Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(113)
“A suspect, more or less,” Pax said. “But we’re not able to share the details of her activities with you. For security reasons.”
“A woman? I know a genuine security threat? How stimulating!”
“Yes, ma’am, a former student. Bibi Blair.”
The Sunday softness in her face hardened into school-day stone. “That syphilitic little whore.”
Paranoia of a reasonable potency was an essential survival tool. But intense and universal paranoia of the everyone-I-know-is-an-evil-space-alien variety was the mantra of a loser. The landscape promoted disorientation. Small clusters of buildings punctuated the barren vastness, but at that hour all were dark, seemingly long abandoned. In the black land, a glow only far to the north. Square miles of yellow and cold-blue scintillation. But not a light that confirmed civilization. An unearthly fungal phosphorescence. Hot plains of radioactive glass. As Bibi drove through the ever stranger and more hostile night, as it seemed that she had driven out of California into a place with no name and no exit, she felt herself traveling a narrow line between sanity and derangement, her balance precarious.
In spite of the antibiotic ointment that the tattoo artist had applied, under the layers of enwrapping gauze, the four words on her right wrist burned as if something worse than inflammation must be at work. Bacteria eating through the flesh. Or a toxic chemical imparted with the ink. The eighteen letters stung. Itched. She had been told not to scratch. She’d left the analgesic cream and fresh bandages at the motel. Nothing with which to change the dressing. No time to change it, anyway. She wondered if the increasing irritation of the eighteen small wounds might arise from an intentionally imparted infection. But since she had chosen the parlor at random, worrying that the tattooist might be in league with Terezin was as flaky as the evil-space-alien theory.
When for a few minutes she encountered no traffic moving in either direction, she wondered if roadblocks had been set up behind and ahead of her, and she waited to turn a bend or top a rise and find an execution squad of Wrong People. On the other hand, when a vehicle appeared in the oncoming lane, she tensed in expectation that the windshield of the Honda might dissolve in a rain of gunfire. Every motorist closing in behind her might be a tail, and when she cut her speed to let him pass, he always lingered alongside her—or she thought he did—to look her over with malevolent intent.
She was still fifteen or twenty minutes from Sonomire Way when a disturbing sound rose above the rubber-on-road hum and the drone of the engine. The flapping-flopping noise was like the struggling of a freshly caught fish in a sportsman’s creel, and at first she thought that it must be a tire shedding tread. In that case, she would have felt such a problem translated to the steering wheel, a strong pull toward the deterioration, but she didn’t.
A subsequent silence didn’t reassure Bibi, and after less than a minute, the noise came again, this time perhaps from under the car. Something that had slipped loose must be slapping the pavement. But the Honda continued to purr along, and no warning lights appeared on the instrument panel.
The third time she heard the sound, she realized that the source was within the vehicle. On the backseat. Or on the floor behind the front passenger seat.
Then she understood what it must be.
The previous night, asleep in the armchair in her father’s office, above Pet the Cat, she had dreamed the truth of what had happened in her bedroom when she was not quite six years old. The truth that she had hidden from herself by using Captain’s memory trick of fire and forgetfulness. Not the whole truth, but part of it. In the dream, she had not revealed to herself the source and nature of the threat. Only that something malicious had come for her. Had come for her and crawled her room. Had gotten under the covers with her.
And here it was again.
After a silence in which the thing perhaps nursed its desire and considered its options, the slick and torsional sound rose again, as if this must be some slippery denizen of murky water and swamp mud, out of its element but hardly deterred, determined to make its way through this unfamiliar environment, toward what it wanted, needed. Toward her. To Bibi, it sounded as though the thing was trying to get purchase on the back of the front passenger seat, or to squirm up the transmission hump and onto the console between the seats, which should have been an easy bit of terrain to conquer.
On a straight stretch of highway, Bibi turned her head to look back and down, over the console. The pearly luminosity of instrument-panel gauges did not reach as far as the rear compartment of the car, where shadows pooled and moonlight rushing past the windows revealed nothing. If something coiled or quivered on the back floor, yearning to climb, and if it was watching her, its eyes did not shine in the gloom.
Starboard tires stuttered on the stony shoulder of the roadway. Bibi looked forward, pulled the wheel to the left, and brought the Honda onto the pavement again, just seconds short of a plunge off a low embankment.
Whether it was a sign of madness or common sense—or repressed knowledge guiding her without her understanding—Bibi told herself that if only she refused to hear the creature, refused to grant it existence, imagined it gone now and forever, she would be rid of it. Had that strategy worked for her when she had been a terrified child? She could not remember.
After a minute and the better part of another, the theory seemed to be confirmed, but then a new sound arose from the back of the car, what might have been a voice or an attempt at a voice. Low and wet, a gutteronasal clutch of syllables that formed no words but expressed nonetheless a craving, a coveting, a ferocious need, and such bitter and implacable rancor that mere hatred paled before it.