The lady or the tiger? Smokey or the millhand? Jack hesitated a moment longer in an agony of indecision. That the man with the yellow eyes was still in the bathroom was a possibility; that Smokey would be back was a certainty.
Jack opened the door and stepped out into the narrow hallway. The pack on his back seemed to gain weight - an eloquent accusation of his planned escape to anyone who might see it. He started down the hallway, moving grotesquely on tiptoe in spite of the thundering music and the roar of the crowd, his heart hammering in his chest.
I was six, Jacky was six.
So what? Why did that keep coming back?
Six.
The corridor seemed longer. It was like walking on a treadmill. The fire-door at the far end seemed to draw closer only by agonizing degrees. Sweat now coated his brow and his upper lip. His gaze flicked steadily toward the door to the right, with the black outline of a dog on it. Beneath this outline was the word POINTERS. And at the end of the corridor, a door of fading, peeling red. The sign on the door said EMERGENCY USE ONLY! ALARM WILL SOUND! In fact, the alarm bell had been broken for two years. Lori had told him so when Jack had hesitated about using the door to take out the trash.
Finally almost there. Directly opposite POINTERS.
He's in there, I know he is . . . and if he jumps out I'll scream . . . I . . . I'll . . .
Jack put out a trembling right hand and touched the crash-bar of the emergency door. It felt blessedly cool to his touch. For one moment he really believed he would simply fly out of the pitcher plant and into the night . . . free.
Then the door behind him suddenly banged open, the door to SETTERS, and a hand grabbed his backpack. Jack uttered a high-pitched, despairing shriek of a trapped animal and lunged at the emergency door, heedless of the pack and the magic juice inside it. If the straps had broken he would have simply gone fleeing through the trashy, weedy vacant lot behind the Tap, and never mind anything else.
But the straps were tough nylon and didn't break. The door opened a little way, revealing a brief dark wedge of the night, and then thumped shut again. Jack was pulled into the women's room. He was whirled around and then thrown backward. If he had hit the wall dead on, the bottle of magic juice would undoubtedly have shattered in the pack, drenching his few clothes and good old Rand McNally with the odor of rotting grapes. Instead, he hit the room's one wash-basin with the small of his back. The pain was giant, excruciating.
The millhand was walking toward him slowly, hitching up his jeans with hands that had begun to twist and thicken.
'You were supposed to be gone, kid,' he said, his voice roughening, becoming at every moment more like the snarl of an animal.
Jack began to edge to his left, his eyes never leaving the man's face. His eyes now seemed almost transparent, not just yellow but lighted from within . . . the eyes of a hideous Halloween jack-o'-lantern.
'But you can trust old Elroy,' the cowboy-thing said, and now it grinned to reveal a mouthful of curving teeth, some of them jaggedly broken off, some black with rot. Jack screamed. 'Oh, you can trust Elroy,' it said, its words now hardly discernible from a doglike growl. 'He ain't gonna hurt you too bad.
'You'll be all right,' it growled, moving toward Jack, 'you'll be all right, oh yeah, you'll . . . ' It continued to talk, but Jack could no longer tell what it was saying. Now it was only snarling.
Jack's foot hit the tall wastecan by the door. As the cowboy thing reached for him with its hooflike hands, Jack grabbed the can and threw it. The can bounced off the Elroy-thing's chest. Jack tore open the bathroom door and lunged to the left, toward the emergency door. He slammed into the crash-bar, aware that Elroy was right behind him. He lurched into the dark behind the Oatley Tap.
There was a colony of overloaded garbage cans to the right of the door. Jack blindly swept three of them behind him, heard them clash and rattle - and then a howl of fury as Elroy stumbled into them.
He whirled in time to see the thing go down. There was even a moment to realize - Oh dear Jesus a tail it's got something like a tail - that the thing was now almost entirely an animal. Golden light fell from its eyes in weird rays, like bright light falling through twin keyholes.
Jack backed away from it, pulling the pack from his back, trying to undo the catches with fingers which felt like blocks of wood, his mind a roaring confusion -
- Jacky was six God help me Speedy Jacky was SIX God please -
- of thoughts and incoherent pleas. The thing snarled and flailed at the garbage cans. Jack saw one hoof-hand go up and then come whistling down, splitting the side of one corrugated metal can in a jagged slash a yard long. It got up again, stumbled, almost fell, and then began to lurch toward Jack, its snarling, rippling face now almost at chest level. And somehow, through its barking growls, he was able to make out what it was saying. 'Now I'm not just gonna ream you, little chicken. Now I'm gonna kill you . . . after.'
Hearing it with his ears? Or in his head?