." "... relaxed," she said dreamily. "Then we get together ..." "... mmmmmmm, together ..." ". . . and we have a really wonderful, wonderful . . ." "... wonderful..." "Snowball fight." She smacked him playfully on the cheek. "Beast. I'll have rocks in my snowballs." "Or we could make love." "Sure you don't want to go outside and make snow angels?" "Not now that I've taken more time to think about "Get dressed, smartass. We've got shopping to do." Heather found Toby in the living room, dressed for the day. He was on the floor in front of the TV, watching a program with the sound off. "Big snow's coming tonight," she told him from the archway, expecting his excitement to exceed her own -because this also would be his first experience with a white winter. He didn't respond. "We're going to buy a couple of sleds when we go to town, be ready for tomorrow." He was as still as stone. His attention remained entirely on the screen. From where she stood, Heather couldn't see what show had so gripped him. "Toby?" She stepped out of the archway and into the living room. "Hey, kiddo, what're you watching?" He acknowledged her at last as she approached him. "Don't know what it is." His eyes appeared to be out of focus, as though he wasn't actually seeing her, and he gazed once more at the television..The screen was filled with a constantly evolving flow of arabic forms, reminiscent of those Lava lamps that had once been so popular. The lamps had always been in two colors, however, while this display progressed in infinite shades of all the primary colors, now bright, now dark. Ever-changing shapes melted together, curled and flexed, streamed and spurted, drizzled and purled and throbbed in a ceaseless exhibition of amorphic chaos, surging at a frenzied pace for a few seconds, then oozing sluggishly, then faster again. "What is this?" Heather asked. Toby shrugged. Endlessly recomposing itself, the colorful curvilinear abstract was interesting to watch and frequently beautiful. The longer she stared at it, however, the more disturbing it became, although for no reason she could discern. Nothing in its patterns was inherently ominous or menacing. Indeed, the fluid and dreamy intermingling of forms should have been restful. "Why do you have the sound turned down?" "Don't." She squatted next to him, picked up the remote control from the carpet, and depressed the volume button. The only sound was the faint static hiss of the speakers. She scanned just one channel farther up on the dial, and the booming voice of an excited sportscaster and the cheering of a crowd at a f ootball game exploded through the living room. She quickly decreased the volume. When she scanned back to the previous channel, the Technicolor Lava lamp was gone. A Daffy Duck cartoon filled the screen instead and, judging by the frenetic pace of the action, was drawing toward a pyrotechnic conclusion. "That was odd," she said. "I liked it," Toby said. She scanned farther down the dial, then farther up than before, but she could not find the strange display. She hit the Off button, and the screen went dark. "Well, anyway," she said, "time to grab breakfast, so we can get on with the day. Lots to do in town. Don't want to run out of time to buy those sleds." "Buy what?" the boy asked as he got to his feet. "Didn't you hear me before?" "I guess." "About snow?" His small face brightened. "It's gonna snow?" "You must have enough wax built up in your ears to make the world's biggest candle," she said, heading for the kitchen. Following her, Toby said, "When? When's it gonna snow, Mom? Huh? Today?" "We could stick a wick in each of your ears, put a match to them, and have candlelight dinners for the rest of the decade."."How much snow?" "Probably dead snails in there too." "Just flurries or a big storm?" "Maybe a dead mouse or three." "Mom?" he said exasperatedly, entering the kitchen behind her. She spun around, crouched in front of him, and held her hand above his knee. "Up to here, maybe higher." "Really?" "We'll go sledding." "Wow." "Build a snowman." "Snowball fight!" he challenged. "Okay, me and Dad against you." "No fair!" He ran to the window and pressed his face to the glass. "The sky's blue." "Won't be in a little while. Guarantee," she said, going to the pantry. "You want shredded wheat for breakfast or cornflakes?" "Doughnuts and chocolate milk." "Fat chance." "Worth a try. Shredded wheat." "Good boy." "Whoa!" he said in surprise, taking a step back from the window. "Mom, look at this." "What is it?" "Look, quick, look at this bird. He just landed right smack in front of me." Heather joined him near the window and saw a crow perched on the other side of the glass. Its head was cocked, and it regarded them curiously with one eye. Toby said, "He just zoomed right at me, whoooosh, I thought he was gonna smash through the window. What's he doing?" "Probably looking for worms or tender little bugs." "I don't look like any bug." "Maybe he saw those snails in your ears," she said, returning to the pantry..While Toby helped Heather set the table for breakfast, the crow remained at the window, watching. "He must be stupid," Toby said, "if he thinks we have worms and bugs in here." "Maybe he's refined, civilized, heard me say cornflakes." " While they filled bowls with cereal, the big crow stayed at the window, occasionally preening its feathers but mostly watching them with one coal-dark eye or the other. Whistling, Jack came down the front stairs, along the hall, into the kitchen, and said, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse. Can we have eggs and horse for breakfast?" "How about eggs and crow?" Toby asked, pointing to the visitor. "He's a fat and sassy specimen, isn't he?" Jack said, moving to the window and crouching to get a close look at the bird. "Mom, look! Dad's in a staring contest with a bird," Toby said, amused. Jack's face was no more than an inch from the window, and the bird fixed him with one inky eye. Heather took four slices of bread out of the bag, dropped them in the big toaster, adjusted the dial, depressed the plunger, and looked up to see that Jack and the crow were still eye-to-eye. "I think Dad's gonna lose," Toby said. Jack snapped one finger against the windowpane directly in front of the crow, but the bird didn't flinch. "Bold little devil," Jack said. With a lightning-quick dart of its head, the crow pecked the glass in front of Jack's face so hard that the tock of bill against pane startled him into a backward step that, in his crouch, put him off balance. He fell on his butt on the kitchen floor. The bird leaped away from the window with a great flapping of wings and vanished into the sky. Toby burst into laughter. Jack crawled after him on hands and knees. "Oh, you think that was funny, do you? I'll show you what's funny, I'll show you the infamous Chinese tickle torture." Heather was laughing too. Toby scampered to the hall door, looked back, saw Jack coming, and ran to another room, giggling and shrieking with delight. Jack scrambled to his feet. In a hunchbacked crouch, growling like a troll, he scuttled after his son. "Do I have one little boy on my hands or two?" Heather called after Jack as he disappeared into the hall. "Two!" he replied. The toast popped up. She put the four crisp pieces on a plate and slipped four more slices of bread into the toaster. Much giggling and maniacal cackling was coming from the front of the house. Heather went to the window. The tock of the bird's bill had been so loud that she more than half expected to see a crack in the glass. But the pane was intact. On the sill outside lay a single black feather, rocking gently in a breeze that could not quite pluck it out of its sheltered niche and whirl it away..She put her face to the window and peered up at the sky. High in that blue vault, a single dark bird carved a tight circle, around and around. It was too far away for her to be able to tell if it was the same crow or another bird. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. They stopped at Mountain High Sporting Goods and purchased two sleds (wide, flat runners, clear pine with polyurethane finish, a red lightning bolt down the center of each), as well as insulated ski suits, boots, and gloves -for all of them. Toby saw a big Frisbee specially painted to look like a yellow flying saucer, with portholes along the rim and a low red dome on top, and they bought that too. At the Union 76, they filled the fuel tank, and then went on a marathon shopping expedition at the supermarket. When they returned to Quartermass Ranch at one-fifteen, only the eastern third of the sky remained blue. Masses of gray clouds churned across the mountains, driven by a fierce high-altitude wind--though at ground level, only an erratic breeze gently stirred the evergreens and shivered the brown grass. The temperature had fallen below freezing, and the accuracy of the weathermans prediction was manifest in the cold, humid air. Toby went immediately to h
is room, dressed in his new red-and-black ski suit, boots, and gloves. He returned to the kitchen with his Frisbee to announce that he was going out to play and to wait for the snow to start falling. Heather and Jack were still unpacking groceries and arranging supplies in the pantry. She said, "Toby, honey, you haven't had lunch yet." "I'm not hungry. I'll just take a raisin cookie with me." She paused to pull up the hood on Toby's jacket and tie it under his chin. "Well, all right, but don't stay out there too long at a stretch. When you get cold, come in and warm up a little, then go back out. We don't want your nose freezing and falling off." She gave his nose a gentle tweak. He looked so cute. Like a gnome. "Don't throw the Frisbee toward the house," Jack warned him. "Break a window, and we'll show no mercy. We'll call the police, have you committed to the Montana Prison for the Criminally Insane." As she gave Toby two raisin cookies, Heather said, "And don't go into the woods." "All right." "Stay in the yard." "I will." "I mean it." The woods worried her. This was different from her recent irrational spells of paranoia..There were good reasons to be cautious of the forest. Wild animals, for one thing. And city people, like them, could get disoriented and lost only a few hundred feet into the trees. "The Montana Prison for the Criminally Insane has no TV, chocolate milk, or cookies." "Okay, okay. Sheeeesh, I'm not a baby." "No," Jack said, as he fished cans out of a shopping bag. "But to a bear, you are a tasty-looking lunch." "There's bears in the woods?" Toby asked. "Are there birds in the sky?" Jack asked. "Fish in the sea so stay in the yard," Heather reminded him. "Where I can find you easy, where I can see you." As he opened the back door, Toby turned to his father and said, "You better be careful too." "Me?" "That bird might come back and knock you on your 6s again." Jack pretended he was going to throw the can of beans that he was holding, and Toby ran from the house, giggling. The door banged shut behind him. Later, after their purchases had been put away, Jack went into the study to examine Eduardo's book collection and select a novel to read, while Heather went upstairs to the guest bedroom where she was setting up -her array of computers. They had taken the spare bed out and moved it to the cellar. The two six-foot folding tables, which had been among the goods delivered by the movers, now stood in place of the bed and formed an L-shaped work area. She'd unpacked her three computers, two printers, laser scanner, and associated equipment, but until now she'd had no chance to make connections and plug them in. As of that moment, she really had no use for such a high-tech array of computing power. She had worked on software and program design virtually all of her adult life, however, and she didn't feel complete with her machines disconnected and boxed up, regardless of whether or not she had an immediate project that required them. She set to work, positioning the equipment, linking monitors to logic units, logic units to printers, one of the printers and logic units to the scanner, all the while happily humming old Elton John songs. Eventually she and Jack would investigate business opportunities and decide what to do with the rest of their lives. By then the phone company would have installed another line, and the modem would be in operation. She could use dat a networks to research what population base and capitalization any given business required for success, as well as find answers to hundreds if not thousands of other questions that would influence their decisions and improve their chances for success in whatever enterprise they chose. Rural Montana enjoyed as much access to knowledge as Los Angeles or.Manhattan or Oxford University. The only things needed were a telephone line, a modem, and a couple of good database subscriptions. At three o'clock, after she'd been working about an hour--the equipment connected, everything working-- Heather got up from her chair and stretched. Flexing the muscles in her back, she went to the window to see if flurries had begun to fall ahead of schedule. The November sky was low, a uniform shade of lead gray, like an immense plastic panel behind which glowed arrays of dull fluorescent tubes. She fancied that she would have recognized it as a snow sky even if she hadn't heard the forecast. It looked as cold as ice. In that bleak light, the higher woods appeared to be more gray than green. The backyard and, to the south, the brown fields seemed barren rather than merely dormant in anticipation of the spring. Although the landscape was nearly as monochromatic as a charcoal drawing, it was beautiful. A different beauty from that which it offered under the warm caress of the sun. Stark, somber, broodingly majestic. She saw a small spot of color to the south, on the cemetery knoll not far from the perimeter of the western rest. Bright red. It was Toby in his new ski suit. He was standing inside the foot-high fieldstone wall. I should have told him to stay away from there, Heather thought with a twinge of apprehension. Then she wondered at her uneasiness. Why should the cemetery seem any more dangerous to her than the yard immediately outside its boundaries? She didn't believe in ghosts or haunted places. The boy stood at the grave markers, utterly still. She watched him for a minute, a minute and a half, but he didn't move. For an