by Simon Clark
”Can't sleep?”he asked.
”There's too many things going round in my mind.”
”Me, too.”
”Would you like a drink?”
”No,”he whispered. ”I'll tell you what I do need right now. I need to hold you, Robyn.”
In a small voice, Robyn said, ”Thank you.”She knew what he'd do next.
There, in the darkened bedroom, he slid across the bed to her, slipping his arms around her as he came closer. She felt his lips on hers. Her lover's muscles were rocklike with tension. She knew she could help him relax. She had the ability to relieve that angst. Just a couple of months ago when he'd got himself all wired over an incident at college, when he'd been wrongly accused of copying another student's assignment, she'd eased him from his anxiety. Noel's arms had been as tense as this; the muscles in his face had been so hard that, to the touch of her lips, it seemed as if his skin overlaid a structure of solid steel. But she'd run a deep tub for him, into which she'd poured scented oil. After that, she'd lit sandalwood candles. Then she'd seduced him. By morning he lay sleeping with a relaxed smile on his face, all his features softened.
Now he needed to make love.
It makes perfect sense, she told herself. This is what we both need.
Lovemaking will release all that pent up muscle tension. Afterwards, we'll sleep until morning. Now come on, Robyn, let him inside of you.
You can do this. You've done it before. Jeez, how do you think you became pregnant? An immaculate conception? You became pregnant because you got naked with Noel and consented-eagerly lustfully consented-to him making love to you. It was only the fault of that perfidious little pill that you must have forgotten to swallow that got you impregnated…
The wash of thoughts as Robyn felt his mouth pressed hard to hers was intended to flood away the instinct to reject his attentions. She tried hard. She knew sexual penetration couldn't harm the fetus. This would be good for both of them. After all, this was a virgin bed as far as they were concerned. It was time to hit that first big erotic home run.
Noel's passion became a tidal wave of love, sweeping over her, leaving her breathless as he kissed her. His hands caressed her body. Slowly, he slid his hand up the inside of her nightdress. Fingertips found her breasts, stroking one then the other, then lightly pinching her nipples.
The rush of his respiration became a hurricane. He rolled her onto her back, then used the stroking of her inner thigh to gently ease her legs apart.
She thought: Let him do this, Robyn. You love him. He loves you. You want to be with him. Sex is good. Sex mates life partners.
He shrugged off the T-shirt he wore for bed, then moved over so even though she couldn't see him, she sensed him poised above her in the darkness. His excited breath brushed against her face. He shifted his balance so he could lower himself onto her as a prelude to slipping his penis between her legs. As always he was gentle. Considerate. Despite his muscular power, never clumsy Never thoughtlessly rushed.
But… dear God… I want him to stop. I want him to stop now. I can't bear him to enter me.
Once more that alien revulsion she'd experienced before at the prospect of sex with Noel erupted inside of her. It roared through her arteries, screamed through bones, through her nerves. No. No! NO! Her muscles formed fierce knots that sent flashes of agony searing through her stomach. She clenched her jaws together to stop herself from screaming out. She knew her face twisted and contorted into a mask of pure revulsion. Common sense told her sex with Noel would be good, would be beneficial. Life-affirming. But something in her body wouldn't permit it. Tension formed hard fingers that fiercely gripped her heart, squeezing it with such savagery she nearly passed out. She knew that if Noel pushed his penis into her it would kill her. The notion was absurd, it was insane… but there it was… the overwhelming furnace of instinct that blazed inside her. Whatever happens she must not let Noel enter her body. If he makes love to me he will KILL the baby.
These thoughts flashed through her head in a split second as she struggled not to cry out as cramps jagged her stomach. While all the time the potential murderer of her unborn child spoke lovingly to her, stroked her thigh, kissed her breasts.
