by Dean Koontz
“Heather! Toby!”
No answer.
“Heather!” He pushed the study door all the way open and looked in there, just to be sure. “Heather!” From the archway he could see the entire living room. Nobody. The dining-room arch. “Heather!” Not in the dining room, either. He hurried back through the hall, into the kitchen. The back door was shut, though it had obviously been opened at some point, because the tower of housewares had been knocked down. “Heather!”
“Jack!”
He spun around at the sound of her voice, unable to figure where it had come from. “HEATHER!”
“Down here—we need help!”
The cellar door was ajar. He pulled it open, looked down.
Heather was at the landing, a five-gallon can of gasoline in each hand. “We need all of it, Jack.”
“What’re you doing? The house is on fire! Get out of there!”
“We need the gasoline to do the job.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Toby’s got it.”
“Got what?” he demanded, going down the steps to her.
“It. He’s got it. Under him,” she said breathlessly.
“Under him?” he asked, taking the cans out of her hands.
“Like he was under it in the graveyard.”
Jack felt as if he’d been shot, not the same pain but the same impact as a bullet in the chest. “He’s a boy, a little boy, he’s just a little boy, for Christ’s sake!”
“He paralyzed it, the thing itself and all its surrogates. You should’ve seen! He says there isn’t much time. The goddamned thing is strong, Jack, it’s powerful. Toby can’t keep it under him very long, and when it gets on top, it’ll never let him go. It’ll hurt him, Jack. It’ll make him pay for this. So we have to get it first. We don’t have time to question him, second-guess him, we just do what he says.” She turned away from him, retreated down the lower steps. “I’ll get two more cans.”
“The house is on fire!” he protested.
“Upstairs. Not here yet.”
Madness.
“Where’s Toby?” he called as she turned out of sight below.
“The back porch!”
“Hurry and get yourself out of there,” he shouted as he lugged ten gallons of gasoline up the basement stairs of a burning house, unable to repress mental images of the flaming rivers of gasoline in front of Arkadian’s station.
He went onto the porch. No fire there yet. No reflections of second-story flames on the backyard snow, either. The blaze was still largely at the front of the house.
Toby was standing in his red-and-black ski suit at the head of the porch steps, his back to the door. Snow churned around him. The little point on the hood gave him the look of a gnome.
The dog was at Toby’s side. He turned his burly head to look at Jack, wagged his tail once.
Jack put down the gasoline cans and hunkered beside his son. If his heart didn’t turn over in his chest when he saw the boy’s face, he felt as if it did.
Toby looked like death.
“Skipper?”
“Hi, Dad.”
His voice had little inflection. He seemed to be in a daze, as he had been in front of the computer that morning. He didn’t look at Jack but stared uphill toward the caretaker’s house, which was visible only when the dense shrouds of snow were drawn apart by the capricious wind.
“Are you between?” Jack asked, dismayed by the tremor in his voice.
“Yeah. Between.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you afraid of it?”
“Yeah. That’s okay.”
“What’re you staring at?”
“Blue light.”
“I don’t see any blue light.”
“When I was asleep.”
“You saw a blue light in your sleep?”
“In the caretaker’s house.”
“Blue light in a dream?”
“Might have been more than a dream.”
“So that’s where it is?”
“Yeah. Part of me too.”
“Part of you is in the caretaker’s house?”
“Yeah. Holding it under.”
“We can actually burn it?”
“Maybe. But we’ve got to get all of it.”
Harlan Moffit clumped onto the back porch, carrying two cans of gasoline. “Lady in there give me these, told me to bring ’em out here. She your wife?”
Jack rose to his feet. “Yeah. Heather. Where is she?”
“Went down for two more,” Harlan said, “like she doesn’t know the house is on fire.”
In the backyard, there were reflections of fire on the snow now, probably from the main roof or from Toby’s room. Even if the blaze hadn’t yet spread all the way down the front stairs, the whole house would soon be engulfed when the roof fell into second-floor rooms and second-floor rooms fell into those below them.