eight-year-old, who usually had more energy than a nuclear plant, that was an extraordinary period of inactivity. The gray sky settled lower while she watched. The land darkened subtly. Toby stood unmoving. The arctic air didn't bother Jack--invigorated him, in fact--except that it penetrated especially deeply into the thighbones and scar tissue of his left leg. He did not have to limp, however, as he ascended the hill to the private graveyard. He passed between the four-foot-high stone posts that, gateless, marked the entrance to the burial ground. His breath puffed from his mouth in frosty plumes. Toby was standing at the foot of the fourth grave in the line of four. His arms hung straight at his sides, his head was bent, and his eyes were fixed on the headstone. The Frisbee was on the ground beside him. He breathed so shallowly that he produced only a faint mustache of steam that repeatedly evaporated as each brief exhalation became a soft inhalation.."What's up?" Jack asked. The boy did not respond. The nearest headstone, at which Toby stared, was engraved with the name THOMAS FERNANDEZ and the dates of birth and death. Jack didn't need the marker to remind him of the date of death, it was carved on his own memory far deeper than the numbers were cut into the granite before him. Since they'd arrived Tuesday morning, after staying the night with Paul and Carolyn Youngblood, Jack had been too busy to inspect the private cemetery. Furthermore, he'd not been eager to stand in front of Tommy's grave, where memories of blood and loss and despair were certain to assail him. To the left of Tommy's marker was a double stone. It bore the names of his parents--EDUARDO and MARGARITE. Though Eduardo had been in the ground only a few months, Tommy for a year, and Margaret for three years, all of their graves looked freshly dug. The dirt was mounded unevenly, and no grass grew on it, which seemed odd, because the fourth grave was flat and covered with silky brown grass. He could understand that gravediggers might have disturbed the surface of Margarite's plot in order to bury Eduardo's coffin beside hers, but that didn't explain the condition of Tommy's site. Jack made a mental note to ask Paul Youngblood about it. The last monument, at the head of the only grassy llot, belonged to Stanley Quartermass, patron of them. An inscription in the weathered black stone surprised a chuckle out of Jack when he least expected it. Here lies Stanley Quartermass dead before his time because he had to work with so damned many actors and writers. Toby had not moved. "What're you up to?" Jack asked. No answer. He put one hand on Toby's shoulder. "Son?" Without shifting his gaze from the tombstone, the boy said, "What're they doing down there?" "Who? Where?" "In the ground." "You mean Tommy and his folks, Mr. Quartermass?"."What're they doing down there?" There was nothing odd about a child wanting to fully understand death. It was no less a mystery to the young than to the old. What seemed strange to Jack was the way the question had been phrased. "Well," he said, "Tommy, his folks, Stanley Quartermass . . . they aren't really here." "Yes, they are." "No, only their bodies are here," Jack said, gently massaging the boy's shoulder. "Why?" "Because they were finished with them." The boy was silent, brooding. Was he thinking about how close his own father had come to being planted under a similar stone? Maybe enough time had passed since the shooting for Toby to be able to confront t
hings that he'd been repressing. The mild breeze from out of the northwest stiffened slightly. Jack's hands were cold. He put them in his jacket pockets and said, "Their bodies weren't them, anyway, not the real them." The conversation took an even stranger turn: "You mean, these weren't their original bodies? These were puppets?" Frowning, Jack dropped to his knees beside the boy. "Puppets? That's a peculiar thing to say." As if in a trance, the boy focused on Tommy's headstone. His gray-blue eyes stared unblinking. "Toby, are you okay?" Toby still didn't look at him but said, "Surrogates?" Jack blinked in surprise. "Surrogates?" "Were they?" "That's a pretty big word. Where'd you hear that?" Instead of answering him, Toby said, "Why don't they need these bodies any more?".Jack hesitated, then shrugged. "Well, son, you know why--they were finished with their work in this world." "This world?" "They've gone on." "Wwhere?" "You've been to Sunday school. You know where." "No." "Sure you do." "No." "They've gone on to heaven." "They went on?" "Yes." "In what bodies?" Jack removed his right hand from his jacket pocket and cupped his son's chin. He turned the boy's head away from the gravestone, so they were eye-to-eye. "What's wrong, Toby?" They were face-to-face, inches apart, yet Toby seemed to be looking into the distance, through Jack at some far horizon. "Toby?" "In what bodies?" Jack released the boy's chin, moved one hand back - and forth in front of his face. Not a blink. His eyes didn't follow the movement of the hand. "In what bodies?" Toby repeated impatiently. Something was wrong with the boy. Sudden psychological ailment. With a catatonic aspect. Toby said, "In what bodies?" Jack's heart began to pump hard and fast as he stared into his son's flat, unresponsive eyes, which were no longer windows on a soul but.mirrors to keep out the world. If it was a psychological problem, there was no doubt about the cause. They'd been through a traumatic year, enough to drive a grown man--let alone a child--to a breakdown. But what was the trigger, why now, why here, why after all these many months, during which the poor kid had seemed to cope so well? "In what bodies?" Toby demanded sharply. "Come on," Jack said, taking the boy's gloved hand. "Let's go back to the house." "In what bodies did they go on?" "Toby, stop this." "Need to know. Tell me now. Tell me." "Oh, dear God, don't let this happen." Still on his knees, Jack said, "Listen, come back to the house with me so we can--" Toby wrenched his hand out of his father's grasp, leaving Jack with the empty glove. "In what bodies?" The small face was without expression, as placid as still water, yet the words burst from the boy in a tone of ice-cold rage. Jack had the eerie feeling that he was conversing with a ventriloquist's dummy that could not match its wooden features to the tenor of its words. "In what bodies?" This wasn't a breakdown. A mental collapse didn't happen this suddenly, completely, without warning signs. "In what bodies?" This wasn't Toby. Not Toby at all. Ridiculous. Of course it was Toby. Who else? Someone talking through Toby. Crazy thought, weird. Through Toby? Nevertheless, kneeling there in the graveyard, gazing into his son's eyes, Jack no longer saw the blankness of a mirror, although he was aware of his own frightened eyes in twin reflections. He didn't see the innocence of a child, either, or any familiar quality. He perceived--or was imagining--another presence, something both less and more than human, a strangeness beyond comprehension, peering out at him from within Toby.."In what bodies?" Jack couldn't work up any saliva. Tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Couldn't swallow, either. He was colder than the wintry day could explain. Suddenly much colder. Beyond freezing. He'd never felt anything like it before. A cynical part of him thought he was being ridiculous, hysterical, leting himself be swept away by primitive superstition-- because he could not face the thought of Toby having a psychotic episode and slipping into mental chaos. On the other hand, it was precisely the primitive nature of the perception that convinced him another presence shared the body of his son: he felt it on a primal level, deeper than he had ever felt anything before, it was a knowledge more certain than any that could be arrived at by intellect, a profound and irrefutable animal instinct, as if he'd captured the scent of an enemy's pheromones, his skin was tingling with the vibrations of an inhuman aura. His gut clenched with fear. Sweat broke out on his forehead the flesh crimped along the nape of his neck. He wanted to spring to his feet, scoop Toby into his arms, run down the hill to the house, and remove him from the influence of the entity that held him in its thrall. Ghost, demon, ancient Indian spirit? No, ridiculous. But something, damn it. Something. He hesitated, partly because he was transfixed by what he thought he saw in the boy's eyes, partly because he feared that forcing a break of the connection between Toby and whatever was linked with him would somehow harm the boy, perhaps damage him mentally. Which didn't make any sense, no sense at all. But then none of it made sense. A dreamlike quality characterized the moment and the place. It was Toby's voice, yes, but not his usual speech patterns or inflections: "In what bodies did they go on from here?" Jack decided to answer. Holding Toby's empty glove in his hand, he had the terrible feeling that he must play along or be left with a son as limp and hollow as the glove, a drained shell of a boy, form without content, those beloved eyes vacant forever. And how insane was that? His mind spun. He seemed poised on the brink of an abyss, teetering out of balance. Maybe he was the one having the breakdown. He said, "They didn't need bodies, Skipper. You know that. Nobody needs bodies in heaven." "They are bodies," the Toby-thing said cryptically. "Their bodies are." "Not any more. They're spirits now." "Don't understand."."Sure you do. Souls. Their souls went to heaven." "Bodies are." "Went to heaven to be with God." "Bodies are." Toby stared through him. Deep in Toby's eyes, however, like a coiling thread of smoke, something moved. Jack sensed that something was regarding him intensely. "Bodies are. Puppets are. What else?" Jack didn't know how to respond. The breeze coming across the flank of the sloped yard was as cold as if it had skimmed over a glacier on its way to them. The Toby-thing returned to the first question that it had asked: "What are they doing down there?" Jack glanced at the graves, then into the boy's eyes, deciding to be straightforward. He wasn't actually talking to a little boy, so he didn't need to use euphemisms. He was crazy, imagining the whole conversation as well as the inhuman presence. Either way, what he said didn't matter. "They're dead." "What is dead?" "They are. These three people buried here." "What is dead?" "Lifeless." "What is lifeless?" "Without life." "What is life?" "The opposite of death." "What is death?" Desperately, Jack said, "Empty, hollow, rotting." "Bodies are." "Not forever." "Bodies are." "Nothing lasts forever." "Everything lasts."."Nothing." "Everything becomes." "Becomes what?" Jack asked. He was now beyond giving answers himself, was full of his own questions. "Everything becomes," the Toby-thing repeated. "Becomes what?" "Me. Everything becomes me." Jack wondered what in the hell he was talking to and whether he was making more sense to it than it was making to him. He began to doubt that he was even awake. Maybe he'd taken a nap. If he wasn't insane, perhaps he was asleep. Snoring in the armchair in the study, a book in his lap. Maybe Heather had never come to tell him Toby was in the cemetery, in which case all he had to do was wake up. The breeze felt real. Not like a dream wind. Cold, piercing. And it had picked up enough speed to give it a voice. Whispering in the grass, soughing in the trees along the edge of the higher woods, keening softly, softly. The Toby-thing said, "Suspended." "What?" "Different sleep." Jack glanced at the graves. "No." "Waiting." "No." "Puppets waiting." "No. Dead." "Tell me their secret." "Dead." "The secret." "They're just dead." "Tell me."."There's nothing to tell." The boy's expression was still calm, but his face was flushed. The arteries were throbbing visibly in his temples, as if his blood pressure had soared off the scale. "Tell me!" Jack was shaking uncontrollably, increasingly frightened by the cryptic nature of their exchanges, worried that he understood even less of the situation than he thought he did and that his ignorance might lead him to say the wrong thing and somehow put Toby into even greater danger than he already was. "Tell me!" Overwhelmed by fear and confusion and frustration, Jack grabbed Toby by the shoulders, stared into his strange eyes. "Who are you?" No answer. "What's happened to my Toby?" After
