The seventh ceiling light remade itself into a chain-hung lamp, and my pursuer drew close enough in the sullen light for me to see his wealth of eyes, my face grotesquely ornamented, and I recalled both the cold, soft feel of this thing and its inhuman strength.
The only advice that Mr. Hitchcock had had for me regarding the senoculus was Run, Mr. Thomas. Run. Even if he was not my guardian angel, which he had denied being, he was playing for the right team, and his advice should no doubt be heeded.
I intended to delay as long as necessary before stepping out of the hall and slamming the door. I hoped that good Boo would have led Verena and the other captives all the way down to the mudroom before I followed them. Although the senoculus apparently wanted me above all others, there was every reason to suppose that if it saw the children or smelled them—all that delicious innocence—it would be compelled to fall upon them.
In our previous encounter, this thing had not passed through walls as a spirit could, and it had not floated along swiftly above the floor as Mr. Hitchcock had done. I assumed that in Elsewhere, if not in its native wasteland, its means of getting from Point A to Point B were no more sophisticated than mine, an assumption that, if wrong, might lead to a hideous, cold kiss and to something worse than possession.
The eighth of nine ceiling lights metamorphosed into a lamp on a chain, the gray of faux concrete crawled closer, and the senoculus spoke in my voice as he strode forward. “Give me your breath, piglet. I want it now.”
I crossed the threshold, slammed the door, and descended only ten steps, two at a time, before I heard the door crash into the upper-landing wall behind me.
Even if the kids were out of the stairwell, they surely had not already left the mudroom. If I managed to plunge to the bottom of the stairs without being snared by the senoculus, I would bring it with me, and it would be upon those innocents before all of them could escape the house, where—according to my theory—it could not pursue them.
I hit the landing and flew pell-mell off it as the walls turned gray around me. The stairs were treacherous at high speed, my balance never that of a circus aerialist, and I caromed off the walls as I dove into that waterless well.
From behind me, with an intimacy that made the skin crawl on the nape of my neck, the thing said, “Let me suck your tongue, piglet.”
Thirty-four
QUICK THROUGH THE DOOR AT THE LANDING, OUT OF the stairwell, onto the second floor, I heeded the advice of baseball great Satchel Paige, who said about life in general, “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” I ran as I had never run while on my high-school baseball team, because in baseball, happily, no rule allows the opposing team to bring in a supernatural soul-stealer to chase down the runner between bases.
A short hall led to a pair of open French doors and a wider hall beyond. There were rooms behind closed doors to the right and open archways to the left, beyond which lay an enormous chamber lined with leatherbound books and furnished as a grand drawing room that offered numerous elegant seating areas on richly patterned Persian carpets. In the farther wall were sets of French doors standing open to the deep deck on which the crowd of cultists, their backs to me, waited for the Kens to appear with the children on the terrace below.
Ahead of me, on the right, elevator doors opened. A man sporting Oscar the Grouch eyebrows and a Snidely Whiplash mustache, with a chin beard unsuitable for any cartoon character or Muppet, appeared with a bottle of champagne in each hand, the wire coiffes having already been removed and the corks popped, a thin vapor rising from the open necks. His expression told me that six-eyed death was on my heels, that Satchel Paige was a man of deep insight, as usual.
I threw myself against the wall on my right, gracelessly slid-dropped-rolled-scrambled past the guy with all the facial hair, who found himself in the direct path of the senoculus. In that instant, my theory that the demon must be interested only in me proved to be woefully wrong. The thing leaped upon him, driving him to the floor, champagne bottles rolling away in gouts of foam and sparkling pale-gold wine. With savage violence, the senoculus slammed a knee into its victim’s crotch, then a second time even more violently, which seemed to be bad sportsmanship even for a demon. It seized the man’s throat and pressed down upon him, lowering its face toward his.
Having slid-dropped-rolled-scrambled to the elevator just as the senoculus took down the party guy, I was alarmed to see the doors already sliding shut. The demon probably wouldn’t be distracted more than a few seconds by this appetizer, not long enough for me to get out of sight into a stairwell. I thrust one arm between the doors and had the disturbing thought that it would be amputated below the elbow when they proved to be as sharp as guillotine blades. I knew I should never have watched that Wes Craven movie. Instead, the electric eye triggered the safety mechanism, the doors glided open. I rolled into the elevator, thrust to my feet, pressed the 1 on the floor-selection panel, then pressed the CLOSE DOOR button.