Besides, she didn’t want to break this mood, and she figured the best way to keep it rolling was to spend as much time as possible with him.
They’d had a little makeout session in his office before the singer and her band showed up. Paul had wanted to do it on the floor, but she’d drawn the line at that. The floor was filthy, and despite their desire, they weren’t the hormone-enraged adolescents they had been in high school. They could wait until later to consummate their evening. It had been a hot and heavy petting zoo in the office, however, and they’d both come out feeling high. Even though they were adults, it still got the juices flowing to be doing something slightly forbidden, and she was already planning what would happen when they got home.
Around her, the seats began filling. Either the singer or Patsy had a bigger fan vase in McGuane than Paul had thought, and pretty soon nearly all of the chairs and tables were taken. Only two waitresses were working tonight, and they were earning their pay, taking and filling orders that would have kept four girls running.
Deanna sipped her coffee. She was glad things were back on an even keel. It had been a rough couple of weeks. She didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t know what had happened between them, but there’d been a chill, a kind of emotional estrangement, and they’d fought a lot, for no reason, though it never seemed to be the fault of either of them.
Julia had seemed somewhat distant lately, too, and it occurred to her that the problem lay with herself, not her husband or her friends. She was the nucleus around which this was occurring, and it was only logical to assume that she was somehow the cause.
But she knew that was not the case. She seldom listened to gossip or rumor, and almost never believed it, but she was not deaf, and she knew that there were a lot of problems in McGuane right now. Interpersonal problems as well as… other things.
And she was not the cause of that.
She didn’t know what was.
But it made her uneasy.
The lights dimmed, and Deanna looked over her shoulder, saw Paul at the soundboard. She gave a little wave, and he smiled and waved back.
The stage lights clicked on, and to the applause of the audience a slightly overweight woman with a lined but pretty face led a group of guys along the open aisle next to the wall and onto the stage.
“Howdy!” the woman announced. “I’m Linette Daniels, and this here’s my band, the Crazies!”
There was a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, a fiddler, and a pedal-steel player, and they immediately ripped into a typically turbocharged version of “Orange Blossom Special.” Linette did a little buck dance, to the delight of the crowd, and then the musicians downshifted into “She’s Got You” and she started singing.
The woman did a fair Patsy Cline impression, Deanna thought, but it was precisely because of that that her interest began to wander. The monotonous whining and yelping was as off-putting coming from this woman as it had been from Patsy herself, and Deanna found herself reverting to crowd-gazing. There were quite a few people here that she knew, but an equal number that she didn’t. She watched a grossly overweight man awkwardly attempt to dance with a lithe little teenager who looked like his daughter but was obviously his wife or girlfriend. A small section of the café had been cleared and set aside for dancing, but they were the only two on the floor. Her attention wandered to a skinny cowboy sitting alone next to the stage who had what was without a doubt the longest neck she’d ever seen on a human being. He made Audrey Hepburn look like Stubby Kaye, and his head was rocking back and forth in time to the music, flopping around on that huge neck like a plum on the end of a bendable straw.
It was a peculiar-looking crowd, and she was having fun just watching the offstage show when her gaze alighted on something that made her heart skip a beat.
A shadow.
It was short, squat, almost simian, and she watched it scuttle along the edge of the crowd toward the side of the stage. It was not flat, like an ordinary shadow, but seemed to be three-dimensional, as though it was a being in its own right, which was appropriate, because there seemed to be no original source to which it corresponded.
The shadow started to climb up the metal rigging to the right of the stage, and she saw that it was a self-contained entity. There were no ties to anything else. Its form ended at its feet.
The figure climbed hand over hand until it was at the top of the rigging near the ceiling, but no one else seemed to be looking at it. Even those audience members who weren’t intently watching the singer and her band had not noticed the shadow. Deanna looked quickly around, checked out the waitresses. They were busy running back and forth between the tables and the counter, and they had not spotted it either.
Couldn’t anyone else see it?
She scooted her chair to the left, saw the small figure crawl along the rigging pipes until it was directly above the stage. There was something unnatural about it, a deformity visible even in its silhouetted shape that marked it as inhuman. That made no logical sense, but she knew it to be true, and though she wanted to look away, she did not.
The shadow began fiddling with the center spotlight.
Deanna stood, pointing and screaming, as she realized what it was trying to do, but the concert was too loud, and though a few of the people around her saw her pointing and looked in the direction of her finger, no one seemed to hear her.
The light fell.
It crashed on Linette, the huge, blocky casing landing corner-down on the singer’s bleached-blond head, crushing her skull and shearing off the entire right side of her face. Blood was everywhere—spurting, spraying, misting—and the song ended unnervingly, not with a scream but with a quiet “uh” that cut off Linette’s voice as the musicians continued obliviously for a few more bars.
The shadow was jumping up and down on the rigging in a furious assault, and seconds later the entire thing collapsed, lights and pipes, wires and metal bars falling forward onto the audience.
People were screaming, scrambling to get away. Screeching feedback from the speakers drowned out even the screams, and it was as though the entire scene was taking place in some overloud movie. Deanna’s mind focused on and absorbed individual events, recording them with a clarity she had never known before: the musicians, covered with spraying blood, dropping their instruments, stumbling back; a stray light swinging from an attached cord and smashing into the face of the long-necked man, knocking him flat; an intact section of rigging falling onto one of the big tables, crushing several couples beneath it; a stray bar of metal spearing through the foot of an older woman, pinning her to the floor as she tried to run.
Where was the shadow?
At the same time she was backing up, trying not to be knocked down by the surging, panicked crowd, Deanna was scanning the ceiling above the stage for any sign of the dark figure.
There it was.
She saw it swinging through the rafters like an ape, and then she was knocked to the ground by a screaming old man who did not even stop to see if she was all right but continued running over her.
She struggled to her feet, leaned back against a post for protection and scanned the ceiling for the figure. Her eyes found the place where it had been, but it was not there, and her eyes darted back and forth, searching.
She found it.
In the rafters directly above.
It was looking down at her, and for a split second she saw glowing white teeth grinning in its dark shadow face.