a long silence: "What's the matter, Dad?" Jack's scalp prickled. Being called "Dad" by this thing, this hateful intruder, was the worst affront yet. "Dad?" "Stop it." "Daddy, what's wrong?" But he wasn't Toby. No way. His voice still didn't have its natural inflections, his face was slack, and his eyes were wrong. "Dad, what're you doing?" The thing in possession of Toby apparently hadn't realized that its masquerade had come undone. Until now it had thought that Jack believed he was speaking with his son. The parasite was struggling to improve its performance. "Dad, what did I do? Are you mad at me? I didn't do anything, Dad, really I didn't." "What are you?" Jack demanded. Tears slid from the boy's eyes. But the nebulous something was behind the tears, an arrogant puppetmaster confident of its ability to deceive.."Where's Toby? You sonofabitch, whatever the hell you are, give him back to me." Jack's hair fell across his eyes. Sweat glazed his face. To anyone coming upon them just then, his extreme fear would appear to be dementia. Maybe it was. Either he was talking to a malevolent spirit that had taken control of his son or he was insane. Which made more sense? "Give him to me I want him back!" "Dad, you're scaring me," the Toby-thing said, trying to tear loose of him. "You're not my son." "Dad, please!" "Stop it! Don't pretend with me--you're not fooling me, for Christ's sake!" It wrenched free, turned, stumbled to Tommys headstone, and leaned against the granite. Toppled onto all fours by the force with which the boy broke away from him, Jack said fiercely, "Let him go!" The boy squealed, jumped as if surprised, and spun to face Jack. "Dad! What're you doing here?" He sounded like Toby again. "Jeer, you scared me! What're you sneaking in a cemetery for? Boy, that's not funny!" They weren't as close as they had been, but Jack thought the child's eyes no longer seemed strange, Toby peared to see him again. "Holy Jeer, on your hands and knees, sneaking in a cemetery." The boy was Toby again, all right. The thing that had controlled him was not a good enough actor to be this convincing. Or maybe he had always been Toby. The unnerving possibility of madness and delusion confronted Jack again. "Are you all right?" he asked, rising onto his knees once more, wiping his palms on his jeans. "Almost pooped my pants," Toby said, and giggled. What a marvelous sound. That giggle. Sweet music. Jack clasped his hands to his thighs, squeezing hard, trying to stop shaking. "What're you ..." His voice was quavery. He cleared his throat. "What are you doing up here?" The boy pointed to the Frisbee on the dead grass. "Wind caught the flying saucer." Remaining on his knees,.Jack said, "Come here." Toby was clearly dubious. "Why?" "Come here, Skipper, just come here." "You going to bite my neck?" "What?" "You going to pretend to bite my neck or do something and scare me again, like sneaking up on me, something weird like that?" Obviously, the boy didn't remember their conversation while he'd been ... possessed. His awareness of Jack's arrival in the graveyard began when, startled, he'd spun away from the granite marker. Holding his hands out, arms open, Jack said, "No, I'm not going to do anything like that. Just come here." Skeptical and cautious, puzzled face framed by the red hood of the ski suit, Toby came to him. Jack gripped the boy by the shoulders, looked into his eyes. Blue-gray. Clear. No smoky spiral under the color. "What's wrong?" Toby asked, frowning. "Nothing. It's okay." while first, you and me? A Frisbee's more fun with . Frisbee tossing, hot chocolate. Normality hadn't erely returned to the day, it had crashed down like a weight. Jack doubted he could have convinced anyone that he and Toby had so recently been deep in the muddy river of the supernatural. His own fear and his perception of uncanny forces were fading so rapidly that already he could not quite recall the power of what he'd felt. Hard gray sky, every scrap of blue chased way beyond the eastern horizon, trees shivering in the frigid breeze, brown grass, velvet shadows, Frisbee games, hot chocolate: the whole world waited for the first spiraling flake of winter, and no aspect of the November day admitted the possibilities of ghosts, disembodied entities, possession, or any other-worldly Compulsively, he pulled the boy close, hugged him. "Dad?" henomena whatsoever. "You don't remember, do you?" "Huh?" "Good." "Your heart's really wild," Toby said. "That's all right, I'm okay, everything's okay." "I'm the one scared poopless. Boy, I sure owe you one!" Jack let go of his son and struggled to his feet. The sweat on his face felt like.a mask of ice. He combed his hair back with his fingers, wiped his face with both hands, and blotted his palms on his jeans. "Let's go back to the house and get some hot chocolate." Picking up the Frisbee, Toby said, "Can't we play "Can we, Dad?" Toby asked, brandishing the Frisbee. "all right, for a little while. But not here. Not in this . . ." It would sound so stupid to say not in this graveyard. Might as well segue into one of those grotesque Stepin Fetchit routines from old movies, do a double take and roll his eyes and shag his arms at his sides and howl, Feets don't fail me now. Instead, he said, "... not so near the woods. Maybe ... down there closer to the stables." Carrying the flying-saucer Frisbee, Toby sprinted between the gateless posts, out of the cemetery. "Last one there's a monkey!" Jack didn't chase after the boy. Hunching his shoulders against the chill wind, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he stared at the four graves, again troubled that only Quartermass's plot was flat and grass-covered. Freakish thoughts flickered in his mind. Scenes from old Boris Karloff movies. Graverobbers and ghouls. Desecration. Satanic rituals in cemeteries by moonlight. Even considering the experience he'd just had with Toby, his darkest thoughts seemed too fanciful to explain why only one grave of four appeared long undisturbed, however, he told himself that the explanation, when he learned it, would be perfectly logical and not in the least creepy. Fragments of the conversation he'd had with Toby echoed in his memory, out of order: What are they doing down there? What is dead? What is life? Nothing lasts forever. Everything lasts. Nothing. Everything becomes. Becomes what? Me. Everything becomes me. Jack sensed that he had enough pieces to put together at least part of the puzzle. He just couldn't see how they interlocked. Or wouldn't see. Perhaps he refused to put them together because even the few pieces he possessed would reveal a nightmare face, something better not encountered. He wanted to know, or thought he did, but his subconscious overruled him. As he raised his eyes from the mauled earth to the three stones, his attention was caught by a fluttering object on Tommy's marker. It was stuck in a narrow crack between the horizontal base and the vertical slab of granite: a black feather, three inches long, stirred by the breeze. Jack tilted his head back and squinted uneasily into the wintry vault directly overhead. The heavens hung gray and dead. Like ashes. A crematorium sky. However, nothing moved above except great masses of clouds. Big storm coming. He turned toward the sole break in the low stone, walked to the posts, and looked downhill toward Toby had almost reached that long rectangular buildg. He skidded to a halt, glanced back at his laggardly father, and waved. He tossed the Frisbee straight into the air. On edge, the disc knifed high, then curved toward the zenith and.caught a current of wind. Like a spacecraft from another world, it whirled across the somber sky. Much higher than the greatest altitude reached by the frisbee, under the pendulous clouds, a lone bird circled above the boy, like a hawk maintaining surveillance of potential prey, though it was likely a crow rather than a hawk. Circling and circling. A puzzle piece in the shape Of a black crow. Gliding on rising thermals. Silent as a talker in a dream, patient and mysterious. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. After sending Jack to discover what Toby was doing among the gravestones, Heather returned to the spare bedroom where she had been working with her computers. She watched from the window as Jack climbed the hill to the cemetery. He stood with the boy for a minute, then knelt beside him. From a distance, everything seemed all right, no sign of trouble. Evidently, she'd been worried for no good reason. A lot of that going around lately. She sat in her office chair, sighed at her excessive maternal concern, and turned her attention to the computers. For a while she searched the hard disc of each machine, ran tests, and made sure the programs were in place and that nothing had crashed during the move. Later, she grew thirsty, and before going to the kitchen to get a Pepsi, she stepped to the window to check on Jack and Toby. They were almost out of her line of view, near
the stables, tossing the Frisbee back and forth. Judging by the heavy sky and by how icy cold the window was when she touched it, snow would begin to fall soon. She was eager for it. Maybe the change of weather would bring a change in her mood, as well, and help her finally shed the city jitters that plagued her. It ought to be hard to cling to all the old paranoia-soaked expectations of life in Los Angeles when they were living in a white wonderland, trkling and pristine, like a sequined scene on a Christmas card. In the kitchen, as she opened a can of Pepsi and poured it into a glass, she heard a heavy engine approaching. Thinking it might be Paul Youngblood paying an unexpected visit, she took the tablet from the top of the refrigerator and put it on the counter, so she would be less likely to forget to give it to him before he went home. - By the time she went down the hall, opened the door, and stepped onto the front porch, the vehicle pulled to a stop in front of the garage doors. It wasn't Paul's white Bronco, it was a similar, metallic-blue wagon, as large as the Bronco, larger than their own Explorer, but of yet another model, with which she wasn't familiar. She wondered if anyone in those parts ever drove cars. But of course she had seen plenty of cars in town and at the supermarket. Even there, however, pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive truck-style wagons outnumbered automobiles..She went down the steps and crossed the yard to the driveway to greet the visitor, wishing she'd paused to put on a jacket. The bitter air pierced even her comfortably thick flannel shirt. The man who climbed out of the wagon was about thirty, with an unruly mop of brown hair, craggy features, and light-brown eyes kinder than his rugged looks. Closing the driver's door behind him, he smiled and said, "Howdy. You must be Mrs. Mcgarvey." "That's right," she said, shaking the hand he offered. "Travis Potter. Pleased to meet you. I'm the vet in Eagle's Roost. One of the vets. A man could go to the ends of the earth, there'd still be competition." A big golden retriever stood in the back of the wagon. Its bushy tail wagged nonstop, and it grinned at them through the side window. Seeing the direction of Heather's gaze, Potter said, "Beautiful, isn't he?" "They're such gorgeous dogs. Is he a purebred?" "Pure as they come." Jack and Toby rounded the corner of the house. White clouds of breath steamed from them, they had evidently run from the hillside west of the stable, where they'd been playing. Heather introduced them to the vet. Jack dropped the Frisbee and shook hands. But Toby was so enchanted by the sight of the dog that he forgot his manners and went directly to the wagon to stare delightedly through the window at the occupant of the cargo space. Shivering, Heather said, "Dr. Potter--" "Travis, please." "Travis, can you come in for some coffee?" "Yeah, come on in and visit a spell," Jack said, as if he had been a country boy all his life. "Stay to dinner if you can." "Sorry, can't," Travis said. "But thanks for the invitation. I'll take a rain check, if you don't mind. Right now, I've got calls to make--a couple of sick horses that need tending to, a cow with an infected hoof. With this storm coming, I want to get home early as I can." He checked his watch. "Almost four o'clock already." Ten-inch snowfall, we hear," said Jack.."You haven't heard the latest. First storm's built strength, and the second's no longer a day behind it, more like a couple hours. Maybe two feet accumulation before it's all done." Heather was glad they had gone shopping that morning and that their shelves were well stocked. "Anyway," Travis said, indicating the dog, "this was the real reason I stopped by." He joined Toby at the side of the wagon. Jack put an arm around Heather to help her keep -warm, and they stepped behind Toby. Travis pressed two fingers against the window, and the dog licked the other side of the glass enthusiastically, whined, and wagged his tail more furiously than ever. "He's a sweet-tempered fella. Aren't you, Falstaff. His name's Falstaff." "Really?" Heather said. "Hardly seems fair, does it? But he's two years old and used to it now. I hear from Paul Youngblood you're in the market for just such an animal as Falstaff here." Toby gasped. He gaped at Travis. "Hold your mouth open that wide," Travis warned him, "and some critter is going to run in there and build a nest." He smiled at Heather and Jack. "Was this what you had in mind?" "Just about exactly," Jack said. Heather said, "Except, we thought a puppy . . ." "With Falstaff, you get all the joy of a good dog and none of that puppy mess. He's two years old, mature, housebroken, well behaved. Won't spot the carpet or chew up the furniture. But he's still a young dog, lots of years ahead of him. Interested?" Toby looked up worriedly, as if it was beyond conception that such an enormous great good thing as this could befall him without his parents objecting or the ground opening and swallowing him alive. Heather glanced up at Jack, and he said, "Why not?" Looking at Travis, Heather said, "Why not?" "Yes!" Toby made it a one-word expression of explosive ecstasy. They went to the back of the wagon, and Travis opened the tailgate. Falstaff bounded out of the wagon to the ground and immediately began excitedly sniffing everyone's feet, turning in circles, one way and then the other, slapping their legs with his tail, licking their hands when they tried to pet him, a jubilation of fur and warm tongue and cold nose and heart-melting brown eyes. When he calmed down, he chose to sit in front of Toby, to whom he offered a raised paw. "He can shake hands!" Toby exclaimed, and proceeded to take the paw and pump it. "He knows a lot of tricks," Travis said. "Where'd he come from?" Jack asked. "A couple in town, Leona and Harry Seaqui st. They had goldens.all their lives. Falstaff here was the latest." "He seems too nice to just be given up." Travis nodded. "Sad case. A year ago, Leona got cancer, was gone in three months. Few weeks back, Harry suffered a stroke, lost the use of his left arm. Speech is slurred, and his memory isn't so good. Had to go to Denver to live with his son, but they didn't want the dog. Harry cried like a baby when he said goodbye to Falstaff. I promised him I'd find a good home for the pooch." Toby was on his knees, hugging the golden around the neck, and it was licking the side of his face. "We'll give him the best home any dog ever had anywhere anytime ever, won't we, Mom, won't we, Dad?" To Travis, Heather said, "How sweet of Paul Youngblood to call you about us." "Well, he heard mention your boy wanted a dog. And this isn't the city, everyone living in a rat race. We have plenty of time around here to meddle in other people's business." He had a broad, engaging smile. The chilling breeze had grown stronger as they talked. Suddenly it gusted into a whistling wind, flattened the brown grass, whipped Heather's hair across her face, and drove needles of cold into her. "Travis," she said, shaking hands with him again, "when can you come for dinner?" "Well, maybe Sunday a week." "A week from Sunday it is," she said. "Six o'clock." To Toby, she said, "Come on, peanut, let's get inside." "I want to play with Falstaff." "You can get to know him in the house," she insisted. "It's too cold out here." "He's got fur," Toby protested. "It's you I'm worried about, dummkopf. You're going to get a frostbitten nose, and then it'll be as black as Falstaff's." Halfway to the house, padding along between Heather and Toby, the dog stopped and looked back at Travis Potter. The vet made a go-ahead wave with one hand, and that seemed sufficient permission for Falstaff. He accompanied them up the steps and into the warm front hall..Travis Potter had brought a fifty-pound bag of dry dog food with him. He hefted it out of the back of his Range Rover and put it on the ground against a rear tire. "Figured you wouldn't have dog chow on hand just in case someone happened by with a golden retriever." He explained what and how much to feed a dog Falstaff's size. "What do we owe you?" Jack asked. "Zip. He didn't cost me. Just doing a favor for poor Harry." "That's nice of you. Thanks. But for the dog food?" "Don't worry about it. In years to come, Falstaff's going to need his regular shots, general looking after. When you bring him to me, I'll soak you plenty." Grinning, he slammed the tailgate. They went around to the side of the Rover farthest from the house, using it as shelter from the worst of the biting wind. Travis said, "Understand Paul told you in private bout Eduardo and his raccoons. Didn't want to alarm your wife." "She doesn't alarm easy." "You tell her then?" "No. Not sure why, either. Except ... we've all got a lot on our minds already, a year of trouble, a lot of change. Anyway, wasn't much Paul told me. Just that the coons were behaving oddly, out in broad daylight, running in circles, and then
