"What da hick she doing here?" Dewayne whispered.
"I don' know. Shut up." Richie's answering hiss was popsicle cold. She was stepping off the bridge. She could have been stepping off the cover of Vogue. It would have made just as much sense. As if sense mattered.
If there was one way to get back at the white man, raping his women was it. It gave him the coldest, boldest satisfaction available. Richie couldn't stop smiling, anticipating his dive into that sweet white meat. It made him hard. It made him wiggly.
Dewayne snubbed out the joint on the bottom of his shoe. Uncharacteristically good thinking. The less they did to tip her off, the better. She was walking down the pedestrian path that led within five yards of where they crouched. With any luck, she wouldn't see them until they were already up her ass.
Then she turned, following the path that led deep into the Ramble. Dewayne let out a muffled curse that Richie nearly echoed.
Until he thought about the choice she'd made.
Alright, he silently cheered. Alright.
Because the Ramble was the deepest, darkest place in the park: a real live maze of twisty pedestrian paths, leading to the heart of the mystery that was Central Park at night. The trees grew thickest there; the shadows fell most heavily. You couldn't even see the buildings.
In was the most private place in the park. And the scariest, for the cops and everyone else.
At night.
"C'mon, man," Richie hissed, dragging himself to his feet. Dewayne grinned, catching the drift. She had disappeared up the path, was inextricably in the Ramble now. They stole after her in a sublimely cautious half-jog, were swallowed by the darkness themselves.
The path curled and ascended. They followed it up. Even so, it took a minute before they spotted her again. Dewayne smacked Richie lightly on the arm, flashed him a glance that consigned stealth to blackest Hell. Richie nodded, grinning fiercely.
They took off, full-speed.
The woman froze, half-turned toward them. Richie couldn't read the expression on her face, but he guessed it wasn't mild amusement. Then she started to run, those long legs pumping. The chase had officially begun.
"Damn," Richie hissed after only a second. She was fast. They'd gained a couple of yards on her with the element of surprise; she'd won it back at once. Dewayne surged forward, keeping pace with her, but Richie felt himself falling back slightly, cursing. The whole damn trail was uphill, for one thing; for another, he'd been drinking and smoking too much for a long time. It all came together to wreak havoc on his stamina.
The woman reached a fork in the path and veered toward the left. Dewayne tore after her. Richie let out a tight-lipped grimace that was meant to be a smile. The fork to the right was a slightly shorter route to the selfsame place. If he pushed, he might even be able to beat them there.
And what a wonderful spot it was.
Richie veered to the right, pushing, pushing, the path listing south and then veering rather sharply to the left. Not twenty yards ahead the land began to level off. Already, he could see the roof of the altar on which they would sacrifice the woman's right to choose.
It was a pagodalike shelter, one of fifteen summerhouses built throughout the park in the 1860's. It was an octagonal structure, open at either end, with a solid and ornate roof and floor. The support beams were not squared-off slabs of featureless timber, but unhusked and knotty tree trunks whose branches reached up to merge with the ceiling. There were no walls, but six of the eight sides were lined with benches and handrails.
The whole thing came off looking primitive but complex, organic yet meticulously sculpted. It was as if the thing had grown, full-blown, from a mutant seed. It was 125 years old, and had held up nicely. It didn't look a day older than the dawn of Time.
The path was plateauing under Richie's feet when the woman popped out of the darkness to his left. Dewayne was maybe five steps behind her. There was no doubt that everyone was feeling the uphill sprint, but she had tired more quickly than her pursuer. It was a matter of seconds before Dewayne had her nailed.
Richie was bummed. He had been hoping for more than sloppy seconds, but it didn't look like it would work out that way. It was like playing Capture the Flag. There was no question that Dewayne was gonna have first dibs.
She was six feet into the summerhouse when Dewayne pounced onto her back. Her knees buckled under his weight, and she collapsed to the floor. She didn't scream. Even through his disappointment and exertion, Richie found that somewhat strange.
He entered the structure just as his friend flipped the woman over and used his knees to force her legs apart. She struggled like crazy, but it didn't do any good. Richie came to a halt beside them, staring down at her savagely snarling face.
Something wasn't right there. She seemed almost to be smiling. He knelt to get a closer look, and dread exploded in his chest like a fragmentation mine.
Because she was smiling, oh yes, and the smile was literally growing across her face, bones creaking as her jaws elongated and her long sharp teeth jutted outward. Her eyes were slit-irised balls of luminous gold; they fired out beams of light that bored straight into Dewayne's, making them glow as well . . .
Richie was no stranger to the sleazoid movie theatres on Forty-second Street. Next to kung fu fantasies and jackoff spectaculars, horror movies were his favorite things to watch. Staring at the creature transforming before him now, he couldn't help thinking about the vampire chick in Fright Night, the transformation scenes in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London. He'd never been seduced enough to believe what, he was seeing.
He believed it now.
Dewayne's mouth flopped open, but no scream was forthcoming. The only sound was something like a leaky radiator. His body had gone rigid. It started to jerk and twitch and shudder. The tight curls of his hair seemed to tighten and writhe like tiny, black snakes.
