‘Where?’ Tommy asked, blinking rain out of his eyes, studying the murkiness beyond the van’s windshield, searching for some sign of the demon. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But it’s there, all right, in the van. I sense it.’
‘You’re psychic all of a sudden?’
‘Not all of a sudden,’ she said, her voice thickening, as though sleep was overcoming her. ‘I’ve always had strong intuition, very reliable.’
Thirty feet away, the Ford van was exactly as it had been when they had left it to go into the bakery. Tommy didn’t feel what Del felt. He perceived no sinister aura around the vehicle.
He looked at Del as she stared intently at the van. Rain streamed down her face, dripped off the end of her nose and off the point of her chin. Her eyes weren’t blinking, and she seemed to be sinking into a trance. Her lips began to move, as though she were speaking, but no sound escaped her.
‘Del?’
After a moment her silently moving lips produced a wordless murmur, and then she began to whisper:
‘Waiting . . . cold as ice . . . dark inside . . . a dark cold thing. . . ticktock… ticktock…’
He shifted his attention to the van again, and now it seemed to loom as ominously as a hearse. Del’s fear had infected him, and his heart raced as he was overwhelmed by a sense of impending assault.
The woman’s whisper faded into the susurration of the raindrops dissolving against the puddled pavement. Tommy leaned closer. Her voice was hypnotically portentous, and he didn’t want to miss anything that she said.
Ticktock… so much bigger now… snake’s blood and river mud… blind eyes see… dead heart beats… a need… a need… a need to feed….
Tommy wasn’t sure which frightened him more at the moment: the van and the utterly alien creature that might be crouching within it – or this peculiar woman.
Abruptly she emerged from her mesmeric state. ‘We have to get out of here. Let’s take one of these cars.’
‘An employee’s car?’
She was already moving away from the van, among the more than thirty vehicles that belonged to the workers at New World Saigon Bakery.
Glancing warily back at the van, Tommy hurried to keep up with her. ‘We can’t do that.’
‘Sure we can.’
‘It’s stealing.’
It’s survival,’ she said, trying the door of a blue Chevrolet, which was locked.
‘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.