they just dropped dead." "I don't think that was all of it." Travis hesitated. He leaned back at an angle against the side of the Rover bent his knees, slouching a little to get his head down out of the keening wind. "I think Eduardo was holding out on me. Those coons were doing something stranger than what he said." "Why would he hold out on you?" - "Hard to say. He was a sort of quirky old guy. Maybe ... I don't know, maybe he saw something he felt funny talking about, something he figured I wouldn't believe. Had a lot of pride, that man. He wouldn't want to talk about anything that might get him laughed at." "Any guesses what that could be?" "Nope." Jack's head was above the roof of the Rover, and the wind not only numbed his face but seemed to be scouring off his skin layer by layer. He leaned back against the vehicle, bent his knees, and slouched, mimicking the vet. Rather than look at each other, they stared out across the descending land to the south as they talked. Jack said, "You think, like Paul does, it was something Eduardo saw that caused his heart attack, related to the raccoons?"."And made him load a shotgun, you mean. I don't know. Maybe. Wouldn't rule it out. More'n two weeks before he died, I talked to him on the phone. Interesting conversation. Called him to give him the test results on the coons. Wasn't any known disease involved--" "The brain swelling." "Right. But no apparent cause. He wanted to know did I just take samples of brain tissue for the tests or do a full dissection." "Dissection of the brain?" "Yeah. He asked did I open their brains all the way up. He seemed to expect, if I did that, I'd find something besides swelling. But I didn't find anything. So then he asks me about their spines, if there was something attached to their spines." "Attached?" "Odder still, huh? He asks if I examined the entire length of their spines to see if anything was attached. When I ask him what he means, he says it might've looked like a tumor." "Looked like." The vet turned his head to the right, to look directly at Jack, but Jack stared ahead at the Montana panorama. "You heard it the same way I did. Funny way to word it, huh? Not a tumor. Might've looked like one but not a real tumor." Travis gazed out at the fields again. "I asked him if he was holding out on me, but he swore he wasn't. I told him to call me right away if he saw any animals behaving like those coons--squirrels, rabbits, whatever--but he never did. Less than three weeks later, he was dead." "You found him." "Couldn't get him to answer his phone. Came out here to check on him. There he was, lying in the open doorway, holding on to that shotgun for dear life." "He hadn't fired it." "No. It was just a heart attack got him." Tnafr the influence of the wind, the long meadow grass rippled in brown waves. The fields ref rolling, dirty sea. Jack debated whether to tell Travis about what had - happened in the graveyard a short while ago. However, describing the experience was difficult. He could outline the bare events, recount the bizarre exchanges between himself and the Toby-thing. But he didn't have the words--maybe there were no.words--to adequately describe what he had felt, and feelings were the core of it. He couldn't convey a fraction of the essential supernatural nature of the encounter. To buy time, he said, "Any theories?" "I suspect maybe a toxic substance was involved. Yeah, I know, there aren't exactly piles of industrial sludge scattered all around these parts. But there are natural toxins, too, can cause dementia in wildlife, make animals act damn near as peculiar as people. How about you? See anything weird since you've been here?" "In fact, yes." Jack was relieved that the postures they had chosen relative to each other made it possible to avoid meeting the veterinarian's eyes without causing suspicion. He told Travis about the crow at the window that morning--and how, later, it had flown tight circles over him and Toby while they played with the Frisbee. "Curious," Travis said. "It might be related, I guess. On the other hand, there's nothing that bizarre about its behavior, not even pecking the glass. Crows can be damned bold. It still around here?" They both pushed away from the Rover and stood scanning the sky. The crow was gone. "In this wind," Travis said, "birds are sheltering." He turned to Jack. "Anything besides the crow?" That business about toxic substances had convinced Jack to hold off telling Travis Potter anything about the graveyard. They were discussing two utterly different kinds of mystery: poison versus the supernatural, toxic substances as opposed to ghosts and demons and things that go bump in the night. The incident on the cemetery knoll was evidence of a strictly subjective nature, even more so than the behavior of the crow, it didn't provide any support to the contention that something unspeakably strange was going on at Quartermass Ranch. Jack had no proof it had happened. Toby clearly recalled none of it and could not corroborate his story. If Eduardo Fernandez had seen something peculiar and withheld it from Travis, Jack sympathized with the old man and understood. The veterinarian was predisposed to the idea that extraordinary agents were at work, because of the brain swelling he'd found in the autopsies of the raccoons, but he was not likely to take seriously any talk of spirits, possession, and eerie conversations conducted in a cemetery with an entity from the Beyond. Anything besides the crow? Travis had asked. Jack shook his head. "That's all." "Well, maybe whatever brought those coons down, is over with. We might never know. Nature's full of odd little tricks." To avoid the vet's eyes, Jack pulled back his jacket sleeve, glanced at his watch. "I've kept you too long if you want to finish your rounds before the snow sets in." "Never had a hope of managing that," Travis said. "But I should make it back home before there're any drifts the Rover can't handle." They.shook hands, and Jack said, "Don't you forget, a week from tomorrow, dinner at six. Bring a guest if you've got a lady friend." Travis grinned. "You look at this mug, it's hard to believe, but there's a young lady willing to be seen with me. Name's Janet." "Be pleased to meet her," Jack said. He dragged the fifty-pound bag of dog chow away from the Rover and stood by the driveway, watching the vet turn around and head out. Looking in the rearview mirror, Travis Potter waved. Jack waved after him and watched until the Rover had disappeared around the curve and over the low hill just before the county road. The day was a deeper gray than it had been when the vet arrived. Iron instead of ashes. Dungeon gray. The ever-lowering sky and the black-green phalanxes of trees seemed as formidably restricting as walls of concrete and stone. A bitterly cold wind, sweetened by the perfume of pines and the faint scent of ozone from high mountain passes, swept out of the northwest. The boughs of the evergreens strained a low mournful sound from that rushing river of air, the grassy meadows conspired with it to produce a whispery whistle, and the eaves of the house inspired it to make soft hooting sounds like the weak protests of dying owls lying with broken wings in uncaring fields of night. The countryside was beautiful even in that prestorm gloom, and perhaps it was as peaceful and serene as they had perceived it when they'd first driven north from Utah. At that moment, however, none of the usual travel-book adjectives sprang to mind as a singular and apt descriptive. Only one word suited now. Lonely. It was the loneliest place Jack Mcgarvey had ever seen, unpopulated to distant points, far from the solace of neighborhood and community. He hefted the bag of dog chow onto his shoulder. Big storm coming. He went inside. He locked the front door behind him. He heard laughter in the kitchen and went back there to see what was happening. Falstaff was sitting on his hindquarters, forepaws raised in front of him, staring up yearningly at a piece of bologna that Toby was holding over his head. "Dad, look, he knows how to beg," Toby said. The retriever licked his chops. Toby dropped the meat. The dog snatched it in midair, swallowed, and begged, for more. Isn't he great?" Toby said. "He's great," Jack agreed. "Toby's hungrier than the dog," Heather said, getting a large pot out of a cabinet. "He didn't have any lunch, he didn't even eat the raisin cookies I gave him when he went outside. Early dinner okay?" me," Jack said, dropping the bag of dog chow in a corner, with the intention of finding a cupboard for it later. "Spaghetti?" "Perfect."."We have a loaf of crusty French bread. You make the salads?" "Sure," Jack said as Toby fed Falstaff another bite of bologna. Filling the pot with water at the sink, Heather said, Travis Potter seems really nice." "Yeah, I like him. He'll be bringing a date to dinner next Sunday. Janet's her name." Heather smiled and seemed happie
r than at any time since they had come to the ranch. "Making friends." "I guess we are," he said. As he got celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce out of the refrigerator, he was relieved to note that neither of the kitchen windows faced the cemetery. The prolonged and subdued twilight was in its final minutes when Toby rushed into the kitchen, the grinning dog at his heels, and cried breathlessly, "Snow!" Heather looked up from the pot of bubbling water and roiling spaghetti, turned to the window above the sink, and saw the first flakes spiraling through the gloaming. They were huge and fluffy. The wind was in abeyance for the moment, and the immense flakes descended in lazy spirals. Toby hurried to the north window. The dog followed slapped its forepaws onto the sill, stood beside him, and gazed out at the miracle. Jack put aside the knife with which he was slicing tomatoes and went to the north window as well. He stood behind Toby, his hands on the boy's shoulders. "Your first snow." "But not my last!" Toby enthused. Heather stirred the sauce in the smaller pot to be sure it was not going to stick, and then she squeezed in with her family at the window. She put her right arm around Jack and, with her left hand, idly scratched the back of Falstaff's head. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt at peace. With no more financial worries, having settled into their new home in less than a week, with Jack fully recovered, with the dangers of the city schools and streets no longer a threat to Toby, Heather was finally able to put the negativity of Los Angeles behind her. They had a dog. They were making new friends. She was confident that the peculiar anxiety attacks that had afflicted her since their arrival at Quartermass Ranch would trouble her no more. She had lived with fear so long in the city that she had become an anxiety junkie. In rural Montana, she wouldn't have to worry about drive-by gang shootings, carjackings, ATM robberies that frequently involved casual murder, drug dealers peddling crack cocaine on every corner, follow-home stickups--or child molesters who slipped off freeways, cruised residential neighborhods, trolled for prey, and then disappeared with their Wlch into the anonymous urban sprawl. Consequently, habitual need to be afraid of something had given rise to the unfocused dreads.and phantom enemies that marked her first few days in these more pacific regions. That was over now. Chapter closed. Heavy wet snowflakes descended in battalions, in armies, swiftly conquering the dark ground, an occasional outrider finding the glass, melting. The kitchen was comfortably warm, fragrant with the aromas of cooking pasta and tomato sauce. Nothing was quite so likely to induce feelings of contentment and prosperity as being in a well-heated and cozy room while the windows revealed a world in the frigid grip of winter. "Beautiful," she said, enchanted by the breaking storm. "Wow," Toby said. "Snow. It's really, really snow." They were a family. Wife, husband, child, and dog. Together and safe. Hereafter, she was going to think only Mcgarvey thoughts, never Beckerman thoughts. She was going to embrace a positive outlook and shun the negativism that was both her family legacy and a poisonous residue of life in the big city. She felt free at last. Life was good. After dinner, Heather decided to relax with a hot bath, and Toby settled in the living room with Falstaff to watch a video of Beethoven. Jack went directly to the study to review the gun available to them. In addition to the weapons they'd brought from Los Angeles--a collection Heather had substantially increased after the shootout at Arkadian's service station-- a corner case was stocked with hunting rifles, a shotgun, a .22 pistol, a .45 Colt revolver, and ammunition. He preferred to select three pieces from their own armory: a beautifully made Korth .38, a pistol-grip, pump-action Mossberg twelve-gauge, and