by Dean Koontz
In a still lower whisper: “Everything can be understood, but nothing can be understood.”
“I want to understand it.”
“Everything can be understood, but nothing can be understood.”
Heather’s hands were still fisted, but now she pressed them to her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to look at her son in this half-trance any longer.
“Nothing can be understood,” Toby murmured again.
Frustrated, Jack said, “But it understands us.”
“No.”
“What doesn’t it understand about us?”
“Lots of things. Mainly…we resist.”
“Resist?”
“We resist it.”
“And that’s new to it?”
“Yeah. Never before.”
“Everything else lets it in,” Heather said.
Toby nodded. “Except people.”
Chalk one up for human beings, Jack thought. Good old Homo sapiens, bullheaded to the last. We’re just not happy-go-lucky enough to let the puppetmaster jerk us around any way it wants, too uptight, too damned stubborn to love being slaves.
“Oh,” Toby said quietly, more to himself than to them or to the entity controlling the computer. “I see.”
“What do you see?” Jack asked.
“Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“The how.”
Jack looked at Heather, but she didn’t seem to be tracking the enigmatic conversation any better than he was.
“It senses,” Toby said.
“Toby?”
“Let’s not talk about this,” the boy said, glancing away from the screen for a moment to give Jack what seemed to be an imploring or warning look.
“Talk about what?”
“Forget it,” Toby said, gazing at the monitor again.
“Forget what?”
“I better be good. Here, listen, it wants to know.” Then, with a voice as muffled as a sigh in a handkerchief, forcing Jack to lean closer, Toby seemed to change the subject: “What were they doing down there?”
Jack said, “You mean in the graveyard?”
“Yeah.”
“You know.”
“But it doesn’t. It wants to know.”
“It doesn’t understand death,” Jack said.
“No.”
“How can that be?”
“Life is,” the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged to the creature with which he was in contact. “No meaning. No beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is.”
“Surely this isn’t the first world it’s ever found where things die,” Heather said.
Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely. “They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it can’t know them.”
It can use them, but it can’t know them.
A few pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Revealing only a tiny portion of the truth. A monstrous, intolerable portion of the truth.
Jack remained crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly, “Use them?”
“But it can’t know them.”
“How does it use them?”
“Puppets.”
Heather gasped. “The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell in the back staircase.”
Though Jack wasn’t entirely sure what she was talking about, he knew that she’d realized what was out there on the Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing from beyond, this thing that could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out there.
Toby whispered, “But it can’t know them. Not even as much as it can know us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to know them. Become them. And they resist.”
Jack had heard enough. Far too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master switch to Off, and the screen blanked.
“It’s going to come for us,” Toby said, and then he ascended slowly out of his half-trance.
Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it had been able to reach into the room, it couldn’t have made Jack any colder than he already was.
Toby swiveled in the office chair to direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father.
The dog came out of the corner.
Though no one was touching it, the master switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.
Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff.
The screen gushed with vile and squirming colors.
Heather stooped, grabbed the power cord, and tore it out of the wall socket.
The monitor went dark again, stayed dark.
“It won’t stop,” Toby said, getting up from the chair.
Jack turned to the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours, fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep where the wind chose to pile it. Either the first storm had stalled, instead of moving farther eastward, or the second had blown in even sooner than expected, overlapping the first.
“It won’t stop,” Toby repeated solemnly. He wasn’t talking about the snow.
Heather pulled him into her arms, lifted and held him as tightly and protectively as she would have held an infant.
Everything becomes me.
Jack didn’t know all that might be meant by those words, what horrors they might encompass, but he knew Toby was right. The thing wouldn’t stop until it had become them and they’d become part of it.
Condensation had frozen on the inside of the lower panes in the French window. Jack touched the glistening film with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with fear that the ice felt no colder than his own skin.
Beyond the kitchen windows, the white world was filled with cold motion, the relentless angular descent of wind-driven snow.
Restless, Heather moved continuously back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the appearance of a monstrously corrupted intruder in that otherwise sterile landscape.
They were dressed in the new ski suits they’d bought the previous morning, prepared to get out of the house quickly if they came under attack and found their position indefensible.
The loaded Mossberg twelve-gauge lay on the table. Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the shotgun in the event that something—don’t even think about what it might be—launched an assault on the house. The Micro Uzi and the Korth 38 were on the counter by the sink.
Toby sat at the table, sipping hot chocolate from a mug, and the dog was lying at his feet. The boy was no longer in a trance state, was entirely disconnected from the mysterious invader of dreams; yet he was uncharacteristically subdued.
