Halloween III - Season of the Witch (11 page)

Her glass was only half-empty.

She doesn’t even need it, he thought.

The silence, broken only by the music and a cricket outside the window, became a barrier. The longer it went on the harder it was to break.

But it did not seem to trouble her. She set her glass on the night table. The light from the aged lampshade gave her skin the texture of warm wax.

My God, he thought. At a time like this Linda would have a million things to say. I would not be able to shut her up. But this one . . . she’s comfortable with herself, and so with me. She knows what she wants.

I wouldn’t want the wrong thing to happen, he thought. We have a lot more time to spend together. There had better not be any problems between us. We already have enough to worry about on this trip.

She uncapped a bottle of baby oil and began stroking it onto her legs.

Pretty sure of herself, isn’t she? he thought.

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?” he asked at last.

“Shouldn’t I be?”

The radio played on and she proceeded with her baby oil. Eventually she put some on her arms and neck. Her skin glistened like rose petals with dew. She began to rub it into the hollow of her throat. Then below her collarbone.

The night was a wall outside the window, insulating them from the world.

He touched the underside of her leg. To know how it would feel.

She was still warm from the shower, soft and steamed. It was the softest skin he had ever touched.

She tilted her head questioningly.

He didn’t know the answer.

There was no longer any question.

He moved to her.

The music on the radio gave way to an advertisement.

“TWO MORE DAYS TO HALLOWEEN, HAL-LO-WEEN, HAL-LO-WEEN . . .”

Challis sighed a sigh that was like all the breaths he had ever drawn in his life going out at once.

“I don’t believe this commercial,” he said. Her breath was on him. “It doesn’t stop.”

She turned the radio off.

He laid his mouth into the tenderest part of her neck. It fit perfectly.

There was a sound from the cabin two doors down.

“What was that?” said Ellie.

“Mmm.”

“I mean it. It sounded like—”

“Woman in Three.”

“Marge? I talked to her while you were gone.”

“So did I.”

“I like her. She reminds me of my mother.”

What? thought Challis. Marge Guttman is no older than I am. She’s—

His heart sank out of his body and through the floor.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Relax. I’m older than I look.”

So am I, he thought. “But you
are
eighteen?” He was only half-kidding.

“Boy, are you dumb,” said Ellie, and rolled over on top of him.

The towel fell away. He gave up and kissed her. He didn’t have to kiss her again. The first one lasted a long time.

There was a louder noise, a chair or table being knocked over this time.

Then a scream.

Challis sat up. “Batteries,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“I told her to leave it alone.” The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. “I shouldn’t have given it back to her. There’s no telling what—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stay here.”

“Not on your life, Doctor.”

She threw a robe over her and followed him out the door.

“Marge?” called Ellie. “Are you all right in there?”

No answer.

The door was ajar. Had someone else—?

At first they didn’t see her.

The lamp was on the floor, which created harsh shadows on the walls. There was a large pocket of darkness on the chair, something, a pile of clothes or—

On closer inspection it was not a pile of clothes.

No.

Ellie clamped her hands over her mouth and was sick.

Challis steadied her, pushed her out.

He had seen many emergency patients arrive at the hospital over the years. He had seen bodies butchered in collisions, skulls crushed like rotten eggs, torsos ripped open by rusty knives, faces smashed to pulp, limbs dangling by threads, gangrenous organs spilling into his hands. Yes, he had seen all of these things and more. Human beings racked by disease, wounds festering, eyeballs driven out of their sockets from within. He had witnessed complete autopsies and open-heart surgery. Once, in medical school, he had dissected a cadaver. And so on,
ad nauseum.

But he had never seen anything like this.

He fought down his gag reflex.

This one was not a statistic on a slab. It was a woman he had met only an hour ago. She had been vibrant with the life force and in perfect health, as full of fight as a pit bull and ready to go the limit with anyone or anything for what she believed in.

But not anymore.

