At the foot of the stairs Joyce pats the air at him—wait—then leaves briefly to reconnoiter. Koo is beginning very strongly to feel his vulnerability when at last she returns, waving him to come on.
There’s a stone-walled living room through a broad doorway. Koo glances at it, and stops dead when he sees there’s someone in there! Liz, the tough one, is seated in an Eames chair, legs curled under her, either brooding or asleep. High again? Koo is afraid to move; won’t movement attract her attention?
To his left, Joyce is urgently motioning to him: Come on, come on. He hesitates, then somewhere to the right a door opens and there are voices. In a sudden rush he crosses the open space to the shadowed areaway where Joyce is waiting.
The voices approach. Koo listens apprehensively for Mark, but the first identifiable voice belongs to Larry, saying, “How can you justify this, Peter?”
Peter’s voice says, “The Movement can’t be mocked. We can’t permit it.”
They go past the areaway as a third voice, one Koo hasn’t heard before, says, “It’ll be interesting to see just how far you’ll go in practice, as opposed to theory.” This voice is nasty, angry, sarcastic.
“As far as necessary,” Peter says. They’re just the other side of this wall now, apparently in the kitchen; Koo hears drawers being opened and closed. Peter says, “There was a knife here, a long carving knife. Where the hell is it?”
A long carving knife? Koo presses his back against the wall, trying to be one more shadow among the shadows. What are they up to now?
The nasty voice says, “Here’s a cleaver. Just the thing, I should think.”
“All right, give it to me.” And one more drawer slams, then the three men march out of the room and start up the stairs.
Joyce grabs Koo’s arm, tugs at him. Yes, yes. Those three are going up to where they think Koo is, and they’re carrying a cleaver; feet trembling in haste, Koo follows Joyce down another flight of stairs between living room and kitchen, and through a door into a sudden rush of cool moist air. Joyce closes the door, hurriedly but silently, and whispers, “Come on! We have to hurry!”
“Check.”
No outcry yet from above. They run out from under the cantilevered deck into thick sand, hard to move through. The ocean is out there, under a half moon in a clear black sky. Where is this place? No way to tell; it could be any one of a hundred spots between Newport Beach and Oxnard. Koo looks back, trying to guess where they are from the look of the houses, but Joyce pulls at his arm, crying over the surf. “Come on! Hurry!”
“Yes. Right.” But she’s urging him directly toward the ocean, not along the beach. “Where—” The exertion of running through the sand is rapidly using up his strength. “Where—”
“They have a boat. We’re supposed to meet the boat. Hurry!”
The hard sand of high tide line; Koo moves more quickly, Joyce dropping back. A boat? Koo trots forward, gasping, arms pumping, staring out at the black sea with its eerie line of phosphorescence forming and rolling and dying way out there in the cold dark. A boat? Seeing nothing, Koo turns his head to gasp another question, and behind him, rushing at him ahead of Joyce’s savage straining face, is dull moonlight striking yellow from the blade of a long knife. A knife held in her raised fist.
“Jesus!” Koo backpedals, turning, tripping over his own feet, trying to run backward away from the slashing knife, throwing his arms up to fend it off, and the blade slices across his forearm, grating on bone, slitting the flesh like cutting through raw veal. There isn’t pain, not at first, but there’s the horrible knowledge; his flesh has been cut. Koo screams, falls backwards, rolls and rolls, blood spraying from his arm in red showers, and the panting mad girl lunges after him on all fours, stabbing downward, scraping the dull side of the blade along his ribcage, jabbing the knife into the sand, pulling it out with both hands, holding it high in both hands, following him on her knees.
Koo is mindless with terror, gibbering, “Don’t don’t don’t don’t NO JEE-SUS!”
“You’re tearing us apart,” he hears her mutter, through the crash of surf. “Tearing us apart.” And she struggles to her feet, the knife huge and straight and unbending in her hand.
Koo tries to rise, falls back, throws his arms up again and she slashes twice, back and forth. Great triangular strips of flesh hang from his arms, and even in his agony the gag interpretation rises in his shocked mind: She’s filleting me. “Let me go! Let me go! I won’t tell!”
She stops, the red-clouded knife hovering as she sways over him. “Peter would hate me.” Her eyes are also clouded, voice swollen as though her mouth and throat are already clogged with his blood. “We can survive if you’re dead.” And she drops on him, slashing down again, as Koo screams, the loudest harshest most final scream in the world—and all at once Joyce flings herself back from him, as though flying.
No; she doesn’t fling herself, she is thrown. A black figure has come out of the ocean, moving with the speed of dark, a blur of vicious motion; it swarms over Joyce, compelling, irrevocable. Something dull and hard is in its upraised fist, thudding down, thudding again, over and over, the sound first dry and then wet.
Koo struggles to get up, but can barely lift his head. His blood-streaming shredded arms have no strength. “Oh,” he whispers, in what was meant to be a cry for help. “Oh, God.”
People now are running this way from the house. There’s no escape, no safety anywhere. The figure hulking over what had been Joyce turns to him, throwing away the dark sea-rock, dropping to his knees beside Koo, murmuring, “Easy. Easy.”
Koo can barely recognize Mark in this beatific nurse, bending over him, carefully touching his arms. “Don’t,” he begs.
“Lucky fat man,” Mark says, almost tenderly. “We’ll fix you at the house.”
“Mark,” Koo whispers. “You’re all wet.”
It’s true. From head to foot Mark is wet, as drenched with water as Koo is drenched with his own blood. Mark’s eyes gleam like that far-off phosphorescence. “I’ve saved your life,” he says, quick and low and triumphant. “It’s mine. We start fresh.”
The other people are pounding across the beach, are nearly here. “Mark,” Koo whispers. “Help me.”
“You’re mine again,” Mark tells him, slipping his arms under Koo’s body, preparing to lift him.
“Help me. You’re the only one,” Koo whispers, and as Mark lifts him he faints.
27
The trouble outside roused Liz at last. She rose from the Eames chair, looking around in a dazed way like someone coming out of hypnosis, and became aware of blurred movement out on the beach, fitful in the dim moonlight, capering silhouettes against the far-off lines of wave-phosphorescence. Sliding open one of the glass doors, she stepped out onto the cantilevered deck to see the obscure cluster of figures split in two; while a part remained behind, involved with something flat on the beach, another part moved this way, weaving and tottering through the sand. Leaning on the rail, peering hard into the darkness, Liz saw that the thing approaching was a person, carrying another person. They approached, they entered the trapezoid of yellow lightspill from the house, and it was Mark, struggling through the soft sand. And in his arms; was that Davis?
They disappeared beneath her, under the deck, and she went back inside, turning the corner from the living room to the central hallway in time to see Mark struggle up the stairs from the beach door. That was Davis in his arms, unconscious or dead, and both men drenched with water and blood; survivors of some water cult’s sacrificial rite. Daubs and spatters of blood painted Mark’s face, like a marauding Iroquois. Davis was smeared all over with blood, some dripping and spraying as Mark jolted up the stairs. Liz saw the knife-hilt angling from Davis’ side just as Mark reached the first floor; she stared at it, not understanding anything she saw, and on the way by Mark said, “Bandages. Tape. Anything.”