“We don’t have to let it happen,” Don said.
“You talk so brave sometimes.” Peter shook his head. “She said I already was one of them. Because when I saw Gregory turn into—you know—he said he was me. It was like Jim. Just keeping going. Never stopping. Never doubting.”
“And you liked that in Jim Hardie,” Don said, and Peter nodded, his face marked with tears. “I would too,” Don said. “Energy is always likeable.”
“But she knows I’m the weak link,” Peter said, and put his hand to his face. “She tried to use me, and it almost worked. She could use me to get you and Ricky.”
“The difference between you—between all of us— and Gregory Bate,” Don said, “is that Gregory wanted to be used. He chose it. He sought it.”
“But she almost made me choose it too,” Peter said. “God, I hate them.”
Ricky spoke from the back seat. “They’ve taken your mother, most of my friends and Don’s brother, Peter. We all hate them. She could do to any of us what she did to you back there.”
As Ricky continued to speak comfortingly from the back, Don drove on, no longer bothering to notice the desolation caused by the snow: there would be more of it in an hour, in a day or two at the most, and then Milburn would not only be sealed off from outside but a sprung trap. One more heavy snow would see a wave of death to take half the town.
“Stop the car,” Peter said. “Stop.” He laughed. “I know where they are. The place of dreams.” His laughter was high-pitched and tremulous, spiraled out of the boy’s hysteria. “The place of dreams, didn’t she say? And what’s the only place in town that stayed open all during the storms?”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Don asked, turning around on the seat to look at Peter’s face, suddenly open and sure.
“There,” Peter said, and Don followed the line of his pointing finger.
Across the street from them, in giant red neon letters:
Ricky had simply assumed that she was not fit to join them. Even a boy was of more use than she. She looked again at her watch. Another minute had gone by.
Stella went to the downstairs closet and put on her coat: then she took it off, thinking that, after all, maybe she would not be able to help Ricky. “Nuts,” she said out loud, and pulled the coat on again and went out the door.
At least it was not snowing now: and Leon Churchill, who had gaped at her since he was a boy of twelve, had cleared some of the streets. Len Shaw from the service station, another remote-control conquest, had cleared their driveway as soon as his plow could make it to the Hawthorne house;—in an unfair world, Stella had no compunctions about taking unfair advantage of her looks. She started her car easily (Len, denied Stella, had given almost erotic attention to the Volvo’s engine) and rolled down the drive out into the street.
By now Stella, having decided to go there, was in an almost frantic hurry to get to Montgomery Street. Direct access was blocked by the unplowed roads, and she put her foot down on the accelerator and followed the maze of streets Leon had opened—she groaned when she realized that she was being taken all the way over to the high school. From there she’d have to cut down School Road to Harding Lane, and then over on Lone Pine Road back the way she had started and then on Candlemaker Street past the Rialto. Working out this circuitous map in her head, Stella let the car get nearly to her normal driving speed. The drops and elevations left by Churchill’s handling of the plow jolted her against the wheel, but she took the corner into School Road quickly, not seeing in the woolly light that the level of the roadbed dropped seven inches. When the front end slammed down onto the packed snow, Stella floored the accelerator, still trying to think of the roads that could take her to Montgomery once she got off Candlemaker Street.
The rear end of the car spun out sideways, struck a metal fence and a mailbox, and then continued to revolve around so that Stella was traveling astraddle the road: in a cold panic, she wrenched at the wheel just as the car dropped into another of Churchill’s terraces. The car rolled up on its side, wheels spinning, and then dropped down, still traveling, onto the metal fence.
“Damn,” she said, and clenched her hands on the wheel and breathed deeply, forcing herself to stop trembling. She swung the door open and looked down. If she edged off the seat and let her legs dangle, she would be only three or four feet from the ground. The car could stay where it was—in any case, it had to. She’d need a tow-truck to pull it off the fence. Stella let her legs hang out of the open door, took another deep breath and pushed herself off the seat.
She landed hard, but stayed on her feet and began walking down School Road without once looking back at her car. Door open, key in the ignition, leaning against the fence like a stuffed toy—she had to get to Ricky. Ahead of her a quarter of a mile down the road, the high school was a fuzzy dark-brown cloud.
Stella had just realized that she would have to hitchhike when a blue car appeared out of the gray blur behind her. For the first time in her life, Stella Hawthorne turned to face an oncoming car and stuck out her thumb.
