"It's only Bowser McPhee," said Tweed. "Him and Peach. They're going at it."

The high-pitched voice fell silent, falling off its odd o.r.g.a.s.m. Tweed imagined white ribbons of sperm jetting across the red frills of Peach's dress. The image fascinated and revolted her.

She was glad to have resisted, glad to be in Dex's arms.

A group of promgoers swept past them.

In their midst moved the old chaperones with the notched jawflesh. Arm in arm they went, their eyes aglow with perverse delight. If you shut your eyes, you could smell wilted violets.

"Where to now?" Tweed asked.

He shrugged. "Back to the dance?"

She pictured the Ice Ghoul rising out of the darkness the gym had been plunged into. "No way. I bet he's there waiting for the first stragglers to wander in."

Dex snapped his fingers. "The band room."

Not more than an hour before, her biology teacher's spouse had been killed there. His blood would be lying in fresh pools on the planking, near where the French horns sat. Moreover, the room held fond memories of Mr. Jones.

Tweed didn't want to go there.

But how likely was it that the slasher would return to the site of a recent kill?

"Let's do it," she said, taking Dex's arm.

Against the counterclockwise flow they walked, pressed uncomfortably near the lockers. But the band room lay less than half a corridor away.

When they entered, fresh death-smell still befouled the air. The corpse, thank G.o.d, had been removed. No one else was there. The lampstand, bloodstained from the bludgeoning, gave off its feeble glow. Tall gray doors curved around the room, menacing and quiet.

"I don't think we should . . ."

"This is home," Dex said. "I say we take our chances here. Don't worry. I'll die before I let him hurt you or get near you."

Though Tweed had misgivings, she relented. "I feel safe with you." That was both true and untrue.

"Good, let's get comfortable."

In the obscure gloom, Dex removed his white tuxedo jacket, folded it, lining out, and draped it on the floor against the tall door which on a normal day held sax cases. He was gambling, and Tweed went along, that it didn't hold something else tonight.

Dexter Poindexter, risk taker.

She loved that about him.

She loved lots of things about him. Pulling herself over, she planted a kiss on his friendship lobe.

"What's that about?" he asked.

"It's about how I love you."

He smiled and gripped her hand where it rested on his arm. "I love you too," he said.

And he did.

Cries of pain interrupted Bray and Winnie's embrace there in the backways. It was unclear to either of them how far or from what direction the cries came.

A young male voice.

Two sharp grunts.

It raised Bray's hackles. Winnie's too, to judge from her reaction.

Bray had halted her onward hurtle, drawn her into his arms, felt her body melt against his, her mouth open to his lips.

Now the pitch of another victim's pain shot lightning bolts through her and split them apart.

"Come on," she said, pulling him along.

"Wait. Where?"

"I'm pretty sure it came from over there." She pressed forward again.

Winnie must have the night vision of a cat, thought Bray. Or my kisses have energized her.

She gripped his hand as the close warm air breezed past them. The walls swept by like batter made of rotting wood, curving out of the pitch black on either side, dim disconcerting rollers crashing without sound about them. An occasional nail snagged his suit.

The bulbs were burnt out in this section of the backways, but that didn't stop Winnie. It felt to Bray like an endless roil of dreamtime. He had to remind himself that a knife-wielding maniac might leap out at them from anywhere at any time.

"Are you sure you'rea""

"Quiet," she shot back.

In their first moments behind the scenes, Winnie had spoken of trusting to instinct. Now she had clearly slipped into that mode.

Shifts in temperature and air currents and an impression of black-on-black crossings signaled intersections. Winnie barreled through them, taking her and Bray left or right without a moment's hesitation.

Abruptly she slowed, stopped. "That's the place. I'm sure of it." She raised her arm and pointed.

Two boxes of light floated ahead, canted at a peculiar angle. Bray felt imbalanced in their presence. They hovered there like pointillist paintings stippled in gradations of gray, a sense of menace emanating from them.

"Careful now," said Bray, tensing to grapple with their killer friend.

To the right of each box was a recess, the place from which the light was coming. Bray imagined a figure crouched to spring. Winnie wouldn't have a chance.

"Let me by," he said.

He gripped her, turned her, maneuvering past her. Do it, he thought, don't let fear creep in. He raised his hands defensively as he walked into the light and turned toward the recess.

Nothing.

No . . . but . . .tricked!

