by Dean Koontz
A greasy nausea made Jack gag. He felt cold and dirty inside. Corrupted by the Giver’s attempt to seize control and nest within him, even though it had not been successful.
He knew as surely as he had ever known anything in his life that this enemy was real: not a ghost, not a demon, not just the paranoid-schizophrenic delusion of a troubled mind, but a creature of flesh and blood. No doubt infinitely strange flesh. And blood that might not be recognized as such by any physician yet born. But flesh and blood nonetheless.
He didn’t know what the thing was, where it had come from, or out of what it had been born; he knew only that it existed. And that it was somewhere on Quartermass Ranch.
Jack was lying on his side, but Heather was no longer pressed against him. She had turned over during the night.
Crystals of snow tick-tick-ticked against the window, like a finely calibrated astronomical clock counting off every hundredth of a second. The wind that harried the snow made a low whirring sound. Jack felt as if he was listening to the heretofore silent and secret cosmic machinery that drove the universe through its unending cycles.
Shakily, he pushed back the covers, sat up, stood.
Heather didn’t wake.
Night still reigned, but a faint gray light in the east hinted at the pending coronation of a new day.
Striving to quell his nausea, Jack stood in just his underwear until his shivering was a greater concern than his queasiness. The bedroom was warm. The chill was internal. Nevertheless, he went to his closet, quietly slid the door open, slipped a pair of jeans from a hanger, pulled them on, then a shirt.
Awake, he could not sustain the explosive terror that had blown him out of the dream, but he was still shaky, fearful—and worried about Toby. He left the master bedroom, intending to check on his son.
Falstaff was in the shadowy upstairs hall, staring intently through the open door of the bedroom next to Toby’s, where Heather had set up her computers. An odd, faint light fell through the doorway and glimmered on the dog’s coat. He was statue-still and tense. His blocky head was held low and thrust forward. His tail wasn’t wagging.
As Jack approached, the retriever looked at him and issued a muted, anxious whine.
The soft clicking of a computer keyboard came from the room. Rapid typing. Silence. Then another burst of typing.
In Heather’s makeshift office, Toby was sitting in front of one of the computers. The glow from the oversize monitor, which faced away from Jack, was the only source of light in the former bedroom, far brighter than the reflection that reached the hallway; it bathed the boy in swiftly changing shades of blue and green and purple, a sudden splash of red, orange, then blue and green again.
At the window behind Toby, the night remained deep because the gray insistence of dawn could not yet be seen from that side of the house. Barrages of fine snowflakes tapped the glass and were briefly transformed into blue and green sequins by the monitor light.
Stepping across the threshold, Jack said, “Toby?”
The boy didn’t glance up from the screen. His small hands flew across the keyboard, eliciting a furious spate of muffled clicking. No other sound issued from the machine, none of the usual beeps or burbles.
Could Toby type? No. At least, not like this, not with such ease and speed.
The boy’s eyes glimmered with distorted images of the display on the screen before him: violet, emerald, a flicker of red.
“Hey, kiddo, what’re you doing?”
He didn’t respond to the question.
Yellow, gold, yellow, orange, gold, yellow—the light shimmered not as if it radiated from a computer screen but as if it was the glittering reflection of summer sunlight bouncing off the rippled surface of a pond, spangling his face. Yellow, orange, umber, amber, yellow…
At the window, spinning snowflakes glimmered like gold dust, hot sparks, fireflies.
Jack crossed the room with trepidation, sensing that normality had not returned when he’d awakened from the nightmare. The dog padded behind him. Together, they rounded one end of the L-shaped work area and stood at Toby’s side.
A riot of constantly changing colors surged across the computer screen from left to right, melting into and through one another, now fading, now intensifying, now bright, now dark, curling, pulsing, an electronic kaleidoscope in which none of the ceaselessly transfigured patterns had straight edges.
It was a full-color monitor. Nevertheless, Jack had never seen anything like this before.
He put a hand on his son’s shoulder.
Toby shuddered. He didn’t look up or speak, but a subtle change in his attitude implied that he was no longer as spellbound by the display on the monitor as he had been when Jack first spoke to him from the doorway.
His fingers rattled the keys again.
“What’re you doing?” Jack asked.
“Talking.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Masses of yellow and pink, spiraling threads of green, rippling ribbons of purple and blue.
The shapes, patterns, and rhythms of change were mesmerizing when they combined in beautiful and graceful ways—but also when they were ugly and chaotic. Jack sensed movement in the room, but he had to make an effort to look up from the compelling protoplasmic images on the screen.
Heather stood in the doorway, wearing her quilted red robe, hair tousled. She didn’t ask what was happening. As if she already knew. She wasn’t looking directly at Jack or Toby but at the window behind them.
Jack turned and saw showers of snowflakes repeatedly changing color as the display on the monitor continued its rapid and fluid metamorphosis.
“Talking to whom?” he asked Toby.
