'No!' Uhlander gasped.
Books exploded off one of the highest library shelves and rained over Boothe and Uhlander.
The two men cried out and threw their arms over their heads.
A heavy chair rose off the floor, eight feet into the air, hung there, spinning around and around, then was thrown all the way across the library, where it struck the French windows. The brittle sounds of breaking glass and splintering mullions was followed by the crash of the chair rebounding from the window frame and falling to the floor.
Melanie was there. The etheric half of her. The astral body or psychogeist.
Dan thought of trying to speak to her and reason with her now, before she killed again, but he knew there was no hope of getting through to her, no more hope than her mother had had in hypnotic-therapy sessions. He could not save Boothe and Uhlander, and he really had no desire to save them. The only life he might be able to save now was Melanie's, for he had thought of something—a plan, a trick—that might stop her from turning her psychic power upon herself in a suicidal response to her self-loathing and horror. It was a shaky plan. Not much chance that he could make it work. But in order even to try, he had to be with the girl's body, with her physical self, when her astral body returned. Which meant he had to get back to Westwood, to the theater, before she was finished in Bel Air, and he didn't have time to waste in a fruitless attempt to dissuade her from destroying Boothe and Uhlander.
Unseen hands swept another shelf clean of books, and the volumes crashed to the floor, all across the room.
Boothe was screaming.
The bar exploded as if a bomb had gone off in it, and the air reeked of whiskey.
Uhlander was begging for mercy.
Dan saw the Tiffany lamp rising into the air, floating up like a balloon on its cord. Before the lamp had risen to the length of that tether, Dan recovered his wits, regained his sense of urgency. He ran the last few steps to the end of the room. As he pulled open the door, the light went out behind him, and the library was plunged into darkness.
He pulled the door shut as he stepped out of the room. He raced back through the house, retracing the route along which the butler had brought him earlier.
In a room with peach-colored walls and an elaborately molded white ceiling, he encountered that servant rushing the opposite direction in response to the hideous screaming in the library.
Dan said, 'Call the police!' He was sure that Melanie wouldn't harm anyone other than those who had been in the gray room or those closely associated with the conspiracy against her. Nevertheless, as the butler stopped in confusion, Dan said, 'Don't go in the library. Call the police. For God's sake, don't go in there yourself'.
* * *
The dark theater no longer seemed like a sanctuary to Laura. She was claustrophobic. The rows of seats were confining. The darkness threatened her. Why in the name of God had they taken refuge in a place of darkness. It probably thrived on darkness.
What would happen if the air grew cold again and the thing returned.
And it would return.
She was sure of that.
Soon.
* * *
The enormous iron gates began to swing slowly open when Dan had descended half the long driveway.
Ordinarily, the butler probably called ahead to the gatehouse, and the guard opened the gates even as the guest was pulling his car out of the parking circle in front of the house. But at the moment, the butler was calling 911, scared witless by the bloodcurdling screams and battle sounds coming from the library, so the guard had activated the gate controls only when he'd seen the headlights knifing down toward him through the early darkness and rain.
Dan had also slapped the detachable emergency beacon to the roof. He rocketed down the long hill, pressing the accelerator almost to the floor, counting on the gateman to get the barrier out of his way in time to prevent a nasty collision. That ironwork had appeared to be capable of stopping a tank. If he hit it, he would most likely be decapitated or skewered by a jagged bar that would pierce the windshield.
He could have descended the hill at a more reasonable pace, but seconds counted. Even if the girl's astral body did not finish with Boothe and Uhlander for a few minutes, it would no doubt return to that Westwood theater well ahead of Dan; the spirit surely didn't travel as slowly as an automobile, but moved from place to place in the wink of an eye. Besides, the butler might soon collect his wits and get the idea that Dan had done something to cause all the screaming in the library. If such a suspicion arose, the gatehouse guard might be alerted to close the gates again the instant that they finished opening, blocking Dan's escape; then whole minutes would be lost.
Thirty feet from the gates, as they continued to swing open, he finally eased up on the accelerator and touched the brakes. The car started to slide, but he held it to the road and kept its nose pointed where it should be. A sharp snap, a thin squeal: the rear bumper scraped one of the still-moving portals. Then he was on that short length of driveway beyond the walls of the estate. No traffic on the street ahead. He didn't slow down when he turned left. The sedan fishtailed to the far curb, but he maintained control, losing only a little momentum.
