That strange urge bobbed to the surface of Jonathan’s consciousness again, that horrifying desire to smash Rhino’s big face in. He gave in and popped him once on the cheekbone. In the ten seconds of silence that followed, the world seemed to hold its breath. No crickets alive, no frogs, no ducks to shit in the water and make it foul. Just Jonathan and his best friend, who now looked as if he’d been shot.
“I … I’m sorry, Rhino … I … I … uh …” His voice trailed off to nowhere. Rhino’s face looked suddenly haggard and grim in the dying light. When he spoke his voice was low, almost a murmur.
“You know what I could do to you if I wanted to, right? I could break you in so many pieces they’d need a microscope to find what’s left. But that’s not what I want. I know what I want, but I don’t think you do.”
Jonathan hung his head. “Sorry, Rhino, but on this one you’re not my friend. I already caused one person I loved to get killed, and I’m not going to do it again. This one I do myself.”
He cleared his throat softly. “In other words, if you want to be my friend, leave me alone.”
More silence. The park had died. Rhino rubbed his nose and sighed. Then he shuffled around and walked away.
Jonathan started off in the other direction, toward home and the only hope of ending the nightmare. His shoulder burned like red coals, aching, aching. It didn’t matter. Only one thing mattered now, and it was at the bottom of a lake, possibly buried in mud a foot deep, possibly gone for good.
But he ran anyway. There was nothing else to do.
Chapter •
Eleven
It was at the point when Jonathan found it hard to rake air into his overworked lungs that his tiny apartment building loomed in the growing moonlight. His elderly Chevrolet was parked at the curb out front, nothing changed, nothing wrong. No sign of the coach’s familiar van; he and Pac-Man were doubtless back at the coach’s place, whooping it up with a six-pack of beer. Well, they could forget about Jonathan ever rejoining the football team. This was the last laugh they would have at his expense.
The house was dark. Neighboring houses backlit the white siding the landlord had finally gotten around to putting up after the old gray asphalt siding rotted away, and except for the front door, everything was as it should be.
He slowed to a walk, opened the fence gate, and went the short distance to the front. The door looked as if it had been to the moon and back, charred and cratered. It hung slightly ajar on its battered hinges. Jonathan forced himself to breathe easier, telling himself that no, there was no danger here. No Pinker, no danger.
He shoved the door slowly open with the flat of one hand, peering inside, his breath now frozen in his chest by this god-awful fear that capriciously came and went whenever his mind dwelled too long on the name Pinker. Once more he told himself that no one was here. He picked up the ruined doorknob from where it had fallen on the floor and jammed it back in place. To his surprise, it latched. Chalk another one up to Lady Luck.
He stepped fully inside. Moonlight drifted in through the west windows, faint and bone white, turning the furniture into ghostly humps, the floor a black pit. He decided enough was enough, and flipped up the switch to the hallway light. It glowed alive instantly, killing the Halloween appearance of the rooms.
Oooch, Jonathan thought. Don’t think about killing.
He breathed a long, whistling sigh of relief as the fear drained out of his system, thinking, Thank you, God, that no one is here and I am safe. Perhaps I will become a priest or minister, even a rabbi if you deliver me from this evil.
He grinned to himself. Worn out, out of breath, bullet wound in the shoulder, and here he was making mental jokes with himself. Ain’t it cute. He went back to the brown slab of Swiss cheese that had been his door and pushed it firmly shut. Once more he surveyed the place, once more convincing himself that nothing was out of order.
He headed to the closet at the end of the hallway to get the diving mask. He passed the bathroom door. It was shut. Big deal, he thought. Sometimes I leave it shut. Only …
… only someone was taking a shower inside.
His heart jumped into his throat and rebounded to the insoles of his shoes. Not again, please not again. Not Alison again. It was too much to bear.
He eased the door open. Moonlight beamed through the single window above the toilet, showing a room filled with steam. The noise of water in the shower shifted pitch as the Someone inside moved about. Shoes clunked against porcelain, and squeaked much as Rhino’s big shoes had squeaked when they were wet.