Then jagged lines of searing brilliance began to etch themselves across his forehead, blood rolling from the trenches of flesh they cut, blazing from within. Richie fell back, screaming, but he couldn't drag his gaze away from the horror.
A word was forming, letter by letter, as if branded onto Dewayne's face. One word, in large block letters of hellish fluorescence.
RAPIST
Dewayne jerked to his feet suddenly, though Richie knew for a fact that his friend was dead. Invisible fingers seemed to yank the corpse's belt open, yank down the zipper, drag the pants down to the knees. Something wet splutted down with them; in death, a final load had dropped. The body just stood there while the creature climbed out from under it, then toppled face first to the ground and lay still.
The monster smiled at Richie.
Richie screamed and began to run.
Out of the shelter, the altar on which his friend had been sacrificed instead. Down the path, away from the way he'd come, away from the nightmare behind him. The path itself, zigging and zagging in a subtle downward motion. The creature, loping after him on all fours like a hound of Hell.
A pond opened up before him. The water looked black and fetid. Richie stumbled and fell straight into it, and struck his head on a rock less than three feet under. The universe went dull and indifferent for a moment; just long enough for him to realize that he was swallowing water. Then he pulled himself together, and his head broke the surface just in time to see the monster hit the surface of the pond.
There was the ka-booming of a cannonball off a high dive, the requisite pillar of gushing spray. Richie whirled and screeched and ran in hideous slow motion, hands frantically dog-paddling before him. Underwater, no one can see you piss your pants. It was the only reassurance he had.
He was less than a foot from the other side when the hand closed around his ankle.
His throat sucked in for the power to scream, and got a quart of black water instead. It jetted up his nostrils as well, gagging him, flooding the inches around him with hundreds of anguished bubbles. He waited for his life to flash before his eyes, but there w
as nothing but darkness, nothing but darkness and the solid weight of the monster that held him now, grabbed him by the forearms and dragged him to the surface.
The monster was a man.
Richie sputtered and coughed and drooled, eyes bulging.
The monster was a man: no longer a woman, no longer the thing that had slaughtered Dewayne. The monster was a man with pale white skin and light brown hair and piercing eyes. It smiled at him as it reached for his throat and pinned the back of his head to the shore, leaning close.
"Now you know what it's like," the monster said. "Fun, huh? Did you ever think about what it was like to be on the receiving end of a fucker like you?"
Richie shook his head crazily back and forth, not in answer to the question.
"Well, now you know. Or maybe you don't." The man/monster probed its gaze into his own for a moment. Richie remembered what that gaze had done to his partner in crime, slammed his eyelids shut abruptly. The voice continued, its source mercifully invisible.
"No, I don't think that you've quite grasped it yet." The voice was smooth, ebullient, remorseless. "You need something more explicit. More dramatic, shall we say.
"No problem."
Richie felt himself begin to change.
It started with the burning of his skin. That would have been bad enough. The burning of his skin was like a trillion tattoo needles at once. Then he felt and heard his own bones stretching: spine, hips, limbs, skull. There were no words for the pain he felt. There were no rational sounds in his head at all.
And all the while, the Power thrummed through him like a turbine's roar. It numbed and disassociated him from the paling of his flesh, the jutting of his breasts, the widening of his hips and the recession of his genitals into the newly formed wet slit across his groin. He couldn't feel his hair grow blond, flow down past his shoulders. He most certainly couldn't feel the change in his apparel.
Until the thrumming stopped.
And the voice said, "Look."
And he found himself staring at the reflection in the water.
At the man who looked almost indescribably happy. At the woman, whose goggly eyes stared blankly back up at him.
At the woman who he and Dewayne had assaulted. At the woman who he had become.
"In a way, you're getting off easy," the man/monster said. "If you make it home, you can have a wonderful time with yourself.
"If you make it home," it repeated. And winked.
Richie Grover staggered backward, hit the edge of the pond, and clambered up onto the shore like a crab. By increments he realized the nature of his fate. He saw his brand-new, firm white tits, shimmering in their expensive jogging togs. He sensed the immensity of Central Park, sprawling all around him like a great dark jungle full of wild and horny beasts. He envisioned his appearance at the door of his parents' apartment, the what-the-fuck expression on the face of whoever opened the door.
"You'd better run," the man/monster advised him, "before you start looking good to me."
Then Richie ran, trim and hairless feminine legs propelling him forward. He heard Billy's laughter and his own heart pounding, alive in his ears like tribal drums.
As he ran deeper into a park that had never seemed to black and merciless.
As he ran deeper into a darkness that had no end.
THIRTY-ONE
THE WOMAN'S VERSION
By one o'clock, Billy had seven hundred dollars in his pocket and thirteen blood-red notches on his soul. Larry was deep into the now-ritual breaching of Brenda Porcaro. Albert was placing a call to some business associates, with regard to a pair of wayward tenants. Stan "the Man" Peckard was placing himself squarely in the front-row balcony seats of the Variety Photoplays, just in time for the thrilling climax of Objects of Desire ("PLUNGES THE FINAL INCHES INTO TOTAL SENSUALITY!!!"). Dennis Hamilton was sitting alone in a stylish Upper West Side bar, struggling with his gut feelings about one William Rowe. Dave Hart was sitting alone in his stylish Upper West Side apartment, struggling with a song of unrequited love.
