Laura and Earl took only a few steps along that same carpeted route of escape before seats stopped exploding into the air behind them — and erupted, instead, from the rows ahead. After a brief, clumsy, aerial ballet, the mangled seats crashed down into the aisle, blocking it.
Melanie would not be permitted to leave.
Holding the girl in his arms, Earl looked this way and that, unsure of his next move.
Then something shoved him. He staggered backward. Something tore Melanie out of his grip. The girl tumbled along the aisle until she slammed against a row of seats.
Screaming, Laura scurried to her daughter, rolled the girl over, put a hand to her neck. There was a pulse.
‘Laura!’
She looked up when she heard her name, and with an enormous rush of relief she saw Dan Haldane. He had entered through the exiting people at the back of the theater. He rushed down the aisle toward them.
He vaulted the ruined seats that the unseen enemy had piled in the aisle, and as he drew nearer, he shouted, ‘That’s it! Hold her in your arms, shelter her.’ He reached Laura and knelt beside her. ‘Put yourself between her and It, because I don’t think it’ll hurt you.
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ he said. He turned to Earl, who had gotten to his hands and knees. ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah. Just bruised.’
Dan got to his feet.
Laura lay in the aisle, among scattered pieces of popcorn and crumpled paper cups and other debris, embracing Melanie, trying to fold herself around the child. She realized that the theater was silent, that the invisible beast was no longer on the rampage. But the air was cold, blood-freezing.
It was still there.
* * *
Dan turned slowly in a circle, waiting for something to happen.
As the silence continued, he said, ‘You can’t kill yourself unless you kill your mother too. She won’t let you do it unless you kill her first.’
Looking up at him, Laura said, ‘Who are you talking to?’ And then she cried out and pressed closer to Melanie. ‘Something’s pulling at me! Dan, something’s trying to tear me away from her!’
‘Fight it.’
She held tightly to Melanie, and for a moment she looked like an epileptic, jerking and twitching in a fit upon the floor.
But the attack ended, and she stopped struggling.
‘Gone?’ Dan asked.
Gaunt, baffled, she said, ‘Yes.’
Dan spoke to the air, for he could sense that the astral body was hovering out there in the theater somewhere. ‘She won’t let you pry her away just so you can hammer yourself to pieces. She loves you. If she has to, she’ll die to protect you.,
Across the theater, three seats were torn loose of their moorings, and were swept up into the air. They whirled and slammed against one another for a half minute before they dropped back to the floor.
‘No matter what you think,’ Dan said to the psychogeist, ‘you don’t deserve to die. What you did was horrible, but it wasn’t much more than you had to do.’
Silence.
Stillness.
He said, ‘Your mother loves you. She wants you to live. That’s why she’s holding on to you with all her strength.’
A wretched sound from Laura indicated that she understood the whole terrible truth, at last.
At the front of the theater, the crumpled curtains stirred and rose slightly, in a halfhearted attempt to spread themselves into menacing wing-shapes as before, but after a few seconds they sagged into a formless heap.
Earl had gotten to his feet. He stepped beside Dan. Surveying the theater, he said, ‘It was the girl herself?’
Dan nodded.
Weeping in shock and grief and fear, Laura cradled her daughter.
The air was still frigid.
Something touched Dan with invisible hands of ice and shoved him backward, but not hard.
‘You can’t kill yourself. We won’t let you kill yourself,’ he told the unseen astral body. ‘We love you, Melanie. You’ve never had a chance, and we want to give you a chance.’
Silence.
Earl started to say something, and then several rows down from them the psychogeist rushed along a line of seats, snapping the backs off them as it went, and the fallen curtains did rise this time, and the exit doors began to bang open and shut again, and scores of acoustic ceiling tiles rained down, and a cold keening arose that must have been an astral voice, for it came out of midair and filled the theater at such volume that both Earl and Dan clamped their hands over their ears.