“We’ve lost him,” said Bray.
“Not yet,” she shot back, nearly sniffing the air to find their killer. “We’re almost on him.”
“He’s gone.”
She thrust her face into his. “Look, there’s no time for your bullshit, okay?”
No recrimination in her words. Just love and a forgiving, a statement of fact, a simple urging to follow her as she turned and flew off once more on sheer hunch.
Seconds later, an eternity later, Bray saw a flash over Winnie’s right shoulder.
It fluttered. A distant figure came through a panel. A moving smudge. He was headed straight for them! Then clearly no.
The closing panel sheered away the light and Bray saw the figure recede, something swinging from its right hand.
“Wait! Hey you! Stop!” Winnie shouted.
After the briefest of pauses-would he kill them?-the flat sound of running echoed along the backways. Their savior had no interest in chatting. Nor it seemed in confrontation. Not now, at any rate, while he and Winnie had the upper hand.
Bray saw a sickly white 654 above the panel as they passed it. “Shouldn’t we—” he began, but Winnie flew on, then jerked to a halt.
A muffled thud. No running sounds.
Another panel had shut.
They were alone in the backways.
He felt Winnie deflate. “He’s escaped.”
“No, he hasn’t,” protested Bray. “We can still catch him.” His body was suddenly in overdrive, straining to go on. “How many panels can there be up ahead?”
“I had the bastard.” She made a gesture, an expression of despair, her certainty gone. “Now he’s vanished.”
“Yeah but couldn’t we—”
“It’d be a waste of time. I’ll bet he wants us to do that. Then, while we’re mucking about looking for him, he’ll kill again. A few more victims.”
“Speaking of victims…”
“Yes,” said Winnie. “Let’s. He may have left a clue to his identity.”
They doubled back and found 654 again.
Bray found the catch and released it.
And the abattoir that had been a machine shop opened its vile red stench to them, an outrageous glimpse into hell.
In the school’s basement where they had gone to ground, Kyla looked upon the antics of Patrice and Fido with sheer disgust.
She could understand giddy. Hysterical was even in her purview. But throwing caution to the wind, acting like puppystruck schoolkids, shouting juvenile defiance at the walls? It drained the love right out of her, new as well as old.
For years, Patrice had felt like part of her, a hairy wen one accepted and even grew perversely fond of. It stunned Kyla how fleeting eternal love could be, how in one instant over something that seemed trivial, it could crumble, leaving you alone again in the ashes of solitude.
She was sitting crosslegged against a cheaply paneled wall. But the wall felt solid. You could sense- she could anyway-whether or not a wall was hollow. This one had no boobytrap, nothing to give the slasher an advantage.
Out on the concrete floor, Fido brandished his cleavers, Patrice her knives. They circled one another at a safe distance: Jack Spratt sparring with his wife.
“Quiet, you two,” said Kyla.
Again they ignored her.
Giggles.
High-pitched come-out-come-out-wherever-you-are’s.
Safe feints at mutual mayhem.
By God, Kyla wanted to slaughter them both. Impulse twitched in her hands, there where she clutched her own cutting tools.
All part of this evening’s madness, she thought. It would be easy to best them, to put her past behind her, to blame two more deaths on the janitor-who was futtermeat, surely, as soon as he showed his face.
“Me ’n’ Patrice are ready for you!” crowed Fido.
His skin, whose touch for the longest time she and Patrice had craved, seemed loathsome to her now. She despised as well the visual blat of his friendship lobe, an odd bit of flesh that last night she had dreamt of kissing.
Patrice’s knives danced like daggers of rain in the harsh light, a safe distance from Fido’s.
Few kids knew the school had a basement, let alone how to reach it. Fido had hit upon the idea of hiding here. He had convinced them it would be a swell idea, the slasher concentrating on the upper floors for his victims. Now Kyla had her doubts.
Their new beau was too damned cocksure.
Patrice had soaked up his confidence, going giddy in the head, her chubby figure twirling like a hippo in heat.
The gargantuan furnace hummed low and ominous, a row of double bass players bowing hushed subliminal tones from their instruments. Angled pipes rose and fell like thick strands of dark spaghetti, their shadows and smudges hiding just about anything, any one, Kyla’s imagination could conjure.
Beyond the mad dance of her companions, a laundry chute curved down. Its indistinct length faced her squarely.
There was something dark and nasty, something threatening, about it. It hung there like a big gaping elephant’s trunk, the light of a lone bulb throwing shadows into it that glinted, suggesting moisture where dryness surely prevailed.
It reminded Kyla of her fluxidermed granny, her vulval opening as big and blaring as a tuba mouthpiece. Daddy had kept his dead mother in his bedroom closet. He hadn’t bothered to have his fathers fluxed, which made him an oddity among grown-ups, Kyla had later realized. One parent only had been fluxidermed.
Nor did he display it in the vestibule, as normal grown-ups did. When Kyla came home before her father, she would go into his dark bedroom and peer into the closet, past forests of hanging suits and shirts, at the bare buttocks of her grandmother. From that dusty dark ruddy pucker had her daddy dropped, a dark ominous ancestral privacy. That’s what this gaping laundry chute reminded her of, as the huge furnace rumbled in Kyla’s gut and Fido and Patrice flurried knives at one another.
An ancient laundry basket on wheels, its canvas sides bulging with huge mounds of soiled towels and sheets, awaited the laundry chute’s next disgorging.
“Will you two shut the fuck up?”
She said it loud if laconically, knowing they would blow her off. But some things just got said cuz they needed saying. Maybe a failed warning would be sufficient to ward off the killer.
Maybe not.
Probably not.
Then something clanged overhead.
It put a halt to her companions’ silly little dance of death. It raised the hairs on the back of Kyla’s neck, blasting prickly heat straight up into her backbrain.
“What was that?” Patrice wondered aloud.
A rumble began like distant muffled timpani, as the clang reversed itself. Some sliding door wrenched up, then juddered decisively shut, almost the confident slice of a guillotine blade falling home into its groove.
The rumble bumbled about above, growing louder, the beat of it coming faster and more violent.
Kyla couldn’t fix on it. Then her ears peeled the sound from its echo. She focused on the dark downdrop