The slasher was there below, ready to spring. Bray's skin flushed with quick sweeps of heat. His eyes were still adjusting. The slasher charging at him had the advantage.

A knife lunged from the darkness.

Nothing.

No movement at all. No slasher. No knife.

Winnie came up to him. She peered down, then averted her eyes. "Christ," she said.

Crouching closer, he saw what Winnie had seen. Another victim, some old guy, a teacher type, someone he'd never seen. The angle the man's head lay at made no sense.

Then Bray saw that his neck had been brutally sliced open. There was blood everywhere. A crude parabola of gore coated one segment of the gla.s.s, a window onto an empty restroom.

I'm not seeing this, he told himself.

"Bray?" Winnie's throat was flayed raw.

He rose, the shock flooding him.

He wanted someone, anyone, to comfort him. Winnie. She would do. Her arms came about him, and he realized him.

Frantically, they embraced, grappling for elusive a.s.surance, finding it and craving more.

Dumb, he thought.

He and Winnie had laid themselves wide open for attack.

They would die here. At any moment the mad slasher would leap out and cut them to ribbons. But even as he let his mind career about in panic, Bray held Winnie in a numb, shocked embrace, his body as calm as a grave.

Deadened. Dead. One way or another, they were as good as dead already. They would become victims. Or they would be accused and convicted of tonight's killings.

The cards were stacked against them.

Winnie tensed. A soft cry issued from her. Her head lifted as she seemed to sniff something new and terrible, a sharp miasma of misery on the cloying air.

"What?" Bray thought he said.

But Winnie's head was angled back, frozen in attentiveness like the snapshot of a mustang, its mane tossed about, its nostrils flaring wide from the scent of a predator on the wind.

21. Aerated and Tumbled Dry.

Two things awakened Peach.

A warm slap of fluid across her cheeks.

And Bowser's screams.

Aches sang all over her body. Her knees and elbows, her thighs and back, her now-unshod feet, and every part of her head. All of it felt as if she had been drubbed unmercifully. Her hands lay like two comatose crabs, trapped and numb beneath the weight of her torso.

Peach opened her eyes, one puffy eyelid like a nagging fear in her peripheral vision. Shiny snips of tin, like crimped moons, lay scattered about a blunt iron base. Washes of blood coated the dull gray metal.

A low ominous hum came from above.

The machine shop. Elwood Dunsmore's preserve, where humiliation of the inept held sway. Peach hated it.

Fluid spattered her face like gobs of hawked spit. Some of it landed on her lips and splashed into her mouth, salty and rude.

Bowser's screams redoubled.

Peach looked up.

Like a piston frozen in an upthrust position, a silver square plattered Bowser above the blunt iron base. His head hung down, bent back at the neck, hair askew. His shoulders angled awkwardly as he lay upon his bound hands, the white coat of his tux scored and scuffed with dirt.

Off the other side of the square, his legs hung dumbly asplay, the bottoms of his trousers puffed up like wads of b.l.o.o.d.y gauze, dripping, drinking, o'erspilling.

Peach saw janitor overalls rising from odd shoes, powder blue and dressy. A woman's hand grasped a red k.n.o.b in a cross of k.n.o.bs and eased it down.

Nurse Gaskin!

How could it be Nurse Gaskin?

Her eyes were taut, intense, narrowed to an insane point.

Again the hidden drill bit into Peach's new boyfriend, a spew of screamed denial issuing from his lips. Blood shot out from above, swatted her brow, forced her eyelids shut.

She opened them, the sting of blood prompting tears. Wimpy old nurse lady, mateless, over the hill. When they had spoken of her at all, it had been with sneers or innuendo. Now she'd gone over the edge.

A skilled hand reversed the cross of k.n.o.bs, dropped to tug Bowser a few inches farther on, then found again a red k.n.o.b. She was punching b.u.t.tonholes deep into Bowser's body, working her way toward his head as if she were making a human cribbage board.

And Peach was next.

She wanted to cry out, to scream for help.

But all sound had drained from her. Her body, an empty gourd, shook and shivered. Like a sudden blush below, her bladder released. The warmth became clammy and chill. The odor of undiluted urine invaded her nostrils.

Above, a new gush of blood fountained. A spurt of Bowser's heartpump rained again across Peach's face.

Bray felt like a mule tugged along by some crazed prospector, as twists and turns of backway were carved out of nothingness by the womanshape that impelled him on.