Spiffy, Jonathan thought as new terror surged through his veins. The boogeyman is taking a shower in my bathtub, it has to be the boogeyman because who else but the boogeyman (or Alison?) would smear huge quantities of blood all over the walls, the mirror, track blood in big footprints that dead-ended at the tub? For God’s sake, who else?
And who would write this on one wall …
STOP HIM JONATHAN PLEEEASE
… but Alison. No boogeyman at all, just a pretty girl who died last year and has the pesky habit of popping up through the drain and scaring the living shit out of me.
The shoes in the shower went on clunking. The water splashed one way, the other way, now straight down. Clunk clunk clunk.
Jonathan swept the shower curtain aside with one big swipe, knowing that this time Alison would be as she really was, belly bloated and split open with decay, skull pushing through the maggoty flesh of her melting face, hands stitched to each other on her stomach just as the mortician had stitched them when he bled her like a hanging pig and squirted two gallons of formaldehyde through her veins. Teeth yellow, fingernails rotted off, hair a wet clump barely hanging on to the mushy goop that had been her scalp, jaw wrenched open because the gums that had held the giant jaw staple had rotted, lips that were wrinkled and soggy like a tomato left in the sun to rot.
But had they buried her in her shoes?
“Alison?” he said, cringing back.
He peeked through the steam and gloom.
Nope. Not Alison this time. Something, perhaps, that was worse.
The coach had not bothered to take his clothes off before getting into the shower. He was drenched with blood, standing partially away from the stream of water, his pants soaked with water and blood. He was rinsing a large butcher knife over and over. Its shiny blade gleamed weakly in the flat moonlight.
He turned and gave Jonathan an evil smile. “Evening, Jonathan. Alone now, hmm?”
Jonathan staggered backward. The smell of blood was worse than the stagnant water of the lake had been. His back thudded into a wall. “Coach Cooper?” he asked, knowing it was not.
Cooper held the knife up for him to see. “If someone gets in your way, you gotta run right through him. Remember what I told you?”
He climbed out of the tub, favoring one leg that seemed lame. He took a splashing step through the blood, giggling. “I’m gonna rip your heart out, Jonathan!”
Jonathan didn’t wait around to see if this was true. He bolted through the door and slammed it shut, then headed for the front door. Behind him the bathroom door exploded in a gigantic burst of wood chips as Cooper charged through, shrieking and bellowing. His head swiveled back and forth, his eyes bulged and glassy. He grinned again.
“No more Mister Nice Guy!” he roared, and charged at Jonathan, who was within arm’s reach of the remains of the front door. Cooper scurried over on his uneven legs while water flooded out of his pants, running blindingly fast for a cripple, and tackled Jonathan at the knees. Both went down, Jonathan with a yelp of surprise, Cooper with a satisfied grunt. The thing that had been the coach slid on the wet floor and banged against the door. He pushed himself up on his hands, the right one clutching the cleanly washed knife. He swung at Jonathan, who jerked backward while the blade cut the air with a loud whooshing noise, barely missing his throat.
Jonathan jumped up, sliding and skating on the floor. Cooper struggled to his feet, using holes in the do
or as finger grips. His eyes seemed to gleam with that awful reddish color.
“Ah, God,” Jonathan moaned. “Not you. Coach.”
He laughed, no longer with the voice of the irascible coach, but instead with the voice Jonathan had heard in so many dreams, so many living nightmares. It was the grating, howling voice of Pinker.
“Cooper’s gone bye-bye, asshole. You too!”
He lunged. The whispering blade cut past Jonathan’s left ear as he jumped sideways. The knife punched through the wall behind him all the way to the hilt. Plaster dust puffed out. Pinker grunted, trying to pull it free. Jonathan did the first thing that came to mind, making mental apologies to the coach if he ever regained control of his body.
He slammed a foot sideways against Pinker’s bad knee, putting all his body weight into it. Pinker went down with a scream, knife forgotten, holding his ruined knee in both hands while the back of his shirt sopped up the pink water he had dragged with him from the bathroom. Jonathan tried the door but Pinker was blocking it with his body, and the coach had never been a lightweight.
