“This lady’s had some trouble with her car,” Enid told her son. “She needs to use our phone.”
Harch smiled and said, “Hello, Susan.”
Enid blinked. “Oh, you
know
each other.”
“Yeah,” Harch said. “We know each other real well.”
The room seemed to tilt beneath Susan’s feet.
Harch stood up.
Susan backed up, bumped against the refrigerator.
“Mom,” Harch said to Enid, “I can help Susan, if you want to get back to your TV show.”
“Well,” Enid said, looking back and forth between Susan and Harch, “I was going to make some coffee...”
“I’ve already brewed up a pot,” Harch said. “I always need coffee when I’ve got a long night of studying ahead of me. You know that, Mom.”
“Well,” Enid said to Susan, pretending not to notice the sudden tension in the room, “you see, it
is
one of my favorite shows, and I hate to miss it even one week because the story kind of continues episode to episode—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Susan said in a voice that was half whimper, half snarl. “Just cut the crap.”
Enid’s mouth fell open, and she blinked stupidly, as if she was genuinely amazed by Susan’s outburst and was utterly unable to imagine the reason for it.
Harch laughed.
Susan took a step toward the swinging door through which she and Enid had entered the kitchen. “Don’t try to stop me. I swear to God, I’ll claw your eyes and I’ll try my damnedest to bite your jugular open. I
swear
I will.”
“Are you
crazy?”
Enid Shipstat said.
Still laughing, Harch started around the table.
Enid said, “Tom, is your friend joking, or what?”
“Don’t try to stop me,” Susan warned him as she edged away from the refrigerator.
“If this is a joke, it doesn’t seem the least bit funny to me,” Enid said.
Harch said, “Susan, Susan, it’s no use. Don’t you know that by now?”
Susan turned, slammed through the kitchen door, bolted into the hall. She half expected to find the children blocking her exit, but the hallway was deserted. The kids were still sitting in the living room when she ran past the archway. Bathed in blue light and the flickering reflections of the images on the screen, they appeared to be oblivious to the shouting in the kitchen.
What kind of house
is
this? Susan wondered desperately as she hurried down the shadowy hall. What kind of kids
are
they? Little zombies in front of that TV.
She reached the front door, tried it, and found that it was locked.
Harch entered the hall from the kitchen. He was pursuing her but without urgency, just as Jellicoe and Parker had done. “Listen, you stupid bitch, we’ll get you whether you run or not.”
Susan twisted the doorknob back and forth.
Harch approached leisurely along the shadowy hall. “Tomorrow night you’ll pay for what you did to us. Tomorrow night, I’ll have been dead for seven years, and you’ll pay for that. We’ll screw you, all four of us, every which way we can, turn you inside out and upside down, screw your damned brains out—”
The door shuddered as she pulled frantically on it, but it would not open.
“—screw you like we should have that night in the cave, and then we’ll slit you wide open, all the way up the middle, and cut your pretty head off, just exactly the way we should have handled you, just like I
wanted
to do thirteen years ago.”
Susan wished that she had the courage to spin around and face him, strike him, and go for his throat with her teeth. She could do something like that if she were sure it would hurt him; it wouldn’t turn her stomach. She had the nerve and the rage to feel his blood bubbling in her mouth without gagging on it. But she was afraid that she would cut him and find that he
didn’t
bleed, that he was dead, after all. She knew that was impossible. But now that she had encountered Harch again, now that she had seen those peculiar gray eyes once more, had seen them filled with an arctic hatred, she could no longer hold on to her carefully reasoned refutation of the supernatural. Her faith in the scientific method and in logic was crumbling again; she was being reduced to babbling fear once more, losing control, hating it, despising herself, but losing control nevertheless.
Jellicoe’s words came back to her:
For you, for a little while, this is Hell.
She wrenched at the door in blind panic, and it opened with a scraping sound. It hadn’t been locked, just warped by the damp weather.
“You’re wasting your energy, baby,” Harch called after her. “Save it for Friday. I’d be angry if you were too worn out to be any fun on Friday.”
She stumbled through the door, onto the porch, and down the three steps to the walk. She ran to the gate in the picket fence, into the rain and wind.
As she pelted along the dark street, splashing through deep puddles that came over the tops of her shoes, she heard Harch calling to her from back at the house.
“... pointless... no use... nowhere to hide...”
Susan approached the Main Street Cinema by way of alleys and parking lots. Before rounding the corner of the theater, onto the well-lighted Main Street sidewalk, she looked both ways, studying the rain-slashed night for signs of the police.
The ticket booth was closed. The last show for the night was already underway; no more tickets could be sold.
She pushed through the outer doors, into the lobby. It was deserted.
But it was warm, gloriously warm.
The lights had been turned off behind the refreshment counter, which seemed odd. Since theaters made more money from selling food and beverages than they did from their share of the ticket sales, they usually kept the refreshment stand open until the last patron had gone home after seeing the last scene of the final show of the night.