Emergency beacon flashing, he pushed the car to its limits, plunging down from the heights of Bel Air, from one twisting street to another, taking unconscionable chances with his own life and the lives of anyone who might have been in his way around any of several blind and half-blind curves.
His thoughts arced back in time: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey ...
Not again.
Melanie was a killer, yes, but she did not deserve to die for what she had done. She'd not been in her right mind when she killed them. Besides, if murder in self-defense had ever been a justifiable plea, it was now. If she hadn't killed them, every last one, then they would have come for her, not necessarily to exact revenge, but to conduct further experiments with her. If she hadn't killed all ten men, the torture would have continued.
He had to get that idea through to her. He thought he knew a way of doing it.
God, please, let it work.
Westwood was not far away. With the beacon, with no thought for his own mortality, he should reach the theater in a lot less than five minutes.
Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey ... Melanie ...
No!
* * *
The theater was a refrigerator.
Melanie whimpered.
Laura leaped up from her seat, not sure what to do, knowing only that she couldn't sit still as It approached.
The air temperature plummeted. In fact, it seemed colder than it had been in the kitchen the previous night or in the motel room, when It had paid them other visits.
From the row behind, someone asked Laura to please sit down, and heads turned her way from across the aisle too. But after a moment, everyone's attention shifted to the incredibly abrupt chill that had gripped the theater.
Earl was on his feet too, and this time he'd drawn the revolver from his shoulder holster.
Melanie let out a thin, pathetic cry, but her eyes didn't open.
Laura grabbed her, shook her. 'Baby, wake up! Wake up!' Soft exclamatory comments swept in a wave across the auditorium as other patrons reacted not to Laura and Melanie but to the fact that they were freezing. Then the crowd was shocked into a brief silence as the giant movie screen tore open from top to bottom with a ripping noise that sounded as though God had rent the heavens. A jagged line of blackness appeared through the center of the projected images, and the figures on the screen rippled and acquired distorted faces and bodies as the silvery surface on which they existed began to wrinkle and bulge and sag.
Melanie writhed in her seat and struck at the empty air. Her blows landed on Laura, who tried to force the girl to wake up.
No sooner had the screen torn, silencing the audience, than the heavy curtains flanking it were pulled out of the tracks in the ceiling. They flapped in the air like great wings, as if the devil himself had risen into the theater and was unfolding his batlike appendages; then they collapsed with a whoosh! into huge piles of lifeless material.
That was too much for the audience. Confused and frightened, people rose from their seats.
After taking a score of hard blows on her arms and face, Laura got hold of Melanie's wrists and kept her still. She looked over her shoulder, toward the front of the theater.
The projectionist had not touched his equipment yet, so a queer luminosity still bounced off the ruined screen, and a vague amber radiance was provided by the torch-shaped emergency lamps along the walls. The light was just sufficient for everyone to see what happened next. Empty seats in the front row tore loose of the floor, to which they were bolted, and shot violently up and backward, into the air. They struck the large screen, punched through the fabric, destroying what remained of it.
People began to scream, and a few ran toward the exits at the back of the theater.
Someone yelled, 'Earthquake!'
An earthquake didn't explain it, of course, and it wasn't likely that anyone believed that explanation. But that word, much dreaded in California since the Northridge temblor, stoked the panic. More seats—those in the second row—erupted from the floor: bolts snapped, metal shredded, concrete burst.
It was, Laura thought, as if some gigantic invisible best had entered at the front of the theater and was making its way toward them, destroying everything in its path.
'Let's get out of here,' Earl shouted, although he knew as well as she did that they could not run from this thing, whatever it was.
Melanie had ceased struggling. She was limp, like a pile of knotted rags, so limp that she might have been dead. The projectionist switched off his machinery and turned up the house lights. Everyone but Laura, Melanie, and Earl had surged to the back of the theater, and half the audience had already spilled out into the lobby.
Heart jackhammering, Laura scooped Melanie into her arms and stumbled along the row, into the aisle, with Earl following close behind her.