“Get you,” Pinker groaned, looking up at him with his familiar flat and stupid gaze. “Messed with me the last time …”
Jonathan ran for the bedroom, slammed the door shut, and did the thing he had seen dozens of times on television and at the movies: he dragged a chair across the room and propped it under the doorknob, feeling idiotic and helpless. It was the only action he could think of, the only option available. Predictably, Pinker began pounding on the door. It actually seemed as if it might hold. Jonathan snapped the light on, still looking around for some kind of barricade, or weapon if it came to that.
His closet door was open. On the shelf above his shirts, his old reliable Louisville Slugger was lying with the other junk and garbage he tended to toss up there. Keepsakes, some of them, a few ancient trophies, bags of half-eaten McDonald’s Quarter Pounders (probably petrified by now), nameless trash. He hurried over and reached for the bat while Pinker hammered the door to pieces.
A thick length of twine was tied to the narrow end, the place where you grabbed that old bat and let her fly at those oncoming balls. Only there was blood on the twine, fresh blood. Jonathan jerked on it, wishing he had a knife, wondering why the hell Pinker had done something as moronic as tying twine to his bat.
The pounding stopped. Pinker giggled, muffled through the door. “Jonathan,” he said between giggles, “don’t look down!”
Jonathan froze. Don’t look down? What in the hell???
He looked down.
He was standing in a widening pool of blood.
Pinker cackled. “I told you not to look down!”
Jonathan jerked the bat furiously while his sweaty hair flung drops through the room. He slipped in the blood and fell backward, still holding the bat. A thing, some dark thing tied to the other end of the twine, rolled off of the topmost shelf and fell on top of Jonathan like a sack full of bones and old meat. Jonathan heaved it away, revolted, smelling blood everywhere. He backpedaled away from the growing circle of blood, getting it on his hands, his shoes, the ass of his jeans. He stood up, grimacing.
The sack was not quite a sack. At one time, fairly recently by the looks of it, it had been a young fellow nicknamed Pac-Man by his friends, actual name Roy Stuart. Status: dead. Cause of death: multiple slash wounds, the most noticeable one the slash that formed a grinning circlet across his throat, where severed cartilage gleamed a loathsome white in the depths of his larynx. His skin was nearly blue, his eyes open in an eternal stare of disbelief.
Jonathan felt his mind teeter over that same chasm that separates sane from insane, normal from abnormal. It was all really just too much. And now, to add to the fun, Pinker began demolishing the bedroom door while Jonathan stared at his dead friend. The absurd chair splintered and skittered across the room. The door sprouted fists that came in and out of new places, wrecking it. And then Pinker stepped through still clad in the flesh of the coach, smiling, stupidly proud of his handiwork. He leveled two blazing red eyes at Jonathan.
“Pac-Man liked you too much, Jonathan. He wouldn’t let me in. Can you believe it? Wouldn’t let me in. That’s a definite no-no. Now, time to die, sweetie.”
He took a step forward, but only one. A sudden wash of brilliant light behind him made him stop, made him look back. Jonathan’s eyes grew even wider than they had when Pac-Man came tumbling down. The bathroom with its demolished door seemed ablaze with pure white light. From the center of this Alison stepped out, not the disgusting corpse that Jonathan had imagined, but a being of radiance and calm, beauty and purity.
Pinker executed an awkward turn to face her, his arms hanging slack, the knife dangling. She looked at him, and spoke.
“Cooper, for your own sake fight him. Don’t let him have your soul!”
Jonathan walked toward her, no longer afraid of Pinker, who seemed mesmerized. Jonathan put a hand on his shoulder. “Coach? It’s just like you said. Everything’s a matter of will. Will him out.”
Pinker’s face began to distort, as if a huge conflict were going on inside. His eyes lost their glow again and again. He shivered in agony like a man undergoing the rack.
“Do it, Coach,” Jonathan said. “Do it!”
