He quickly turned away from the pool.
He stepped under the aluminum awning, where the tinny drumming of the rain made him feel claustrophobic, as if he were sealed inside a can. He went to room 15, near the center of the middle wing of the U, and tried the door. It was locked, too, but the lock looked old and flimsy. He stepped back and began kicking the door. By the third blow, he was so excited by the very act of destruction that he began to keen shrilly and uncontrollably. On the fourth kick, the lock snapped, and the door flew inward with a screech of tortured metal.
He went inside.
He remembered Shadway telling Rachael that electrical service had been maintained, but he did not switch on the lights. For one thing, he did not want to alert Rachael to his presence when, at last, she arrived. Besides, because of his drastically improved night vision, the dimensions of the lightless room and the contours of the furniture were revealed in sufficient detail to allow him to roam the chamber without falling over things.
Quietly he closed the door.
He moved to the window that looked out upon the courtyard, parted the musty, greasy drapes an inch or two, and peered into the lesser gloom of the blustery night. From here, he had a commanding view of the open end of the motel and of the door to the office.
When she came, he would see her.
Once she had settled in, he would go after her.
He shifted his weight impatiently from one foot to the other.
He made a thin, whispery, eager sound.
He longed for the blood.
Amos Zachariah Tate — the craggy-faced, squint-eyed trucker with the carefully tended handlebar mustache — looked as if he might be the reincarnation of an outlaw who had prowled these same solitary reaches of the Mojave in the days of the Old West, preying upon stagecoaches and pony-express riders. However, his manner was more that of an itinerant preacher from the same age: soft-spoken, most courteous, generous, yet hard-bitten, with firm convictions about the redemption of the soul that was possible through the love of Jesus.
He provided Ben not merely with a free ride to Las Vegas but with a wool blanket to ward off the chill that the truck's air conditioner threw upon his rain-sodden body, coffee from one of two large thermos bottles, a chewy granola bar, and spiritual advice. He was genuinely concerned about Ben's comfort and physical well-being, a natural-born Good Samaritan who was embarrassed by displays of gratitude and who was devoid of self-righteousness, which drained all of the potential offensiveness from his well-meant, low-key pitch for Jesus.
Besides, Amos believed Ben's lie about a desperately injured — perhaps dying — wife in the Sunrise Hospital in Vegas. Although Amos said he did not usually take the laws of the land lightly — even minor laws like speed limits — he made an exception in this case and pushed the big rig up to sixty-five and seventy miles an hour, which was as fast as he felt he dared go in this foul weather.
Huddled under the warm wool blanket, sipping coffee, chewing the sweet granola bar and thinking bitter thoughts of death and loss, Ben was grateful to Amos Tate, but he wished they could make even better speed. If love was the closest that human beings could hope to come to immortality — which was what he'd thought when in bed with Rachael — then he had been given a key to life everlasting when he had found her. Now, at the gates of that paradise, it seemed the key was being snatched out of his hand. When he considered the bleakness of life without her, he wanted to seize control of the truck from Amos, push the driver aside, get behind the wheel, and make the rig fly to Vegas.
But all he could do was pull the blanket a little tighter around himself and, with growing trepidation, watch the dark miles go by.
The manager's apartment at the Golden Sand Inn had been unused for a month or more, and it had a stale smell. Although the odor was not strong, Rachael repeatedly wrinkled her nose in distaste. There was a quality of putrescence in the smell which, over time, would probably leave her nauseated.
The living room was large, the bedroom small, the bathroom minuscule. The tiny kitchen was cramped and dreary but completely equipped. The walls did not look as if they had been painted in a decade. The carpets were threadbare, and the kitchen linoleum was cracked and discolored. The furniture was sagging and scarred and splitting at the seams, and the major kitchen appliances were dented and scraped and yellowing with age.
“Not a layout you're ever going to see in Architectural Digest,” Whitney Gavis said, bracing himself against the refrigerator with the stump of his left arm and reaching behind with his one good hand to insert the plug in the wall socket. The motor came on at once. “But the stuff works, pretty much, and it's unlikely anyone's going to look for you here.”
As they had gone through the apartment, turning on lights, she had begun to tell him the real story behind the warrants for her and Benny's arrest. Now they pulled up chairs at the Formica-topped kitchen table, which was filmed with gray dust and ringed with a score of cigarette scars, and she told him the rest of it as succinctly as she could.
Outside, the moaning wind seemed like a sentient beast, pressing its featureless face to the windows as if it wanted to hear the tale she told or as if it had something of its own to add to the story.
Standing at the window of room 15, waiting for Rachael to arrive, Eric had felt the changefire growing hotter within him. He began to pour sweat; it streamed off his brow and down his face, gushed from every pore as if trying to match the rate at which the rain ran off the awning of the promenade beyond the window. He felt as if he were standing in a furnace, and every breath he drew seared through his lungs. All around him now, in every corner, the room was filled with the phantom flames of shadowfires, at which he dared not look. His bones felt molten, and his flesh was so hot that he would not have been surprised to see real flames spurt from his fingertips.
“Melting…” he said in a voice deep and guttural and thoroughly inhuman. “… the… melting man.”
His face suddenly shifted. A terrible crunching-splintering noise filled his ears for a moment, issuing from within his skull, but it turned almost at once into a sickening, spluttering, oozing liquid sound. The process was accelerating insanely. Horrified, terrified — but also with a dark exhilaration and a wild demonic joy — he sensed his face changing shape. For a moment he was aware of a gnarled brow extending so far out over his eyes that it penetrated his peripheral vision, but then it was gone, subsiding, the new bone melting into his nose and mouth and jawline, pulling his nominally human countenance forward into a rudimentary, misshapen snout. His legs began to give way beneath him, so he turned reluctantly from the window, and with a crash he fell to his knees on the floor. Something snapped in his chest. To accommodate the snoutlike restructuring of his visage, his lips split farther back along his cheeks. He dragged himself onto the bed, rolled onto his back, giving himself entirely to the devastating yet not essentially unpleasant process of revolutionary change, and as from a great distance he heard himself making peculiar sounds: a doglike growl, a reptilian hiss, and the wordless but unmistakable exclamations of a man in the throes of sexual orgasm.
For a while, darkness claimed him.
When he came partially to his senses a few minutes later, he found that he had rolled off the bed and was lying beneath the window, where he had recently been keeping a watch for Rachael. Although the changefire had not grown cooler, although he still felt his tissues seeking new forms in every part of his body, he resolutely pushed aside the drapes and reached up toward the window. In the dim light, his hands looked enormous and chitinous, as if they belonged to a crab or lobster that had been gifted with fingers instead of pincers. He grabbed the sill and pulled himself off the floor, stood. He leaned against the glass, his breath coming in great hot gasps that steamed the pane.