by Dean Koontz
She remembered that name from her dream, the hateful thing’s attempt to portray itself as the source of great relief, peace, and pleasure. “It’s not a giver. That’s a lie. It’s a taker. You keep saying ‘no’ to it.”
Toby stared up at her.
She was shaking. “You understand me, honey?”
He nodded.
She was still not sure he was listening to her. “You keep saying ‘no,’ nothing but ‘no.’”
“All right.”
She threw the Game Boy in the waste can. After a hesitation, she took it out, placed it on the floor, and stomped it under her boot, once, twice. She rammed her heel down on it a third time, although the device was well crunched after two stomps, then once more for good measure, then again just for the hell of it, until she realized she was out of control, taking excess measures against the Game Boy because she couldn’t get at the Giver, which was the thing she really wanted to stomp.
For a few seconds she stood there, breathing hard, staring at the plastic debris. She started to stoop to gather up the pieces, then decided to hell with it. She kicked the larger chunks against the wall.
Falstaff had become interested enough to get to his feet. When Heather returned to the window at the sink, the retriever regarded her curiously, then went to the trashed Game Boy and sniffed it as if trying to determine why it had elicited such fury from her.
Beyond the window, nothing had changed. A wind-driven avalanche of snow obscured the day almost as thoroughly as a fog rolling off the Pacific could obscure the streets of a California beach town.
She looked at Toby. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let it in.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t. Be tough. You can do it.”
On the counter under the microwave, the radio powered up of its own accord, as if it incorporated an alarm clock set to provide five minutes of music prior to a wake-up buzzer. It was a big multiple-spectrum receiver, the size of two giant-economy-size boxes of cereal, and it pulled in six bands, including domestic AM and FM; however, it was not a clock and could not be programmed to switch itself on at a preselected time. Yet the dial glowed with green light, and strange music issued from the speakers.
The chains of notes and overlapping rhythms were not music, actually, just the essence of music in the sense that a pile of lumber and screws amounted to the essence of a cabinet. She could identify a symphony of instruments—flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns of all kinds, violins, timpani, snare drums—but there was no melody, no identifiable cohesive structure, merely a sense of structure too subtle to quite hear, waves of sound that were sometimes pleasant and sometimes jarringly discordant, now loud, now soft, ebbing and flowing.
“Maybe,” Toby said.
Heather’s attention had been on the radio. With surprise, she turned to her son.
Toby had gotten off his chair. He was standing by the table, staring across the room at the radio, swaying like a slender reed in a breeze only he could feel. His eyes were glazed. “Well…yeah, maybe…maybe…”
The unmelodious tapestry of sound coming from the radio was the aural equivalent of the ever-changing masses of color that she had seen swarming across the television, computer, and Game Boy screens: a language that evidently spoke directly to the subconscious. She could feel the hypnotic pull of it herself, although it exerted only a small fraction of the influence on her that it did on Toby.
Toby was the vulnerable one. Children were always the easiest prey, natural victims in a cruel world.
“…I’d like that…nice…pretty,” the boy said dreamily, and then he sighed.
If he said ‘yes,’ if he opened the inner door, he might not be able to evict the thing this time. He might be lost forever.
“No!” Heather said.
Seizing the radio cord, she tore the plug out of the wall socket hard enough to bend the prongs. Orange sparks spurted from the outlet, showered across the counter tile.
Though unplugged, the radio continued to produce the mesmerizing waves of sound.
She stared at it, aghast and uncomprehending.
Toby remained entranced, speaking to the unseen presence, as he might have spoken to an imaginary playmate. “Can I? Hmmm? Can I…will you…will you?”
The damn thing was more relentless than the drug dealers in the city, who did their come-on shtick for kids at schoolyard fences, on street corners, in videogame parlors, outside movie theaters, at the malls, wherever they could find a venue, indefatigable, as hard to eradicate as body lice.
Batteries. Of course. The radio operated off either direct or alternating current.
