In This Skin (37 page)

    Thankful, he bundled his soiled garment into the trash, then slipped the fresh one over his slender torso.

    Taking grateful swallows from the soda, Noel still sat in the hallway with the handgun resting on the floor close by. ”They're going to have to get past me first,”he said again. ”If they have the guts to try.”

    Robyn remembered the painfully loud crack-crackcrack! of the submachine gun and looked at Noel's pistol. Suddenly, it looked feeble in comparison. Also, she remembered clearly enough that three monstrosities had emerged from the wall of mist. Only two had been shot. That meant one remained at large in the building.

    ”I'm keeping you company.”Robyn sat down on the floor beside Noel. When Ellery left the bathroom, his hair damp from the shower, he joined them, so all three formed a line against the wall. For a moment they sat gathering their scattered wits.

    At last Noel said, ”Those two guys are really out to get you, Ellery?”

    ”Ah… th-th… uh!” The words refused to come. Instead, he gave a nod of his head. That was eloquent enough.

    Yup. They're out to get me.

    

    

    ”Fuck.”Logan was furious.

    ”They got out through the front doors,”Joe said.

    ”No, they didn't. Them doors are nailed tight. They're hiding through there.” From around the corner of the wall that formed the bottom of the proscenium arch, Logan shone his flashlight onto the dance floor. Two corpses of… what exactly, he didn't know… lay flat out. There'd been a third one with a weird flat face and ratty eyes, only the third had vanished into the shadows when the shooting started. He didn't think he'd hit it. And he was pretty certain he hadn't managed to put a slug into Ellery or his two cronies because they'd been down on the floor beneath the plane of flying bullets. But he'd get them. Also, he'd started to consider the long legged woman he'd seen. The one who'd had her T-shirt torn off to expose her breasts. Well… he'd started to think about her a lot. But first things first, he told himself.

    ”Joe, shine the light on the gun. No, here on the firing chamber.”He worked the firing bolt, jiggled it until he loosened the fuck round that had jammed the gun. ”Bingo.” He eased the round from the spent case ejector. ”Bent cartridge. Some dumb fuck must have stood on it.” He tossed the round aside, where it went tumbling across the stage with a pit-pat sound. After that, he fed more rounds from his pockets into the magazine clip. With a spare 'zine jammed into the belt of his pants, he had sixty rounds of happy shooting ahead of him. ”Now you reload,” he told Joe.

    ”You really going after these people?”

    ”You bet. You saw what we did to their ugly buddies? You think they're not going to tell the cops?” When Joe had finished slotting fresh rounds into the revolver's ammo cylinder, he handed him one of the two flashlights. ”Time we finished this chore, bud.”

    Logan crossed the stage, then dropped down the four feet to the dance floor. In the center lay the mess of two corpses and toppled armchair.

    He only gave them a scant glance now. Time to finish Ellery Hann, the stuttermonkey. Also he couldn't get the long-legged girl out of his head now. Shit, she's something. Soon they were through the door into the lobby. Logan swept the light around, checking out the glass ticket booth… all the shadowed corners where Stutter Monkey and pals might hide.

    It took mere seconds to confirm there was no one here.

    ”They did come through here, didn't they?” Joe sounded doubtful. ”I couldn't see shit 'cause of the light in my eyes. They might have got behind the bar at the back.”

    ”It's got shutters up.”

    ”There might have been a way under the bar flap. They might slip out the back while we're friggin' around here.”

    Logan considered. ”OK. You go stand in the doorway back there. You can watch the bar and keep an eye on here in case they come out one of those doors. One of the creeps has a gun. Got that?”

    ”Got it, boss.”

    Logan watched Joe walk back to the dance floor door, push it open, then hold it open with his back. He had his left foot in the dance floor and his right in the lobby. Straddling the doorway like that, he could check out both areas.

    Logan examined the ticket office more closely in case anyone was squatting under the desk. No one there, but he saw the brown slick on the floor. Someone had done a tub full of bleeding in there. He grinned.

