The mirror trembled; with his breath or with his hand, I could not say. Pulses jumped in my ears. My voice echoed off the glass, a boy’s voice: “Can’t we talk here?”
Again the melancholy half-sighed laugh. “No. The grand tour. You must know everything if you’re going to take my place.”
“I don’t want it! Whoever said?”
“I said. I say. Listen, I’m good as dead.”
A damp wind blew, smelling of nitrate from the ancient films and raw earth from the tombs.
The mirror slid open again. Footsteps moved off quietly.
I stared through into the tunnel half lit by mere firefly ceiling lights.
The Beast’s massive shadow drifted on the incline going down, as he turned.
He gazed at me steadily out of his incredibly wild, incredibly sad eyes.
He nodded down the incline at darkness. “Well, if you can’t walk, then run,” he murmured.
“From what?”
The mouth munched wetly on itself and at last pronounced it: “Me! I’ve run all my life! You think I can’t follow? God! Pretend! Pretend I’m still strong, that I still have power. That I can kill you. Act afraid!”
“I am!”
“Then run! God damn you!”
He raised one fist to knock shadows off the walls.
I ran.
He followed.
71
It was a dreadful pretend pursuit, through the vaults where all the film reels lay, toward the stone crypts where all the stars from those films hid, and under the wall and through the wall, and suddenly it was behind, and I was ricocheted through catacombs with the Beast flooding his flesh at my heels toward the tomb where J. C. Arbuthnot had never lain.
And I knew, running, it was no tour, sweet Jesus, but a destination. I was not being pursued but herded. To what?
The bottom of the vault where Crumley and blind Henry and I had stood a thousand years ago. I jolted to a halt.
The sarcophagus platform steps waited, empty, in place.
Behind me I felt the dark tunnel churn with footfalls and the fire bellows roar of pursuit.
I jumped on the steps, reaching somehow to climb. Slipping, crying insipid prayers, I groaned to the top, cried out with relief, and shouted myself out of the sarcophagus, onto the floor.
I hit the tomb door. It burst wide. I fell out into the graveyard and stared wildly along through the stones at the boulevard, miles off and empty.
“Crumley!” I yelled.
There was no traffic, no cars parked.
“Oh, God,” I mourned. “Crumley! Where?”
Behind me there was a riot of feet clubbing the tomb entry. I whirled.
The Beast stepped into the doorway.