Paul felt more hands grip him from behind. Maureen. With all her weight she pulled at him. Abby lunged with her spear and this time fully buried the tiny exacto blade in the heel of the hand. The fingers lost their purchase on Paul and he began to fall back into Maureen’s lap, but they quickly seized his pentagram talisman.
There was a high-pitched sound from behind the stacks of cardboard, as of a whistling tea kettle. Upper register steam whistle. The hand let go of Paul abruptly and he and Maureen tumbled backwards in a tangle.
Abby’s spear slipped free.
As the withdrawing hand loomed again, Paul’s Buck knife protruding, Abby looked up and saw ugly, crusted black charred areas on several fingertips and the thumb, and these scabs oozed sap and smoked.
It was apparent. The contact with the pentagram had burned it.
The hand sank from view. The high whistle seemed to move away and then drained off.
Maureen sobbed. Paul scrambled to his feet, shaking hard and his heart battering-ramming his inner wall. Abby, with her spear, knelt closer to them. “Your necklace burned it, Paul…did you see that?”
“Is it gone? Where’d it go?” cried Maureen. “How did it get right behind our boxes without us hearing it?”
Their backs rested against the stacks pushed up against the brick wall.
As far from the row of stacks that separated them from the main aisle as they could get. Which wasn’t very far.
Paul picked up his medallion and held it before his face. It didn’t feel hot to him. The properties of the lead? He doubted it was that scientific.
“It is some kind of devil or something, isn’t it?” Abby panted.
“A spirit,” Paul corrected. “Of some kind.”
“That’s why it’s afraid of us!” Abby hissed. “That’s why it didn’t show itself when it attacked us just now—all it did was reach around the boxes, Paul. It’s afraid of your necklace!”
“Maybe,” Paul said. “Probably.” His head turned slowly and glazed eyes settled on Abby’s. “You got a marker or pen?”
Abby caught on, patted her pockets. “Shit.”
Maureen glanced about the wooden floor in quick, nervous, bird-like jerks of her head.
Paul eyed the floor also. A crushed coffee cup. Squashed cigarette butts. Cellophane from a sandwich. A dusty unopened packet of ketchup…
Paul’s hand darted to the ketchup.
Abby dragged a folded box off one of the shorter stacks behind them.
It wasn’t a big box, so folded it wasn’t unwieldy. Paul tore the packet with his teeth.
Paul was the artist so Abby and Maureen watched reverently.
Squeezing the packet, trying not to use up too much ketchup too quickly, Paul painted a circle on the cardboard, and within that, shakily, a five-pointed star.
««—»»
The driver for Westman Freight cursed, his curse coming out in cold steam. He had knocked, waited, knocked, called out. Tried to force the knob. Locked. He walked around the building to the back docks, lighting up a cigarette for the illusion of warmth.
No lights on back here, but there was street lamp light and the driver could see to mount concrete steps to the back dock platform. It jutted out in such a way that trucks could back up to the platform, but not flush with the dock doors as they could at the shipping dock. Between the two dock doors was a trash compactor-dumpster, blue and immense. Plastic rubble strewn around it.
The driver tugged on one door, then the other. Both locked. He cursed.
Now he headed around the building to the door through which most employees came and went, opening onto the street. Locked. He pounded its metal surface loudly and called in. No wonder they couldn’t hear him with the fucking radios so loud in there. “Hey!” he bellowed, his truck driver’s temper getting roused.
If it weren’t for the radios he’d think the place was shut down for the night, it was so dark. No lit windows. But there were also cars along the street, and there had been cars around back in the dirt parking lot, he had noticed.
“Come on, morons,” he muttered under his steamy breath, and thumped the door again.
After a few moments he strode around to the shipping dock again. Gave the door one last pummeling. “Hey! Westman Freight!” He sighed. “Fuck it.” He skipped down the cement steps. Where was that little guy Paulie?
