They were high, dissonant, eerie screams. Coming from inside the Alcott.
And he knew that he was the only one who could hear them.
"Got another one over here!" one of the firemen shouted. "Get me a bodybag, it's a bad one!"
Billy stared across the barricades into the blackened remnants of the lobby. Furniture had been charred into lumps. A tangle of pipes leaked dirty water, and a narrow staircase, warped by intense heat and the weight of water, ascended along a sooty wall. The screams drove themselves into his brain like spikes, and he knew there were too many. He couldn't handle them all, they'd kill him. He'd never tried to help this many, not at one time!
"Step back," a policeman told him, and he obeyed.
But he knew that if he didn't at least try, give it his best and strongest effort, he'd hear that terrible screaming in his mind for the rest of his life. He paused, waiting for the chance. I am strong, he told himself. I can do it. But he was trembling, and he'd never been more uncertain in his life.
The drunks started shouting at the firemen who were zipping a black form into a bodybag. The policeman hurried over to shut them up, his broad face reddening with anger.
And Billy slipped under the barricade, then into the Alcott Hotel's ruined lobby.
He ascended the stairs as quickly as he could, ducking low beneath twisted pipes and dangling timbers. The stairs groaned under his weight, and around him shifted a curtain of gray smoke. Above the sound of the ghostly screams he could hear restless wind roaring along the upper floors. As he reached the dank second floor, noises from the outside world faded away. He could sense the pulse of agony at the heart of the Alcott Hotel.
His foot plunged through a step; he fell to his knees, ashes whirling around him, as the entire staircase shook. It took him a moment to work his foot free, and then he forced himself upward. Cold sweat and soot clung to his face. The screaming spectral voices led him to the third floor; he was aware also of individual voices—low, agonized moaning, snippets of shouts, cries of terror—that he seemed to feel vibrating in his bones. The third-floor corridor was dark, puddled with ashy water, clogged with burned, unidentifiable shapes. Billy found a shattered window and leaned against it to inhale some fresh air Down on the street, a white van marked with the eye of Chicago had pulled up to the barricade. Three people, a woman and two men—one with a camera unit braced against his shoulder—were having a heated argument with the cop while the drunks shouted and whistled.
The voices of the dead urged Billy on. He continued along the corridor, feeling something like a cold hand exploring his features as a blind man might. The floor groaned under his weight, and from above ashes shifted down like black snow. His shoes crunched on a layer of debris.
To his right there was a doorway that had been shattered by firemen. Beyond was a thick gloom of gray ashes. Billy could sense the terrible cold in that room, leaking out into the corridor. It was the chill of terror, and Billy shivered in its frigid touch.
Beyond that doorway, he knew, was what he had come here to find.
Billy braced himself, his heart hammering, and stepped through the doorway. The voices stopped.
A pall of black ashes and smoke drifted around him. It had been a large room; he looked up, saw that most of the ceiling had collapsed in a morass of charred timbers. Water was still seeping down from above and lay a half-inch deep around the objects on the floor: charred rib cages, arm and leg bones, unrecognizable shapes that might once have been human beings. Around them, like black barbed wire, was a metal framework that had been melded together by intense heat. Bed frames, Billy realized. Bunk beds. They were sleeping in here when the ceiling collapsed on top of them.
There was a silence, as of something waiting.
He could feel them all around him. They were in the smoke, in the ash, in the burned bones and malformed shapes. They were in the air and in the walls.
There was too much agony here; it weighed heavily in the dense air, and terror crackled like electricity. But it was too late to run, Billy knew. He would have to do what he could.
But there was something else here, as well. The hair at the back of his neck stirred, and his flesh prickled. Hatred oozed from this room. Something in here seethed; something wanted to tear him to pieces.
A shape stirred in a far corner and rose up from the ashes, taking hideous form. It stood seven feet tall, and its narrowed eyes glittered like red beads. The shape changer's boarlike face grinned. "I knew you'd come," it whispered, in a voice neither masculine nor feminine, young nor old. "I've been waiting for you."
Billy stepped back, into puddled water.
"Oh, you're not afraid, are you?" The shape changer came out of the corner like a drift of smoke, its bestial gaze fixed on Billy. "Not you, no. Never afraid. You're strong, aren't you?"
"Yes," Billy said. "I am." And he saw a flicker of hesitation in the shape changer's gaze. He wasn't sure of the limits of the shape changer's powers—if indeed, there were any—but it seemed to him that as he got stronger, the shape changer grew more uncertain, more threatened. Perhaps, he thought, the beast couldn't physically hurt him in that demonic, elemental shape, but it could affect his mind, possibly make him hurt himself. If the shape changer ever devised a way to attack him physically, he feared he couldn't survive against such a hideous force.
The thing's form shifted, like a reflection seen in a rippling pond of stagnant water, and suddenly it looked like Lee Sayre. "You're a meddler," it said, in Sayre's voice. "Your family's full of meddlers. Some of them couldn't stand up to me, boy. Do you think you can?"
Billy didn't reply, but stood his ground.
Lee Sayre's face grinned. "Good! Then it'll be you and me, boy, with a roomful of souls in the balance! Think fast, boy!"
The floor creaked and pitched downward, dropping Billy to his knees in the water. It's a trick! he thought, as the floor seemed to sway precariously. An illusion, conjured up by the beast!
A blizzard of lighted matches swirled around Billy, burning him on the face and hands, sparking his hair and sweater. He cried out and tried to shield his face with his arms. A trick! Not really burning, not really . . . ! If he was strong enough, he knew, he could overcome the shape changer's tricks. He looked up into the matches that sizzled off his cheeks and forehead, and he tried to concentrate on seeing the shape changer not as Lee Sayre, but as it really looked. The blizzard of matches faded away, and the boar-thing stood before him.
"Tricks," Billy said, and looked up through the darkness at Melissa Pettus.
A fireball suddenly came crashing through the ceiling upon him, burying him in flaming debris. He could smell himself burning—a May Night smell—and he screamed as he tried to fight free. He ran, his clothes on fire, his mind panicked.
Before he reached the doorway, he stepped through a gaping hole in the floor that had been hidden by rubble.
As he plunged through, he caught a jagged piece of twisted metal bed frame that cut into his hand. His body hung halfway through the hole, his legs dangling twenty feet over a pile of timbers studded with blackened nails. His clothes were still on fire, and he could hear his skin sizzling.
"Let go, Billy," Melissa whispered. "It hurts, doesn't it? It hurts to burn."
"No!" he shouted. If he let go, he knew he'd fall to his death. The shape changer had wanted him to flee, had wanted him to step through this hole. Panic, terror, illusions, and insanity—those were the shape changer's most lethal weapons.
"Your mother's dead," Melissa's pretty face said. "The cowboy came and cut her throat. Your little house is a heap of ashes. Billy, your hand's bleeding—"