One of her hands was pressed to Noel's back. Robyn kept her fingers bunched into a fist because that alien, evil-minded instinct urged her to dig her fingernails into his skin and claw him away from her… anything to protect the baby swimming inside her womb. Her other hand gripped the bed frame at her side. Even at this moment the rational side of her hoped she could ride out this emotional storm. That she could lie there. Let Noel make love to her. Then it would be over. But the rational side sank beneath an instinct raging that she should protect herself from penetration.
”I love you,”he told her.
Then it started. The gentle pressure against her vagina. A muscley torpedo shape, engorged with blood. A pulse beat within its shaft. Noel let out a heartfelt sigh of pleasure as he eased himself down.
'Wo.”Robyn's rejection of Noel came as a hiss through gritted teeth rather than a shout. Her hand whipped outward to the bedside table. As if watching from a distance, she saw herself grab the clock radio and smash it into the side of Noel's head. It all happened in a split second in the dark. And, dear God, she was appalled.
”Noel, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hit you. I don't know what's-”
”Robyn.”Noel switched on the flashlight. The light bounced back from the wall, revealing her boyfriend kneeling up in bed, looming over her. His eyes glittered with total shock. ”Robyn, what the hell did you do that for?”
”Please. I'm sorry. I felt sick. It's what's happening here… Noel?
Noel, what are you doing?”Panic rose inside of her as she watched him move. ”Noel, please come back to bed.”
Instead, she watched him drag on his jeans. He didn't bother with a T-shirt or shoes. In horror she watched him open the drawer in his bedside table, pull out the canvas wallet that contained the handgun. In silent rage he dragged the gun from the wallet, threw the canvas bag aside, then checked the gun, spinning the magazine so he could see the brassy gleam of the ammunition.
”Noel… oh, God, please don't do this.”
He picked up the flashlight. The hard white light reformed his face into a mask riven by gullies, scarred by shadow. God, yes, there was a fury there. A blazing fury that screamed violence.
He hissed: ”Here we are, holed up like rats in a stinking box. But I'm not taking any more. I've got this.”He held up the handgun that gleamed with all its hard, dark lethality. ”I'm going to search this place-every damn room and closet. If there are any freaks in this building I'm going to find them.”
He strode from the room, the light of fury burning in his eyes. When she heard a door thump shut in the distance, she knew Noel had left the apartment. Robyn knew, also, she had no other choice of action. She would have to follow her boyfriend into the Luxor's dark and brooding heart.
***
Robyn Vincent followed the man she loved most in the world into darkness.
Pausing only to light a candle and to drag his denim jacket over her long nightdress, she went downstairs. In his rage, Noel wasn't thinking straight. He'd left the stairwell door open to the lobby, oblivious to the chance of an intruder slipping in.
This wasn't like Noel. That fury had exploded his reason. But then, he had good reason to be angry. She'd rejected his romantic advances by hitting him on the side of the head with the clock radio. At that moment instinct had overwhelmed reason. If there'd been an axe on the bedside table she'd have struck him with that. The battery-operated timepiece was lightweight. It couldn't have inflicted any real wounds to his head.
If anything it would have felt more like a slap, but a slap that was charged full of rejection and numerous implications. In the fury of rejection-and denied sex-he was determined to vent that anger.
He loved her enough not to discharge his fury on her; even so, she was scared of what he'd do. Maybe he'd
find an outlet for his sexual and emotional frustration by killing crows with the gun. But what if some vagrant had found shelter in one of the dressing rooms backstage. Sweet Jesus, someone's going to get hurt tonight.
***
Logan waited in the shadows. Twenty paces away, Joe beat on the door to the apartment where Ellery Hann lived with his family. After ten minutes of pounding, a growling bear of a man appeared. In answer to the question, the man told Joe that no, Ellery wasn't home and then snarled at Joe to ”Fuck off.”Joe didn't need telling twice and returned to Logan.
Joe began, ”Ellery's not-”
”I know: not fucking there.”Logan eased the submachine gun back into the folded combat jacket he carried. Even in this district, even at midnight, he wouldn't be careless enough to walk around with the firearm in plain view. He nodded at the streets that wore the weight of midnight with a sinister air. ”I know where the stutter monkey is hiding.”He grinned. ”And if I'm right, he'll think he's sitting pretty where no one can find him. But that's going to suit us fine, Joe, because it's miles from anywhere. No one's gonna hear the stutter monkey scream.”