The lamp had been knocked over in the first convulsions. On the table was the ceramic chip, now seared white and frosted with ash. It had burned a spot into the tabletop. Next to it was a bent bobby pin and a small jeweler’s screwdriver.

He picked up the chip in his handkerchief. It was still hot.

Somehow she remained upright in the chair in an incomprehensible defiance of gravity. She still wore her glasses, in a manner of speaking. They drooped over what was left of her nose. The frame was melted into her face.

Tiny rivulets of blood seeped from every pore. Her eyes were filled with blood, the pupils gone. And her mouth. Her mouth was open, distended forward and torn to shreds by a force that had snapped off teeth and rendered her lips into streaming filaments of skin.

Challis approached, and heard the barely audible exhaust whisper of a still-human wailing from somewhere deep inside her chest cavity.

As he reached for a pulse, something—
something
—moved within the woman’s mouth.

What?

Challis bent closer.

It was black and pearlescent. Her tongue? No.

No, it was not her tongue at all.

From out of the croaking hiss of her mined throat crawled the wet, obscene legs of a living black spider.

Challis bolted for the door.

Ellie was wild, disoriented. She started across the doorway. He grasped her arms and propped her against the cabin.

“Don’t move,” he ordered. “And don’t look. It’s going to be all right.”

“No, it’s not! How can you say that? Nothing’s been right since—since what happened to my father! That wasn’t all right! And this is just like it! Something insane that nobody can underst—!”

He shook her into submission and held her close.

Then he had to leave her.

He ran to the Kupfers’ room.

“Buddy!”

Before Buddy could answer, Rafferty poked his head out of the office. He set the phone back on its cradle and wandered out.

“There’s a woman down there,” Challis explained. “She’s had a—a seizure. Get an ambulance right—”

“Seizure?” said Rafferty.

Challis felt the earth tremble. He looked up.

Several late-model cars were converging on the scene, led by a van bearing the sign of the shamrock.

“Don’t trouble yourself, sir,” said Rafferty. “I heard the accident and looked in on her. I’ve taken care of everything. She’ll get the best care money can buy.”

Challis stood by in amazement as a carload of white-suited men poured into Cabin Three. They were dressed similarly to medical technicians, but not the same. He had never seen coats quite like these before. Some detail was not right. He could not put his finger on what it was.

Challis attempted to follow them in.

“I’m a doctor. I found her like this a few minutes ago. She screamed, and then—”

They shuffled him out of the way and brought her out lashed to a stretcher. They did not take time for any emergency measures. They did not bother to examine her. It was as if they were working against a deadline.

“Hey, I told you I’m a doctor! This woman is badly in need of—”

They loaded her into the back of the van.

Challis intervened and bodily prevented them from closing the doors.

“Who is taking responsibility for this patient?” he demanded.

He was gently but firmly lifted aside.

“Why, Mr. Cochran, of course,” said Rafferty, following the activity. “And wouldn’t you know it? There he is now! Never far away when he’s needed.”

The big silver Cadillac docked in front of the motel. The back door opened wide and a distinguished, white-haired man with mirror-polished shoes and an immaculate black suit disembarked. He unfolded to his full height, an effortless motion like an oiled machine. He straightened up and up. His clear, penetrating eyes found the proprietor.

“Evening, Mr. Rafferty,” he said benignly. He possessed the kindly, self-assured air of an undertaker.

Rafferty scraped and bowed. “Mr. Cochran! Good to see you, sir!”

The white-haired man towered over the crowd. His untroubled gaze passed over Rafferty’s head and paused briefly at Challis and Ellie before panning to take in the rest of the small congregation.

There were the Kupfers, Buddy and his wife and son, huddled together in nightclothes as if to watch a pyrotechnics display on a summer evening. Several more unknown faces had emerged from other cabins to witness the disturbance.

Cochran lifted his hands in the manner of a preacher about to lead a communal prayer.

“It’s all over, friends. A small accident. The lady will be given the best of care, I can assure you of that.”