Pinker lashed out suddenly with the knife, nearly spilling Jonathan’s guts in a heap on the floor. Jonathan edged away, looking at the knife, looking at the face. If it was the coach resurfacing, he was not enjoying it at all. The hand that held the knife tried to thrust it again, but the other hand, the coach’s left hand, snapped out and restrained it. Then Cooper with his own voice. “Jonathan—he’s so strong—I can’t get him out—”
Pinker’s hand jerked free of the left one as the flame in his eyes took over again. Once more the left hand, the coach’s, tried to grab it. Then the knife snapped down and stabbed through the left one. Blood squirted. Pinker pulled the knife out and pressed the bleeding hand to his grinning mouth. Jonathan looked away as he drank the coach’s blood, drooling and slurping.
He looked at Jonathan with blood running down his chin like melting lipstick. “I can eat this wimp’s willpower for breakfast, Jon-boy, and drink his blood for lunch. And I think you know what supper’s gonna be.”
Jonathan nodded. His own willpower was ebbing fast. The shimmering form of Alison seemed out of action; she looked on with her face full of sorrow and pity.
Pinker raised the knife as Jonathan gathered himself for this uneven battle. Blood dripped off the tip of the blade, the coach’s own blood. Pinker started forward. He stopped with a squawk, looking baffled. His mouth fell open.
“I’m willing this for you, Jonathan. I want you to get this bastard.”
It was Cooper’s voice. His bleeding left hand came up and clutched the other one. They wobbled, lurching back and forth, the hands of a man performing arm wrestling with himself. Slowly the knife turned away from Jonathan and began to aim itself at Pinker’s own chest.
His eyes flared. He began to bellow
“Noooooooo!”
and then the knife slipped neatly through his ribs and into his heart. He crashed to the floor. For a moment, before his eyes slid shut forever, he smiled at Jonathan. But even as Coach Cooper died, the smoking, foul-smelling ectoplasm that was Pinker boiled out of his chest, still shrieking with anger and pain. Jonathan reached out to snag his ghostly arm. Alison cried out, but too late. Jonathan was seared by a tremendous blast of electrical discharge that spun him around and hurled him across the bedroom. He skidded to the east wall and smashed against it with his head, hard enough to crack the plaster. His eyes closed and stayed that way. The bizarre shadow that was Pinker, a shadow wearing fluorescent orange overalls with a checkered band across his chest, floated over, shimmering dark and light again, as if the blast of electricity had drained him, as if his flame were about to be extinguished at last.
Alison moved to block his way, standing over Jonathan, shining with that pure, radiant energy. It drove Pinker back, an
d he snarled at her.
“Get out of my way, bitch! I need a body!”
“Go back to hell where you belong, Pinker,” she said firmly.
He howled with pain and rage, convulsing, losing light and power. His shape staggered toward the shattered door, heavily dragging the left foot but making no sound on the floor. He stepped through, turned right, and was gone.
The radiance that was Alison sank down beside Jonathan. She touched his face, caressing it with fingers made of light. Jonathan slept his dreamless sleep. She bent and whispered in his ear. “Jonathan, I have something very important to tell you. Wake up!”
He stirred in his sleep.
Barely shining, crackling with the dying remnants of power, Pinker lurched down the hallway to the door, wavering, dying, about to wink out. His ghostly face was twisted with pain and helplessness. He fell to his knees, too drained to go on. In desperation he tried to get to his feet, but they were no longer there. He shrieked in horror, looking around wildly, ready to stutter out like a used-up light bulb.
His fading red eyes snapped to the wall beside him. If he had had the strength, he would have smiled.
Wall socket. Electricity.
Power.
His right hand moved feebly toward the socket. With effort he raised his arm, aiming with the last of his strength. His fingers seemed to lengthen, growing longer even as the rest of him sputtered out. No longer firm, they passed easily through the narrow slots of the socket. Nothing happened.
Noooooo! Pinker screamed without sound, and jabbed his fingers deeper.
Electricity popped out of the socket, a shower of blue sparks, surging up his arm and into the rest of him. The hallway light dimmed to a dismal orange, the hallway itself lit now only by the growing, glowing force that was Pinker recharged. He looked like a junkie finally getting his fix: eyes half shut with pleasure, shuddering in ecstasy, a satisfied smile spreading across his face.
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