And Mona was alone, in a drugged and battered dreamworld.
Where the nightmare never ended.
But only changed in shape.
Lisa sat curled on the sofa, polishing off her tenth greyhound of the day and wishing she still smoked. Enough vodka and grapefruit juice for one more drink remained; any minute now, she would stagger into the kitchen and polish it off.
She had been drinking slowly and steadily since noon, pacing herself so that she never got too drunk or too sober. The result was a steadily thrumming buzz that stripped away her inhibitions but left her coordination largely intact.
She'd spent three hours, all told, playing with good ol' Bubba. She'd spent another four hours just holding him while she cried her silly head off. Reading was out of the question; five bites of a cheese-and-sprout sandwich were all that she'd managed to put down. There were always more bookshelves, but she was afraid of waking Mona.
That left her with the TV set, which had been running on low volume throughout the day, where she could occasionally lose herself for up to five minutes at a time.
It left her with way too much time to think.
The news came on, a low simmer of global atrocity that Lisa tuned out with ease. She shifted her attention to the piles of books surrounding the sofa, the dismantled shelves, the imperfections in the white ceiling. There were a number of tiny hairs on her fingers that demanded careful scrutiny . . .
. . . And there was Mona, playing across the private screening room of her mind: a thousand luminous freeze-frames that alternately assuaged and assailed her sight. Dancing, provocative as Original Sin, in the Dave Hart video. Crying, as she announced her breakup with Billy. Moaning buckets, as she was fingered to orgasm. Grinning fiercely, as she spoke her piece to Paula on the subject of the male-finale dynamic.
Unconscious, with her face battered out of all recognition.
Walking expressionless through the kitchen, with the outer damage miraculously gone.
"Shit," Lisa hissed. Her mind's spinning wheels had dug a psychic Grand Canyon of futility over the last thirteen hours. How could she answer an insoluble question? How could she explain the inexplicable?
"That's easy," she murmured. "I can't." It was the most unsatisfactory explanation imaginable, but she was stuck with it. The only one who could answer her questions had been asleep for thirteen hours, and she was not about to interrupt that healing slumber. She would rather go crazy first.
Which was convenient, since that's exactly what she was doing.
There was a last cool swallow at the bottom of her glass. She brought the cold glass lip to her own, tilted it back.
And Mona's face appeared on the TV screen.
Lisa choked. Most of the greyhound made it back into the glass; a few sweet sticky drops spritzed onto her hand, her knees, the floor. She let out a series of pain-wracking coughs that doubled her over, then shot to her feet too quickly. Gravity and vertigo conspired to knock her back on her ass.
She fought them down, staggering on unsteady legs toward the tube. The anchorwoman's face had replaced Mona's; it wasn't nearly as nice, but it filled her with an equal measure of dread. Don't let me have missed it, she prayed to God and Channel 4 as she crashed to her knees before the set and flipped up the volume.
". . .was the third victim of the Smiley-Face Slasher," the newswoman said. "It followed by one day the killing of Christine Brackett, a thirty-four-year-old employee of Polynote Records
"Shit," Lisa hissed again, her fingers moving back to the volume.
Then a trio of black-and-white photos were montaged across the screen, and Lisa stayed her hand. They were pictures of the three dead women; and the one on the far right was Mona.
But not Mona.
"Whoa." It was the only thing she could think of to say. The resemblance was absolutely uncanny. Even with the volume up, she couldn't hear the woman's voice over the sudden manic prattle of her own internal ones.
A composite drawing.
Of Billy's face.
"It doesn't make sense," she informed herself, while the woman informed her subliminally of the Slasher Task Force now being assembled, citywide. "Not really. I mean, what could . . . could Billy have to do with it? It—"
A terrible moaning sound erupted from behind her. She whirled, sloshing the last recycled slug of greyhound across the floor. It didn't matter.
The sound came again.
It was coming from Mona's room.
In the dream, she was surrounded by fire. Rats with gargoyle faces were skittering and screeching across the walls and floor and ceiling, their mottled fur ablaze. Something huge and terrible stood just beyond them, in the center of the flames. Staring at her.
Smiling.
And Billy was there, directly before her. He was covered with blood. There was no way of knowing whether the blood was his own or somebody else's.
It's not so bad, he told her gently, his gore-smothered fingers reaching out for her throat.
And she screamed, left hand coming under-and-in to cup his forearm, right hand smacking down on the outside to lock the elbow . . .
Lisa's reaction was instinctive, requiring not a second of thought. She broke the hold and jumped back, in a fighting posture: body balanced, arms curled and ready, eyes burning holes in her assailant.
All in the thoughtless second.
Before Mona began to cry.
It took several seconds more for Lisa to ease herself back to the world of the wounded. Part of her mind was boggling at the fact that Mona had executed the arm-bar so well, from out of deepest slumber; part of her was fighting the adrenaline rush, the training she had so deeply ingrained.
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