Although Toby had been fine yesterday afternoon and evening, following the apparently far more extensive assault he had suffered in the graveyard, Heather worried about him. He had come away from that first experience with no conscious memory of it, but the trauma of total mental enslavement had to have left scars deep in the mind, the effects of which might become evident only over a period of weeks or months. And he did remember the second attempt at control, because this time the puppetmaster hadn’t succeeded in either dominating him or repressing the memory of the telepathic invasion. The encounter she’d had with the creature in a dream the night before last had been frightening and so repulsive that she had been overcome with nausea. Toby’s experiences with it, much more intimate than her own, must have been immeasurably more terrifying and affecting.
Moving restively from one window to the other, Heather stopped behind Toby’s chair, put her hands on his thin shoulders, gave him a squeeze, smoothed his hair, kissed the top of his head. Nothing must happen to him. Unbearable to think of him being touched by that thing, whatever it was and whatever it might look like, or by one of its puppets. Intolerable. She would do anything to prevent that. Anything
. She would die to prevent it.
Jack looked up from the tablet after quickly reading the first three or four pages. His face was as white as the snowscape. “Why didn’t you tell me about this when you found it?”
“Because of the way he’d hidden it in the freezer, I thought it must be personal, private, none of our business. Seemed like something only Paul Youngblood ought to see.”
“You should’ve showed it to me.”
“Hey, you didn’t tell me about what happened in the cemetery,” she said, “and that’s a hell of a lot bigger secret.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t share what Paul and Travis told you, either.”
“That was wrong. But…now you know everything.”
“Now, yes, finally.”
She had been furious that he’d withheld such things from her, but she hadn’t been able to sustain her anger; and she could not rekindle it now. Because, of course, she was equally guilty. She’d not told him about the uneasiness she’d felt during the entire tour of the property Monday afternoon. The premonitions of violence and death. The unprecedented intensity of her nightmare. The certainty that something had been in the back stairwell when she’d gone into Toby’s room the night before last.
In all the years they had been married, there had not been as many gaps in their communication with each other as since they’d come to Quartermass Ranch. They had wanted their new life not merely to work but to be perfect, and they had been unwilling to express doubts or reservations. For that failure to reach out to each other, though motivated by the best intentions, they might pay with their lives.
Indicating the tablet, she said, “Is it anything?”
“It’s everything, I think. The start of it. His account of what he saw.”
He spot-read to them about the waves of virtually palpable sound that had awakened Eduardo Fernandez in the night, about the spectral light in the woods.
“I thought it would’ve come from the sky, a ship,” she said. “You expect…after all the movies, all the books, you expect them to come in massive ships.”
“When you’re talking about extraterrestrials, alien means truly different, deeply strange,” Jack said. “Eduardo makes that point on the first page. Deeply strange, beyond easy comprehension. Nothing we could imagine—including ships.”
“I’m scared about what might happen, what I might have to do,” Toby said.
A blast of wind skirled under the back porch roof, as shrill as an electronic shriek, as questing and insistent as a living creature.
Heather crouched at Toby’s side. “We’ll be okay, honey. Now that we know something’s out there, and a little bit about what it is, we’ll handle it.” She wished she could be half as confident as she sounded.
“But I shouldn’t be scared.”
Looking up from the tablet, Jack said, “Nothing shameful about being afraid, kiddo.”
“You’re never afraid,” the boy said.
“Wrong. I’m scared half to death right now.”
That revelation amazed Toby. “You are? But you’re a hero.”
“Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. But there’s nothing unique about being a hero,” Jack said. “Most people are heroes. Your mom’s a hero, so are you.”
“Me?”
“Sure. For the way you handled this past year. Took a lot of courage to deal with everything.”
“I didn’t feel brave.”
“Truly brave people never do.”
Heather said, “Lots of people are heroes even if they never dodge bullets or chase bad guys.”
“People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it—those are the real heroes,” Jack told him. “Lots of them out there. And once in a while all of them are afraid.”
“Then it’s okay I’m scared?” Toby said.
“More than okay,” Jack said. “If you were never afraid of anything, then you’d be either very stupid or insane. Now, I know you can’t be stupid because you’re my son. Insanity, on the other hand…well, I can’t be too sure about that, since it runs in your mom’s family.” Jack smiled.
“Then maybe I can do it,” Toby said.
“We’ll get through this,” Jack assured him.
Heather met Jack’s eyes and smiled as if to say, You handled that so well, you ought to be Father of the Year. He winked at her. God, she loved him.
“Then it’s insane,” the boy said.
Frowning, Heather said, “What?”
“The alien. Can’t be stupid. It’s smarter than we are, can do things we can’t. So it must be insane. It’s never afraid.”
Heather and Jack glanced at each other. No smiles this time.
“Never,” Toby repeated, both hands clasped tightly around the mug of hot chocolate.