Jack started toward the kitchen, but Harlan Moffit put down the fuel cans and grabbed him by the arm. “What the hell’s going on here?”
Jack tried to pull away from him. The chubby, bearded man was stronger than he looked.
“You tell me your family’s in danger, going to die any minute, trapped somehow, but then we get here and what I see is your family is the danger, setting fire to their own house by the look of it.”
From the second floor came a great creaking and a shuddering crash as something caved in, wall or ceiling.
Jack shouted, “Heather!”
He tore loose from Harlan and made it into the kitchen just as Heather climbed out of the basement with two more cans. He grabbed one of them from her, guided her toward the back door.
“Out of the house now,” he ordered.
“That’s it,” she said. “No more down there.”
Jack paused at the pegboard to get the keys to the caretaker’s cottage, then followed Heather outside.
Toby had already started up the long hill, trudging through snow that was knee-high in some places, hardly up to his ankles in others. It was nowhere as deep as out on the fields, because the wind relentlessly swept the slope between the house and the higher woods, even scouring it to bare ground in a few spots.
Falstaff accompanied him, a brand-new dog but as faithful as a lifelong companion. Odd. The finest qualities of character—rare in humankind and perhaps rarer still in what other intelligent species might share the universe—were common in canines. Sometimes, Jack wondered if the species created in God’s image was, in fact, not one that walked erect but one that padded on all fours with a tail behind.
Picking up one of the cans on the porch to go with the one she already had, Heather hurried into the snow. “Come on!”
“You going to burn down the house uphill now?” Harlan Moffit asked dryly, evidently having glimpsed that other structure through the snow.
“And we need your help.” Jack carried two of the remaining four cans to the steps, knowing Moffit must think they were all mad.
The bearded man was obviously intrigued but also spooked and wary. “Are you people plumb crazy, or don’t you know there’s better ways of getting rid of termites?”
There was no way to explain the situation in a reasonable and methodical fashion, especially not when every second counted, so Jack went for it, took the plunge off the deep end, and said, “Since you knew I was the new fella in these parts, maybe you also know I was a cop in L.A., not some flaky screenwriter with wild ideas—just a cop, a working stiff like you. Now, it’s going to sound nuts, but we’re in a fight here against something that isn’t of this world, something that came here when Ed—”
“You mean aliens?” Harlan Moffit interrupted.
He could think of no euphemism that was any less absurd. “Yeah. Aliens. They—”
“I’ll be a fucking sonofabitch!” Harlan Moffit said, and smacked one meaty fist into the palm of his other hand. A torrent of words burst from him: “I knew I’d get to
see one sooner or later. Read about them all the time in the Enquirer. And books. Some are good aliens, some bad, and some you’ll never figure out in a month of Sundays—just like people. These are real bad bastards, huh? Come whirling down in their ships, did they? Holy shit on a holy shingle! And me here for it!” He grabbed the last two cans of gasoline and charged off the porch, uphill through the bright reflections of flame that rippled like phantom flags across the snow. “Come on, come on—let’s waste these fuckers!”
Jack would have laughed if his son’s sanity and life had not been balanced on a thin line, a thread, a filament. Even so, he almost sat down on the snow-packed porch steps, almost let the giggles and the guffaws come. Humor and death were kin, all right. Couldn’t face the latter without the former. Any cop knew as much. And life was absurd, down to the deepest foundations of it, so there was always something funny in the middle of whatever hell was blowing up around you at the moment. Atlas wasn’t carrying the world on his shoulders, no giant muscular hulk with a sense of responsibility; the world was balanced on a pyramid of clowns, and they were always tooting horns and wobbling and goosing each other. But even though it was absurd, though life could be disastrous and funny at the same time, people still died. Toby might still die. Heather. All of them. Luther Bryson had been making jokes, laughing, seconds before he took a swarm of bullets in the chest.
Jack hurried after Harlan Moffit.
