* * *
The air in the motel room grew colder.
Though apparently still asleep, Melanie writhed and kicked her legs beneath the covers. She gasped and whimpered softly and said, ‘The … door … the door …’
Dan went to the door, checked the lock, because the girl seemed to sense that something was coming.
‘… keep it shut!’
The door was locked. The air temperature dropped even lower.
Softly but urgently: ‘Don’t … don’t … don’t let it out!’
In, Laura thought. She should be afraid of it getting in.
Melanie thrashed, gasped, shuddered violently, but didn’t wake.
Oppressed by a feeling of utter helplessness, Laura surveyed the small room, wondering which inanimate objects, like the radio in her kitchen, might abruptly come to life.
Dan Haldane had drawn his revolver.
Laura turned, expecting the window to explode, expecting the door to burst into splinters, expecting the chairs or the television to be infused with sudden malevolent life.
Dan stayed near the door, as if anticipating trouble from that quarter.
But then, as abruptly as the disturbance had begun, it ended. The air grew warm again. Melanie stopped whimpering and gasping, ceased speaking. She was also utterly motionless on the bed, and her breathing was unusually slow and deep.
‘What happened?’ Dan asked.
Laura said, ‘I don’t know.’
The room was now as warm as it had been before the disturbance.
‘Is it over?’ Dan asked.
‘I don’t know.’
Melanie was death-pale.
* * *
Because she was wearing a dress that bared her shoulders, Regine felt the change in the air before Eddie did. They were standing at a craps table, watching the action, and Eddie was deciding whether or not to put a bet down and go with the shooter. People were crowding in on every side, and the casino was warm, so warm that Regine wished that she had something with which to fan herself. Then, abruptly, there was a change of atmosphere. Regine shivered and saw gooseflesh on her arms. For an instant she thought that the management had overreacted to the heat and had turned the air conditioning too high, but then she realized that the temperature had plummeted too quickly and too steeply to be explained merely by the air conditioning.
A couple other women noticed the change, and then Eddie became aware of it, and the effect on him was astonishing. He turned from the craps table, hugging himself, shaking, a look of horror on his face. His skin was bloodless alabaster, and his eyes were bleak. He looked wildly left and right, then pushed through the crowd that had formed around the table, shoving and elbowing toward the broad aisle between rows of gaming tables, moving away from Regine, a desperate jerkiness to his movements.
‘Eddie?’ she called after him.
He didn’t glance back.
‘Eddie!’
It was bitterly cold now, at least immediately around the craps tables, and people were commenting on this sudden and inexplicable frigidity.
Regine pushed through the crowd, following Eddie. He shouldered into the main aisle and reached a clear space. He was turning in a circle, his arms raised, as if expecting to be attacked and preparing to ward off the assailant. But no assailant was in sight, and Regine wondered if he had cracked up or something. She continued to make her way toward him, and now she saw that a security guard had noticed Eddie’s strange behavior and was heading in his direction too.
She called to Eddie again, but even if he heard her, he had no opportunity to answer, for at that moment he was struck so hard that he stumbled sideways. He collided with people streaming past the blackjack tables, and he went to his knees.
But who had struck him?
For that brief moment, he had been in an island of open space between surging rivers of people. No one had been closer to him than six or eight feet. But he had been hit. His hair was in disarray, and his face was covered with blood.
Jesus, so much blood.
He began to scream.
A torrent of sound had been pouring through the busy casino — the happy shouts and squeals of winning craps shooters, the age-old litany of blackjack dealers and players, the snap of cards, the click of dice, the ticka-ticka-ticka of the wheel of fortune, the clack and rattle of the ball in the roulette wheel, laughter, groans of dismay at the wrong turn of a card, stridently ringing bells and wailing sirens from those slot machines that were making payoffs, pounding music from the quartet playing in the lounge — but it all ground to a silence when Eddie began to scream. His cries were as bone-shaking, as marrow-piercing as the shrieks of any creature in a nightmare. Alone, this shocking series of screeches and ululations would have been enough to turn heads, but now unseen amplifiers — or some strange sound-enhancing quality inherent in the cold and smoky air — seemed to take up his scream, echo and reecho it, double and triple the volume. It was as if some invisible and monstrous presence were mocking him by rebroadcasting his screams at an even more hysterical pitch. All conversation ceased, and then all gambling, and then even the band stopped playing, and the only sound — other than Eddie’s tortured cries of pain and terror — was the ringing of a slot machine in some far corner of that vast chamber.