Desperation

“Tak ah lah!”

The woman spoke in a voice that was both frightening and powerful, nothing like her earlier one, her storytelling voice-that one had been low and often hesitant. To Joh

“Mm! Mm! Mm en tow!”

Cynthia cast a bewildered glance at Steve. “What’s she saying.” Steve shook his head.

She looked at Joh

“It’s the cop’s language,” he said. He cast his peculiarly efficient recollection back to the moment when the cop had apparently sicced a buzzard on him. “Timoh!” he snapped at Audrey Wyler. “Candy-latch!”

That wasn’t quite right, but it must have at least been close; Audrey recoiled, and for a moment there was a very human look of surprise on her face. Then the lip lifted again, and the lunatic smile reappeared in her eyes.

“What did you say to her.” Cynthia asked Joh

“I have no idea.”

“Boss, you gotta get the kid out. Now.”

Joh

When she opened her hand and showed him her offering, the emotional weather inside his head changed at once… and yet he still saw everything and sequenced it, just as he had when Sean Hutter’s goddamned Party—mobile had rolled over. He had kept on recording every-thing then, when he had been sure he was going to die, and he went on recording everything now, when he was suddenly consumed with hate for the boy in his arms and overwhelmed by a desire to put something-his motor-cycle key would do nicely-into the interfering little prayboy’s throat and open him like a can of beer.

He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying on her open palm-the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets-But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bi—lging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient.

“Can tah!” she screamed. “Can tah, can tak, kill the boy, kill him now, kill him!”

Steve stepped forward. With her attention and concen-tration fully fixed on Joh

The murderous fury which had come over Joh

“Get him the fuck out of here!” Steve yelled. Audrey lunged for the carvings. Steve seized her arm and yanked her back. Her skin was darkening and sagging. Joh

Steve yelled again, and smacked Joh

He had snatched David from Joh

Audrey saw him go. She howled-it was despair Joh

Audrey seemed unaware of what had happened to her. One-armed, the right side of her dress now dark-ening with blood, she made for the carvings, gibbering in that strange language. Steve was frozen in place, look-ing at what he held-a lightly freckled human arm with a Casio watch on the wrist. The boss was equally frozen. If it hadn’t been for Cynthia, Steve later thought, Audrey would have gotten to the carvings again. God knew what would have happened if she had; even when she had been obviously focusing the power of the stones on the boss, Steve had felt the backwash. There had been nothing sexual about it this time. This time it had been about murder and nothing else.

Before Audrey could fall on her knees in the corner and grab her toys, Cynthia kicked them deftly away, sending them skittering along the wall with the cutouts in it. Audrey howled again, and this time a spray of blood came out of her mouth along with the sound.

She turned her head to them, and Steve staggered backward, actually raising a hand, as if to block the sight of her from his vision.

Audrey’s formerly pretty face now drooped from the front of her skull in sweating wrinkles. Her staring eye-balls hung from widening sockets. Her skin was black-ening and splitting. Yet none of this was the worst; the worst came as Steve dropped the hideously warm thing he was holding and she lurched to her feet.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, and in her choked and failing voice Steve heard a real woman, not this decaying monstrosity. “I never meant to hurt anyone. Don’t touch the can tahs. Whatever else you do, don’t touch the can tabs!”

Steve looked at Cynthia. She stared back, and he could read her mind in her wide eyes: I touched one. Twice. How lucky was Very, Steve thought. I think you were very lucky. I think we both were.

Audrey staggered toward them and away from the pitted gray stones. Steve could smell a rich odor of blood and decay. He reached out but couldn’t bring himself to actually put a restraining hand on her shoulder, even though she was headed for the stairs and the hallway headed in the direction Ralph had taken his boy. He couldn’t bring himself to do it because he knew his fin-gers would sink in.

Now he could hear a plopping, pattering sound as parts of her began to liquefy and fall off in a kind of flesh rain. She mounted the steps and lurched out through the door.

Cynthia looked up at Steve for a moment, her faced pinched and white. He put his arm around her waist and followed Joh

Audrey made it about halfway down the short but steep flight of stairs leading to the second-floor hall, then fell. The sound of her inside her blood-soaked dress was grisly-a splashing sound, almost. Yet she was still alive. She began to crawl, her hair hanging in strings, mercifully obscuring most of her dangling face. At the far end, by the stairs leading down to the lobby, Ralph stood with David in his arms, staring at the oncoming creature.

“Shoot her!” Joh

“Can’t,” Steve said. “No guns up here but the kid’s, and that one’s empty.”

“Ralph, get downstairs with David,” Joh

“Get down before.

But the thing which had been Audrey Wyler had no fur-ther interest in David, it seemed.

It reached the arched entrance to the balcony, then crawled through it. Almost at once the support timbers, dried out by the desert cli-mate and dined upon by generations of termites, began to groan. Steve hurried after Joh