The wind was cold.
The hill was slippery.
The day was hard and gray.
Climbing the sloped backyard, Toby pictured himself in a green boat on a cold black sea. Green because it was his favorite color. No land anywhere in sight. Just his little green boat and him in it. The sea was old, ancient, older than ancient, so old that it had come alive in a way, could think, could want things and need to have its way. The sea wanted to rise on all sides of the little green boat, swamp it, drag it down a thousand fathoms into the inky water, and Toby with it, ten thousand fathoms, twenty thousand, down and down to a place with no light but strange music. In his boat, Toby had bags of Calming Dust, which he’d gotten from someone important, maybe from Indiana Jones, maybe from E.T., maybe from Aladdin—probably from Aladdin, who got it from the Genie. He kept scattering the Calming Dust on the sea as his little green boat puttered along, and though the dust seemed light and silvery in his hands, lighter than feathers, it became hugely heavy when it hit the water, but heavy in a funny way, in a way that didn’t make it sink, magical Calming Dust that crushed the water flat, made the sea as smooth and ripple-free as a mirror. The ancient sea wanted to rise up, swamp the boat, but the Calming Dust weighed it down, more than iron, more than lead, weighed it down and kept it calm, defeated it. Deep in the darkest and coldest canyons below its surface, the sea raged, furious with Toby, wanting more than ever to kill him, drown him, bash his body to pieces against shoreline rocks, wear him away with its waters until he would be just sand. But it couldn’t rise, couldn’t rise; all was calm on the surface, peaceful and calm, calm.
Perhaps because Toby was concentrating so intensely on keeping the Giver under him, he lacked the strength to climb the entire hill, though the snow was not piled dauntingly high on that windswept ground. Jack put down the fuel cans two-thirds of the way to the higher woods, carried Toby to the stone house, gave Heather the keys, and returned for the ten gallons of gasoline.
By the time Jack reached the fieldstone house again, Heather had opened the door. The rooms inside were dark. He hadn’t had time to discover the reason for the malfunctioning lights. Nevertheless, now he knew why Paul Youngblood couldn’t get power to the house on Monday. The dweller within hadn’t wanted them to enter.
The rooms were still dark because the windows were boarded over, and there was no time to pry off the plywood that shielded the glass. Fortunately, Heather had remembered the lack of power and come prepared. From two pockets of her ski suit, she produced, instead of bullets, a pair of flashlights.
It always seems to come down to this, Jack thought: going into a dark place. Basements, alleyways, abandoned houses, boiler rooms, crumbling warehouses. Even when a cop was chasing a perp on a bright day and the chase led only outdoors, in the final confrontation, when you came face-to-face with evil, it was always a dark place, as if the sun could not find that one small patch of ground where you and your potential murderer tested fate.
Toby walked into the house ahead of them, either unafraid of the gloom or eager to do the deed.
Heather and Jack each took a flashlight and a can of gasoline, leaving two cans just outside the front door.
Harlan Moffit brought up the rear with two cans. “What’re these buggers like? They all hairless and big-eyed like those geeks who kidnapped Whitley Strieber?”
In the unfurnished and unlighted living room, Toby was standing in front of a dark figure, and when their flashlight beams found what the boy had found before them, Harlan Moffit had his answer. Not hairless and big-eyed. Not the cute little guys from a Spielberg movie. A decomposing body stood with legs spread, swaying but in no danger of crumpling to the floor. A singularly repulsive creature was draped across the cadaver’s back, bound to it by several greasy tentacles, intruded into its rotting body, as though it had been trying to become one with the dead flesh. It was quiescent but obviously alive: queer pulses were visible beneath its wet-silk skin, and the tips of some appendages quivered.
The dead man with which the alien had combined was Jack’s old friend and partner Tommy Fernandez.