Now seats were exploding into the air from the fourth row and crashing backward into the demolished screen with thunderous impact. But the worst sound was coming from the emergency-exit doors that flanked the screen. They swung open and slammed shut, again and again, banging back and forth with such tremendous force that their pneumatic cylinders, which should have ensured a soft closing every time, could not cope.
Laura saw not doors but flapping mouths, hungry mouths, and she knew that if she was foolish enough to try to escape through those exits, she would find herself stepping not into the theater parking lot but into the gullet of some unimaginably foul beast. Crazy thought. Insane. She was teetering on the brink of mindless panic.
If she had not experienced the poltergeist phenomena on a smaller scale in her own kitchen, she would have been unhinged by the sight before her. What was it? What was It? And why the hell did it want Melanie?
Dan knew. At least he knew part of it.
But it didn't matter what he knew, because he couldn't help them now. Laura doubted that she would ever see him again.
Considering that she was hysterical and already emotionally overcharged, the thought of never seeing Haldane again hit her harder than seemed possible.
She had no sooner reached the aisle than her knees began to buckle under the combined weight of her terror and Melanie. Earl jammed his revolver back into its holster and took the girl out of Laura's arms.
Only a few people remained at the lobby doors, pressing against those in front of them. Some were looking back, wide-eyed, at the inexplicable chaos.
Laura and Earl took only a few steps along that same carpeted route of escape before seats stopped exploding into the air behind them—and erupted, instead, from the rows ahead. After a brief, clumsy, aerial ballet, the mangled seats crashed down into the aisle, blocking it.
Melanie would not be permitted to leave.
Holding the girl in his arms, Earl looked this way and that, unsure of his next move.
Then something shoved him. He staggered backward. Something tore Melanie out of his grip. The girl tumbled along the aisle until she slammed against a row of seats.
Screaming, Laura scurried to her daughter, rolled the girl over, put a hand to her neck. There was a pulse.
'Laura!'
She looked up when she heard her name, and with an enormous rush of relief she saw Dan Haldane. He had entered through the exiting people at the back of the theater. He rushed down the aisle toward them.
He vaulted the ruined seats that the unseen enemy had piled in the aisle, and as he drew nearer, he shouted, 'That's it! Hold her in your arms, shelter her.' He reached Laura and knelt beside her. 'Put yourself between her and It, because I don't think it'll hurt you.
'Why not?'
'I'll explain later,' he said. He turned to Earl, who had gotten to his hands and knees. 'You okay?'
'Yeah. Just bruised.'
Dan got to his feet.
Laura lay in the aisle, among scattered pieces of popcorn and crumpled paper cups and other debris, embracing Melanie, trying to fold herself around the child. She realized that the theater was silent, that the invisible beast was no longer on the rampage. But the air was cold, blood-freezing.
It was still there.
* * *
Dan turned slowly in a circle, waiting for something to happen.
As the silence continued, he said, 'You can't kill yourself unless you kill your mother too. She won't let you do it unless you kill her first.'
Looking up at him, Laura said, 'Who are you talking to?' And then she cried out and pressed closer to Melanie. 'Something's pulling at me! Dan, something's trying to tear me away from her!'
'Fight it.'
She held tightly to Melanie, and for a moment she looked like an epileptic, jerking and twitching in a fit upon the floor.
But the attack ended, and she stopped struggling.
'Gone?' Dan asked.
Gaunt, baffled, she said, 'Yes.'
Dan spoke to the air, for he could sense that the astral body was hovering out there in the theater somewhere. 'She won't let you pry her away just so you can hammer yourself to pieces. She loves you. If she has to, she'll die to protect you.,
Across the theater, three seats were torn loose of their moorings, and were swept up into the air. They whirled and slammed against one another for a half minute before they dropped back to the floor.
'No matter what you think,' Dan said to the psychogeist, 'you don't deserve to die. What you did was horrible, but it wasn't much more than you had to do.'
Silence.
Stillness.
He said, 'Your mother loves you. She wants you to live. That's why she's holding on to you with all her strength.'
A wretched sound from Laura indicated that she understood the whole terrible truth, at last.
At the front of the theater, the crumpled curtains stirred and rose slightly, in a halfhearted attempt to spread themselves into menacing wing-shapes as before, but after a few seconds they sagged into a formless heap.