He closed his hateful eyes, swaying dreamily.
A second passed.
What's he doing?
Two seconds, four, six, ten.
Still, his eyes remained closed.
She felt herself carried away in a whirlpool of hysteria.
Could she slip past him? While his eyes were closed? Jesus. No. He was too close. To get away, she would have to brush against him. Jesus. Brush against him? No. God, that would snap him out of his trance or whatever this was, and he would seize her, and his hands would be cold, dead-cold. She could not bring herself to touch him. No.
Then she noticed something odd happening behind his eyes. Wriggling movement. The lids themselves no longer conformed to the curvature of his eyeballs.
He opened his eyes.
They were gone.
Beneath the lids lay only empty black sockets.
She finally screamed, but the cry she brought forth was beyond human hearing. Breath passed out of her in an express train rush, and she felt her throat working convulsively, but there was absolutely no sound that would bring help.
His eyes.
His empty eyes.
She was certain that those hollow sockets could still see her. They sucked at her with their emptiness.
His grin had not faded.
“Little pussy,” he said.
She screamed her silent scream.
“Little pussy. Kiss me, little pussy.”
Somehow, dark as midnight, those bone-rimmed sockets still held a glimmer of malevolent awareness.
“Kiss me.”
No!
Let me die, she prayed. God, please let me die first.
“I want to suck on your juicy tongue,” Wargle said urgently, bursting into a giggle.
He reached for her.
She pressed hard against the unyielding wall.
Wargle touched her cheek.
She flinched and tried to pull away.
His fingertips trailed lightly down her cheek.
His hand was icy and slick.
She heard a thin, dry, eerie groan—"Uh-uh-uh-uhuhhhhhhh" — and realized that she was listening to herself.
She smelled something strange, acrid. His breath? The stale breath of a dead man, expelled from rotting lungs? Did the walking dead breathe? The stench was faint but unbearable. She gagged.
He lowered his face toward hers.
She stared into his eaten-away eyes, into the swarming blackness beyond, and It was like peering through two peepholes into the deepest chambers of Hell.
His hand tightened on her throat.
He said, “Give us-”
She heaved in a hot breath.
“- a little kiss.”
She heaved out another scream.
This time the scream wasn't silent. This time she pealed forth a sound that seemed loud enough to shatter the mirrors and to crack the ceramic tile.
As Wargle's dead, eyeless face slowly, slowly descended toward her, as she heard her echoing off the walls, the whirlpool of hysteria in which she'd been spinning became, now, a whirlpool of darkness, and she was drawn down into oblivion.
Chapter 20
Body snatchers
In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, on a rust-colored sofa, against that wall which was farthest from the restrooms, Jennifer Paige sat beside her sister, holding the girl.
Bryce squatted in front of the sofa, holding Lisa's hand, which he couldn't seem to make warm again no matter how firmly he pressed and held it.
Except for the guards on duty, everyone had gathered behind Bryce, in a semicircle around the front of the sofa.
Lisa looked terrible. Her eyes were guarded, haunted.
Her face was as white as the tile floor in the ladies' room, where they had found her unconscious.
“Stu Wargle is dead,” Bryce assured her yet again.
“He wanted me t-t-to… kiss him,” the girl repeated, clinging resolutely to her bizarre story.
“There was no one in the room but you,” Bryce said. “Just you, Lisa.”
“He was there,” the girl insisted.
“We came running as soon as you screamed. We found you alone”
“He was there.”
“- on the floor, in the corner, out cold.”
“He was there.”
“His body is in the utility room,” Bryce said, gently squeezing her hand, “We put it there earlier. You remember. don't you?”
“Is it still there?” the girl asked, “Maybe you'd better look.”
Bryce met Jenny's eyes. She nodded. Remembering that anything was possible tonight, Bryce got to his feet, letting go of the girl's hand. He turned toward the utility room.
“Tal?”
“Yeah?”
“Come with me.”
Tal drew his revolver.
Pulling his own sidearm from his holster, Bryce said, “The rest of you stay back.”
With Tal at his side, Bryce crossed the lobby to the utility room door and paused in front of it.
“I don't think she's the kind of kid who makes up wild stories,” Tal said.
“I know she's not.”
Bryce thought about how Paul Henderson's corpse had vanished from the substation. Damn it, though, that had been very different from this. Paul's body had been accessible, unguarded. But no one could have gotten to Wargle's corpse and it couldn't have gotten up and walked away of its own accord — without being seen by one of the three deputies posted in the lobby. Yet no one and nothing had been seen.
Bryce moved to the left of the door and motioned Tal over to the right of it.
They listened for several seconds. The inn was silent. There was no sound from within the utility room.
Keeping his body out of the doorway, Bryce leaned forward and reached across the door, took hold of the knob, turned it slowly and silently until it had gone as far as it would go. He hesitated. He glanced over at Tal, who indicated his own readiness. Bryce took a deep breath, threw the door inward, and jumped back, out of the way.
Nothing rushed from the unlighted room.
Tal inched to the edge of the jamb, reached around with one arm, fumbled for the light switch, and found it.
Bryce was crouched down, waiting. The instant the light came on, he launched himself through the doorway, his revolver poked out in front of him.
Stark fluorescent light spilled down from the twin ceiling panels and glinted off the edges of the metal sink and off the bottles and cans of cleaning materials.
The shroud, in which they had wrapped the body, lay in a pile on the floor, beside the table.
Wargle's corpse was missing.
Deke Coover had been the guard stationed at the front doors of the inn. He wasn't much help to Bryce. He had spent a lot of time looking out at Skyline Road, with his back to the lobby. Someone could have carted Wargle's body away without Coover being the wiser.
“You told me to watch the front approach, Sheriff,” Deke Said, “As long as he didn't accompany himself with a song, Wargle could've come out of there all by his lonesome, doing an old soft-shoe routine and waving a flag in each hand, and he mightn't have attracted my notice.”
The two men stationed by the elevators, near the utility room, were Kelly MacHeath and Donny Jessup. They were two of Bryce's younger men, in their mid-twenties, but they were both able, trustworthy, and reasonably experienced.
MacHeath, a blond and beefy fellow with a bull's neck and heavy shoulders, shook his head and said, “Nobody went in or out of the utility room all night.”