Heather returned to the windows, first one, then the other.
Jack skimmed the tablet pages he hadn’t yet read, found a passage about the doorway, and quoted from it aloud. Standing on edge, a giant coin of darkness. As thin as a sheet of paper. Big enough to drive a train through. A blackness of exceptional purity. Eduardo daring to put his hand in it. His sense that something was coming out of that fearful gloom.
Pushing the tablet aside, getting up from his chair, Jack said, “That’s enough for now. We can read the rest of it later. Eduardo’s account supports our own experiences. That’s what’s important. They might’ve thought he was a crazy old geezer, or that we’re flaky city people who’ve come down with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies in all this open space, but it isn’t as easy to dismiss all of us.”
Heather said, “So who’re we going to call, the county sheriff?”
“Paul Youngblood, then Travis Potter. They already suspect something’s wrong out here—though, God knows, neither of them could have a clue that it’s anything this wrong. With a couple of locals on our side, there’s a chance the sheriff’s deputies might take us more seriously.”
Carrying the shotgun with him, Jack went to the wall phone. He plucked the handset off the cradle, listened, rattled the disconnect lever, punched a couple of numbers, and hung up. “The line’s dead.”
She had suspected as much even as he started toward the phone. After the incident with the computer, she had known that getting help wasn’t going to be easy, although she hadn’t wanted to think about the possibility that they were trapped.
“Maybe the storm brought down the lines,” Jack said.
“Aren’t phone lines on the same poles as power lines?”
“Yeah, and we have power, so it wasn’t the storm.” From the pegboard, he snatched the keys to the Explorer and to Eduardo’s Cherokee. “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here. We’ll drive over to Paul and Carolyn’s, call Travis from there.”
Heather tucked the yellow tablet into the waistband of her pants, against her stomach, and zipped her ski jacket over it. She took the Micro Uzi and the Korth .38 from the countertop, one in each hand.
As Toby scooted off his chair, Falstaff came out from under the table and padded directly to the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage. The dog seemed to understand that they were getting out, and he heartily concurred with their decision.
Jack unlocked the door, opened it fast but warily, crossing the threshold with the shotgun held in front of him, as if he expected their enemy to be in the garage. He flipped the light switch, looked left and right, and said, “Okay.”
Toby followed his father, with Falstaff at his side.
Heather left last, glancing back at the windows. Snow. Nothing but cold cascades of snow.
Even with the lights on, the garage was murky. It was as chilly as a walk-in refrigerator. The big sectional roll-up door rattled in the wind, but she didn’t push the button to raise it; they would be safer if they activated it with the remote from inside the Explorer.
While Jack made sure that Toby got in the back seat and buckled his safety belt—and
that the dog was in as well—Heather hurried to the passenger side. She watched the floor as she moved, convinced that something was under the Explorer and would seize her by the ankles.
She remembered the dimly and briefly glimpsed presence on the other side of the threshold when she had opened the door a crack in her dream Friday night. Glistening and dark. Writhing and quick. Its full shape had not been discernible, although she had perceived something large, with vaguely serpentine coils.
From memory she could clearly recall its cold hiss of triumph before she had slammed the door and exploded from the nightmare.
Nothing slithered from under either vehicle and grabbed at her, however, and she made it safely into the front passenger seat of the Explorer, where she put the heavy Uzi on the floor between her feet. She held on to the revolver.
“Maybe the snow’s too deep,” she said as Jack leaned in the driver’s door and handed her the twelve-gauge. She braced the shotgun between her knees, butt against the floor, muzzle aimed at the ceiling. “The storm’s a lot worse than they predicted.”
Getting behind the wheel, slamming his door, he said, “It’ll be all right. We might push a little snow here and there with the bumper, but I don’t think it’s deep enough yet to be a big problem.”
“I wish we’d had that plow attached first thing.”
Jack jammed the key in the ignition, twisted the switch, but was rewarded only with silence, not even the grinding of the starter. He tried again. Nothing. He checked to be sure the Explorer wasn’t in gear. Tried a third time without success.
Heather was no more surprised than she had been when the phone proved to be dead. Although Jack said nothing and was reluctant to meet her eyes, she knew he had expected it too, which was why he had also brought the keys to the Cherokee.
While Heather, Toby, and Falstaff got out of the Explorer, Jack slipped behind the wheel of the other vehicle. That engine wouldn’t turn over, either.
He raised the hood on the Jeep, then the hood on the Explorer. He couldn’t find any problems.
They went back into the house.
Heather locked the connecting door to the garage. She doubted that locks were of any use in keeping out the thing that now held dominion over Quartermass Ranch. For all they knew, it could walk through walls if it wished, but she engaged the dead bolt, anyway.