"Tell dat to da cop."

"I don't think we'll have to," Sandy said. "Not yet, anyway."

Reaching forward, she twisted the ignition key and started the engine.

"Tink it's sape?" Lib asked.

"Yeah. It would've been here by now."

She put on the headlight, then pulled forward, steered onto the road and picked up speed.

She wished she was back on Front Street. This might be her last time in Malcasa Point. It didn't seem right to miss all the old, familiar places along the main road if you wouldn't ever have a chance to see them again.

Better to be safe, though.

Anyway, who says I can't come back?

It'd be too dangerous, she told herself. Especially after tonight.

But I could come back. If I wanted to badly enough.

Ahead of her, the road dead-ended. She turned left and returned to Front Street. Waiting at a stop sign, she looked back at the town. There were no cars on the move. She saw no one. Some of the shops were lighted, but none seemed to be open.

The lone traffic signal, a flashing red light, blinked on and off and on again.

"Whatcha waitin' por?" Lib asked.

Sandy shrugged. "Nothing," she said. Then she turned right and put downtown behind her.

When she drove past the Welcome Inn, she tried not to look at it. But her eyes strayed over.

At the sight of the motel, memories rushed in.

Mom...

And that dirty rotten Jud. He'd seemed like such a good guy, at first...

And Larry. Poor, funny Larry.

She felt an emptiness inside. And a hurt.

They'd all betrayed her.

Well, not Larry. But he would've, probably. Just never got the chance.

It had all been so exciting, right at the start. A little scary, but fun, too. Taking off with Mom, so early in the morning. The all-day drive up the coast. Then the fog and the crash and Axel Kutch coming to the rescue. Their first night at the Welcome Inn. And the next day, going on the Beast House tour for the very first time.

Those had been such great times.

Only three years ago.

But it sure felt like longer. It felt like eons. She'd still been a kid. She'd still loved her mom...

She felt a tightness in her throat.

Screw it, she thought.

"Y'okay?" Lib asked.

"It's just...you know...I'm going to miss some stuff around here."

"Yeah?"

"A lot of stuff."

"Ya don't gotta leabe. Ain't nobody holdin' a gun to your head."

"I wouldn't have to, except for that Slade. He wrecked everything."

"Reckon he paid por it."

Tears in her eyes, Sandy looked across at Lib. "I just wanted to be left alone, you know? That's all I ever wanted. I had my job and my baby and Agnes and everything till those damn movie people came along. They ruined it all."

"It's the shits, honey."

She took a very deep breath and exhaled slowly, letting the air puff out her cheeks and hiss through her pursed lips. When it was gone, she took a normal breath and said, "Well. I guess we'll be fine, anyway. And maybe it's for the best, you know? Might be kind of fun, settling down someplace new. Maybe it'll turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to us."

"Don't count on it."

Sandy glanced at Lib and laughed.

Then Lib patted her on the thigh. "Just gotta take stupp as it comes. Eben a bed ob roses got torns, and dare ain't a garden nowhere dat don't hab its share ob turds. You gotta watch your step, dat's all."

"We'll both have to watch our steps."

"But dat don't mean we can't hab pun."

"Hab pun-will travel."

"Puck you."

Laughing, Sandy blurted, "Puck you!"

"And da horse ya rode in on. How'd ya like it ip I busted out yer teet?"

"My teeth?"

"Yet teet!"

"My what?"

"Yer choppers, ya little shit."

"Then I'd be talking like you, Lib, and neither one of us'd know what was going on."

"Dat's real punny. Dat's hilarious."

Sandy grinned at her and said, "You know what?"

"What?"

"I'm already habbing pun."

Lib gave her leg a gentle squeeze and said, "Me, too."

With that, they seemed to run out of things to say. Lib settled down in her seat and lowered her head. Sandy turned her attention to driving.

She wasn't exactly sure of her location.

Definitely on Pacific Coast Highway, somewhere north of town.

But not very far north.

Five or ten miles?

Though she'd traveled this section of road several times before, she couldn't remember being on it at night. In the darkness, nothing looked very familiar.

On the other hand, it all looked sort of familiar.

The right side of the road was bordered by densely wooded hills. On the left, across the narrow pavement, was a guard rail and a rocky shoreline and the ocean itself. The ocean looked black, but it didn't go far. Some distance out, maybe a mile or two, it vanished under fog.