“…maybe…maybe…”
She dropped the Uzi on the counter, grabbed the radio, popped open the plastic cover on the back, and tore out the two rechargeable batteries. She threw them into the sink, where they rattled like dice against the backboard of a craps table. The siren song from the radio had stopped before Toby acquiesced, so Heather had won that roll. Toby’s mental freedom had been on the come line, but she had thrown a seven, won the bet. He was safe for the moment.
“Toby? Toby, look at me.”
He obeyed. He was no longer swaying, his eyes were clear, and he seemed to be back in touch with reality.
Falstaff barked, and Heather thought he was agitated by all the noise, perhaps by the stark fear he sensed in her, but then she saw that his attention was on the window above the sink. He rapped out hard, vicious, warning barks meant to scare off an adversary.
She spun around in time to see something on the porch slip away to the left of the window. It was dark and tall. She glimpsed it out of the corner of her eye, but it was too quick for her to see what it was.
The doorknob rattled.
The radio had been a diversion.
As Heather snatched the Micro Uzi off the counter, the retriever charged past her and positioned himself in front of the pots and pans and dishes stacked against the back door. He barked ferociously at the brass knob, which turned back and forth, back and forth.
Heather grabbed Toby by the shoulder, pushed him toward the hall door. “Into the hall, but stay close behind me—quick!”
The matches were already in her jacket pocket. She snared the nearest of the five-gallon cans of gasoline by its handle. She could take only one because she wasn’t about to put down the Uzi.
Falstaff was like a mad dog, snarling so savagely that spittle flew from his chops, hair standing up straight on the back of his neck, his tail flat across his butt, crouched and tense, as if he might spring at the door even before the thing outside could come through it.
The lock opened with a hard clack.
The intruder had a key. Or maybe it didn’t need one. Heather remembered how the radio had snapped on by itself.
She backed onto the threshold between the kitchen and ground-floor hall.
Reflections of the overhead light trickled scintillantly along the brass doorknob as it turned.
She put the can of gasoline on the floor and held the Uzi with both hands. “Falstaff, get away from there! Falstaff!”
As the door eased inward, the tower of housewares tottered.
The dog backed off as she continued to call to him.
The security assemblage teetered, tipped over, crashed. Pots, pans, and dishes bounced-slid-spun across the kitchen floor, forks and knives rang against one another like bells, and drinking glasses shattered.
The dog scrambled to Heather’s side but kept barking fiercely, teeth bared, eyes wild.
She had a sure grip on the Uzi, the safeties off, her finger curled lightly on the trigger. What if it jammed? Forget that; it wouldn’t jam. It had worked like a dream when she’d tried it out against a canyon wall in a remote area above Malibu several months earlier: automatic gunfire echoing along the walls of that narrow defile, spent shell casings spewing into the air, scrub brush torn to pieces, the smell of hot brass and burned gunpowder, bullets banging out in a
punishing stream, as smooth and easy as water from a hose. It wouldn’t jam, not in a million years. But, Jesus, what if it does?
The door eased inward. A narrow crack. An inch. Then wider.
Something snaked through the gap a few inches above the knob. In that instant the nightmare was confirmed, the unreal made real, the impossible suddenly incarnate, for what intruded was a tentacle, mostly black but irregularly speckled with red, as shiny and smooth as wet silk, perhaps two inches in diameter at the thickest point that she could see, tapering as thin as an earthworm at the tip. It quested into the warm air of the kitchen, fluidly curling, flexing obscenely.
That was enough. She didn’t need to see more, didn’t want to see more, so she opened fire. Chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda. The briefest squeeze of the trigger spewed six or seven rounds, punching holes in the oak door, gouging and splintering the edge of it. The deafening explosions slammed back and forth from wall to wall of the kitchen, sharp echoes overlaying echoes.
The tentacle slipped away with the alacrity of a retracted whip.
She heard no cry, no unearthly scream. She didn’t know if she had hurt the thing or not.
She wasn’t going to go and look on the porch, no way, and she wasn’t going to wait to see if it would storm into the room more aggressively the next time. Because she didn’t know how fast the creature might be able to move, she needed to put more distance between herself and the back door.
