Jim turned on the record player.
'Jesus!' Garcia called out, jumping. 'What's that?' The freight train was coming closer. You could almost feel the walls thrumming with it.
The sound no longer seemed to be coming out of the speakers but from the hall, from down tracks someplace far away in time as well as space.
'I don't like this, man,' Lawson said.
'It's too late,' Vinnie said. He stepped forward and gestured with the knife. 'Give us your money, dad.'
...letusgo...
Garcia recoiled. 'What the hell -, But Vinnie never hesitated. He motioned the others to
spread out, and the thing in his eyes might have been relief. 'Come on, kid, how much you got?' Garcia asked suddenly.
'Four cents,' Jim said. It was true. He had picked them out of the penny jar in the bedroom. The most recent date was 1956.
'You f**kin' liar.'
.leave him alone...
Lawson glanced over his shoulder and his eyes widened. The walls had become misty, insubstantial. The freight train wailed. The light from the parking-lot street-lamp had reddened, like the neon Burrets Building Company sign, stuttering against the twilight sky.
Something was walking out of the pentagram, something with the face of a small boy perhaps twelve years old. A boy with a crew cut.
Garcia darted forward and punched Jim in the mouth. He could smell mixed garlic and pepperoni on his breath. It was all slow and painless.
Jim felt a sudden heaviness, like lead, in his groin, and his bladder let go. He looked down and saw a dark patch appear and spread on his pants.
'Look, Vinnie, he wet himself!' Lawson cried out. The tone was right, but the expression on his face was one of horror - the expression of a puppet that has come to life only to find itself on strings.
'Let him alone,' the Wayne-thing said, but it was not Wayne's voice - it was the cold, greedy voice of the thing from the pentagram. Run, Jimmy! Run! Run! Run!'
Jim slipped to his knees and a hand slapped down on his back, groping for purchase, and found none.
He looked up and saw Vinnie, his face stretching into a caricature of hatred, drive his knife into the Wayne-thing just below the breastbone . . . and then scream, his face collapsing in on itself, charring, blackening, becoming awful.
Then he was gone.
Garcia and Lawson struck a moment later, writhed, charred, and disappeared.
Jim lay on the floor, breathing harshly. The sound of the freight train faded.
His brother was looking down at him.
'Wayne?' he breathed.
And the face changed. It seemed to melt and run together. The eyes went yellow, and a horrible, grinning malignancy looked out at him.
'I'll come back, Jim,' the cold voice whispered.
And it was gone.
He got up slowly and turned off the record player with one mangled hand. He touched his mouth. It was bleeding from Garcia's punch. He went over and turned on the lights. The room was empty. He looked out into the parking lot and that was empty, too, except for one hubcap that reflected the moon in idiot pantomime. The classroom air smelled old and stale - the atmosphere of tombs. He erased the pentagram on the floor and then began to straighten up the desks for the substitute the next day. His fingers hurt very badly - what fingers? He would have to see a doctor. He closed the door and went downstairs slowly, holding his hands to his chest. Halfway down, something -a shadow, or perhaps only an intuition - made him whirl around.
Something unseen seemed to leap back.
Jim remembered the warning in Raising Demons - the danger involved. You could perhaps summon them, perhaps cause them to do your work. You could even get rid of them.
But sometimes they come back.
He walked down the stairs again, wondering if the nightmare was over after all.
STRAWBERRY SPRING
Springheel Jack.
I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how they take me back. All that was eight years ago, almost to the day. Once, while it was going on, I saw myself on nationwide TV - the Walter Cronkite Report. Just a hurrying face in the general background behind the reporter, but my folks picked me out right away. They called long-distance. My dad wanted my analysis of the situation; he was all bluff and hearty and man-to-man. My mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn't want to come home. I was enchanted.
Enchanted by that dark and mist-blown strawberry spring, and by the shadow of violent death that walked through it on those nights eight years ago. The shadow of Springheel Jack.