After a hesitation, the boy said, “No name.” His voice was not flat and soulless as it had been in the graveyard, but neither was it quite normal.
“Where is he?” Jack asked.
“Not he.”
“Where is she?”
“Not she.”
Frowning, Jack said, “Then what?”
The boy said nothing, gazed unblinking at the screen.
“It?” Jack wondered.
“All right,” Toby said.
Approaching them, Heather looked strangely at Jack. “It?”
To Toby, Jack said, “What is it?”
“Whatever it wants to be.”
“Where is it?”
“Wherever it wants to be,” the boy said cryptically.
“What is it doing here?”
“Becoming.”
Heather stepped around the table, stood on the other side of Toby, and stared at the monitor. “I’ve seen this before.”
Jack was relieved to know the bizarre display wasn’t unique, therefore not necessarily related to the experience in the cemetery, but Heather’s demeanor was such that his relief was extremely short-lived. “Seen it when?”
“Yesterday morning, before we went into town. On the TV in the living room. Toby was watching it…sort of enraptured like this. Strange.” She shuddered and reached for the master switch. “Shut it off.”
“No,” Jack said, reaching in front of Toby to stay her hand. “Wait. Let’s see.”
“Honey,” she said to Toby, “what’s going on here, what kind of game is this?”
“No game. I dreamed it, and in the dream I came in here, then I woke up and I was here, so we started talking.”
“Does this make any sense to you?” she asked Jack.
“Yes. Some.”
“What’s going on, Jack?”
“Later.”
“Am I out of the loop on something? What is this all about?” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I don’t like this.”
“Neither do I,” Jack said. “But let’s see where it leads, whether we can figure this out.”
“Figure what out?”
The boy’s fingers pecked busily at the keys. Although no words appeared on the screen, it seemed as if new colors and fresh patterns appeared and progressed in a rhythm that matched
his typing.
“Yesterday, on the TV…I asked Toby what it was,” Heather said. “He didn’t know. But he said…he liked it.”
Toby stopped typing.
The colors faded, then suddenly intensified and flowed in wholly new patterns and shades.
“No,” the boy said.
“No what?” Jack asked.
“Not talking to you. Talking to…it.” And to the screen, he said, “No. Go away.”
Waves of sour green. Blossoms of blood red appeared at random points across the screen, turned black, flowered into red again, then wilted, streamed, a viscous pus yellow.
The endlessly mutagenic display dazed Jack when he watched it too long, and he could understand how it could completely capture the immature mind of an eight-year-old boy, hypnotize him.
As Toby began to hammer the keyboard once more, the colors on the screen faded—then abruptly brightened again, although in new shades and in yet more varied and fluid forms.
“It’s a language,” Heather exclaimed softly.
For a moment Jack stared at her, uncomprehending.
She said, “The colors, the patterns. A language.”
He checked the monitor. “How can it be a language?”
“It is,” she insisted.
“There aren’t any repetitive shapes, nothing that could be letters, words.”
“Talking,” Toby confirmed. He pounded the keyboard. As before, the patterns and colors acquired a rhythm consistent with the pace at which he input his side of the conversation.
“A tremendously complicated and expressive language,” Heather said, “beside which English or French or Chinese is primitive.”
Toby stopped typing, and the response from the other conversant was dark and churning, black and bile green, clotted with red.
“No,” the boy said to the screen.
The colors became more dour, the rhythms more vehement.
“No,” Toby repeated.
Churning, seething, spiraling reds.
For a third time: “No.”
Jack said, “What’re you saying ‘no’ to?”
“To what it wants,” Toby replied.
“What does it want?”
“It wants me to let it in, just let it in.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Heather said, and reached for the Off switch again.
Jack stopped her hand as he’d done before. Her fingers were pale and frigid. “What’s wrong?” he asked, though he was afraid he knew. The words “let it in” had jolted him with an impact almost as great as one of Anson Oliver’s bullets.
“Last night,” Heather said, staring in horror at the screen. “In a dream.” Maybe his own hand turned cold. Or maybe she felt him tremble. She blinked. “You’ve had it too, the dream!”
“Just tonight. Woke me.”
“The door,” she said. “It wants you to find a door in yourself, open the door and let it in. Jack, damn it, what’s going on here, what the hell’s going on?”
He wished he knew. Or maybe he didn’t. He was more scared of this thing than of anyone he’d confronted as a cop. He had killed Anson Oliver, but he didn’t know if he could touch this enemy, didn’t know if it could even be found or seen.
“No,” Toby said to the screen.
Falstaff whined and retreated to a corner, stood there, tense and watchful.
“No. No.”
Jack crouched beside his son. “Toby, right now you can hear it and me, both of us?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not completely under its influence.”
“Only a little.”
“You’re…in between somewhere.”
“Between,” the boy confirmed.
“Do you remember yesterday in the graveyard?”