The blue car rolled toward her and began to brake. Stella lowered her arm as the car drew up beside her. When she bent down and looked in she saw a pudgy man bending sideways and giving her a shy welcoming look. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for her. “It’s against my principles,” he said, “but you look like you need a ride.”
Stella got in and leaned back against the seat forgetting for the moment that this helpful little man would not be able to read her mind. Then she and the car started forward and she said, “Oh, please excuse me, I just had an accident and I’m not thinking right. I must—”
“Please, Mrs. Hawthorne,” the man said, turning his head to smile at her. “Don’t waste your breath. I assume you were going to Montgomery Street. You needn’t bother. That was all a mistake.”
“You know me?” Stella asked. “But how did you know—”
The man silenced her by reaching out with a boxer’s quickness and tightening his hand around her hair. “Soft,” he said, and his voice, formerly as shyly ingratiating as the man’s appearance, was the quietest she’d ever heard.
“Mr. Mulligan?” Peter asked quietly.
Ricky came up to the counter and looked over. “Oh, no.” He drew his knife from his coat pocket. “We still don’t know that what we’re trying to do is possible, do we? For all we know, we need wooden stakes or silver bullets or a fire or …”
“No,” Peter said. “We don’t need any of those things. We have everything we need right here.” The boy was very pale, and he avoided looking over the counter at Mulligan’s body, but the determination set deeply in his face was unlike anything Don had ever seen: it was fear’s negation. “That was just how they killed vampires and werewolves—what they thought were vampires and werewolves. They could have used anything.” He challenged Don directly. “Isn’t that what you think?”
“Yes,” Don said, not adding that it was one thing to offer a theory in comfortable rooms, another to stake your life on it.
“I do too,” Peter said. He held his knife, blade up, so rigidly that Don could sense the tautness of his muscles all the way up his arm. “I know they’re inside. Let’s go.”
Then Ricky spoke and simply said what was obvious. “We don’t have a choice.”
Don lifted his axe and held the head pressed flat against his chest; went quietly to the doors to the stalls; slipped inside. The other two followed him.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw only the rounded backs of the seats stretching away. The heavy blade of the axe pressed against his chest. The movie’s soundtrack filled his head with shouts and cries. It played to an empty theater. And of all the spectacles to which their enemy had treated him, Don thought that this was surely the strangest—the horror on the screen, the turmoil of voices and music washing out in darkness over all those empty seats. He looked sideways toward Peter Barnes and even in the dark saw the set of his face. He pointed to the far aisle; then bent forward to see Ricky, who was only a shadow against the wall, and motioned toward the wide middle aisle. Peter immediately moved away toward the other side of the theater. Ricky went more slowly to the center, and checked Peter and Don’s position before bending down to make sure Gregory or Fenny was not hiding in the row. Then they advanced forward, checking each row in turn.
And what if Ricky finds them? Don thought. Could we get to him in time to save him? He’s exposed, way out there in the open.
But Ricky, holding his knife out to one side, moved down the wide center aisle, looking calmly on either side of him as if he were looking for a lost ticket—he was being as thorough as he had been in Anna Mostyn’s house.
Don moved in tandem with the others, straining to see into the darkness between the rows. Candy wrappers, torn paper, what looked like a winter’s worth of dust, rows of seats, some torn, some taped together, a few in every row with broken arms—and in the middle of each row, a well of darkness that wanted to suck him toward it. Above him, ahead of him, the film paraded a succession of images Don caught as disconnected frames whenever he looked up from the floor of the theater. Corpses pushing themselves up from their graves, cars rolling dangerously fast around corners, a girl’s stricken face … Don glanced up at the screen and thought for a moment he was seeing a film of himself in Anna Mostyn’s cellar.
But no, of course not, the scene was just part of the film, a man unlike him in a cellar unlike Anna’s. The movie family had barricaded themselves in a basement, and the soundtrack boomed with the sounds of doors closing: maybe that’s how you fight them, you just hole up until they go away … you bite down and close your eyes and hope they get your brother, your friend, anybody, before they get you … and that, he realized, was what the nightwatchers had done. He looked over the rows of seats, seeing them filled with Gregory’s victims, and then saw Ricky and Peter looking curiously back at him. He was two rows behind. Don bent forward again, found himself staring stiffly with embarrassment at a flattened popcorn box, and moved hurriedly down the broad steps to catch up with the others.
