its hammerhead lowered, and then it would chase them down this narrow, hopeless path, overbear them, trample them, gore them.
“Shhhhh ...” she breathed.
“Norman, you idiot . . .”
Drifting to them like smoke, like moonlight.
“You’re such a fool . . . did you really think you could catch me? Silly old bull!”
There was a burst of high, mocking laughter. The sound made Bill think of spun glass and open wells and empty rooms at midnight. He shuddered and felt gooseflesh ripple his arms.
From in front of the temple there was an interval of quiet (broken only by a puff of breeze that briefly moved the thorn-bushes like a hand combing through tangled hair), and silence from where Rosie had been calling him. Overhead, the bony disk of the moon sailed behind a cloud, fringing its edges with silver. The sky sprawled with stars, but Bill recognized none of the constellations they made. Then:
“Norrr-munnnn . . . don’t you want to taaalllk to me?”
“Oh, I’ll talk to you,” Norman Daniels said, and Bill felt the black woman jerk against him in surprise as his own heart took a large, nasty leap from his chest into his throat. That voice had come from no more than twenty yards away. It was as if Norman had been making those clumsy movements on purpose, allowing them to track his progress, and then, when quiet suited him better, he had become utterly quiet. “I’ll talk to you up close, you cunt.”
The black woman’s finger was on his lips, admonishing him to be quiet, but Bill didn’t need the message. Their eyes locked, and he saw that the black woman was also no longer sure that Norman would go through the building.
The silence spun out, creating what felt like an eternity. Even Rosie seemed to be waiting.
Then, from a little farther away, Norman spoke again. “Boo, you old sonofabitch,” he said. “What you doing here?”
Bill looked at the black woman. She shook her head slightly, indicating that she didn’t understand, either. He realized a horrible thing: he needed to cough. The throbbing tickle behind his soft palate was almost overpowering. He dropped his mouth into the crook of his arm and tried to keep it back in his throat, aware of the woman’s concerned eyes on him.
I can’t hold it for long, he thought. Christ, Norman, why don’t you move? You were fast enough before.
As if in reply to this thought: “Norr-munnn! You’re so fucking SLOWWW, Norr-munnn!”
“Bitch,” the thick voice on the other side of the temple said. “Oh you bitch.”
Shoes, gritting on crumbled stone. A moment later Bill heard echoing footfalls and realized that Norman was inside the building which the black woman had called a temple. He realized something else as well: the urge to cough had passed, at least for the time being.
He leaned close to the woman in the blue dress and whispered into her ear: “What do we do now?”
Her whispered reply tickled his own ear: “Wait.”
2
Discovering that the mask seemed to have become part of his flesh scared him for a moment or two, and badly, but before fright could escalate into panic, Norman saw something a short distance away that distracted him from the subject of the mask entirely. He hurried down the slope a little way and knelt. He picked up the sweater, looked at it, flung it aside. Then he picked up the jacket. It was the one she had been wearing, all right. A motorcycle jacket. The guy had a scoot and she’d been out riding with him, probably with her crotch pretty well banged into his ass. Jacket’s too big for her, he thought. He loaned it to her. The thought infuriated him, and he spat on it before flinging it aside, leaping to his feet, and looking wildly around.
“You bitch,” he murmured. “You dirty, cheating bitch.”
“Norman!” It came drifting out of the darkness, stopping his breath in his throat for a second.
Close, he thought. Holy shit, she’s close, I think she’s in that building.
He stood stock-still, waiting to see if she’d yell again. After a moment, she did. “Norman, I’m down here!”
His hands went to the mask again, but this time they did not pull; they caressed. “Viva ze bool, ” Norman said into it, and started down the hill toward the ruins of the building at the bottom. He thought he could see tracks going that way—broken swatches of high grass that might be places where feet had come down, anyway—but the moonlight made