Del followed him into the storm, as ebullient as any child. ‘Hey, did you ever see Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain?’
‘Don’t start dancing,’ he warned.
‘You need to be more spontaneous, Tommy.’
‘I’m very spontaneous,’ he said, tucking his head down to keep the rain out of his eyes. He bent into the wind and headed toward the battered, mural-bright van, which stood under a tall lamppost.
‘You’re about as spontaneous as a rock.’
Splashing through ankle-deep puddles, shivering, poised at the slippery slope of self-pity, he didn’t bother to answer.
‘Tommy, wait,’ she said, and grabbed his arm again. Spinning to face her, cold and wet and impatient, he demanded, ‘Now what?’
‘It’s here.’
‘Huh?’
No longer flirtatious or flippant, as alert as a deer scenting a wolf in the underbrush, she stared past Tommy: ‘It.’
He followed the direction of her gaze. ‘Where?’
‘In the van. Waiting for us in the van.’
FIVE
Oil-black rain briefly blazed as bright as molten gold, down through lamplight, drizzled over the van, and then puddled black again around the tires.
‘Where?’ Tommy asked, blinking rain out of his eyes, studying the murkiness beyond the van’s windshield, searching for some sign of the demon. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But it’s there, all right, in the van. I sense it.’
‘You’re psychic all of a sudden?’
‘Not all of a sudden,’ she said, her voice thickening, as though sleep was overcoming her. ‘I’ve always had strong intuition, very reliable.’
Thirty feet away, the Ford van was exactly as it had been when they had left it to go into the bakery. Tommy didn’t feel what Del felt. He perceived no sinister aura around the vehicle.
He looked at Del as she stared intently at the van. Rain streamed down her face, dripped off the end of her nose and off the point of her chin. Her eyes weren’t blinking, and she seemed to be sinking into a trance. Her lips began to move, as though she were speaking, but no sound escaped her.
‘Del?’
After a moment her silently moving lips produced a wordless murmur, and then she began to whisper:
‘Waiting... cold as ice... dark inside... a dark cold thing... ticktock… ticktock...’
He shifted his attention to the van again, and now it seemed to loom as ominously as a hearse. Del’s fear had infected him, and his heart raced as he was overwhelmed by a sense of impending assault.
The woman’s whisper faded into the susurration of the raindrops dissolving against the puddled pavement. Tommy leaned closer. Her voice was hypnotically porten-tous, and he didn’t want to miss anything that she said.
Ticktock… so much bigger now… snake’s blood and river mud… blind eyes see… dead heart beats… a need… a need… a need to feed….
Tommy wasn’t sure which frightened him more at the moment: the van and the utterly alien creature that might be crouching within it - or this peculiar woman.
Abruptly she emerged from her mesmeric state. ‘We have to get out of here. Let’s take one of these cars.’
‘An employee’s car?’
She was already moving away from the van, among the more than thirty vehicles that belonged to the workers at New World Saigon Bakery.
Glancing warily back at the van, Tommy hurried to keep up with her. ‘We can’t do that.’
‘Sure we can.’
‘It’s stealing.’
It’s survival,’ she said, trying the door of a blue Chevrolet, which was locked.
‘Let’s go back into the bakery.’
‘The deadline is dawn, remember?’ she said, moving on to a white Honda. ‘It won’t wait forever. It’ll come in after us.’
She opened the driver’s door of the Honda, and the dome light came on, and she slipped in behind the steering wheel. No keys dangled in the ignition, so she searched under the seat with one hand to see if the owner had left them there.
Standing at the open door of the Honda, Tommy said, ‘Then let’s just walk out of here.’
‘We wouldn’t get far on foot before it caught us. I’m going to have to hot-wire this crate.’
Watching as Del groped blindly for the ignition wires under the dashboard, Tommy said, ‘You can’t do this.’
‘Keep a watch on my Ford.’
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Movement, a strange shadow, anything,’ she said ner-vously. ‘We’re running out of time. Don’t you sense it?’
Except for the wind-driven rain, the night was still around Del’s van.
‘Come on, come on,’ Del muttered to herself, fumbling with the wires, and then the Honda engine caught, revved.
Tommy’s stomach turned over at the sound, for he seemed to be sliding ever faster down a greased slope to destruction - if not at the hands of the demon, then by his own actions.
‘Hurry, get in,’ Del said as she released the hand-brake.
‘This is car theft,’ he argued.
‘I’m leaving whether you get in or not.’
‘We could go to jail.’
She pulled the driver’s door shut, forcing him to step back, out of the way.
Under the tall sodium-vapour lamp, the silent van appeared to be deserted. All the doors remained closed. The most remarkable thing about it was the Art Deco mural. Already its ominous aura had faded.
Tommy had allowed himself to be infected by Del’s hysteria. The thing to do now was get control of himself, walk over to the van, and show her that it was safe.
Del put the Honda in gear and drove forward. Quickly stepping in front of the car, slapping his palms down flat on the hood, Tommy blocked her way, forcing her to stop. ‘No. Wait, wait.’
She shifted into reverse and started to back out of the parking space.
Tommy ran around to the passenger’s side, caught up with the car, pulled open the door, and jumped inside. ‘Will you just wait a second, for God’s sake?’
‘No,’ she said, braking and shifting out of reverse. As she tramped the accelerator, the car shot forward across the parking lot, and the door beside Tommy was flung shut.
They were briefly blinded by the rain until Del found the switch for the windshield wipers.
‘You’re not thinking this through,’ he argued.
‘I know what I’m doing.’
The engine screamed, and great plumes of water sprayed up from the tires.
‘What if the cops stop us?’ Tommy worried.
‘They won’t.’
‘They will if you keep driving like this.’
At the end of the large building, before turning the corner, Del braked hard. The car shrieked, fishtailing as it slid to a full stop.
Studying her rear-view mirror, she said, ‘Look back.’
Tommy turned in his seat. ‘What?’
‘The van.’
Under the tall lamppost, falling rain danced on empty pavement.
For a moment Tommy thought he was looking in the wrong place. There were three other lampposts behind the bakery. But the van was not under any of those, either.
‘Where’d it go?’ he asked.
‘Maybe out to the alley, or maybe around the other side of the building, or maybe it’s just behind those delivery trucks. I can’t figure why it didn’t come straight after us.’ She drove forward, around the corner, along the side of the bakery, toward the front.
Bewildered, Tommy said, ‘But who’s driving it?’
‘Not a who. A what.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said.
‘It’s a lot bigger now.’
‘It would have to be. But still-’ ‘It’s changed.’
‘And it got a driver’s license, huh?’
‘It’s very different from what you’ve seen before.’ ‘Yeah? What’s it like now?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it.’ ‘Intuition again?’
‘Yeah. I just know... it’s different.’
Tommy tried to envision a monstrous entity, some-thing like one of the ancient gods from an old H. P. Lovecraft story, with a bulbous skull, a series of mean little scarlet eyes across its forehead, a sucking hole where the nose should be, and a wicked mouth surrounded by a ring of writhing tentacles, comfortably ensconced behind the steering wheel of the van, fumbling with a clumsy tentacle at the heater controls, punching the radio selector buttons in search of some old-fashioned rock-’n’-roll, and checking the glove box to see if it could find any breath mints.