Logan and Joe went back to the purple Chevy with its crust of rust defacing once-pristine paintwork. Its motor ran sweetly though. And within moments, Logan was cruising with a menace-laden confidence in the direction of the Luxor dance hall.
***
Robyn Vincent crossed the lobby. The burning candle she carried revealed her ghostly reflection in the glass walls of the ticket booth. All around her, the Egyptian decor seemed to sway in the wavering light.
Shadows bloomed, to swell across reproductions of tomb paintings, or to run fingers of darkness across plaster moldings of pharaonic faces.
Above her, the painted Egyptian eye gazed down from the ceiling. Bare feet whispering on carpet, she approached the doors that led to the dance floor.
”Noel?”She found it hard to lift her voice much above a whisper. ”Noel?”
Maybe the savage rage had driven him in a run across the dance floor to that labyrinth of corridors and empty rooms. Even when she paused she couldn't hear his footsteps. She glanced back at the door that led to the apartment, hopeful that Benedict or Ellery would have woken and joined her. Maybe she should have roused them? No, better this way. She didn't want them to see Noel gripped by this ugly anger. He'd never been like this before. Soon it should pass and he'd become the gentle man that she loved.
Taking a breath as if she was about to plunge into a cold lake, Robyn pushed open one of the large doors that led onto the dance floor.
Candlelight spilled through to illuminate at least a little of the void.
She made out the glimmer of bare wooden floors. The stage revealed itself as a faintly pale line in the midst of all that darkness.
Swallowing, she moved out onto the dance floor. An uncanny excitement at being here traded sparks of fear with what she might encounter and a fear of what might happen because of Noel angrily storming through the building with the loaded gun in his hand.
And above her head, above the roof, the crows must still be squatting there, waiting to capture a soul that would be released here soon. Robyn shivered. Hot dry air seemed to be yielding to a cooler draft. The shiver ran deep into her bones. This was the place where others had passed through a supernatural gateway to The Place, as Ellery had called it. A cool, dripping woodland Place. Populated by… shivering, she closed off the thought. Moving farther across the dance floor, she saw the armchair in its center emerge from the darkness as candlelight touched it. Only from here it had the loathsome squatting presence of a huge toad, the kind of monster toad that would come hopping all bulging-eyed from The Place. The Place would breed creatures like that, just as surely as it bred the distorted men and women she had seen.
Refusing to be frightened into retreat by what both candlelight and her imagination conjured for her, she walked slowly forward, holding the candle high like she'd become some fragile Statue of Liberty with a living, beating heart. Once she'd taken enough steps toward the squatting toad monster that waited for her on the dance floor, the candlelight killed the object's toadiness. She saw it was nothing more than the armchair after all. Still she walked forward. Now the light revealed the raised stage that contained the table. Beyond the table hung the stage curtain that was high as the wall and as wide as the stage itself. In the center, standing close to six feet tall, a stain had formed in the lower part of the curtain. In the dim candlelight it showed as an elongated shadow, bulbous at the top, narrowing toward the bottom. Robyn walked toward it, watching the candle's radiance brighten against the material of the old stage curtain. Again her imagination and the candle's random trickery conjured odd images-just as they'd conspired to make the armchair resemble a toad. Now, there in front of her, the curtain appeared to bear a kind of Turin Shroud image. The stain in the fabric forming the silhouette of a man with an odd lumpy head, long arms256 Robyn stopped sharply and drew in a breath of shock. That's no stain.
There, in the faint light of the candle, stood a figure. It had remained as still as if it had been carved from granite. It had been watching her all the time as she'd walked across the dance floor.
”Robyn. You shouldn't have followed me down here.”