Chin raised high, Cochran smiled to dismiss them all.

He tapped his ring finger on the driver’s door of the van. A white-garbed attendant rolled down the window.

“I don’t like this,” said Challis tajutly, but no one was listening.

No one had seen anything. Ellie was out of it. He was on his own.

He followed Cochran.

“Where are they taking her?”

Cochran broke off his conversation with the driver and turned, unruffled.

“Why, they’re taking her to the factory. We have a wonderful facility there for emergency treatment.”

Surprised to hear that, Challis withdrew a couple of steps.

Cochran resumed his consultation with the driver.

The crowd thinned out and grumbled back to their rooms. Soon there would be no indication that any of it had happened.

But it’s important, thought Challis. It matters. This woman matters.

The tailgate closed and locked.

Challis, standing next to the van, shaded his eyes and peeked in through a small observation window.

There was Marge Guttman. Her litter was locked down to the floorboard and her body was covered with a sheet up to the neck, A methodical technician was unrolling a layer of gauze over what remained of her face. No I.V., no respirator, no medical equipment of any kind was in evidence.

They were doing nothing for her—
nothing.

Challis was enraged. He pounded the steel side panel and peered deeper.

He was about to run back and yank the tailgate off its hinges and force some answers from these white-coated efficiency experts, when he caught sight of something else inside the van.

There was another stretcher farther forward, behind the cab, at right angles to Marge Guttman. It, too, bore the weight of a white-sheeted figure. On this one, too, the sheet was drawn up to the neck. But a few inches of dirty T-shirt and rumpled collar showed above the cover.

It was unmistakably the tattered man, the panhandler from the shanty under the railroad trestle. Though his head was in shadow, Challis was sure of it.

No one else in Santa Mira dressed like that.

A company car drove off, its headlights momentarily sweeping the van. A reflection of light scattered through the interior, and then the car was gone and the stretchers inside the van were dim phantoms.

But for a second there had been just enough light to show Challis what was wrong with the tattered man’s head, why he couldn’t see it.

What was wrong with his head was that he didn’t have one.

Challis reeled back on his heels. It must have been an optical illusion, a trick of perspective.
It’s dark, my eyes
—

“All right,” Cochran was saying to the driver. Challis barely made out the words. “What happened?”

The driver stuck his head out the window. “It was a misfire. She must have—”

The driver noticed Challis and ducked back in.

Cochran turned again. In the departing headlights, the movement appeared to take an uncommonly long time, stopping and starting, stopping and starting with the jerkiness of a slowed-down film.

Before he could say anything, Challis felt a hand on his arm.

“Don’t,” whispered Ellie. She appeared to be in control again. “We can’t afford it.”

He wanted to tell her that she hadn’t seen what was in the van. Then he remembered that she had seen Mrs. Guttman. And her father. That was enough.

Challis backed off without another word. For the moment.

Cochran was unperturbed. He waited until the van and the other company cars were gone and the bystanders were back in their rooms. Then he adjusted his cuffs, gave the motel a last, approving glance, like a shepherd overseeing his flock, and returned to his silver limousine.

As soon as the grounds were clear Challis ran for the phone in the office. Fortunately Rafferty was occupied elsewhere. He made his call and slipped back to Cabin One in the belief that he had not been seen.

Ellie dragged him back inside and sat him on the bed.

“A
misfire?”
said Challis. “Did you hear that? What the hell were they talking about?”

“There’s something crazy going on here,” said Ellie with breathtaking understatement. “Did you call the police?”

“I called the sheriff in Sierra Mesa. I don’t even think they have a police force around here. If they do, Cochran’s probably running the show. He runs everything else.”

“What did he say?”

“I started to lay it all on him. For some reason he didn’t let me finish. He said to get the hell out and phone it in from Leytonville. He must know something we don’t. Odd . . .”

“What?”

“When I asked him how the investigation’s going back there, he said—oh, it doesn’t make sense.”