    Shit, there'd be plenty more to come, too. He shone the
light around the walls. There were paintings on them that he recognized as
ancient tombs and pharaoh stuff. Real 'Curse of the Mummy' shit.

    Five doors led off from the foyer. Some had signs like manager's office and private, no admittance. All were locked. So any one of them could be barring his way to Ellery Hann and the other two (his imagination neatly supplied the image of the long-legged girl with the gleaming naked top half)- Five doors. He could punch a heavy-duty 9-mm round through each door, until he heard a squeal from inside. That would leave him twenty-plus rounds to finish Ellery Hann and his buddies. More than enough…

    He stood back. Sized up the first door that bore the manager's office sign. Then he raised the stock of the weapon to his shoulder, his finger eager for the trigger.

    Before the gun barked he heard a shout… no, more than a shout. A yell.

    A scream. Turning, he shone the light back at the lobby door; it swung shut. Another cry echoed, only this one rose higher, as if some poor fuck was having his balls crushed. You could hear pain-pure, unalloyed pain-transform the voice into a quavering note sustained beyond what seemed humanly possible.

    ”Joe?” Logan ran for the door, holding the machine gun straight out in front of him like it was a pistol. ”Joe!”

    The screech of agony cut off to a silence that seemed big enough to crush his ears. ”Joe!”

    Logan shoved open the door, then sprayed the dance floor with light. His finger tightened on the trigger, ready to blast whoever was hurting his buddy. Only there was emptiness as well as silence now. The two corpses had vanished.

    ”Joe?” Silence stole away the word into nothingness, then the quiet returned to press down on him with a weight that was near physical.

    Logan shone the light at the floor. A smear of liquid painted a line toward the stage. Logan guessed what it was. When he touched it and shone the light onto the strawberry-colored smudge on his finger, identification came instantly Joe's blood. The revolver lay on the floor where his buddy had dropped it without firing a shot. Logan picked up the gun and shoved it into his belt. Even as he did this his eyes followed the trail of blood. Joe had been hurt, then dragged. Easy to figure that one. He'd follow the trail, then knock a few holes into Joes assailant. Bingo. Logan followed the thin line of blood until he was ten yards from the stage. There it ended as suddenly as if some phantom had flown Joe away from the face of the earth. Logan even shone the light up at the featureless ceiling, expecting to see Joe floating up amongst the shadows. The moment he did so he felt a breath of cold, wet wind, as if just for a moment a door had been opened on another world.

    

    

    Benedict West saw bad things… the worse things. He woke to find himself staring up at branches without leaves. When he raised his head, which still throbbed from the blow, he saw a gray forest surrounded him.

    He tried to move but found he'd been tied with strips of filthy rag.

    Trussed, he lay on wet leaves, smelling their spiky aroma. Inches from his head, bone-white toadstools pushed through the loam like the pale fingertips of the dead breaking through to the living world. Only this wasn't the bad thing… the worse thing…

    Walking through the wood with a slow-measured step came a creature with a flat face and tiny rodent eyes. Its mule face grimaced as it walked, due to the effort of dragging the man it held-one ankle in each meaty paw. The man lay on his back with his arms straight above his head, trailing limply across the fallen leaves.

    He was unconscious; his head rolled from side to side with every step of the creature. Benedict thought: It must be Noel or Ellery. From where he lay on the ground, Benedict tried to lift his head higher so he could see.

    No. The man was a stranger. He had unkempt hair and wore scruffy denims.

    Although he couldn't have been out of his teens yet, he wore the older, chewed-up face of someone who'd discovered the delights of hard liquor and hard-hitting drugs early in life. Benedict blinked, still groggy from the slam on his skull that had knocked him cold. By this time the creature had almost reached where Benedict lay. There was a brutal muscular power in its compact body, but it wasn't matched by any symmetry of limbs. Balance and a harmonious structure of the body were completely absent. It looked as if a careless god had molded the creature in a hurry Then it had been tossed down here into the gray forest where it had been left to fend the best it could. Its head was misshapen. It limped because one leg was a couple of inches longer than the other. One arm was jointed in at least three places between shoulder and wrist, whereas the other only boasted one joint. One nostril appeared to be a narrow slit, the other a circular hole that glistened silver snot. The split of a mouth looked like an afterthought, too.