Startled, she nearly dropped the candle as she spun in the direction of the voice. Noel had walked onto the side of the stage from behind the curtain, then called out to her. He was perhaps fifteen paces to the right of the figure standing stage center.
Noel shone the flashlight in her direction, temporarily dazzling her.
”Robyn? Has something happened?”
Even though blinded by the light, she still stared at the misshapen figure. What's more, she guessed Noel had suddenly figured out what she was looking at. He turned the flashlight from her. Through phantom light spots that haunted her dazzled retina, she could see what happened next only too clearly. He directed the hard beam of light full onto the figure. She saw the shellfish gray pallor of its skin, the same misshapen head, its glass ball eyes that blazed at her. The mouth pulsed like an excised heart there on its face. A pulsating flapped and flanged thing that burned a shocking crimson against the lifeless gray. Then it turned and raised an arm toward Noel-an elongated arm that tapered to a point where a human hand should be.
Robyn caught her breath. She saw that Noel not only pointed the flashlight; in the other hand he aimed the gun, too. The flash lit up the dance floor like a lightning burst. The report sounded more brittle than an explosion. It was the same sound as a bone snapping, only amplified to earsplitting volume. The creature spun around, slashed open the curtain with its stalk-like limbs, then vanished into the backstage area.
Gunsmoke hung there, a ghostly blue presence on the post-midnight air.
Noel ran to the center of the stage where the monster had stood. He shone the light at the boards, then he turned to her and called out, ”There's blood… I've hit it!”
CHAPTER 25
Benedict West pushed through the lobby door onto the Luxor's dance floor. Behind him, Ellery followed, still pulling his T-shirt over his head. Both men carried flashlights. The time was fifteen minutes past midnight.
Benedict had woken hearing voices. Realizing it was Robyn and Noel talking in angry whispers, he decided to stay put in bed. Maybe Noel had taken the opportunity to try persuading Robyn to leave the Luxor. It was only when he heard the apartment door bang that he'd woken Ellery.
Together they'd headed downstairs. And together they'd stopped dead by the ticket booth when they'd heard the gunshot.
Racing through the doors, they saw the scene that now confronted them.
My God, they're staging a play… That was the conviction that for a split second occupied Benedict's mind. Standing there on the stage, gun in one hand, pointing it toward stage center, smoke still drooling from the muzzle in veins of blue, was Noel. In the other hand he held a flashlight, which he directed to that same part of the stage. And there was such an intense express
ion molding his face: fascination, mingling with horror and amazement. A wide-eyed look that had been frozen on his face as he held that immobile, gun-in-hand pose. Meanwhile, on the dance floor, equally statue-like, stood Robyn in a white nightdress and denim jacket. No… not a play-reality. Cold, hard reality. Something had happened to them.
Benedict moved forward. ”Robyn. Noel. Are you two okay?”
Robyn remained fixed in that position. Noel seemingly could only move his head. He rotated it so he turned his face to Benedict. Now the man's expression morphed to one of triumph. ”I've shot it,”he told them. ”I've gone and damn well shot it!”
The act of Noel speaking dissipated Robyn's shock. She let out a breath, her knees buckling a little as she glanced back at Benedict and Ellery.
”It was right there on the stage. It was looking at me when Noel came through from the backstage area. It was looking at me, then-”
”Then it turned, saw me, and lunged at me,”Noel interrupted. ”I squeezed off a shot before it could touch me.”
Benedict reached Robyn. ”It was the same one?”
Robyn gave a laugh that was glittery with shock. ”Lip Boy? The Mouth Monster? Yes, it was the same one.”
Benedict turned to Ellery. ”Stay here with Robyn.”He ran to the stage and vaulted onto it. Then he swept the blazing light over the area Noel had indicated. A Frisbee-sized pool of red glistened on the boards.
”Noel hit it,” Benedict confirmed. ”There's blood… lots of it, too.”He looked up as Noel walked forward to stare in fascination at the disk of gore. At last he lowered the gun. ”Noel? Do you know where the bullet struck?”