Fuck it. No skin off his nose—he was just a driver. He’d call his boss from a pay phone and let him sweat it. Let the boss call Rim and ask what was up. He’d have a cup of coffee. But he wasn’t going to stay out all night—no fucking way. He wanted to be home and with his wife by midnight.
The trucker pulled himself up into his warm cab, closed himself in.
He didn’t think to lay on his horn a few times. Anyway, it was late and the neighbors wouldn’t appreciate it.
The truck from Westman Freight belched and rumbled and pulled away.
««—»»
Paul had felt weak. Now he felt potent.
Abby had her spear, and Paul deemed it best to keep his hands mostly free, so Maureen seemed the logical choice to carry their pentagram shield—and she was only too willing. She could hide behind it. She held it up in both hands and Paul held his removed necklace aloft as the three of them left their bunker and entered the main aisle.
They looked up and down the aisle and saw nothing. Heard nothing—no tea kettle whistling, nothing moving. But then they hadn’t heard it move up behind their barricade of stacked cardboard, either.
“Keep close,” Paul reminded them in a hushed, grave voice. “No matter what.”
They began moving slowly down the aisle in the direction of the shipping room. Paul faced forward, Abby faced mostly sideways but scanned, Maureen walked carefully backwards, holding up the cardboard to cover their retreat. Their shoulders brushed and several times they stepped on heels, irritating each other.
“Should we got through the caf,” asked Abby, “or through the curtain?”
“It might be in the bathrooms or right around the corner of the door.”
“It might be right around the corner or behind the curtain.”
“The curtain is straightest and quickest. Don’t talk.”
Already they had reached the corridor bordered by the cafeteria partition on their right and the “cage,” where parts were stored, on their left.
The heavy canvas curtain ahead. Closed. Through its plastic window the shipping room looked glaringly reassuring and empty. How could they ever have been fools enough to leave it? Paul eyed the cage anxiously.
Dark in there, but he quickly established its contents as harmless. Abby likewise stared through the glass windows in the cafeteria wall. Those inappropriately cheery orange seats and yellow tables. Luminous windows in vending machines.
Maureen’s especially anxious eyes ricocheted like laser beams throughout the receding cardboard room, expecting to see some hideous freak of Nature spring up from the primordial forest of shadows.
A face popped up in the cafeteria window and stared directly into Abby’s eyes. She screamed.
The cute little boy wore an innocent half-smile; he was almost cherubic in mood, though a little too shy, pale, and thin.
Paul swung around with his amulet. Maureen jumped and whipped the cardboard around to face the windows. “Go away!” Maureen cried in desperation.
The tea kettle whistle could be heard as the head quickly ducked back down out of sight, but none of them saw the sweet smile falter or the lips open to utter the sound; the expression had remained constant, like an unthinking mask.
“It worked,” Maureen babbled, almost laughing, “it worked!”
“Beautiful,” hissed Paul. “Keep moving.”
“Be careful,” Abby warned, “it might be coming around behind the curtain.”
“I know. Yeah, give me the spear and you hold the pentagram.”
“Okay.” That sounded good to Abigail.
The curtain was within spear range. “Whoa. Hold
it,” said Paul. The girls shuffled to a halt. It wasn’t easy for Maureen to resist looking behind her. Abby kept her gaze fixed on the cafeteria windows, visibly vibrating but gripped by her own intense, steely determination. Of the two women, Paul fleetingly recognized now, as he prepared to probe the curtain, he was more grateful to have Abby with him than Maureen. Despite their debating over strategies, he acknowledged a respect for her. If life ever went normal again, and their jobs in this place resumed, he would be glad to let her be his assistant group leader as she had requested, to his previous disgust…no matter how small their masking team was.
Maureen—she was holding up adequately, but he felt a simple protective sympathy for her rather than respect. He would defend her, particularly, with his life. It was good to have someone to fight for.
Paul extended the broom-handle lance, the razor tip slimy with the honey-thick goo the creature carried for blood.