    The unconscious man groaned as he was dragged. Benedict guessed he was recovering consciousness. A bloody cleft above an eye told him the man had taken a harder blow than Benedict. Ten feet from Benedict, the creature stopped dragging the man, dropped his legs, then grunted. For a moment Benedict wondered if he'd been the one grunted at. Only when he followed the creature's line of vision from its tiny eyes, he realized it watched something else-behind Benedict.

    Benedict rolled back to look, his heart beating hard. Standing there in a line of eight were more misshapen figures. Tall, short. Shovel-shaped mouths, spindle-thin arms, bulging arms, inverted triangle eyes, slit eyes, bulging pear-shaped eyes, skins of a different hue-the creatures were all unique in their own tortured style.

    Dear God, Benedict thought. The sight of so much monstrous flesh winded him. Every nerve of his body longed to crawl away from the repulsive creatures. That's when the worst so far in his life happened, when he saw something that would stay burned into his mind for as long as he lived.

    He watched the creatures bound toward the man as he sat up, waking properly. They moved in, chins jutting forward, staring at him as eagerly as a pack of hungry dogs rushing to their first meal in days. In terror, the man held up a hand as if he really believed he could push them all back. The panicked moans he started making segued smoothly into a scream as they dug their fingernails into his face.

    Benedict couldn't look away no matter how hard he tried, even though he knew that those creatures were peeling the skin from a living, breathing human being.

    

    

    When the intruders-human or nonhuman-never came, Robyn, Noel and Ellery moved into the living room. The first thin glow of dawn had started to seep over the parking lot to touch the Luxor. Moments later, a red stain like a show of blood appeared on the horizon prior to the sun's arrival.

    Although the black gave way to deep blue, two stars clung on to shine with all the brilliance of new nailheads gleaming in a casket lid. One by one, the three were drawn to the windows to watch the night steal away, not beaten back by the sun, but withdrawing to rest and regroup before returning when the sun sank into the west once more at the end of the day. As they watched the solemn changeover from darkness to light, they heard a sudden clamoring on the roof of the Luxor. A furious scratching sounded through the ceiling. Scraps of feathery black fell like devil snowflakes beyond the glass.

    ”Its the crows.”Robyn knew the statement was unnecessary even as she spoke it, because they could see the birds taking off in hundreds from the roof and from the trees behind the buildings. They whirled up into the sky, wings beating. She could hear their excited calls, which ran from the deep caw sound to a piercing cry. When she spoke again, she thought of Benedict West.

    ”Someone's died here tonight.”

    She remembered what Benedict had told them, that the crows gathered at the place where a doomed man or woman would live out their last minutes on earth. And that when they did breathe their last breath the crows would pursue the departing soul as it rose upward. Furiously they'd hunt it-whirling, darting, soaring. This is what she witnessed now. The night-dark creatures spun and twisted as they flew in pursuit of some airborne thing she could not see. They moved with savage bursts of speed, keen to catch their prey-turning in tight circles, beaks snapping open and shut. In her mind's eye, she saw the soul struggling to make a desperate dash to evade the claws, the beaks. Robyn held her breath, momentarily sharing its fear and its panic.

    Hundreds of crows clouded the sky. A whirling vortex of the creatures turned above the Luxor as the grim chase reached its end.

    After five minutes at most, the birds returned one by one, to sit on the roof or settle into the trees. Almost immediately they squatted there like strange feathery fruit. They no longer moved. They no longer made a sound. Within ten minutes the sky was free of the sinister creatures.

    ”What was that Benedict said?”she murmured. ”If the crows continue to fly around the building and call out, that means they've captured the soul and are celebrating. But if they return to their roosts and keep silent…” She trailed off, thinking of Benedict.

    In a whisper Ellery said, ”Whoever it was, they're free now.”