“They’re here, though,” Peter whispered. “They have to be.”
“There’s the projection booth,” Don said. “The toilets. And Mulligan must have had some sort of office.”
On the screen a door slammed: noise of life walled in, and of death walled in with it.
“Maybe the balcony,” Peter said, and glanced up at the screen. “And what’s behind there? How do you get there?”
Again, a door slammed. Inhuman voices matching the scale of the people on the screen, inflated with assumed emotions, fell toward them from the speakers.
The door clicked open with a flat, ticking noise—the sound made when a metal bar, depressed, lifts a catch; then it slammed shut again.
“Of course,” Ricky said, “that’s where they’d”—but the other two were not paying attention. They had recognized the sound, and were staring at the entrance to a lighted cavernous tunnel to the right of the screen. Above the tunnel a white sign read EXIT.
The soundtrack blared down on them, to their side giant forms enacted a pantomime romantic enough for the music, but what they listened to was a light, dry noise coming down the exit corridor toward the light: a noise like clapping hands. It was the sound of bare feet.
A child appeared at the end of the corridor and paused at the edge of the light. He looked toward them—an apparition from a thirties’ study of rural poverty, a small boy with shivering sides and prominent ribs and a smudgy, shadowy face that would never be invaded by thought. He stood in the last traces of the corridor’s light, drool forming on his lower lip. The boy raised his arms, holding his bunched hands level before him, and made the gesture of pumping up and down on an iron bar. Then he tilted back his head and giggled; and again made the gesture of closing a heavy door.
“My brother is telling you that the doors are locked,” said a voice from above them. They whirled around, Don hefting the axe in his arms, and saw Gregory Bate standing on the stage beside the red curtains flanking the screen. “But three such brave adventurers wouldn’t have it otherwise, would they? You have come for this, haven’t you? Especially you, Mr. Wanderley—all the way from California. Fenny and I were sorry not to have been properly introduced there.” He moved easily to the center of the stage, and the movie broke and flowed over the surface of his body. “And you really think that you can harm us with those medieval objects you carry? Why, gentlemen …” He flung out his arms, his eyes glowing. Every part of him was printed with gigantic forms—an open hand, a falling lamp, a splintering door.
And beneath all that, Don saw what Bate had demonstrated to Peter Barnes—that the gentlemanly diction and theatrical manner were insubstantial clothing over a terrible concentration, a purpose as implacable as a machine’s. Bate was standing on the stage, smiling down at them. “Now,” he said, his tone like a god’s summoning light.
Don jumped sideways, hearing something rush past him, and saw Fenny’s mad little body crashing into Peter Barnes. None of them had seen the child move; now he was already on top of Peter, forcing his arms to the floor of the theater, snarling, holding Peter’s knife harmlessly away while he wriggled on top of him, making a squealing noise that got lost in the screams from the speakers.
Don raised his axe and felt a strong hand close over his wrist. (Immortal whispered up his arm, don’t you want to be?)
“Wouldn’t you like to live forever?” Gregory Bate said in his ear, blowing foulness toward his face. “Even if you must die first? It’s a good Christian bargain, after all.”
The hand spun him easily around, and Don felt his own strength draining out as if Bate’s hand on his wrist drew it out of him like a magnet. Bate’s other hand took his chin and tilted it up, forcing Don to look into his eyes. He remembered Peter telling him how Jim Hardie had died, how Bate had sucked him down into his eyes, but it was impossible not to look: and his feet seemed to be floating, his legs were water, at the bottom of the shining gold was a comprehensive wisdom and beneath that was total mindlessness, a rushing violence, pure cold, a killing winter wind through a forest.
“Watch this, you scum,” he dimly heard Ricky saying. Then Bate’s attention snapped away from him, and his legs seemed to be filled with sand, and the side of the werewolf’s head moved past his face as slowly as a dream. Something was making an appalling racket, and Bate’s profiled head slid past his own, marble skin and an ear as perfect as a statue’s—Bate flung him away.
“Do you see this, you filth?” Ricky was shouting, and Don, lying all tumbled over his axe (now what was that for?), half-wedged beneath one of the front-row seats, looked dreamily up and saw Ricky Hawthorne sawing into the back of Fenny’s neck.
“Bad,” he whispered, and “no,” and no longer sure that it was not really just a part of the giant shadowy action blazing on above them all, saw Gregory slap the old man down onto Peter Barnes’s motionless body.