back in Pennsylvania when the windows iced up like that. Jenny hadn't seen it since she was five years old. In those days she'd loved to trace things in the frost with the warmth of her finger... .
Something was appearing on the window as if traced by an unseen finger. A letter.
L.
Jenny couldn't breathe. Her mouth opened to call for Tom, but no sound came out.
I. T. T.L.E....
Little. The letters appeared slowly as if a fingertip were tracing them on the icy window.
M. I. S. S. M. U. F. F. E. T. S. A. T... .
Jenny watched, scalp crawling. She couldn't seem to make herself move. It was too strange, to be sitting here in daylight and seeing something that simply couldn't happen.
0. N. A. T. U. F. F. E. T. E. A. T. I. N. G. H. E. R....
It's me, Jenny thought, gripped by an irrational certainty. This time it's me he's after. I'm Miss Muffet.
C. U. R. D. S. A. N. D. W. H. E. Y. A. L. O. N. G....
Still unable to move, Jenny's eyes shifted upward. A spider. She was afraid of spiders, and crickets, and all crawly, jumpy things. She expected to see a thread descending from the ceiling, but there was nothing.
C. A. M. E. A. S. P. I. D. E. R. A. N. D. S. A. T. D. O. W. N. B. E. S. I. D. E. H.E.R____
The Spider. The Spider, Jenny thought. Audrey's car.
"Tom," she whispered. And then suddenly she was moving, tearing her eyes from the letters that were still appearing. "Tom, come here. Tom!"
As she ran she almost fell over the footstool where Dee had been sitting earlier. Eating cottage cheese, small curd. Curds and whey.
Chapter 13
"Stupid old lady," Michael said as Dee pulled the Spider out of the carport. "She doesn't even use this space, but will she let anybody else park here? God forbid. Now we have to go all the way down to the garage-take a left up there and go around the trash cans."
"I didn't even know this place had a garage," Dee said.
"Dad and I never use it," Michael said as Dee pulled into a dark entrance and headed down a ramp. "The carports are a lot more convenient."
"Yeah, but right now it's probably a good idea to have Audrey's car down here. In fact, we might want to put all the cars here-if somebody notices them outside your apartment, it's a dead giveaway that we're all here. We should have thought of that before."
"I guess," Michael said without enthusiasm. "I dunno-when I was a kid I always hated this place. I had the idea there ought to be a dragon at the bottom of it."
Dee grinned. "It's just a garage, Mikey." But he was right, she thought. There was something unpleasant about the garage. It was dingy and badly lit, and she could see how a kid with an active imagination might think of dragons.
Don't be ridiculous, she told herself. It's broad daylight-but it wasn't. They had turned the corner to the lower level of the garage, and it was as dark as twilight down here with the flickering bluish fluorescents on the ceiling. A strange and unnatural twilight.
Even as she thought it, the lights around them flickered wildly and went out.
It was like being plunged into the tunnel on a roller coaster. Dee suddenly felt that everything was happening too fast-while at the same time it was all happening in slow motion, frame by frame.
Her eyes weren't dark-adapted yet-in that first instant she could see nothing. But she heard the growl from the back of the car clearly.
It was a thick, clotted, animal sound. A large sound-the timbre alone let you know that only something big could have produced it. So low and dragging that it sounded like a soundtrack in slow motion. It sounded like a hallucination.
"What-" Michael was tearing at his seat belt, turning to look. Dee saw the whites of his eyes. Then, as she twisted her head over her shoulder, she got a glimpse of what was in the back of the car.
Pale eyes and white teeth in gaping jaws. Dee's vision was adapting. She saw a hulking shape materializing in that incredibly small space-as if it were
coming through a door in the area between the cabin and the trunk. Coming and coming like a genie emerging from a bottle.
It isn't all the way out yet, Dee realized.
There was no time to think about anything. "Get out!" she