a Micro Uzi like the one Anson Oliver had used, although this particular weapon had been converted to full automatic status. The Uzi had been acquired on the black market. It was odd that a cop's wife should feel the need to purchase an illegal gun--odder still that it had been so easy for her to do so. He closed the study door and stood at the desk, working quickly to ready the three firearms while he still had privacy. He didn't want to take such precautions with Heather's knowledge, because he would have to explain why he felt the need for protection. She was happier than she'd been in a long time, and he could see no point in spoiling her mood until--and unless--it became necessary. The incident in the graveyard had been frightening, however, although he'd felt threatened, no blow had actually been struck, no harm. He'd been afraid more for Toby than for himself, the boy was back, no worse for what had happened. And what had happened? He didn't relish having to explain what he had sensed rather than seen: a presence lrl and.enigmatic and no more solid than the wind. Hour by hour, the encounter seemed less like something he had actually experienced and more like a dream. He loaded the .38 and put it to one side of the desk. He could tell her about the raccoons, of course, although he himself had never seen them and although they had done no harm to anyone. He could tell her about the shotgun Eduardo Fernandez had been clutching fiercely when he'd died. But the old man hadn't been brought down by an enemy vulnerable to buck shot, a heart attack had felled him. A massive cardiac infarction was as scary as hell, yes, but it wasn't a killer that could be deterred with firearms. He fully loaded the Mossberg, pumped a shell into the breech, and then inserted one additional shell in the magazine tube. A bonus round. Eduardo had prepared his own gun in the same fashion shortly before he died. If he tried to explain all this to Heather now, he'd succeed in alarming hen- but to no purpose. Maybe there would be no trouble. He might never again come face-to-face with whatever presence he had been aware of in the cemetery. One such episode in a lifetime was more contact with the supernatural than most people ever experienced. Wait for developments. Hope there were none. But if there were, and if he obtained concrete proof of danger, then he would have to let her know that maybe, just maybe, their year of tumult was not yet at an end. The Micro Uzi had two magazines welded at right angles, giving it a forty-round capacity. The heft of it was reassuring. More than two kilos of death waiting to be dispensed. He couldn't imagine any enemy--wild creature or man--that the Uzi couldn't handle. He put the Korth in the top right-hand desk drawer, toward the back. He closed the drawer and left the study with the other two weapons. Before slipping past the living room, Jack waited until he heard Toby laughing, then glanced around the corner of the archway. The boy was focused on the TV, Falstaff at his side. Jack hurried to the kitchen at the end of the hall, where he put the Uzi in the pantry, behind extra boxes of cornflakes, Cheerios, and shredded wheat that wouldn't be opened for at least a week. Upstairs in the master bedroom, breezy music played behind the closed door to the adjoining bathroom. Soaking in the tub, Heather had turned the radio to a goldenoldies station. "Dreamin' " by Johnny Burnette was just winding down. Jack pushed the Mossberg under the bed, far enough back so she wouldn't notice it when they ma de the bed in the morning but not so far back that he couldn't get hold of it in a hurry. "Poetry in Motion." Johnny Tillotson. Music from an innocent age. Jack hadn't even been born yet when that record had been made. He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the music, feeling mildly guilty about not sharing his fears with Heather. But he just didn't want to upset her needlessly. She'd been through so much. In some ways, his being wounded and hospitalized had been harder on her than him. because she'd been required to bear alone the pressures of day-to-day existence while he'd recuperated. She needed a reprieve from tension. Probably nothing to.worry about, anyway. few sick raccoons. A bold little crow. A strange experience in a cemetery which was suitably creepy itial for some television show like Unsolved Mysteries but hadn't been as threatening to life and limb as of a hundred things that could happen in the average police officer's workday. Loading and secreting the guns would most likely prove to have been an overreaction. .. Well, he'd done what a cop should do. Prepared himself to serve and protect. On the radio in the bathroom, Bobby Vee was singing "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes." Beyond the bedroom windows, snow was falling harder than before. The flakes, previously fluffy and wet, were now small, more numerous, and dry. The ..wind had accelerated again. Sheer curtains of snow rippkd and billowed across the black night. Afte
r his mom warned him against allowing Falstaff to sleep on the bed, after good-nigh kisses, after his dad told him to keep the dog on the floor, after the lights were turned out--except for the red night-light-- after his mom warned him again about Falstaff, after the hall door was pulled half shut, after enough time had passed to be sure neither his mom nor his dad was going to sneak back to check on the retriever, Toby sat up in his alcove bed, patted the mattress invitingly, and whispered, "Here, Falstaff. Come on, fella." The dog was busily sniffing along the base of the door at the head of the back stairs. He whined softly, unhappily. "Falstaff," Toby said, louder than before. "Here, boy, come here, hurry." Falstaff glanced at him, then put his snout to the doorsill again, snuffling and whimpering at the same time. "Come here--we'll play covered wagon or spaceship or anything you want," Toby wheedled. Suddenly getting a whiff of something that displeased him, the dog sneezed twice, shook his head so hard that his long ears flapped loudly, and backed away from the door. "Falstaff!" Toby hissed. Finally the dog padded to him through the red light-which was the same kind of light you'd find in the engine room of a starship, or around a campfire out on a lonely prairie where the wagon train had stopped for the night, or in a freaky temple in India where you and Indiana Jones were sneaking around and trying to avoid a bunch of weird guys who worshiped Kali, Goddess of Death. With a little encouragement, Falstaff jumped onto the bed. "Good dog." Toby hugged him. Then in hushed, conspiratorial tones: "Okay, see, we're in a rebel starfighter on the edge of the Crab Nebula. I'm the captain and ace Inner You're a super-superintelligent alien from a lanet that circles the Dog Star, plus you're psychic, you can read the thoughts of the bad aliens in their starfighters, trying to blow us apart, which they I don't know. They don't know..They're crabs with sort of hands instead of just claws, see, like this, crab hands, rack-scrick-scrack-scrick, and they're mean, really really vicious. Like after their mother gives birth to eight or ten of them at once, they turn on her and eat her alive! You know? Crunch her up. Feed on her. Mean as it, these guys. You know what I'm saying?" Falstaff regarded him face-to-face throughout the briefing and then licked him from chin to nose when he finished. "All right, you know! Okay, let's see if we can ditch these crab geeks by going into hyperspace--jump across half the galaxy and leave em in the dust. So what's the first thing we got to do? Yeah, right, put up e cosmic-radiation shields so we don't wind up full of pinholes from traveling faster than all the subatomic particles we'll be passing through." He switched on the reading lamp above his headboard, reached to the draw cord- -"Shields up!"--and pulled the privacy drapes all the way shut. Instantly the alcove bed became a cloistered capsule that could be any sort of vehicle, ancient or futuristic, traveling as slow as a sedan chair or faster than light through any part of the world or out of it. "Lieutenant Falstaff, are we ready?" Toby asked. Before the game could begin, the retriever bounded off the bed and between the bunk drapes, which fell shut again behind him. Toby grabbed the draw cord and pulled the drapes open. "What's the matter with you?" The dog was at the stairwell door, sniffing. "You know, dogbreath, this could be viewed as mutiny." Falstaff glanced back at him, then continued to investigate whatever scent had fascinated him. "We got crabulons trying to kill us, you want to go play dog." Toby got out of bed and joined the retriever at the door. "I know you don't have to pee. Dad took you out already, and you got to make yellow snow before I ever did." The dog whimpered again, made a disgusted sound, then backed away from the door and growled low in his throat. "It's nothing, it's some steps, that's all." Falstaff's black lips skinned back from his teeth. He lowered his head as if he was ready for a gang of crabulons to come through that door right now, scrackscrick-scrack-scrick, with their eye stalks wiggling two feet above their heads. "Dumb dog. I'll show you." He twisted open the lock, turned the knob. The dog whimpered and backed away. Toby opened the door. The stairs were dark. He flipped on the light and stepped onto the landing. Falstaff hesitated, looked toward the half-open hall door as if maybe he would bolt from the bedroom. .. You're the one was so interested," Toby reminded him. "Now come on, I'll show you--just stairs." As if he had been shamed into it, the dog joined Toby on the landing. His tail was held so low that the end of.it curled around one of his hind legs. Toby descended three steps, wincing as the first one squeaked and then the third. If Mom or Dad was in the kitchen below, he might get caught, and then they'd think he was sneaking out to grab up some snow--in his bare feet!--to bring it back to his room to watch it melt. Which wasn't a bad idea, actually. He wondered whether snow was interesting to eat. Three steps, two squeaks, and he stopped, looked back at the dog. "Well?" Reluctantly, Falstaff moved to his side. crural. Trying to make as little noise as possible. Well, one of them was trying, anyway, staying close to the wall, where the treads weren't as likely to creak, but the other .. one had claws that ticked and scraped on the wood. Toby whispered, "Stairs. Steps. See? You can go down. You can go up. Big deal. What'd you think was behind the door, huh? Doggie hell?" Each step they descended brought one new step into view. The way the walls curved, you couldn't see far ahead, couldn't see the bottom, just a few steps with the paint worn thin, lots of shadows because of the dim bulbs, so maybe the lower landing was just two steps below or maybe it was a hundred, five hundred, or - maybe you went down and down and around and around for ninety thousand steps, and when you reached the bottom you were at the center of the earth with dinosaurs and lost cities. "In doggie hell," he told Falstaff, "the devil's a cat. You know that? Big cat, really big, stands on his hind feet, has claws like razors ..." Down and around, slow step by slow step. ". . . this big devil cat, he wears a cape made out of dog fur, necklace out of dog teeth . . ." Down and around. "... and when he plays marbles ..." Wood creaking underfoot. "... he uses dogs' eyes! Yeah, that's right ..." Falstaff whimpered. ". . . he's one mean cat, big mean cat, mean as shit." They reached the bottom. The vestibule. The two doors. "Kitchen," Toby whispered, indicating one door. He turned to the other. "Back porch." He could probably twist open the deadbolt, slip onto the porch, scoop up a double handful of snow, even if he had to go as far as the yard to get it, but still make it back inside and all the way up to his room without his mom or dad ever knowing about it. Make a real snowball, his first. Take a taste of it. When it started to melt, he could just put it in a corner of his room, and in the morning, there'd be no evidence. Just water. Which, if anyone noticed it, he could blame on Falstaff. Toby reached for the doorknob with his right hand and for the dead-bolt turn with his left. The retriever jumped up, planted both paws on the wall beside the door, and clamped his jaws around Toby's left wrist. Toby stifled a squeal of surprise. -Falstaff held the wrist firmly, but he didn't bite down, didn't really hurt, just held on and rolled.his eyes at Toby, as if what he would have said, if he could speak, was something like, No, you can't open this door, it's nuts, forget it, no way. "What're you doing?" Toby whispered. "Let go." Falstaff would not let go. "You're drooling on me," Toby said as a rivulet of thick saliva trickled down his wrist and under the sleeve of his pajama tops. The retriever worked his teeth slightly, still not hurting his master but making it clear that he could cause a little pain anytime he wanted. "What, is Mom paying you?" Toby let go of the doorknob with his right hand. The dog rolled his eyes, relaxed his jaws, but didn't entirely let go of the left wrist until Toby released the thumb-turn on the lock and lowered his hand to his side. Falstaff dropped away from the wall, onto all fours again. Toby stare d at the door, wondering if he would be able to move quickly enough to open it before the dog could leap up and seize his wrist again. The retriever watched him closely. Then he wondered why Falstaff didn't want him to go outside. Dogs could sense danger. Maybe a bear was prowling around outside, one of the bears that Dad said lived in the woods. A bear could gut you and bite your head off so quick you wouldn't have a chance to scream, crunch your skull up like hard candy, pick its teeth with your armbone, and all they'd find in the morning was a bloody scrap of pajamas and maybe a toe that the bear had overlooked