Heather realized, too late, that Jack had never actually seen one of the walking dead with its puppetmaster in full saddle. That sight alone was sufficient to undermine a lot of his assumptions about the inherently benign—or at least neutral—character of the universe and the inevitability of justice. There was nothing benign or just about what had been done with Tommy Fernandez’s remains—or about what the Giver would do to her, Jack, Toby, and the rest of humanity while they were still alive, if it had the opportunity. The revelation had more sting because these were Tommy’s remains in this condition of profound violation, rather than those of a stranger.
She turned her flashlight away from Tommy and was relieved when Jack lowered his own quickly, as well. It would not have been like him to dwell on such a horror. She liked to believe that, in spite of anything he might have to endure, he would always hold fast to the optimism and love of life that made him special.
“This thing has gotta die,” Harlan said coldly. He had lost his natural ebullience. He was no longer Richard Dreyfuss excitedly chasing his close encounter of the third kind. The most ominous apocryphal fantasies of evil aliens that the cheap tabloids and science fiction movies had to offer were not merely proved foolish by the grotesquerie that stood in the caretaker’s house; they were proved naive as well, because their portrayals of extraterrestrial malevolence were shabby fun-house spookery compared to the endlessly imaginative abominations and tortures that a dark, cold universe held in store. “Gotta die right now.”
Toby walked away from Tommy Fernandez’s body, into the shadows.
Heather followed him with her flashlight beam. “Honey?”
“No time,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
They followed him to the back of the lightless house, through the kitchen, into what might once have been a small laundry room but now was a vault of dust and cobwebs. The desiccated carcass of a rat lay in one corner, its slender tail curled in a question mark.
Toby pointed to a blotchy yellow door that no doubt had once been white. “In the cellar,” he said. “It’s in the cellar.”
Before going down to whatever awaited them, they put Falstaff in the kitchen and closed the laundry-room door to keep him there.
He didn’t like that.
As Jack opened the yellow door on perfect blackness, the frantic scratching of the dog’s claws filled the room behind them.
Following his dad down the swaybacked cellar stairs, Toby concentrated
intensely on that little green boat in his mind, which was really well built, no leaks at all, unsinkable. Its decks were piled high with bags and bags of silvery Calming Dust, enough to keep the surface of the angry sea smooth and silent for a thousand years, no matter what it wanted, no matter how much it raged and stormed in its deepest canyons. He sailed on and on across the waveless ocean, scattering his magical powder, the sun above him, everything just the way he liked it, warm and safe. The ancient sea showed him its own pictures on its glossy black surface, images meant to scare him and make him forget to scatter the dust—his mother being eaten alive by rats; his father’s head split down the middle and nothing inside it but cockroaches; his own body pierced by the tentacles of a Giver that was riding on his back—but he looked away from them quickly, turned his face to the blue sky instead, and wouldn’t let his fear make a coward of him.
The cellar was one big room, with a broken-down furnace, a rusted water heater—and the real Giver from which the other, smaller Givers had detached. It filled the back half of the room, all the way to the ceiling, bigger than a couple of elephants.
It scared him.
That was okay.
But don’t run. Don’t run.
It was a lot like the smaller versions, tentacles everywhere, but with a hundred or more puckered mouths, no lips, just slits, and all of them working slowly in its current calm state. He knew what it was saying to him with those mouths. It wanted him. It wanted to rip him open, take out his guts, stuff itself into him.
Toby started shaking; he tried very hard to make himself stop but couldn’t.
Little green boat. Plenty of Calming Dust. Putter along and scatter, putter along and scatter.
As the beams of the flashlights moved over it, he could see gullets the color of raw beef beyond those mouths. Clusters of red glands oozed clear syrupy stuff. Here and there the thing had spines as sharp as any on a cactus. There wasn’t a top or bottom or front or back or head to it; just everything at once, everywhere at once, all mixed up. All over it, the working mouths were trying to tell him it wanted to push tentacles in his ears, mix him up too, stir his brains, become him, use him, because that’s all he was, a thing to be used, that’s all anything was, just meat, just meat to be used.