whom they were aware, were merely the tip of the iceberg. The cup hug/rngs/liked to save its victims.. And play with their bodies.
But why had it left some out where they could be found? Why hadn't it taken Manuel Tortes or Terry Clifford down here? Why hadn't it hidden the two teenagers killed in the river?
Because it had wanted them to find the bodies. Because it had been toying with them.
He suddenly realized the enormity of what they were up against.
'How long has it been here?' Robert said softly. 'How long has it been in our town?' He pointed toward a shriveled husk of a body lying on the ground at Pam's feet. 'That's Lew Rogers. He and his girlfriend skipped town about two years ago. We thought. I figured it was because of all they owed.'
On the other side of the passage, Sue gasped, her sharp and sudden intake of breath echoing and unusually loud.
Rich hurried over to where she stood, followed her gaze. It was a nativity scene, only baby Jesus was a tiny, hydrated, barely formed fetus, connected by a tiny urn bilical cord to a mummified Mary whose empty breasts were little more than flattened flaps of dried wrinkled skin.
'That's my friend,' Sue whispered. 'That's Janine.' Her grandmother spoke in a clear strong voice, and Sue's attention shifted from the manger scene to the old woman. 'What did she say?' Rich asked.
'She says it knows we are. coming. It put these here to warn us, to frighten us.' . He nodded. 'It's trying to scare us away.'
Sue shook her head. 'No. It wants us to come.' They were all gathered around her now, the other six. They had looked where they'd wanted, had not liked what they'd seen, and had come together around Sue and her grandmother for protection and reassurance. Robert was pensive, Woods and lSuford silent and subdued, and even Rossiter's aggressive assurance seemed to have fled. They were a more thoughtful group than they had been up above, more fully aware of what they were facing, but Rich was not sure that was a good thing. They needed some cockiness now, they needed some aggressiveness. They needed the bravery of the foolhardy.
There was none of that now. He felt as though they'd all given up before they'd started, and that frightened him. He thought of Corrie, thought of Anna, tried to tell himself they were up ahead, hostages to the cup hugirngsi. He looked at Sue. 'Corrie and Anna are not in hiding, are they? They didn't sense danger coming and find some place to hide, did they?'
Sue looked over at her grandmother but did not translate. 'I don't think so,' she said.
Rich nodded. 'I think they're up ahead. I'm going to find them.' He held up his spear and flashlight, lifted his half of the baht gta.
'Dead or alive, I'm going to find them.'
The started forward.
They followed him. As he'd thought, as he'd hoped, his determination seemed to have energized his companions, provided them with renewed purpose, and they strode with him down the center of the earthen tunnel, flashlights trained in unison on the darkness directly before them, no beams sidetracked by the strange staged scenes off to the sides.
The tunnel curved slightly to the left--underneath the stream.-and then narrowed. The rounded ceiling grew flatter, rougher.
They stopped walking. Before them was a doorway, a high thin slice in the hard packed earth that led into even deeper darkness. i And would allow only one of us through at a time.
'I'm going through,' Rich announced, putting down the baht gwa. His heart was trip-hammering in his chest with attack force, and there was nothing in his life he had ever felt less like doing, but he knew that this was why he was here, this was why he had come. The time for selfishly succumbing to fear had passed.
Robert grabbed his arm, held him back. 'You're not going in first. I am.'
Rich managed a smile. 'You want to hog all the glory for yourself?.'
'it's probably a rap. I'm better prepared to deal with something like that than you.'
Sue's grandmother slid through the opening.
'Heyt' Robert yelled.
There was no time to argue now. Robert quickly followed the old woman;
Rich followed Robert. They walked through, one after the other, in an order that was entirely circumstantial: Sue, Buford, Woods, Rossiter.
Buford and the coroner carried the mirror between them as they moved single file through the opening.
The high narrow doorway led into a chamber, a rock room.
The lair of the cup hugirngsi.
Rich bumped into his brother and the grandmother as he stepped through.
He felt the hard tenseness of his brother's muscles, felt the trembling fear of the old woman as he grabbed her arm to keep her from falling.
The undirected beam of his flashlight shone upon the nearest wall, and as he righted himself and stepped out of the way to let Sue through behind him, he saw not dirt, as he would have expected, not rock, but colors, shapes. Paintings.
His flashlight beam played over the wall, joined by Robert's, then Sue's, then Buford's.
'Mother of shit,' Buford breathed.
The walls of the chamber were decorated with an unearthly mural, a pictographic rendering of horrors and atrocities so overwhelmingly evil that he was grateful the flashlights revealed only a small portion of it. He moved closer, tentatively touched the wall. His beam revealed the visages of beings that had either never existed or had lived so long ago that their existence remained unrecorded. There were bodies flayed, souls in torment, every perversity imaginable and many unimaginable depicted in the unholy picture.
He had assumed that the vampire was a creature operating on instinct, not intelligence--a being that existed only to feed. But the mural proved that they were dealing with something much more complex, a creature that was not acting simply on impulses, but a being that was actively and sophisticatedly evil. Whether the mural was a recorded history, depicting scenes that had actually occurred, or whether it was merely an example of artistic expression, it was the product of a profoundly corrupt mind, and Rich grew cold as he tried to imagine the cup hugirngsi sitting alone in this underground darkness, painting these painstakingly detailed horrors.
Only his mind did not see that overly tall baby-faced thing from the videotape.
F He saw in his. mind the Laughing Man.
The idea of the Laughing Man chuckling to himself, alone in the darkness, frightened Rich more than any thing else could have.
There was the sound of wind or water, an indeterminate whooshing rush, and all flashlights turned toward the noise. Against the far wall, the beams revealed a throne, an oversize throne made of bones and skulls and animal heads.
Upon the throne sat the Pastor Mr. Wheeler.
Rich looked at the pastor, saw the wildness in his eyes, the bloody Bible on his lap, and for a brief second he thought they'd all been wrong, they'd all been fooled, there was no cup hugrngsi, there was only this human fanatic and his cult of human followers who'd been terrorizing the town.
And C, or and Anna were safe.
Then he heard the laughing, saw the shadow loom next to the throne, felt the temperature drop.
The cup hugirngsi.
He backed up, bumped into Sue, and only that contact kept him from running out through that narrow doorway the way he'd come in. He could feel the scream building in his throat. The shadowy figure moved into one of the flashlight beams, and it was the Laughing Man. He saw that grinning, characterless face, heard that horrible throaty chuckle.
Then the figure turned toward them, and he saw the faint traces of other faces as well. The structure of the head seemed to shift as the creature moved. Did the monster now have Elvis's lips?. Dracula's widow's peak? Oriental eyes? Skin fashioned from sand? Was that Jesus Christ hiding underneath there? He had been right, he realized, but he took no comfort from that fact. The cup hugirngsi did indeed draw from mythologies for its appearance, for its form, tapping those deep and primal images that spoke so personally and so eloquently to the holder of the mythology.
'What do we do?' Robert asked Sue.
