“Bastard!” Debbie snapped. She shoved her arm straight up, aimed her pistol at the grate, but didn’t fire. Shaking her head, she lowered the pistol.
“Hey, sweet stuff,” the troll said.
“Babes babes babes,” said another.
“Tasty bits.”
“Where are the others?” Debbie yelled at the ceiling. “Where are my friends?”
Trolls laughed.
“Oh, they been by, they been by.”
“Bound fer hell.”
“Let’s go,” Joan said. She swept the walls with the flashlight, probed the darkness of the hallway to the left, and jogged in that direction.
“Bye-bye, sweets.”
“Say hi to Webster!”
Dave nudged Debbie’s back, and she started to run.
He hurried after her. He slipped his arms into the vest as he ran. Though he wanted Joan to wear it, he saw no point in wasting time on argument.
Joan and Debbie crouched at the edge of a barrel that filled the hallway. Dave stepped up behind them as Debbie muttered, “Oh, jeez, no.”
A dead kid was stretched out inside the barrel. All around him, the wooden staves bristled with spikes.
“One of your friends?” Joan asked.
“Samson.”
“Looks like they used him for a bridge,” Dave said.
“I guess we do too,” Joan said.
Debbie curled her left hand against the side of her mouth and shouted through the barrel, “Hello! Jeremy! Hey, you guys, it’s Shiner! Can you hear me?”
No answer came.
“Jeremy? Tanya? Cowboy? Liz? It’s Shiner. We’ve got guns! Wait up! Or come back! You’ll be all right! We’ve got guns!”
Still no answer.
“Dammit,” she muttered.
“I’ll go first,” Dave said. He stepped around them. He swept the edge of his shoe against one of the spikes. The barrel rocked from side to side. “Christ,” he said.
Joan and Debbie grabbed spikes near the rim of the barrel to hold it steady.
Dave knelt on the dead boy’s shins. They felt steady under him. Of course they do, he thought. They’re nailed down.
Leaning forward, he gripped the boy’s thighs and started to crawl.
Robin, kneeling on the seat and clutching its back, watched the troll climb onto the beam that led straight to her gondola.
The same route the other had used.
Well, she’d taken care of that one.
Two down, one to go.
This guy was bigger than the last troll. He had a round face, hardly any neck at all, and shoulders the size of hams. His eyes were small and close together. Pig eyes, Robin thought. A squat, upturned nose. A tiny slit of a mouth, lips tight.
He really looks like a pig, she thought.
But he also looked, somehow, like a little boy in a body that had bloated out of control.
He wore a ball cap with its bill turned up. The skin around its sides was hairless.
“Go back,” she said. “I don’t want to kill you.”
As she spoke those words, she saw herself in the steaming spa with Nate, holding him tightly, both of them weeping for the deaths they had caused.
She saw Nate sprawled on the sheet. His bloody head.
She felt her throat tighten.
Oh, God, Nate.
Had he deserved it? she wondered. Was all this some kind of rough justice at work?
“I really don’t want to kill you,” she pleaded, her voice sliding to a higher pitch. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
The troll straddled the beam and stared at her.
“Just go away,” she begged. “Please.”
The troll lowered his head. Looking down at the dead ones? He hunched himself over and hugged the beam.
He’s afraid, Robin thought. He doesn’t want to fall.
“If I knock you off here,” she said, “you’ll be broken to pieces.”
He began to make soft whimpery sounds.
Oh, no, Jeremy thought. We forgot the camera.
It was back there somewhere, hanging around Cowboy’s neck, the incriminating film still in it.
He decided not to tell Tanya.
She might insist they return for it. They’d come a long distance, winding their way through the total darkness, bumping into mirrors, often backtracking when they found themselves at dead ends. To go back now…
To be in the same place with those bodies again…
Jeremy shivered as he remembered falling onto Liz and Cowboy. Trying to get up, he’d pushed a hand into something sodden and mushy.
Besides, he told himself, the film doesn’t matter. Most of the kids in the pictures are already dead.
There’re just the two of us. And Heather. Lucky Heather. She’d fled down the stairs before it got bad.
We should’ve gone too.
If only I’d listened to Shiner.
I got Shiner killed.
It seemed like ages ago, and the pain and guilt of it were muffled by all that had happened since.
It was probably fifteen minutes ago, he thought.
The head of his ax bumped glass. He swung it slowly to the