He would cut her up like Kara. He would crush her head like Stacy. He would let the abbess lick blood off her legs. Then he would take her body to Satan.
She bowed her head in the dark. Jesus…please…
“All clear.” Jervis was walking away. “I just had this funny feeling that someone else was here.”
The abbess rose, chin smeared red and grinning. She followed Jervis out, who impossibly had rolled the three girls up in the carpet and was carrying them away on his shoulder.
“Thank you, Jesus,” Nina whispered when they were long gone.
««—»»
Wade cut across campus quickly, weaving between unlit buildings and hulking trees. It was embarrassing having to walk when you owned one of the most expensive cars in America. He could call a Yellow, but what on earth would he say? Cabbie, drop me off at the clearing behind the agro site, you know, the mutated one?
But when he rounded Tillinghast Hall, he saw headlights.
A car had turned off Arkham to the Hill. Lydia! he thought at once, but then he noted the headlight configuration. It wasn’t the Vette. It was a Dodge Colt.
Wade dove behind trimmed hedges. The Colt passed under the streetlamp. Jervis’ face was plainly visible. He was smoking a Carlton. One of those girls sat beside him, grinning. The back of the car seemed weighed down.
Wade waited for the tailgate to disappear. They’d come off Arkham, away from Duke of Clarence Hall and the dean’s house. He trotted north, up the drive, to the dean’s estate.
The mansion faced him, quiet, normal. But when Wade rapped on the old brass knocker, the door fell in. It had been broken off its hinges and propped back up, to feign security.
Don’t go in, Wade warned himself, and went in. The hall lights were on; he took the stairs up, watching for shadows, listening. A door down the hall appeared to be open, but when he moved closer he saw that it, too, had been knocked down.
Wade was shit scared. He expected—something. So it almost shocked him when he turned on the lights and found himself standing in a perfectly normal bedroom.
Then he opened the door to the not-so normal closet.
One glimpse was all it took: the dean’s crumpled corpse acrawl with flies, the enormous wash of blood on the clean white walls. All that blood was too much to view at once. Wade didn’t even notice what exactly had been done to the dean. He didn’t need to. This was a butcher’s jubal, party-time for a maniac. Blood was a sacred substance, the Eucharist of life. Here, though, in the dim closet, it had been spilled for the sheer sport of it. For fun.
Wade ran. He pounded down the steps and tore out of the house, and he didn’t stop running until his legs could bear no more of it, his energy ejaculated as a spurt of the basest fears. The night swept him into its velvet black caress, and Wade, brain numb now and exhausted, was left to stumble with feet of lead back to the beginning…
—
CHAPTER 28
Murder, he thought. Blood.
Wade couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop seeing it in his mind. There’d been so much blood.
Through the dead, empty night, he drifted more than walked. The campus lay silent behind him, strangely still and very black. Insentient, he made his way along trails once familiar but now forgotten, past buildings and halls dark and blank as gravestones.
The sky seemed depthless, a slate void. Phantom reefs of clouds roved past a darkled moon. Far and away, the chapel bell tolled, signaling 4 A.M. The monotonous, dull peals incited him, chipped cracks into his shock. Then he saw the lighted sign: “Campus Police.”
Wade stepped in unnoticed. Leaving the hot night and its murder behind him was like stepping into paradise…
Porker was eating microwaved cheese dogs at the booking desk. He was eating them with his fingers, without rolls. Sergeant Peerce sat at his own desk, intent on a magazine called Babes with Big Boobs.
“The dean is dead,” Wade announced.
Porker’s immense face floated up. Babes with Big Boobs lowered to the desk, unveiling Peerce’s typical hillbilly smirk.
“You heard me,” Wade said. “The dean’s dead. Murdered.”
“Probably dumped his fancy car in a ditch,” Porker surmised, “and wants us to tow it out for him.”
“Just another daddy rich smart ass,” Peerce added.
Wade could not believe this response to his announcement. “Are you guys deaf? I just got done telling you the dean is dead!”
“You mean Dean Saltenstall?” Porker inquired.
Wade slumped. “No, Dean Dick. Is there any other dean on this campus, you fat jughead? He’s been murdered.”
Peerce and Porker stood up at the same time. They looked at each other. Then they looked at Wade.
“Just like that, huh?” Peerce asked. “The dean’s been murdered?”
“Yes! You understand English! Praise God!”
“And just how did he come to be murdered, boy?”
“Well, I don’t actually know,” Wade admitted. “But—”
“Ya hear that, Porker? He don’t really know.”
“What difference does it make, you brickhead? I saw him in the closet! and I saw the…I saw the…blood.”
Peerce and Porker chuckled. “St. John,” Peerce said. “This is just another one of your practical jokes.”
“You must think we’re pretty dumb,” Porker added.
Dumb? Wade thought. Naw.
“We been bustin’ our tails all night. We got one missing security guard and two dormitory break ins. We ain’t got time for your practical jokes.”
“Look,” Wade said. “All that stuff you just said—missing persons, break ins—it’s all part of this. A lot of crazy shit has gone on tonight, and it all starts in the dean’s closet.”
Chewing cheese dogs, Porker inquired, “What would the dean be doing in a closet at four in the morning?”
“Getting murdered,” Wade answered. “Don’t believe me? Go check.”
Peerce made a contemplating face. He got the dean’s number out of White’s directory. He paused. Then he dialed the number.
“You’re wasting your time,” Wade declared. “He won’t answer.”
Peerce listened and waited, tapping his foot. He waited some more and hung up. “He didn’t answer.”
“Of course he didn’t answer, you crawfish for brains Cajun moron! How can a dead man answer a fucking telephone?”
Then Porker said, “It can’t hurt to take a look, Sarge.”
“Shee-it,” Peerce agreed. “All right, punk. Lead the way.”
Wade felt a shimmy of panic. “Not me, fellas. You guys go, I’ll wait here. But before you go, you have to lock me up,” He pointed to the station’s jail cell. “In there.”
“Why?”
“For my protection.”
“Protection from what?”
Wade gulped. “From them.”
Peerce squinted. “Who’s them?”
“Look, Sarge, just pacify me, okay? Lock me up and go check.”
“We can’t lock you up,” Porker informed him. “There’s no probable cause to believe you’re in danger.”
“But I’m telling you I am!”
“We cain’t lock you up unless you commit a crime,” Peerce said. “And unfortunately, bein’ an asshole is not a crime.”
Wade was getting desperate. “In other words, you won’t lock me up in that cell unless I commit a crime?”
“That’s right, boy.”
Crime, Wade contemplated. Okay. With impressive reflexes, he kicked Porker square in the belly as hard as he could. Porker bent over, howling like a gelded walrus.