He poked the curtain in several places. Stepped a bit closer, poked further. Paul stabbed into the fabric itself and used the spear to pull the curtain open in one violent whoosh.
Nothing beyond. “Okay,” he panted.
As one they shuffled onward. Paul reached the curtain and traded Abby back her spear quickly, extended the pentagram around the corner to the left. Then poked his head into the shipping department. Clear to left and right. “Okay,” he repeated. They were through.
They dashed to the farthest table, where Paul worked. “Magic markers—hurry,” he instructed, snatching up stray hunks of cardboard.
“Draw pentagrams.” While the girls did this, Paul grabbed Maureen’s shield and a roll of tape. Necklace again hanging down his chest, he darted back toward the cafeteria.
Gingerly, but also boldly, he ventured into the cafeteria threshold. It looked empty in there, but… Fuck taping up the cardboard sign—Paul stepped into the caf and used his thick-tipped marker to draw a pentagram directly on the door. He leaped out of the caf, pulling the swinging door shut after him. On the glass, wire-meshed window in the door he drew another of the magical symbols.
Had it ducked into one of the bathrooms? If so, he could draw a pentagram inside the opposite door as well and on all the partition windows—trap the creature alive. But Paul wasn’t willing to gamble on entering the cardboard room again, new-found potent boldness or not.
Instead he drew the curtain closed and inked a pentagram on the window in it. The ink was faint on the plastic, however, didn’t take too well. He glanced around him, spotted a number of paper cups filled with the paint first shift used to touch up defects in the paint of finished pieces. With a paintbrush Paul the artist deftly rendered a thick black pentagram on the translucent plastic window.
Across the room, Abby had taped one of the cardboard signs in the window of the door that led upstairs, too leery of opening the door to draw a symbol on its inner surface. Maureen taped another sign to the red moveable safety bar on the elevator platform, so that it could be seen clearly from above the shaft should anything attempt coming down that way, somehow. Now it was their turn to block off all its exits and access routes, and they attacked this with relish.
Paul painted a symbol in the window of the metal door that led downstairs, waited a moment, then jerked the door open and painted a huge pentagram on the door itself. He let the door swing shut.
“Just in case,” he said, and ran across the room to paint on the window in the door that led out onto the shipping dock. Rejoining the girls, he opened the staircase door and painted on the wood to support the sign Abby had taped to the glass.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Abby said.
Paul let the door swing shut and smiled sinister triumph. “Looks like it.” “So now we just wait for Westman, right?” Maureen said anxiously.
“It can’t get in here, and we don’t have to leave.”
Abby pointed to the clock across the room. “Paul, it’s twenty past ten.”“Oh no— no! ” Maureen whined.
“It’s okay—listen,” said Paul. “Even if Westman came already he’ll call his boss, and his boss will call Ted at home.”
“At this hour?”
“Yeah—I’ve called Ted some nights when a truck didn’t show up or something. Anyway, it’s only an hour-and-a-half ’til midnight. If we aren’t out of here by twelve, people will come looking for us. Why don’t you give the phone another try?”
Maureen and Abby headed into the office while the intercom broadcasted a Van Halen song, and under that, less distinct, George Harrison’s Beware Of Darkness, one of Paul’s favorite songs. His spine tingled.
218
Chapter
9
There was no distinct border he crossed, no abrupt change, but as Ray wound through the tunnel-like wooded back roads on the drive to his house it seemed as though somewhere along the way he had entered another country, skirted some kind of checkpoint. He had passed or seen no other car for some time now; in this country he was the entire population but for them. The farmhouse he finally passed was black, unlit, impossible to be thought of as containing life—just a mau-soleum by the side of the road. It fell behind.
He didn’t put on the radio for companionship; a ridiculous concept.
There was an iron curtain, and Van Halen and Culture Club and such nonsense should not penetrate here with their foolish loud gaiety. This was a somber land, and no outside voice should reach here.
Ray’s anger almost had a gladness to it, a relief. It fueled his car, this rocket plunging through space, through a black hole into dimensions beyond. But solemn voices inside him made his eager rage falter, cracked chinks in his armor.
