Winny was beyond fear. That didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid.
If he could have pulled the velvety shadows around him like a cloak of invisibility, he wouldn’t have done it, because he could be sure that there was already something hostile wrapped in them and waiting there for him.
When he turned the corner into the next row of machinery, he saw Iris standing in front of a huge bubble or blister that formed in the corner where two walls met. It was about four feet wide and seven feet high, and it bellied out from the corner as if it were a giant water balloon. The blister glowed faintly, not nearly as bright as the fungus light, more green than yellow, and you didn’t need creepy music to tell you it was trouble.
Winny didn’t want to surprise Iris into flight, but he didn’t want to shout a big hello, either. He sidled up to her, not quite near enough to reach out and touch her, in case that the prospect of being touched would be enough to chase her off again.
The girl’s face was zombie-green, but only because of the pale light from the blister. Her eyes were very wide, and they shone with that eerie light, too. Her lips moved, as if she were speaking to someone, but no sound came from her.
From back toward the middle of the long vault came the overhead rustle as something advanced another foot or two before pausing to listen.
While Winny tried to think what to say—his usual problem—he looked more closely at the blister and saw that it was a moist and tightly stretched membrane webbed with what appeared to be veins, translucent but not transparent. The light within it was very dim, but he saw something in there, something big and strange.
So the blister was a kind of womb. Something would sooner or later come out of it. He hoped later.
Iris continued to move her lips in silent speech. Since she wasn’t actually saying anything, Winny wondered if maybe she was mouthing the words that something in the blister was sending to her telepathically.
One
When the elevator doors opened, Twyla said in surprise, “Martha, Edna,” and Sparkle asked, “What’re you doing here, where are you going?”
Even as the questions were being asked, Twyla realized they were not going to be answered. Something was terribly wrong with the Cupp sisters, as well as with the security chief. Martha’s face was less seamed with age than before. Not younger. Just fuller. She was bloated, like someone with a bad heart that caused fluid retention, and her skin had a yellow cast even in the elevator’s blue light. Edna was also bloated, and her flesh, like that of the other two, appeared to be soft, pitted with large pores, almost spongy, perhaps akin to the flesh of the six- legged baby-thing that Sparkle had described.
Their eyes were what chilled Twyla and most emphatically declared that they were no longer human. Lotus- petal eyes of people who had forgotten all the days of their lives, crocodilian eyes of insatiable hunger, they were smoky as if with early cataracts yet burning with implacable hatred.
Sparkle was nearer the elevator than Twyla, but she backed away when she registered the nature of those eyes.
Twyla brought up her pistol, gripping it with both hands, not really cool about shooting people she knew, even if they were not people anymore, but she would do whatever was necessary if they moved toward her. She fully expected them to rush out of the elevator, but they only stood there, staring intently, as though waiting for the doors to slide shut and for the car to carry them down to whatever hell might be their destination.
The murderous fury in the three figures was palpable, which made their restraint significant, though Twyla didn’t know what to deduce from it. Their arms hung slack, but their hands worked ceaselessly, as if with the urge to rend and strangle. Black fingernails. Edna’s mouth hung slightly open, and from what Twyla could see, the old woman’s teeth were also black. These two
In a voice recognizably his but wet and viscid, as if filtered through a mucus-clotted throat, the thing that had been Logan Spangler declared through black teeth, “I shall be.”
Twyla didn’t know what that meant, if it meant anything at all, whether it was a prelude to an attack or an invitation to become as they were.
She wasn’t holding the gun steady. It almost seemed to be alive, jumping in her hands. If she had to fire it, the muzzle would kick upward, it always kicked upward, and because her arms were so loose, she wouldn’t hit anyone, she’d put the round high in the wall. She made an effort to lock her wrists, lock her elbows, and bring the front sight low on target.