She grabbed the can of gasoline at her side, Uzi in one hand, and backed out of the doorway, into the hall, almost tripping over the dog as he scrambled to retreat with her. She backed to the foot of the stairs, where Toby waited for her.
“Mom?” he said, voice tight with fear.
Peering along the hall and across the kitchen, she could see the back door because it was in a direct line with her. It remained ajar, but nothing was forcing entry yet. She knew the intruder must still be on the porch, gripping the outside knob, because otherwise the wind would have pushed the door all the way open.
Why was it waiting? Afraid of her? No. Toby had said it was never afraid.
Another thought rocked her: If it didn’t understand the concept of death, that must mean it couldn’t die, couldn’t be killed. In which case guns were useless against it.
Still, it waited, hesitated. Maybe what Toby had learned about it was all a lie, and maybe it was as vulnerable as they were or more so, even fragile. Wishful thinking. It was all she had.
She was not quite to the midpoint of the hall. Two more steps would put her there, between the archways to the dining and living rooms. But she was far enough from the back door to have a chance of obliterating the creature if it erupted into the house with unnatural speed and power. She stopped, put the gasoline can on the floor beside the newel post, and clutched the Uzi in both hands again.
“Mom?”
“Sssshhhh.”
“What’re we gonna do?” he pleaded.
“Sssshhhh. Let me think.”
Aspects of the intruder were obviously snakelike, although she couldn’t know if that was the nature of only its appendages or of its entire body. Most snakes could move fast—or coil and spring substantial distances with deadly accuracy.
The back door remained ajar. Unmoving. Wisps of snow followed drafts through the narrow gap between the door and the jamb, into the house, spinning and glittering across the tile floor.
Whether or not the thing on the back porch was fast, it was undeniably big. She’d sensed its considerable size when she’d had only the most fleeting glimpse of it slipping away from the window. Bigger than she was.
“Come on,” she muttered, her attention riveted on the back door. “Come on, if you’re never afraid, come on.”
Both she and Toby cried out in surprise when, in the living room, the television switched on, with the volume turned all the way up.
Frenetic, bouncy music. Cartoon music. A screech of brakes, a crash and clatter, with comic accompaniment on a flute. Then the voice of a frustrated Elmer Fudd booming through the house: “OOOHHH, I HATE THAT WABBIT!”
Heather kept her attention on the back door, beyond the hall and kitchen, altogether about fifty feet away.
So loud each word vibrated the windows, Bugs Bunny said: “EH, WHAT’S UP, DOC?” And then a sound of something bouncing: BOING, BOING, BOING, BOING, BOING.
“STOP THAT, STOP THAT, YOU CWAZY WABBIT!”
Falstaff ran into the living room, barking at the TV, and then scurried into the hall again, looking past Heather to where he, too, knew the real enemy still waited.
The back door.
Snow sifting through the narrow opening.
In the living room, the television program fell silent in the middle of a long comical trombone glissando that, even under the circumstances, brought to mind a vivid image of Elmer Fudd sliding haplessly and inexorably toward one doom or another. Quiet. Just the keening wind outside.
One second. Two. Three.
Then the TV blared again, but not with Bugs and Elmer. It spewed forth the same weird waves of unmelodic music that had issued from the radio in the kitchen.
To Toby, she said sharply, “Resist it!”
Back door. Snowflakes spiraling through the crack.
Come on, come on.
Keeping her eyes on the back door, at the far side of the lighted kitchen, she said, “Don’t listen to it, honey, just tell it to go away, say no to it. No, no, no to it.”
The tuneless music, alternately irritating and soothing, pushed her with what seemed like real physical force when the volume rose, pulled on her when the volume ebbed, pushed and pulled, until she realized that she was swaying as Toby had swayed in the kitchen when under the spell of the radio.
In one of the quieter passages, she heard a murmur. Toby’s voice. She couldn’t catch the words.
She looked at him. He had that dazed expression. Transported. He was moving his lips. He might have been saying “yes, yes,” but she couldn’t tell for sure.