The fog stretched across the ocean like a low range of soft, white hills. Under the light of the full moon, it looked whiter than fresh drifts of snow.

Beautiful, Sandy thought.

Not so beautiful when you're in it, though.

She sure hoped it would stay offshore.

Probably will, she told herself. It'd usually be in by now if it was coming.

She found herself remembering how it had come in during the afternoon that she and her mother were fleeing up the coast highway. The way it had reached up over the edges of the road like the tendrils of a ghostly sea creature testing the pavement, then silently crept all the way up, covering their car and the highway and the hills until all the world seemed gray. Until there was no longer a road to see, and they'd gone off into a ditch.

What if the fog had stayed offshore? Sandy wondered.

We wouldn't have crashed. Maybe Mom would've kept on driving all the way through Malcasa Point. We never would've spent the night at the Welcome Inn or gone to Beast House the next day.

And everything would've happened differently from then on.

A lot of people might still be alive, she thought. Mom and I might still be together.

Or maybe Dad would've caught up to us.

Screw it, she told herself. The fog did come in and we crashed and it all happened and there's no way to change it. And who'd want to change it, anyway, even if you had the chance?

Dad probably would've nailed us. I'd have spent the last three years dead.

There wouldn't be any Eric, either.

"It's funny how stuff goes," she said.

Lib's only comment was a soft, rumbling snore.

Chapter Twelve.

THE DAY TOUR III.

"Only sixteen nights," Maggie said, her voice low and gruff through Owen's earphones. Then it came after us. It came right up these stairs."

Several tourists were on their way up the stairs. Owen, Monica and the others at Station Five stepped back a little to let them by as Maggie continued to talk into Owen's ears.

"It was on the night of May seventh, 1931. Me and Joseph, we were in our bedroom just down the hall. We didn't use Lilly's room, as my husband figured it'd bring us bad luck. So we had the room across the hall from it. Our girls were way down at the other end of the hall, in the same room where Lilly's boys got themselves slaughtered. They didn't have no problems with it. Fact is, they claimed it was haunted by the little fellers, but liked 'em just fine. Now my little baby, Theodore, he was snug in the nursery. That's at the end of the hall, too, but over on the right. I keep the door locked and you can't go in. I don't let nobody in the nursery. It ain't part of the tour.

"Anyhow, it'd been a stormy, wet day-May seventh-but the rain slowed down after dark. We had our windows open. I recall how nice and peaceful the rain sounded when I was laying there in bed. I listened to it for a good long time. But it got hard to hear, 'cause of Joseph's snoring.

"By and by, I fell asleep, myself. I must've been sleeping light, though, 'cause long about midnight I heard a noise. It sounded like it came from downstairs. Sounded like breaking glass. It was loud enough to wake up Joseph, too. Well, he jumped out of bed real quick and quiet and hurried over here to the chest where he kept his pistol."

"This portion of the tour," Janice's voice broke in, "used to take place in Maggie and Joseph's bedroom. She would walk over to their dresser, pull open a drawer and take out her husband's old Colt .45 automatic."

"This pistol!" Maggie announced gleefully. "Joseph kept the chamber empty, 'cause of the girls, but he had a clip in it, all right. So he had to work its top like this." Owen heard a harsh metallic chick-chack, and pictured old Maggie grinning as she jacked a round into the chamber. "It was awful loud, that noise. In the dark, like that. In the silence.

"With his pistol ready, Joseph snuck out into the hallway. I stayed in bed and listened. The rain had stopped by then, and the house was real quiet. I heard Joseph's footsteps out in the hall. But then he started to go downstairs. That's when I figured I'd best not just lay there. So I climbed out of bed and went out into the hall. I didn't much like the notion that me and the children were left alone, you see."

"At this point," Janice interrupted, "Maggie put away the pistol and led her group of tourists out of the bedroom and into the hall. She brought them to the top of the stairway, where you are now standing."

Maggie's voice returned.

"I was right here when gunshots came from downstairs. BOOM! BOOM! And then Joseph, he let out a scream fit to send shivers up a dead man. Lord, it turned my blood cold. But Joseph, he no sooner quit that awful scream than I heard feet thumping and scratching over the floor downstairs. They were bare feet. I could tell that from the sounds they made. And I could tell they had claws. It was the claws that made the scratching sounds.

"The sounds came from downstairs, but they were rushing closer. And I knew they didn't belong to Joseph. I thought maybe a bear had got into the house. But I've never been so wrong.