The killer's malevolence lay everywhere, eye and hand full of power. Dex's sax strap. Tweed had a sudden fear that it might be yanked up at any moment. His neck would snap. She gripped it, wrenched it over his head, and flung it into the churning crowd.

"Hey, what're youa"?"

Tweed hugged Dex fiercely. His balance went haywire. But he steadied himself and hugged her too, his warm sweet head tucked alongside hers. "I love you, Dex."

"It's okay. We'll get through this." His words were an echo of Mr. b.u.t.tweiler's. "We'll stay here like Futzy says and we'll be safe. He and the teachers'll figure something out."

"Whoever's doing this is gonna kill us all."

"No he won't."

"He will. I know it." It wasn't over yet. Not by a longshot.

"Don't work yourself up," said Dex. "You're spooking me now. It'll be okay. You'll see." His hands comforted Tweed at her waist.

Everyone had so bunched toward the front that the gym felt suddenly packed, dense with fear and restlessness. Towering above, the Ice Ghoul, its face set in chill triumph, seemed to see many more bodies strewn before it. It l.u.s.ted after broken bones, torn limbs, futtered flesha"far more sacrifices than had been laid before it.

Knife raised high.

Crude c.o.c.k viciously erect.

Knees and bent legs. Feet like a runner's poised at the starting block. b.u.t.tocks splayed over one heel.

Its hunger was limitless, its cruel red maw only now beginning to be filled. Tweed hugged Dex closer. She wanted to turn away from those dark eyes, but they held her in their sway, made her look, made her shudder.

Trilby feared she would pa.s.s out when rumor came, then was confirmed, that the slain girls had been found in the faculty lounge. Brest held her. A wash of sound rushed through her brain, white noise before a swoon.

"But Pill is in there," she said. "We've got toa""

"Come on," said Brest. "Bix, you stay here."

"I'd better go with you."

"No, Futzy's gonna need your help," insisted Brest. "Me and Trilby'll be careful."

Trilby had resisted fainting, the gymnasium taking on its painful reality around her. She followed Brest past the refreshment table to the entrance.

The corridor shone with a feeble light full of shadows and menace. That didn't matter. Nothing mattered but finding her way to Pill. Trilby prayed her daughter hadn't been killed.

Or maimed.

Or kidnapped.

At a run, they pa.s.sed by the array of phones, a wall of gla.s.sed-in trophies, the entrance doors secured with the lock Elwood Dunsmore had snapped shut. The faculty lounge at the far corner of the building seemed miles away.

"Pill? Honey?"

Trilby shouted the words. Fear gave them a sharp edge. She worried it would terrorize Pill further.

The cherry-stained door of the lounge hung ajar, but no reply came.

Brest shoved the door wide open.

Trilby rushed past.

Spatters of blood by the paper cutter. On the floor. On thea"Oh, my G.o.d!a"on and running down the splintered wood of the coat closet.

"Pill?" A sob choked her. "Pill? It's Mommy."

Brest grabbed the k.n.o.b, silver smeared with streaks of blood.

Trilby would have eased the door open, but Brest, always more violent and impetuous, flung it back and held her splayed fingers out to catch the rebound as it banged off the wall.

Pill sat cowering in the corner.

No blood.

In her arms, held so tight as to deform its plush body, Gigi the goat tried to comfort her.

Her face held shock. Her eyes took their time focusing. She looked smaller, every limb tight, as if the muscles tensed around her bones drew all her flesh inward.

"Come on out, Pill," Brest said.

But Trilby tore past her, went into the coat closet, crouched to her child and peeled her from the flimsy wood walls and into her arms. Her skin felt ice cold.

"Mommy?" A voice barely audible. "Mommy?"

"Yes, Pill. It's Mommy. Mommy's here. You're safe now." Nothing mattered but holding and soothing her little girl.

Brest's attempts to break them free of Bix and trio them up with Delia Gaskin, Bix's openly expressed wish for extramarital affairs, Trilby's own subservience to Bix and Brest, not just under the riding crop but in everyday lifea"none of that mattered now.

The one thing of importance in the world was hugging Pill. Bringing her back. Healing her in the days ahead, once this nightmare was over.

"He killed them, Mommy."

"I know he did, Pill. But he's gone now and Mommy is here and you're safe. Safe as can be."

"The man in the janitor suit. I saw his hand. It had a knife in it. The girl was just asking. That's what she said. I'm just asking. But he killed her." Her voice, weak as tea, lanced Trilby's ear with hurt.

She rocked her little girl there on the floor of the coat closet.

Brest's shadow fell on them.

The child suddenly let go of her goat and groped at her mother, her head nestling deep into Trilby's neck, her hands as clingy as claws high up where the shoulderblades nearly met over her mother's spine.