. He was scaring himself. He checked the crack between the door and the jamb to be sure the deadbolt was actually in place. He could see the dull brass shine of it in there. Good. Safe. Of course, Falstaff had been afraid of the door above too, curious but afraid. He hadn't wanted to open it. Hadn't wanted to come down here, really. But nobody had been waiting for them on the steps. No bear, for sure. Maybe this was just a dog who spooked easy. "My dad's a hero," Toby whispered. Falstaff cocked his head. "He's a hero cop. He's not afraid of nothin', and I'm not afraid of nothin', either." The dog stared at him as if to say, Yeah? So what next? Toby looked again at the door in front of him. He could just open it a crack. Take a quick look. If a bear was on the porch, slam the door fast. "If I wanted to go out there and pet a bear, I would." Falstaff waited. "But it's late. I'm tired. If there's a bear out there, he'll just have to wait till tomorrow." Together, he and Falstaff climbed back to his room. Dirt was scattered on the stairs. He'd felt it under his bare feet on the way down, now he felt it going up. On the high landing, he stood on his right leg and brushed the bottom of his left foot, stood on his left foot and ushed off his right. Crossed the threshold. Closed the.-door. Locked it. Switched off the stair light. Falstaff was at the window, gazing out at the backyard, and Toby joined him. The snow was coming down so hard there would probably be nine feet of it by morning, maybe sixteen. The porch roof below was white. The ground was white everywhere, as far as he could see, but he couldn't see all that far because the snow was really coming down. He couldn't even see the woods. The caretaker's house was swallowed by whipping white clouds of snow. Incredible. The dog dropped to the floor and trotted away, but Toby watched the snow awhile longer. When he began to get sleepy, he turned and saw that Falstaff was sitting - in the bed, waiting for him. Toby slipped under the blankets, keeping the retriever on top of them. Letting the dog under the blankets was going one step too far. Infallible eight-year-old-boy instinct told him as much. If Mom or Dad found them like that--boy head on one pillow, dog head on the other pillow, covers pulled up to their chins--there would be big trouble. He reached for the draw cord to shut the drapes, so he and Falstaff could go to sleep on a train, crossing Alaska in the dead of winter to get to the gold rush country and stake a claim, after which they'd change Falstaffs name to White Fang. But as soon as the drapes began to close, the dog sprang to its feet on the mattress, ready to leap to the floor. "Okay, all right, pleez," Toby said, and he pulled the drapes wide open. The retriever settled beside him again, lying so he was facing the door at the head of the back stairs. "Dumb dog," Toby muttered from the edge of sleep. "Bears don't have door keys." In the darkness, when Heather slid against him, smelling faintly of soap from her hot bath, Jack knew he'd have to disappoint her. He wanted her, needed her, God knew, but he remained obsessed with his experience in the cemetery. As the memory grew rapidly less vivid, as it became increasingly difficult to recall the precise nature and intensity of the emotions that had been part of the encounter, he turned it over and over more desperately in his mind, examining it repeatedly from every angle, trying to squeeze sudden enlightenment from it before it became, like all memories, a dry and faded husk of the actual experience. The conversation with the thing that had spoken through Toby had been about death--cryptic, even inscrutable, but definitely about death. Nothing was as certain to dampen desire as brooding about death, graves, and the moldering bodies of old friends. At least, that's what he thought when she touched him, kissed him, and murmured endearments. Instead, to his surprise, he found that he was not only ready but rampant, not merely capable but full of more vigor than he'd known since long before the shooting back in LA. She was so giving yet demanding, alternately submissive and aggressive, shy yet all-knowing, as enthusiastic as a bride embarking on a new marriage, velvet and silken and alive, so wonderfully alive. Later, as he lay on his side and she drifted asleep with her breasts pressed to his back, the two of them a pair of spoons, he understood that making love with her had been a rejection of the frightening yet alluring presence in the cemetery..A day of brooding about death had proved to be a perverse aphrodisiac. He was facing the windows. The draperies were open. Ghosts of snow whirled past the glass, dancing white phantoms spinning to the music of the fluting wind, waltzing spirits, pale and cold, waltzing and pale, cold and spinning, spinning..in cloying blackness, blindly feeling his way toward the Giver, toward an offer of peace and love, pleasure and joy, an end to all fear, ultimate freedom, his for the taking, if only he could find the way, the path, the truth. The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Then he understood that the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself. Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn't have to be. But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I can't, no, can't, won't, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight, compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with that pressure came the Giver's furious assertion: Everything becomes, everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must submit . . . useless to resist . .. Let it in . . . paradise, paradise, joy forever . . . Let it in. Hammering on his soul. Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him, ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ-- A brief internal sizzle and crack, like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move. Bodies are. Everything becomes me. Puppets. Surrogates. Jack had never before awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking. Listening to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but . . . an intrusion. Communication. Contact. n attempt to subvert and overpower his will while he slept. .. Everything becomes me. Those three words were not so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken by the unseen Giver in the dream and by the hate entity that communicated through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and sleeping Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, impedous, hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate. 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 gr
eater 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 c ould 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 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 swiftly changing shades of blue and green and purple, a sudden splash of red, orange, then blue and green. 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 snow flakes 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 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 protomic images on the screen. Heather stood in the doorway, wearing her quilted red robe, hair tousled. She didn't ask what was happening. 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 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 ads, 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 ther
e, 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 acknowle dged. "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 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 you ... does it have to be actually in you? Physically? A part of it inside you somewhere?" 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 is." "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. 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." Ikl still lower whisper: "Everything can be underd, but nothing can be understood." I want to understand it." everything can be understood, but nothing can be stood." Hether's hands were still fisted, but now she pressed to her eyes, as if she.couldn't bear to look at him 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 stuborn to love being slaves. "Oh," Toby said quietly, more to himself than to hem 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." can use them, but it can't know them. A few pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the truth. A monstrous, terible 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 ,the back staircase." Though Jack wasn't entirely sure what she was talking about, he knew that she'd realized what was out e on the Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in 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 e. 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 Ucended 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 comp
uter 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 with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with fear that 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 driven snow. Restless, Heather moved continuously back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the pearance 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 prison indefensible. The loaded Mossberg twelve-gauge lay on the table. Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the gun 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 .."I'm sorry." You didn't share what Paul and Travis told you. that was wrong. But now you know everything. yes, finally." She had been furious that he'd withheld such things from her, but she hadn't been able to sustain her anger, she could not rekindle it now. Because, of course she was equally guilty. She'd not told him about the unease she'd felt during the entire tour of the property yesterday afternoon. The premonitions of violence and the unprecedented intensity of her nightmare. Certain that something had been in the back stairwell she'd gone into Toby's room the night before all the years they had been married, there had not been as many gaps in their communication with each-other since they'd come to Quartermass Ranch. They wanted their new life not merely to work but to be ct, and they had been unwilling to express doubts observations. For that failure to reach out to each , 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 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 theres nothing unique about being a hero," Jack said.."Most people are heroes. Your mom's a hero, so are you." "Me?" "For the way you handled this past year. Took courage to deal with everything." didn't feel brave." "Truly brave people never do." said, "Lots of people are heroes even if they it dodge bullets or chase bad guys." People who go to work every day, make sacrifices for their families, and get through life without hurting 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 if I'm scared?" Toby said. rmore than okay," Jack said. "If you were never afraid of anything, then you'd be either very stupid or me. Now, I know you can't be stupid because you're Insanity, on the other hand . . . well, I can't be )sure about that, since it runs in your mom's family." he 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 did 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 any-thing this wrong. With a couple of l
ocals 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." He had suspected as much even as he started toward the phone. After the incident with the computer, she knew that getting help wasn't going to be easy, she hadn't wanted to think about the possibility they were trapped. "Maybe the storm brought down the lines," Jack said. "Aren't the phone lines on the same poles as the power and we have power, so it wasn't the storm." the pegboard, he snatched the keys to the Explorer and to Eduardo's Cherokee. "Okay, let's get the 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 from the countertop, one in each hand. 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 fully concurred with their decision. Jack unlocked the door, opened it fast but warily, sing the threshold with the shotgun held in front of him, as if he expected their enemy to be in the garage. 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. ow. 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 vehi cle 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-gage. 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. Jack looked grim. "Let's prepare for the worst." CHAPTER TWENTY. Shatters of snow ticked and pinged against the windows in the ground-floor study. Though the outer world was whitewashed and full of glare, little daylight filtered into the room. Lamps with parchment shades cast an amber glow. Reviewing their own guns and those that Eduardo had inherited from Stanley Quartermass, Jack chose to load only one other weapon: a Colt .45 revolver. "I'll carry the Mossberg and the Colt," he told Heather. "You'll have the Micro Uzi and the thirty-eight. Use the revolver only as backup to the Uzi." "That's it?" she asked. He regarded her bleakly. "If we can't stop whatever's coming at us with this much firepower, a third gun isn't going to do either of us a damned bit of good." In one of the two drawers in the base of the gun cabinet, among other sporting paraphernalia, he found three game-hunting holsters that belted around the waist. One was crafted from nylon or rayon--some man-made fabric, anyway--and the other two were leather. Exposed to below-zero temperatures for an extended period, nylon would remain flexible long after the leather holster would stiffen, a handgun might snag or bind up slightly if the leather contracted around it..Because he intended to be outdoors while Heather remained inside, he gave her the most supple of the two leather rigs and kept the nylon for himself. Their ski suits were replete with zippered pockets. They filled many of them with spare ammunition, though it might be optimistic to expect to have a chance to reload after the assault began. That an assault would occur, Jack had no doubt. He didn't know what form it would take--an entirely physical attack or a combination of physical and mental blows. He didn't know whether the damn thing would come itself or through surrogates, neither when nor from what direction it would launch its onslaught, but he knew it would come It was impatient with their resistance, eager to control and become them. Little imagination was required to see that it would next want to study them at much closer range, perhaps dissect them and examine their brains and nervous systems to learn the secret of their ability to resist. He had no illusions that they would be killed or anesthetized before being subjected to that exploratory surgery. Jack put his shotgun on the kitchen table again. From one of the cupboards he removed a round galvanized-tin can, unscrewed the lid, and extracted a box of wooden matches, which he put on the table. While Heather stood watch at one window, Toby and Falstaff at the other, Jack went down to the basement. In the second of the two lower rooms, along the wall beside the silent generator, stood eight five-gallon cans of gasoline, a fuel supply they had laid in at Paul Youngblood's suggestion. He carried two cans upstairs and set them on the kitchen floor beside the table. "If the guns can't stop it," he said, "if it gets inside, and you're backed into a corner, then the risk of fire might be worth taking." "Burn down the house?" Heather asked disbelievingly. "It's only a house. It can be rebuilt. If you have no other choice, then to hell with the house. If bullets don't work--" He saw stark terror in her eyes. "They will work, I'm sure of that, the guns will stop it, especially that Uzi. But if by some chance, some one-in-a-million chance, that doesn't stop it, fire will get it for sure. Or at least drive it back. Fire could be just what you need to give you time to distract the thing, hold it off, and get out before you're trapped." She stared at him dubiously. "Jack, why do you keep saying 'you' instead of 'we'?" He hesitated. She wasn't going to like this. He didn't like it much himself. There was no alternative. "You'll stay here with Toby and the dog while I--" "No way." "--while I try to get to the Youngbloods' ranch for help." "No, we shouldn't split up." "We don't have a choice, Heather."