Heidi. Poor innocent Heidi. She had extended her life to him, given to him, in the end had begged for him to go on living. And now she was dead, because of him. Yes…his fault. His fault. Her family would come home to find their loved Heidi, be shattered forever—his fault. And her boyfriend. Her fiancee. He loved her. He wanted to marry her. Once he had wanted to kill himself over her, as Ray himself had come so close.
How could Ray have been disgusted with him? He had seen himself in Tim’s actions, and had been disgusted with that. Tim had done no harm to Heidi, or to Ray. Ray had disgraced Tim, dishonored him, cheated him, all out of his own selfish, desperate lust and greed. Ray hoped to God that Tim would never learn this final despairing ruth. Ray had not put himself in Tim’s shoes; he would kill anyone who touched his fiancé, if it were him. If he could ever have a fiancé. Such a pathetically hopeless thought.
Tim had been good for Heidi; Ray had gotten her killed. Why did women invariably gravitate to the dark forces, the primal animal, and not to the secure, the peaceful—was it excitement? Adventure? Ray had always thought of himself as the secure and peaceful, had cursed women for gravitating to rough types and louts and druggies and batterers and the insensitive. Now, compared to the normalcy and stability of someone like Tim, Ray felt sick, morbid, poisonous…dangerous. Why, Heidi, why? I am the scum, Ray’s inner voice droned with fatalistic conviction. Twisted little pitiful factory boy—even Heidi’s parents had been right.
The very least that he could do for her, the very least he could do to redeem himself for his sins, was to avenge her. Or die trying.
He was afraid, but he was not terrified. He did not want to die, but perhaps he deserved to die…and he was prepared to die.
He was anxious for the confrontation. As they had been waiting for him, so had he been waiting to confront them. Ray now seemed to understand things unsaid and unthought, beyond his conscious understanding.
His conscious had shifted into the role of mere mechanical vehicle.
The car slowed, passed the spot where the goat had lain. He turned into his driveway, the headlamps sweeping across the chestnut tree.
Grooved and thick like the leg of some towering Godzilla creature. Leaf scales and night, its body. The car rolled past the yawning maw of his garage, a black hole framed in rotting wood. He stopped the car closer to the house than usual—just a q
uick dart to the door would do it. But he sat there for the moment. Doors locked, windows rolled up, the .38 snub in his right fist.
The outside light was still on, the same rooms lit and some unlit, as he had left them. But that could be the trap. His anxiousness stumbled a little—he was hesitant to step out of the car, as though its door was the last, deciding portal.
A lot could happen from here to the back door. Not to mention what might be inside the house. But he wasn’t eager to be surrounded here, which could happen at any minute, any moment…and driving away at this point was beyond unthinkable.
Ray extinguished his car’s lights, cracked the door and stepped out.
He reached the back door, through the storm door and the windows in the door proper saw no one in the back hall, quickly swung the outer door open and pushed the inner door inward. Ray moved to unlock the door to his apartment. Shoved the door open all the way, aimed his gun.
The refrigerator hummed. The doorway to the bathroom was black.
Behind the stove? This was further away, the bathroom nearest—he would deal with each threat in the order that he came to it. He didn’t want his back open, and reached behind himself to shut the door and turn the locking switch in the knob.
Revolver extended in both hands, he swung and planted himself in an official police firing stance aiming into his cramped bathroom. No one.
Next, the stove and the livingroom close behind. Ray swung around the stove, found nothing, jerked his head toward the spacious central livingroom. Switching the .38 to his left, he blindly opened the broom closet, closed his hand on the .22 rifle and jerked it out hurriedly as if expecting a guillotine blade to whoosh down on his wrist. Ah, that was better. The
.38 was just a life preserver; the rifle in his hands was life boat, solid and reassuring weight. Almost a shield across his body. The pistol, being so small, he had tucked into a front pocket.
Ray stepped into his livingroom.
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