Kitchen door. Still ajar two inches, no more, as it had been. Something still waiting out there on the porch.
She knew it.
The boy whispered to his unseen seducer, soft urgent words that might have been the first faltering steps of acquiescence or total surrender.
“Shit!” she said.
She backed up two steps, turned toward the living-room arch on her left, and opened fire on the television. A brief burst, six or eight rounds, tore into the TV. The picture tube exploded, thin white vapor or smoke from the ruined electronics spurted into the air, and the darkly beguiling siren song was hammered into silence by the clatter of the Uzi.
A strong, cold draft swept through the hallway, and Heather spun toward the rear of the house. The back door was no longer ajar. It stood wide open. She could see the snow-covered porch and, beyond the porch, the churning white day.
The Giver had first walked out of a dream. Now it had walked out of the storm, into the house. It was somewhere in the kitchen, to the left or right of the hall door, and she had missed the chance to cut it down as it entered.
If it was just on the other side of the threshold between the hall and the kitchen, it had closed to a maximum striking distance of about twenty-five feet. Getting dangerously close again.
Toby was standing on the first step of the staircase, clear-eyed once more but shivering and pale with terror. The dog was beside him, alert, sniffing the air.
Behind her, another pot-pan-bowl-flatware-dish alarm went off with a loud clanging of metal and shattering of glass. Toby screamed, Falstaff erupted into ferocious barking again, and Heather swung around, heart slamming so hard it shook her arms, made the gun jump up and down. The front door was arcing inward. A forest of long red-speckled black tentacles burst through the gap between door and jamb, glossy and writhing. So there were two of them, one at the front of the house, one at the back. The Uzi chattered. Six rounds, maybe eight. The door shut. But a mysterious dark figure was hunched against it, a small p
art of it visible in the beveled-glass window in the top of the door.
Without pausing to see if she’d actually hit the son of a bitch or scored only the door and wall, she spun toward the kitchen yet again, punching three or four rounds through the empty hallway behind her even as she turned.
Nothing there.
She had been sure the first one would be striking at her back. Wrong. Maybe twenty rounds left in the Uzi’s double magazine. Maybe only fifteen.
They couldn’t stay in the hall. Not with one of the damned things in the kitchen, another on the front porch.
Why had she thought there’d be only one of them? Because in the dream there was only one? Because Toby had spoken of just a single seducer? Might be more than two. Hundreds.
The living room was on one side of her. Dining room on the other. Ultimately, either place seemed likely to become a trap.
In different rooms all over the ground floor, windows imploded simultaneously.
The clink-jangle-tink of cascading glass and the shrieking of the wind at every breach decided her. Up. She and Toby would go up. Easier to defend high ground.
She grabbed the can of gasoline.
The front door came open behind her again, banging against the scattered items with which they had built the alarm tower. She assumed that something other than the wind had shoved it, but she didn’t glance back. The Giver hissed. As in the dream.
She leaped for the stairs, gasoline sloshing in the can, and shouted at Toby, “Go, go!”
The boy and the dog raced to the second floor ahead of her.
“Wait at the top!” she called as they scrambled upward and out of sight.
At the top of the first flight, Heather halted on the landing, looked back and down into the front hall, and saw a dead man walking. Eduardo Fernandez. She recognized him from the pictures they had found while sorting through his belongings. Dead and buried more than four months, he nevertheless moved in a shambling and stiff-jointed manner, kicking through the dishes and pans and flatware, heading for the foot of the stairs, accompanied by swirling flakes of snow like ashes from the fires of hell.
There could be no self-awareness in the corpse, no slightest wisp of Ed Fernandez’s consciousness remaining in it, for the old man’s mind and soul had gone on to a better place before the Giver had requisitioned his body. The soiled cadaver was evidently being controlled with the same power that had switched on the radio and the TV at long distance, had opened the dead-bolt locks without a key, and had caused the windows to implode. Call it telekinesis, mind over matter. Alien mind over earthly matter. In this case, it was decomposing organic matter in the rough shape of a human being.