."It'll take us easier if we split up." "Probably won't make a difference." "I think it will." "This shotgun doesn't add much to that Uzi." He gestured at the whiteout beyond the window. "Anyway, we can't all make it through that weather." She stared morosely at the wall of blowing snow, unable to argue the point. "I could make it," Toby said, smart enough to know that he was the weak link. "I really could." The dog sensed the boy's anxiety and padded to his side, rubbed against him. "Dad, please, just give me a chance." Two miles wasn't a great distance on a warm spring day, an easy walk, but they were faced with fierce cold against which even their ski suits were not pe
rfect protection. Furthermore, the power of the wind would work against them in three ways: reducing the subjective air temperature at least ten degrees below what it was objectively, pounding them into exhaustion as they tried to make progress against it, and obscuring their desired route with whirling clouds of snow that reduced visibility to near zero. Jack figured he and Heather might have the strength and stamina required to walk two miles under those conditions, with snow up to their knees, higher in places, but he was sure Toby wouldn't get a quarter of the way, not even walking in the trail they broke for him. Before they'd gone far, they would have to take turns carrying him. Thereafter, they would quickly become debilitated and surely die in that white desolation. "I don't want to stay here," Toby said. "I don't want to do what I might have to do if I stay here." "And I don't want to leave you here." Jack squatted in front of him. "I'm not abandoning you, Toby. You know I'd never do that, don't you?" Toby nodded somberly. "And you can depend on your mom. She's tough. She won't let anything happen to you." "I know," Toby said, being a brave soldier. "Good. Okay. Now I've got a couple of things to do yet, and then I'll go. I'll be back fast as I can--straight over to Ponderosa Pines, round up help, get back here with the cavalry. You've seen those old movies. The cavalry always gets there in the nick of time, doesn't it? You'll be okay. We'll all be okay." The boy searched his eyes. He.met his son's fear with a falsely reassuring smile and felt like the most deceitful bastard ever born. He was not as confident as he sounded. Not by half. And he did feel as if he was running out on them. What if he got help-- but they were dead by the time he returned to Quartermass Ranch? He might as well kill himself then. Wouldn't be a point in going on. Truth was, it probably wouldn't work out that them dead and him alive. At best he had a fifty-fifty chance of making it all the way to Ponderosa Pines. If the storm didn't bring him down ... something else might. He didn't know how closely they were being observed, whether their adversary would be aware of his departure. If it did see him go, it wouldn't let him get far. Then Heather and Toby would be on their own. Nothing else he could do. No other plan made sense. Zero options. And time running out. Hammer blows boomed through the house. Hard, hollow, fearful sounds. Jack used three-inch steel nails because they were the largest he had been able to find in the garage tool cabinet. Standing in the vestibule at the bottom of the back stairs, he drove those spikes at a severe angle through the outside door and into the jamb. Two above the knob, two below. The door was solid oak, and the long nails bit through it only with relentless hammering. The hinges were on the inside. Nothing on the back porch could pry them loose. Nevertheless, he decided to fix the door to the jamb on that flank as well, though with only two nails instead of four. He drove another two through the upper part of the door and into the header, just for good measure. Any intruder that entered those back stairs could take two immediate routes once it crossed the outer threshold, instead of just one as with the other doors. It could enter the kitchen and confront Heathen-or turn the other way and swiftly ascend to Toby's room. Jack wanted to prevent anything from reaching the second floor because, from there, it could slip into several rooms, avoiding a frontal assault, forcing Heather to search for it until it had a chance to attack her from behind. After he'd driven the final nail home, he disengaged the dead-bolt lock and tried to open the door. He couldn't budge it, no matter how hard he strained. No intruder could get through it quietly anymore, it would have to be broken down, and Heather would hear it regardless of where she was. He twisted the thumb-turn. The lock clacked into the striker plate again. Secure. While Jack nailed shut the other door at the back of the house, Toby helped Heather pile pots, pans, dishes, flatware, and drinking glasses in front of the door between the kitchen and the back porch. That carefully balanced tower would topple with a resounding crash if the door was pushed open even slowly, alerting them if they were elsewhere in the house. Falstaff kept his distance from the rickety assemblage, as if he understood that he would be in big trouble if he was the one to knock it over. "What about the cellar door?" Toby said. "That's safe," Heather assured him. "There's no way into the cellar from outside." As Falstaff watched with interest, they constructed a.similar security device in front of the door between the kitchen and the garage. Toby crowned it with a glassful of spoons atop an inverted metal bowl. They carried bowls, dishes, pots, baking pans, and forks to the foyer. After Jack left, they would construct a third tower inside the front door. Heather couldn't help feeling that the alarms were inadequate. Pathetic, actually. However, they couldn't nail shut all the first-floor doors, because they might have to escape by one--in which case they could just shove the tottering housewares aside, slip the lock, and be gone. And they hadn't time to transform the house into a sealed fortress. Besides, every fortress had the potential to become a prison. Even if Jack had felt there was time enough to attempt to secure the house a little better, he might not have tried. Regardless of what measures were taken, the large number of windows made the place difficult to defend. The best he could do was hurry from window to window upstairs--while Heather checked those on the ground floor--to make sure they were locked. A lot of them appeared to be painted shut and not easy to open in any case. Pane after pane revealed a misery of snow and wind. He caught no glimpse of anything unearthly. In Heather's closet off the master bedroom, Jack sorted through her wool scarves. He selected one that was loosely knit. He found his sunglasses in a dresser drawer. He wished he had ski goggles. Sunglasses would have to be good enough. He couldn't walk the two miles to Ponderosa Pines with his eyes unprotected in that glare, he'd be risking snowblindness. When he returned to the kitchen, where Heather was checking the locks on the last of the windows, he lifted the phone again, hoping for a dial tone. Folly, of course. A dead line. "Got to go," he said. They might have hours or only precious minutes before their nemesis decided to come after them. He couldn't guess whether the thing would be swift or leisurely in its approach, there was no way of understanding its thought processes or of knowing whether time had any meaning to it. Alien. Eduardo had been right. Utterly alien. Mysterious. Infinitely strange. Heather and Toby accompanied him to the front door. He held Heather briefly but tightly, fiercely. He kissed her only once. He said an equally quick goodbye to Toby. He dared not linger, for he might decide at any second not to leave, after all. Ponderosa Pines was the only hope they had. Not going was tantamount to admitting they were doomed. Yet leaving his wife and son alone in that house was the hardest thing he had ever done-- harder than seeing Tommy Fernandez and Luther Bryson cut down at his side, harder than facing Anson Oliver in front of that burning service station, harder by far than recovering from a spinal injury. He told himself that going required as much courage on his part as staying required of them, not because of the ordeal the storm would pose and not because something unspeakable might be waiting for him out there, but because, if they died and he lived, his grief and guilt and selfloathing would make life darker than.death. He wound the scarf around his face, from the chin to just below his eyes. Although it went around twice, the weave was loose enough to allow him to breathe. He pulled up the hood and tied it under his chin to hold the scarf in place. He felt like a knight girding for battle. Toby watched, nervously chewing his lower lip. Tears shimmered in his eyes, but he strove not to spill them. Being the little hero, so the boy's tears would be less visible to him and, therefore, less corrosive of his will to leave. He pulled on his gloves and picked up the Mossberg shotgun. The Colt .45 was holstered at his right hip. The moment had come. Heather appeared stricken. He could hardly bear to look at her. She opened the door. Wailing wind drove snow all the way across the porch and over the threshold. Jack stepped out of the house and reluctantly turned away from everything he loved. He kicked through the powdery snow on the porch. He heard her speak to him one last time--"I love you"--the words distorted by the wind but the meaning unmistakable. At the head of the porch steps he hesitated, turned to her, saw that she had taken one step out of the house, said, "I love you, Heather," t
hen walked down and out into the storm, not sure if she had heard him, not knowing if he would ever speak to her again, ever hold her in his arms, ever see the love in her eyes or the smile that was, to him, worth more than a place in heaven and the salvation of his soul. The snow in the front yard was knee-deep. He bulled through it. He dared not look back again. Leaving them, he knew, was essential. It was courageous. It was wise, prudent, their best hope of survival. However, it didn't feel like any of those things. It felt like abandonment. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Wind hissed at the windows as if it possessed consciousness and was keeping watch on them, thumped and rattled the kitchen door as if testing the lock, shrieked and snuffled along the sides of the house in search of a weakness in their defenses. Reluctant to put the Uzi down in spite of its weight, Heather stood watch for a while at the north window of the kitchen, then at the west window above the sink. She cocked her head now and then to listen closely to those noises that seemed too purposeful to be just voices of the storm. At the table, Toby was wearing earphones and playing with a Game Boy. His body language was different from that which he usually exhibited when involved in an electronic game--no twitching, leaning, rocking from side to side, bouncing in his seat. He was playing only to fill the time. Falstaff lay in the corner farthest from any window, the warmest spot.in the room. Occasionally he lifted his noble head, sniffing the air or listening, but mostly he lay on his side, staring across the room at floor level, yawning. Time passed slowly. Heather repeatedly checked the wall clock, certain that at least ten minutes had gone by, only to discover that a mere two minutes had elapsed since she'd last looked. The two-mile walk to Ponderosa Pines would take maybe twenty-five minutes in fair weather. Jack might require an hour or even an hour and a half in the storm, allowing for the hard slogging through knee-deep snow, detours around the deeper drifts, and the incessant resistance of the gale-force wind. Once there, he should need half an hour to explain the situation and marshal a rescue team. Less than fifteen minutes would be required for the return trip even if they had to plow open some snowbound stretches of road and driveway. At most he ought to be back in two hours and fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour sooner than that. The dog yawned. Toby was so still he might have been asleep sitting up. They had turned the thermostat down so they could wear their ski suits and be ready to desert the house without delay if necessary, yet the place was still warm. Her hands and face were cool, but sweat trickled along her spine and down her sides from her underarms. She unzipped her jacket, though it interfered with the hip holster when it hung loose. When fifteen minutes had passed uneventfully, she began to think their unpredictable adversary would make no move against them. Either it didn't realize they were currently more vulnerable without Jack or it didn't care. From what Toby had said, it was the very definition of arrogance--never afraid--and might operate always according to its own rhythms, plans, and desires. Her confidence was beginning to rise--when Toby spoke quietly and not to her. "No, I don't think so." Heather stepped away from the window. He murmured, "Well ... maybe." "Toby?" she said. As if unaware of her, he stared at the Game Boy screen. His fingers weren't moving on the controls. No game was under way: shapes and bold colors swarmed across the miniature monitor, similar to those she had seen twice before. "Why?" he asked. She put a hand on his shoulder.."Maybe," he said to the swirling colors on the screen. Always before, responding to this entity, he had said "no." The "maybe" alarmed Heather. "Could be, maybe," he said. She took the earphones off him, and he finally looked up at her. "What're you doing, Toby?" "Talking," he said in a half-drugged voice. "What were you saying "maybe" to?" "To the Giver," he explained. 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 winddriven 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 ac
