down.
At least one of the golems had reached the head of one set of stairs. He descended the steps two at a time. In his cloaklike raincoat, shoulders hunched, burly head lowered, leaping down in the rollicking manner of an ape, he reminded her of an illustration in a long-forgotten storybook, a picture of an evil troll from some medieval legend.
Struggling so fiercely that her heart felt as if it might explode, she drew herself within eight feet of the floor. But she was angled headfirst; she would have to pull herself laboriously all the way to the concrete, which would provide the first solid surface against which she could regain her equilibrium and scramble to her feet. BOOM- BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
The golem reached the bottom of the stairs.
Connie was exhausted. Freezing.
She heard Harry cursing the cold and the resisting air.
The pleasant dream of flying had become the most classic of all nightmares, in which the dreamer could flee only in slow motion, while the monster pursued with terrifying speed and agility.
Concentrating on the floor below, seven feet from it now, Connie nevertheless saw movement from the corner of her left eye and heard Harry cry out. A golem had reached him.
A darker shadow fell across the shadow-layered floor directly below her. Reluctantly, she turned her head to the right.
Suspended in midair, with her feet above and behind her, like an angel swooping down to do battle with a demon, she found herself face to face with the other golem. Regrettably, unlike an angel, she was not armed with a fiery sword, a bolt of lightning, or an amulet blessed by God and capable of knocking demons back into the fires and boiling tar of the Pit.
Grinning, Ticktock gripped her throat. The golem’s hand was so enormous that the thick fingers overlapped the fat thumb where they met at the back of her head, completely encircling her neck, though it did not immediately crush her windpipe and cut off her breath.
She remembered how Ricky Estefan’s head had been turned backward on his shoulders, and how the raven-haired dancer’s slender arm had been ripped so effortlessly from her body.
A flash of rage burned away her terror, and she spat in the huge and terrible face. “Let go of me, shithead.”
A foul exhalation washed over her, making her grimace, and the scar-faced golem-vagrant said, “Congratulations, bitch. Time’s up.”
The blue-flame eyes burned brighter for an instant, then winked out, leaving deep black sockets beyond which it seemed that Connie could see to the end of eternity. The vagrant’s hideous face, writ large on this oversize golem, was abruptly transformed from flesh and hair into a highly detailed monochromatic brown countenance that appeared to have been sculpted from clay or mud. An elaborate web of hairline cracks formed from the bridge of his nose, swiftly spinning in a spiral pattern across his face, and in a wink his features crumbled.
The giant vagrant’s entire body dissolved, and with a shattering detonation of techno music that resumed full-blast in mid-note, the world started up again. No longer suspended in the air, Connie fell the last seven feet to the warehouse floor, face-first into the moist mound of dirt and sand and grass and rotting leaves and bugs that had been the golem’s body, cushioned from injury by the now-lifeless mass but gagging and spitting in disgust.
Around her, even above the pounding music, she heard screams of shock, terror, and pain.
5
“Game’s over — for now,” the golem-vagrant said, then obligingly dissolved. Harry dropped out of the air. He sprawled on his stomach in the remains, which smelled strongly of nothing more than rich damp earth.
In front of his face was a hand formed entirely of dirt, similar to— but larger than — the one they had seen in Ricky’s bungalow. Two fingers twitched with a residue of supernatural energy and seemed to reach toward his nose. He slammed one fist into that disembodied monstrosity, pulverizing it.
Screaming dancers stumbled into him and collapsed across his back and legs. He scrambled out from under the falling bodies, onto his feet.
An angry boy in a Batman T-shirt rushed forward and took a swing at him. Harry ducked, threw a right into the kid’s stomach, planted a left uppercut under his chin, stepped over him when he fell, and looked around for Connie.
She was nearby, dropping a tough-looking teenage girl with a karate kick, and then swiveling on one foot to drive her elbow into the solar plexus of a muscle-bound youth who looked surprised as he went down. He obviously thought he was going to polish his shoes with her and throw her away.
If she felt as rotten as Harry did, she might not be able to hold her own. His joints still ached with the cold that had seeped into them during the Pause, and he felt tired, as if he had carried a great weight on a journey of many miles.
Joining up with her, screaming to be heard above the music and other noise, Harry said, “We’re too old for this crap! Come on, let’s get out of here!”
For the most part, on every side, the dancing had given way to fighting, or at least to vigorous pushing and shoving, thanks to the tricks that Ticktock had played earlier on his way through the Paused crowd. However, not all of the partiers seemed to understand that the rave had devolved into a dangerous brawl, because some of the pushers and shovers were laughing as if they believed they had merely been caught up in a boisterous, relatively good-natured slam dance.
Harry and Connie were too far from the front of the building to make it out that way before an understanding of the true nature of the situation swept the crowd. Though there was nothing as immediately threatening as a fire, the tendency of a panicked crowd would be to react to the violence as if flames had been seen. Some of them would even believe they
Harry grabbed Connie’s hand to keep them from being separated in the turmoil, and led her toward the nearer rear wall, where he was sure there would have to be other doors.
In that chaotic atmosphere, it was easy to understand why the revelers would confuse real violence for make-believe, even if they hadn’t been on drugs. Spotlights swung back and forth and swooped across the metal ceiling, intensely colored laser beams slashed complex patterns across the room, strobes flashed, phantasmagoric shadows leaped-twisted-twirled through the energetic crowd, young faces were strange and mysterious behind ever-changing carnival masks of reflected light, psychedelic film images pulsed and writhed over two big walls, the disc jockey pumped up the volume on the manic music, and the crowd noise alone was loud enough to be disorienting. The senses were overloaded and apt to mistake a glimpse of violent confrontation for an exhibition of high good spirits or something even more benign.
Far behind Harry a scream rose unlike any of the others, so shrill and hysterical that it pierced the background roar and called attention to itself even in that cacophony. No more than a minute had passed since the Pause had ended, if that long. Harry figured the new screamer was either the black-haired girl coming out of shock and discovering that her shoulder ended in a gory stump — or the person who had suddenly found himself confronted by the grisly detached arm.
Even if that heart-stopping wail didn’t draw attention, the crowd would not party on in ignorance much longer. There was nothing like a punch in the face to dislodge fantasy and snap reality into place. When the change in the mood penetrated to a majority of the ravers, the rush to the exits would be potentially deadly, even though there was no fire.
A sense of duty and a policeman’s conscience encouraged Harry to turn back, find the girl who had lost an arm, and try to administer first aid. But he knew that he would probably not be able to find her in the churning throng, and that he wouldn’t have a chance to help even if he did manage to locate her, not in that growing human maelstrom, which already seemed to have reached the equivalent of hurricane force.
Holding tight to Connie’s hand, Harry pushed out of the dancers and through the now-clamorous onlookers with their bottles of beer and balloons of nitrous oxide, all the way to the back wall of the warehouse, which was deep under the loft. Beyond the reach of the party lights. Darkest place in the building.
