temple.
Crouching in the lightless attic, Rachael began to believe that she had fooled the Eric-thing. Its degeneration was apparently mental as well as physical, just as she had suspected, and it did not possess sufficient intellectual capacity to figure out what had happened to her. Her heart continued to pound wildly, and she was still shaking, but she dared to hope.
Then the plyboard trapdoor in the closet ceiling swung upward, and light from below speared into the attic. The mutant's hideous hands reached through the opening. Then its head came into view, and it pulled itself into the upper chamber, turning its mad eyes upon her as it came.
She scuttled across the attic as fast as she dared go. She was acutely aware of the nails lancing down just inches above her head. She also knew that she must not put her weight down on the insulated hollows between the two-by-fours because there was no flooring; if she misstepped, shifting her weight off the beams for even a second, she would crash through the Sheetrock that formed the ceilings of the rooms below, tumbling into one of those chambers. Even if she did not tear loose electrical wires and fixtures in the fall — and thus escaped electrocution — she might break a leg or even snap her spine when she hit the floor below. Then she would be able only to lie immobile while the beast descended and took its sweet time with her.
She went about thirty feet, with at least another hundred and fifty feet of the motel attic ahead of her, before she glanced back. The thing had clambered all the way through the trap and was staring after her.
“Rayeeshuuuul,” it said, the quality of its speech declining by the minute.
It slammed the trapdoor shut, plunging them into total darkness, where it had all the advantages.
Ben's soggy Adidas running shoes were so thoroughly saturated that they began to slip on his feet. He felt the mild irritation of an incipient blister on his left heel.
When at last he came within sight of the Golden Sand Inn, where lights shone in the office windows, he slowed down long enough to shove one hand under his rain-soaked shirt and pull the Combat Magnum out of the waistband at the hollow of his back.
He wished he had the Remington shotgun that he had left behind in the disabled Merkur.
As he reached the motel's entrance drive, he saw a man crawling away from the place, toward Tropicana. An instant later he realized it was Whit Gavis without the artificial leg and, apparently, injured.
He had become something that loved the dark. He did not know what he was, did not clearly remember what — or who — he had once been, did not know where he was ultimately bound or for what purpose he existed, but he knew that his rightful place was now in darkness, where he not only thrived but ruled.
Ahead, the prey made her way cautiously through the blackness, effectively blinded and moving too slowly to stay out of his reach much longer. Unlike her, he was not hampered by the lack of light. He could see her clearly, and he could see most details of the place through which they crept.
He was, however, slightly confused as to his whereabouts. He knew that he had climbed up into this long tunnel, and from the smell of it he also knew its walls were made of wood, yet he felt as if he should be deep under the earth. The place was similar to moist dark burrows which he vaguely remembered from another age and which he found appealing for reasons he did not entirely comprehend.
Around him, shadowfires sprang to life, flourished for a moment, then faded away. He knew that he had once been afraid of them, but he could not recall the reason for his fear. Now the phantom flames seemed of no consequence to him, harmless as long as he ignored them.
The prey's female scent was pungent, and it inflamed him. Lust made him reckless, and he had to struggle against the urge to rush forward and throw himself upon her. He sensed that the footing here was perilous, yet caution had far less appeal than the prospect of sexual release.
Somehow he knew that it was dangerous to stray off the beams and into the hollow spaces, though he did not know why. Keeping to those safe tracks was easier for him than for the prey, because in spite of his size he was more agile than she. Besides, he could see where he was going, and she could not.
Each time she started to look back, he squinted so she would not be able to pinpoint his position by spotting his radiant eyes. When she paused to listen, she could surely hear him coming, but her inability to get a visual fix had her obviously terrified.
The stink of her acute terror was as strong as her femaleness, though sour. The former scent sparked his blood lust as effectively as the latter incited his sexual desire. He longed to feel her blood spurting against his lips, to taste it on his tongue, to push his mouth within her slashed abdomen in search of the rich and satisfying flesh of her liver.
He was twenty feet behind her.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Ben helped Whit sit up against a four-foot-high retaining wall that enclosed a tangle of weeds where once had been a bed of flowers. Above them, the motel sign scraped and creaked in the wind.
“Don't worry about me,” Whit said, pushing him away.
“Your face—”
“Help
“You're bleeding.”
“I'll live, I'll live. But it's after Rachael,” Whit said with that unnervingly familiar note of purest horror and desperation that Ben had not heard in anyone's voice since Vietnam. “It left me, and it went after her.”
“It?”
“You have a gun? Good. A Magnum. Good.”
“It?” Ben repeated.
Abruptly the wind wailed louder, and the rain fell as if a dam had broken above them, and Whit raised his voice to be heard over the storm. “Leben. It's Leben, but he's changed. My God, he's changed. Not really Leben anymore. Genetic chaos, she calls it. Retrograde evolution, devolution, she says. Massive mutations. Hurry, Ben! The manager's apartment!”
Unable to understand what the hell Whit was talking about, but sensing that Rachael was in even graver danger than he had feared, Ben left his old friend propped against the retaining wall and ran toward the entrance to the motel office.
Blind, half deafened by the thunderous impact of the rain upon the roof, Rachael crawled through the mine- dark attic as fast as she dared. Though she was afraid that she was moving too slowly to escape the beast, she came to the end of the long chamber sooner than she'd expected, bumping up against the outer wall at the end of the motel's first wing.
Crazily, she had given no thought to what she would do when she reached a dead end. Her mind had been focused so intently upon the need to stay beyond the reach of the Eric-thing that she had proceeded as if the attic would go on forever.
She let out a whimper of despair when she discovered that she was cornered. She shuffled to her right, hoping that the attic made a turn and continued over the middle wing of the U-shaped building. In fact, it must have done just that, but she encountered a concrete-block partition between the two wings, perhaps a fire wall. Searching frantically in the darkness, she could feel the cool, rough surface of the blocks and the lines of mortar, and she knew there would be no pass-through in such a barrier.
Behind her, the Eric-thing issued a wordless cry of triumph and obscene hunger that pierced the curtain of rain noise and seemed to originate only inches from her ear.
She gasped and snapped her head around, shocked by the nearness of the demonic voice. She'd thought she had a minute to scheme, half a minute at least. But for the first time since the beast had cast the attic into absolute darkness by closing the trap door, Rachael saw its murderous eyes. The radiant pale green orb was undergoing changes that would no doubt make it more like the orange serpent's eye. She was so close that she could see the unspeakable hatred in that alien gaze. It…
Its breath reeked.