From inside the theater auditorium, music swelled, and Dudley Moore’s voice was raised in drunken laughter. Obviously, the movie currently unreeling was
Arthur.
She had come to the theater because she needed to get warm and dry; but more than that, she had to have a chance to sit and think, think, think—before she lost her mind altogether. From the moment she had walked into the sheriff’s offices and had encountered Jellicoe, she had been
re
acting rather than acting, and she knew she must stop drifting wherever they pushed her. She had to regain control of events.
She had considered going up the street to the Plenty Good Coffee Shop instead of to the theater, but she had worried about the police cruising by and spotting her through the restaurant’s big plate-glass windows. By contrast, the movie theater was a dark and private sanctuary.
She crossed the clean, plushly carpeted lobby to the padded inner doors, opened one of them just far enough to slip through, and closed it quickly behind her.
On the big screen, Arthur had just awakened in bed after a night of debauchery. It was John Gielgud’s first scene. Susan had seen the film when it had first been released, early last summer. In fact she had liked it so much that she had gone to see it twice. She knew that the scene now playing was fairly early in the movie. There must be at least an hour to go before the end credits, an hour of dry, warm time during which she could attempt to make some sense of what had happened to her tonight.
Susan’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the pitch-black theater. She couldn’t see if there was a crowd or only a few patrons. Then she remembered that there were only two cars in the parking lot. Mustn’t be a crowd; not many people would
walk
to the theater on a night like this.
She was standing beside the left-hand aisle seat in the last row, which was the only seat she could see clearly, and it was empty. She took it, rather than search for something more private and risk drawing attention to herself. Her wet clothes squished as she sat down, and they clung to her, cold and sticky.
She tuned the movie out.
She thought about ghosts.
Demons.
Walking dead men.
Again, she decided that she couldn’t accept a supernatural explanation. At least not for the time being. For one thing, there wasn’t anything to be gained by dwelling on the occult possibilities, for if that
was
the explanation, there was absolutely nothing she could do to save herself. If all the forces of Hell were aligned against her, then she was lost for sure, so she might just as well rule out the very possibility of it.
She ruled out madness, too. She might actually
be
mad, but there was nothing whatsoever she could do to change that if it were the case, so it was better not even to think about it.
Which left her with the conspiracy theory.
That wasn’t much of a theory, either. She didn’t have the slightest idea who, how, or why.
As she puzzled over those three essential questions, her thoughts were briefly disturbed by a wave of laughter that swept the theater. Although it came in reaction to a very funny scene in
Arthur
and wasn’t at all out of place, there was something about the laughter which seemed distinctly odd to Susan.
Of course, the volume of laughter indicated that there were quite a few people in the theater, at least a hundred, maybe more, and that was certainly a surprise, considering the fact that there were only two cars in the parking lot. But that wasn’t what was odd about it.
Something else.
Something about the sound of it.
The laughter subsided, and Susan’s thoughts returned to her escape plans.
When had it begun to go wrong?
As soon as she had left the hospital—or, rather, as soon as she’d left Milestone
—that
was when it had begun to go wrong. The keys in the Pontiac. Too easy. Which meant they had known she would try to escape, and they had actually
wanted
her to try. The Pontiac had been left there expressly for her use.
But how had they known that she would think to look in the car for the keys? And how could they have been so certain that she would stop at the sheriff’s station?
How could they have known she would go to the Shipstat house for help? Willawauk contained hundreds of other houses, other people to whom she might have turned. Why had the Harch look-alike been waiting with such perfect confidence at the Shipstat place?
She knew the most likely answer to her own question, but she didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t even want to consider it. Maybe they always knew where she was going to go next because they had
programmed
her to go there. Maybe they had planted a few crucial directives in her subconscious while she’d been in the coma. That would explain why they never seriously pursued her when she ran from them; they knew she would walk into their arms later, at a prearranged place.
Maybe she had no free will whatsoever. That possibility made her feel sick to her stomach—and in her soul, as well.
Who
were
these shadowy manipulators with godlike power over her?
Her train of thought was derailed by another wave of loud laughter that rolled through the theater, and this time she realized what was odd about the sound. It was the laughter of young people: higher pitched than that of a general audience, quicker and more eager and more shrill than the laughter of adults.
Her eyes had adapted somewhat to the darkness in the theater, and she raised her head, looked around. At least two hundred people were present. No, it was more like three hundred. Of those nearest to Susan, of those she could see, all appeared to be kids. Not young children. Teenagers. Thirteen to eighteen, or thereabouts. High school and junior high kids. As far as she could tell, she was the only adult in the crowd.
Why had three hundred kids walked through a fierce storm to see a movie that was almost six months old? And what kind of uncaring parents would have permitted them to risk pneumonia and possibly even electrocution by lightning just to come to a movie?