"He killed them both, Mommy."

"I know he did, Pill," she soothed. "I know."

16. In the Midst of Mayhem, Love.

Bray and Winnie had entered the gym with the bodies of the dead trumpeters, stunned at the savagery of the kill.

Bray nodded as his datea"that's how he had begun thinking about Winniea"angrily abandoned her optimism. They followed the seniors, attached to the crowd but not integral to it, off far enough that no one could hear their conversation.

She understood now, she said, that their killer friend wasn't the champion she had believed him to be.

Disillusionment lay bitter upon her face.

Then they had seen the slain girls and "Oh, Jesus," Winnie had said, nearly in synch with his unspoken thoughts.

The sheriff had fallen.

The bandleader.

And Bray understood that he and Winnie, there under false colors and archly eyed by the amazing Miss Brindisi, were quite possibly in the deepest of s.h.i.t one could be in.

Through the princ.i.p.al's speech, through the huddle of faculty and the uneasy buzz of students, Bray held Winnie. She seemed airless, without focus. A forlorn sylph. Even in her distraught state, he thought, she was gorgeous.

He would protect her.

He felt brave. He didn't know why such a feeling had come to him, but it had.

While Winnie, gung-ho for glory at the start, had deflated, Bray had somehow gained in strength. Poor lamb. They would survive this night somehow. Then they'd go off and start a life together.

Her head suddenly twisted up, her eyes newly flaring. "Where's that packet from Fronemeyer's house?"

"In the car. Why?"

She slumped back down. "Great."

"Except for this." He reached into his tuxedo jacket and pulled out the thick sheaf of twice-folded paper. "In case we wanted to go exploring, I thoughta""

"The map!"

He unfolded it like a flower coming into bloom. Four pages, stapled, the top one with a three-digit combination Bray guessed allowed the designated slasher, and him only, access to the school's secret pa.s.sageways.

"We coulda""

It occurred to him too. "Of course." Their means of escape. Why hadn't he thought of it?

"a"find him," she said, "and reason with him."

"It's our way out." Then Winnie's words registered. "Hey, wait a minute. I'm not gonna let you get near our madman. He's wigged out. He'll kill us both."

"No, listen." Winnie paused.

Bray could tell she had been ready to go at him again. To attack his cowardice. But now her mind slipped into gear, more furious in its cogitations than he'd ever seen it.

Jonquil Brindisi stood at the mike. Two men were near the Ice Ghoul, hacking at the rope that held the dead sheriff aloft.

Winnie's hands danced in colored light as she pieced things together. "We find him," she said. "We sneak up on him, overcome him, maybe knock him out. Then we reason with him, we talk to him, for as long as it takes. We get in touch with his problem, soothe him, convince him he's already done enough to solve it. Then we get him to confess, give himself up, make a speech to the press, go national."

"Oh sure, Winnie. And he's just gonna go alonga""

"Yes. He will."

Bray stopped speaking. Her certainty never ceased to amaze him.

"He will. No two ways about it. I can do it. I can convince anybody of anything."

"I've got a better plan," he said.

They blended into the crowd in a reasonable fashion. But Bray felt that a spotlight had been trained on them. At any moment, Jonquil Brindisi would point an accusatory finger at them and have them torn apart, futter bait for the frenzy that lay just beneath the surface for the poor panic-stricken kids around them.

"Here's what we do," he went on. "We escape into the hidden backways. We find the designated slasher's private parking area. Using his car, we blow this town, this state, this whole wretched nation. And we start a new life together, plain and simple, somewhere else."

"They hunt us down." She said it as if she could see it. "They scapegoat us for tonight's outrages. They toy with us on the tube. They tear us apart, they torture us. They put us on Notorious next year, an extra special three-hour version, a slow h.e.l.lacious juicing."

She made him see it.

The pauses between sentences, the stare full of import and meaning, made him see it.

Winnie's arms came about him, her lips near his friendship lobe. "Bray, my strange lovely man, one way or another, they'll fry us. Finding the killer is our only choice."

Bray could hear Jonquil's words at the mike. Tough talk, thrusting iron rods up into youthful backbones. Without looking at her, he knew she was brooding on them. Her accusation might come at any moment.

Winnie felt warm and solid in his arms.

"Do you understand?" she murmured.

He kissed her neck, her cheek, her lips. Her nape felt so perfect against his palm.

"Let's go," he said, determined. "Let's find him."

Winnie took his hand. They sauntered toward the door the two women had rushed out of.

Bray thought they'd be halted at any moment. "Wait a minute," her stern s.e.xy voice would rise, "where do you think you're sneaking off to?"

But through his envelope of fear, past the refreshments and out the door to the hallway, Bray and Winnie walked hand in hand, toward a meeting Bray wasn't looking forward to at all.