“Let’s go back into the bakery.”
“The deadline is dawn, remember?” she said, moving on to a white Honda. “It won’t wait forever. It’ll come in after us.”
She opened the driver’s door of the Honda, and the dome light came on, and she slipped in behind the steering wheel. No keys dangled in the ignition, so she searched under the seat with one hand to see if the owner had left them there.
Standing at the open door of the Honda, Tommy said, “Then let’s just walk out of here.”
“We wouldn’t get far on foot before it caught us. I’m going to have to hot-wire this crate.”
Watching as Del groped blindly for the ignition wires under the dashboard, Tommy said, “You can’t do this.”
“Keep a watch on my Ford.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “What am I looking for?”
“Movement, a strange shadow, anything,” she said nervously. “We’re running out of time. Don’t you sense it?”
Except for the wind-driven rain, the night was still around Del’s van.
“Come on, come on,” Del muttered to herself, fumbling with the wires, and then the Honda engine caught, revved.
Tommy’s stomach turned over at the sound, for he seemed to be sliding ever faster down a greased slope to destruction—if not at the hands of the demon, then by his own actions.
“Hurry, get in,” Del said as she released the hand-brake.
“This is car theft,” he argued.
“I’m leaving whether you get in or not.”
“We could go to jail.”
She pulled the driver’s door shut, forcing him to step back, out of the way.
Under the tall sodium-vapour lamp, the silent van appeared to be deserted. All the doors remained closed. The most remarkable thing about it was the Art Deco mural. Already its ominous aura had faded.
Tommy had allowed himself to be infected by Del’s hysteria. The thing to do now was get control of himself, walk over to the van, and show her that it was safe.
Del put the Honda in gear and drove forward. Quickly stepping in front of the car, slapping his palms down flat on the hood, Tommy blocked her way, forcing her to stop. “No. Wait, wait.”
She shifted into reverse and started to back out of the parking space.
Tommy ran around to the passenger’s side, caught up with the car, pulled open the door, and jumped inside. “Will you just wait a second, for God’s sake?”
“No,” she said, braking and shifting out of reverse. As she tramped the accelerator, the car shot forward across the parking lot, and the door beside Tommy was flung shut.
They were briefly blinded by the rain until Del found the switch for the windshield wipers.
“You’re not thinking this through,” he argued.
“I know what I’m doing.”
The engine screamed, and great plumes of water sprayed up from the tires.
“What if the cops stop us?” Tommy worried.
“They won’t.”
“They will if you keep driving like this.”
At the end of the large building, before turning the corner, Del braked hard. The car shrieked, fishtailing as it slid to a full stop.
Studying her rear-view mirror, she said, “Look back.”
Tommy turned in his seat. “What?”
“The van.”
Under the tall lamppost, falling rain danced on empty pavement.
For a moment Tommy thought he was looking in the wrong place. There were three other lampposts behind the bakery. But the van was not under any of those, either.
“Where’d it go?” he asked.
“Maybe out to the alley, or maybe around the other side of the building, or maybe it’s just behind those delivery trucks. I can’t figure why it didn’t come straight after us.” She drove forward, around the corner, along the side of the bakery, toward the front.
Bewildered, Tommy said, “But who’s driving it?”
“Not a who. A what.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“It’s a lot bigger now.”
“It would have to be. But still—”
“It’s changed.”
“And it got a driver’s license, huh?”
“It’s very different from what you’ve seen before.”
“Yeah? What’s it like now?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”
“Intuition again?”
“Yeah. I just know… it’s different.”
Tommy tried to envision a monstrous entity, something like one of the ancient gods from an old H.P. Lovecraft story, with a bulbous skull, a series of mean little scarlet eyes across its forehead, a sucking hole where the nose should be, and a wicked mouth surrounded by a ring of writhing tentacles, comfortably ensconced behind the steering wheel of the van, fumbling with a clumsy tentacle at the heater controls, punching the radio selector buttons in search of some old-fashioned rock-‘n’-roll, and checking the glove box to see if it could find any breath mints.