading to the second-floor hall, then fell. The sound of her inside her blood-soaked dress was grisly-a splashing sound, almost. Yet she was still alive. She began to crawl, her hair hanging in strings, mercifully obscuring most of her dangling face. At the far end, by the stairs leading down to the lobby, Ralph stood with David in his arms, staring at the oncoming creature.
“Shoot her!” Johnny roared. “For God’s sake, some-body shoot her!”
“Can’t,” Steve said. “No guns up here but the kid’s, and that one’s empty.”
“Ralph, get downstairs with David,” Johnny said. He started carefully down the hail.
“Get down before .
But the thing which had been Audrey Wyler had no further interest in David, it seemed.
It reached the arched entrance to the balcony, then crawled through it. Almost at once the support timbers, dried out by the desert cli-mate and dined upon by generations of termites, began to groan.
Steve hurried after Johnny, his arm still around Cynthia. Ralph came toward them from the other end of the hall. They met just in time to see the thing in the soaked dress reach the balcony railing. Audrey had crawled over the mostly deflated sex-doll, leaving a broad streak of blood and less identifiable fluids across its plastic midsection. Frieda’ s pursed mouth might have been expressing outrage at such treatment.
What remained of Audrey Wyler was still clutching the railing, still attempting to pull itself up enough to dive over the side when the supports let go and the balcony tore away from the wall with a large, dusty roar. At first it slipped outward on a level, like a tray or a floating plat-form, tearing away boards from the edge of the hallway and forcing Steve and the others back as the old carpet first tore open and then gaped like a seismic fault.