“Yes.”
“You remember this thing…speaking through you.”
“Yes.”
“What?” Heather asked, surprised. “What about the graveyard?”
On the screen: undulant black, bursting boils of yellow, seeping spots of kidney red.
“Jack,” Heather said, angrily, “you said nothing was wrong when you went up to the cemetery. You said Toby was daydreaming—just standing up there daydreaming.”
To Toby, Jack said, “But you didn’t remember anything about the graveyard right after it happened.”
“No.”
“Remember what?” Heather demanded. “What the hell was there to remember?”
“Toby,” Jack said, “are you able to remember now because…because you’re half under its spell again but only half…neither here nor there?”
“Between,” the boy acknowledged.
“Tell me about this ‘it’ you’re talking to,” Jack said.
“Jack, don’t,” Heather said.
She looked haunted. He knew how she felt. But he said, “We have to learn about it.”
“Why?”
“Maybe to survive.”
He didn’t have to explain. She knew what he meant. She had endured some degree of contact in her sleep. The hostility of the thing. Its inhuman rage.
To Toby, he said, “Tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?”
On the screen: blues of every shade, spreading like Japanese fans but without the sharp folds, one blue over the other, through the other.
“Where does it come from, Toby?”
“Outside.”
“What do you mean?”
“Beyond.”
“Beyond what?”
“This world.”
“Is it…extraterrestrial?”
Heather said, “Oh, my God.”
“Yes,” Toby said. “No.”
“Which, Toby?”
“Not as simple as…E.T. Yes. And no.”
“What is it doing here?”
“Becoming.”
“Becoming what?”
“Everything.”
Jack shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” the boy said, riveted to the display on the computer monitor.
Heather stood with her hands fisted against her breast.
Jack said, “Toby, yesterday in the graveyard, you weren’t just between, like now.”
“Gone.”
“Yes, you were gone all the way.”
“Gone.”
“I couldn’t reach you.”
“Shit,” Heather said furiously, and Jack didn’t look up at her because he knew she was glaring at him. “What happened yesterday, Jack? Why didn’t you tell me, for Christ’s sake? Something like this, why didn’t you tell me?”
Without meeting her eyes, he said, “I will, I’ll tell you, just let me finish this.”
“What else haven’t you told me,” she demanded. “What in God’s name’s happening, Jack?”
To Toby, he said, “When you were gone yesterday, son, where were you?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Under.”
“Under? Under what?”
“Under it.”
“Under…?”
“Controlled.”
“Under this thing? Under its mind?”
“Yeah. In a dark place.” Toby’s voice quavered with fear at the memory. “A dark place, cold, squeezed in a dark place, hurting.”
“Shut it off, shut it down!” Heather demanded.
Jack looked up at her. She was glaring, all right, red in the face, as furious as she was frightened.
Praying that she would be patient, he said, “We can shut the computer off, but we can’t keep this thing out that way. Think about it, Heather. It can get to us by a lot of routes—through dreams, through the TV. Apparently even while we’re awake, somehow. Toby was awake yesterday when it got to him.”
“I let it in,” the boy said.
Jack hesitated to ask the question that was, perhaps, the most critical of all. “Toby, listen…when it’s in control…does it have to be actually in you? Physically? A part of it inside you somewher
e?”
Something in the brain that would show up in a dissection. Or attached to the spine. The kind of thing for which Eduardo had wanted Travis Potter to look.
“No,” the boy said.
“No seed…no egg…no slug…nothing that it inserts.”
“No.”
That was good, very good, thank God and all the angels, that was very good. Because if something was implanted, how did you get it out of your child, how did you free him, how could you cut open his brain and tear it out?
Toby said, “Only…thoughts. Nothing in you but thoughts.”
“You mean, like it uses telepathic control?”
“Yeah.”
How suddenly the impossible could seem inevitable. Telepathic control. Something from beyond, hostile and strange, able to control other species telepathically. Crazy, right out of a science fiction movie, yet it felt real and true.
“And now it wants in again?” Heather asked Toby.
“Yes.”
“But you won’t let it in?” she asked.
“No.”
Jack said, “You can really keep it out?”
“Yes.”
They had hope. They weren’t finished yet.
Jack said, “Why did it leave you yesterday?”
“Pushed it.”
“You pushed it out?”
“Yeah. Pushed it. Hates me.”
“For pushing it out?”
“Yeah.” His voice sank to a whisper. “But it’s…it…it hates…hates everything.”
“Why?”
With a fury of scarlet and orange swirling across his face and flashing in his eyes, the boy still whispered: “Because…that’s what it is.”
“It’s hate?”
“That’s what it does.”
“But why?”
“That’s what it is.”
“Why?” Jack repeated patiently.
“Because it knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Nothing matters.”
“It knows…that nothing matters?”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing means.”
Dizzied by the only half-coherent exchange, Jack said, “I don’t understand.”