quiesced, 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-chudachuda-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 understan d 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, BOINC, 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 crescendo 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 livingroom 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 part 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 clinkjangle-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 stiffjointed 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. At the bottom of the steps, the corpse stopped and gazed up at her. Its face was only slightly swollen, though darkly empurpled, mottled with yellow here and there, a crust of evil green under its clogged nostrils. One eye was missing. The other was covered with a yellow film, it bulged against a half-concealing lid that, though sewn shut by a mortician, had partially opened when the rotting threads had loosened. Heather heard herself muttering rapidly, rhythmically. After a moment she realized that she was feverishly reciting a long prayer she had learned as a child but had not repeated in eighteen or twenty years. Under other circumstances, if she had made a conscious effort to recall the words, she couldn't have come up with half of them, but now they flowed out of her as they had when she'd been a young girl kneeling in church. The walking corpse was less than half the reason for her fear, however, and far less than half the reason for the acute disgust that knotted her stomach, made breathing difficult, and triggered her gag reflex..It was gruesome, but the discolored flesh was not yet dissolving from the bones. The dead man still reeked more of embalming fluid than of putrescence, a pungent odor that blew up the staircase on a cold draft and instantly reminded Heather of long-ago high-school biology classes and slippery specimen f rogs fished from jars of formaldehyde for dissection. What sickened and repelled her most of all was the Giver that rode the corpse as it might have ridden a beast of burden. Though the light in the hallway was bright enough to reveal the alien clearly, and though she might have wanted to see less of it rather than more, she was nevertheless unable to precisely define its physical form. The bulk of the thing appeared to hang along the dead man's back, secured by whiplike tentacles-- some as thin as pencils, some as thick as her own forearm--that were firmly lashed around the mount's thighs, waist, chest, and neck. The Giver was mostly black, and such a deep black that it hurt her eyes to stare at it, though in places the inky sheen was relieved by blood-red speckles. Without Toby to protect, she might not have been able to face this thing, for it was too strange, incomprehensible, just too damned much. The sight of it dizzied like a whiff of nitrous oxide, brought her to the edge of desperate giddy laughter, a humorless mirth that was perilously close to madness. Not daring to take her eyes off the corpse or its hideous rider, for fear she would look up to find it one step below her, Heather slowly lowered the five-gallon can of gasoline to the floor of the landing. Along the dead man's back, at the heart of the churning mass of tentacles, there might have been a central body akin to the sac of a squid, with glaring inhuman eyes and a twisted mouth--but if it was there, she couldn't catch a glimpse of it. Instead, the thing seemed to be all ropy extremities, ceaselessly twitching, curling, coiling, and unraveling. Though oozing and gelatinous within its skin, the Giver occasionally bristled into spiky shapes that made her think of lobsters, crabs, crawfish--but in a blink, it was all sinuous motion once more. In college, a friend of Heather's--Wendi Felzer--had developed liver cancer and had decided to augment her doctors' treatments with a course of self-healing through imaging therapy. Wendi had pictured her white blood cells as knights in shining armor with magic swords, her cancer as a dragon, and she had meditated two hours a day, until she could see, in her mind, all those knights slaying the beast. The Giver was the archetype for every image of cancer ever conceived, the slithering essence of malignancy. In Wendi's case, the dragon had won. Not a good thing to remember now, not good at all. It started to climb the steps toward her. She raised the Uzi. The most loathsome aspect of the Giver's entanglement with the corpse.was the extent of its intimacy. The buttons had popped off the white burial shirt, which hung open, revealing that a few of the tentacles had pried open the thoracic incision made by the coroner during his autopsy, those red-speckled appendages vanished inside the cadaver, probing deep into unknown reaches of its cold tissues. The creature seemed to revel in its bonding with the dead flesh, an embrace that was as inexplicable
as it was obscene. Its very existence was offensive. That it could be seemed proof that the universe was a madhouse, full of worlds without meaning and bright galaxies without pattern or purpose. It climbed two steps from the hall, toward the landing. Three. Four. Heather waited one more. Five steps up, seven steps below her. A bristling mass of tentacles appeared between the dead man's parted lips, like a host of black tongues spotted with blood. Heather opened fire, held the trigger down too long, used up too much ammunition, ten or twelve rounds, even fourteen, although it was surprising--considering her state of mind--that she didn't empty both magazines. The 9mm slugs stitched a bloodless diagonal line across the dead man's chest, through body and entwining tentacles. Parasite and dead host pitched backward to the hallway floor below, leaving two lengths of severed tentacles on the stairs, one about eighteen inches long, the other about two feet. Neither of those amputated limbs bled. Both continued to move, initially twisting and flailing the way the bodies of snakes writhe long after they have been separated from their heads. Heather was transfixed by the grisly sight because, almost at once, the movement ceased to be the result of misfiring nerves and randomly spasming muscles, it began to appear purposeful. Each scrap of the primary organism seemed aware of the other, and they groped toward each other, the first curling down over the edge of a step while the second rose gracefully like a flute-charmed serpent to meet it. When they touched, a transformation occurred that was essentially black magic and beyond Heather's understanding, even though she had a clear view of it. The two became as one, not simply entwining but melding, flowing together as if the soot-dark silken skin sheathing them was little more than surface tension that gave shape to the oozing protoplasm within. As soon as the two combined, the resulting mass sprouted eight smaller tentacles, with a shimmer like quick shadows playing across a puddle of water, the new organism bristled into a vaguely crablike--but still eyeless--form, though it was as soft and flexible as ever. Quivering, as if to maintain even a marginally more angular shape required monumental effort, it began to hitch down the steps toward the mothermass from which it had become separated..Less than half a minute had passed from the moment when the two severed appendages had begun to seek each other. Bodies are. Those words were, according to Jack, part of what the Giver had said through Toby in the cemetery. Bodies are. A cryptic statement then. All too clear now. Bodies are--now and forever, flesh without end. Bodies are-- expendable if necessary, fiercely adaptable, severable without loss of intellect or memory and therefore in infinite supply. The bleakness of her sudden insight, the perception that they could not win regardless of how valiantly they struggled or how much courage they possessed, kicked her across the borderline of sanity for a moment, into madness no less total for its brevity. Instead of recoiling from the monstrously alien creature stilting determinedly down the steps to rejoin its mothermass, as any sane person would have done, she plunged after it, off the landing with a strangled scream that sounded like the thin and bitter grievance of a dying animal in a sawtooth trap, the Micro Uzi thrust in front of her. Although she knew she was putting herself in terrible jeopardy, unconscionably abandoning Toby at the top of the stairs, Heather was unable to stop. She went down one, two, three, four, five steps in the time that the crablike thing descended two. They were four steps apart when the thing abruptly reversed direction without bothering to turn around, as if front and back and sideways were all the same to it. She stopped so fast she almost lost her balance, and the crab ascended toward her a lot faster than it had descended. Three steps between them. Two. She squeezed the trigger, emptied the Uzi's last rounds into the scuttling form, chopping it into four-five-six bloodless pieces that tumbled and flopped down a few steps, where they lay squirming. Squirming ceaselessly. Supple and snakelike again. Eagerly and silently questing toward one another. Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain when it was shot. No shrieks of rage. , Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the assault, mocked her hopes of triumph. At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps again. Heather's spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed.the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and Falstaff were waiting. The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked as if he'd sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself: effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn't be brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns. Toby said, "Do I have to do it? I don't want to." She didn't know what he meant, didn't have time to ask. "We'll be okay, honey, we'll make it." From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe--but a cold sound. She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the gasoline can. Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned, nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work. "It's never afraid," Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound depths of his own fear. "Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!" The boy ran, and the dog went with him. At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road, he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and blowing snow as obscuring as fog at se a. Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway. Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the Giver itself or one of the surrogates that it had mined from the graveyard. He continually scanned left and right, ready to pump out every round in the shotgun to bring down anything that rushed him..He was glad that he had worn sunglasses. Even with shades, he found the unrelieved brightness inhibiting. He strained to see through the wintry sameness to guard against attack and to make out familiar details of the terrain that would keep him on the right track. He dared not think about Heather and Toby. When he did so, his pace slowed and he was nearly overcome by the temptation to go back to them and forget about Ponderosa Pines. For their sake and his own, he blocked them from his thoughts, concentrated solely on covering ground, and virtually became a hiking machine. The baleful wind shrieked without surcease, blew snow in his face, and forced him to bow his head. It shoved him off his feet twice--on one occasion causing him to drop the shotgun in a drift, where he had to scramble frantically to find it--and became almost as real an adversary as any man against whom he'd ever been pitted. By the time he reached the end of the private lane and paused for breath between the tall stone posts and under the arched wooden sign that marked the entrance to Quartermass Ranch, he was cursing the wind as if it could hear him. He wiped one gloved hand across the sunglasses to scrape off the snow that had stuck to the lenses. His eyes stung as they sometimes did when an opthalmologist put drops in them to dilate the pupils prior to an examination. Without the shades, he might already have been snowblind. He was sick of the taste and smell of wet wool, which flavored the air he drew through his mouth and scented every inhalation when he brea
thed through his nose. The vapor he exhaled had thoroughly saturated the fabric, and the condensation had frozen. With one hand he massaged the makeshift muffler, cracking the thin, brittle ice and crumbling the thicker layer of compacted snow, he sloughed it all away so he could breathe more easily than he'd been able to breathe for the past two or three hundred yards. Though he found it difficult to believe that the Giver didn't know he had left the house, he had reached the edge of the ranch without being assaulted. A considerable trek remained ahead, but the greatest danger of attack would have been in the territory he had already covered without incident. Maybe the puppetmaster was not as omniscient as it either pretended or seemed to be. A distended and ominous shadow, as tortured as that of a fright figure in a fun house, rose along the landing wall: the puppetmaster and its decomposing marionette laboring stiffly but doggedly toward the top of the first flight of stairs. As the thing ascended, it no doubt absorbed the fragments of strange flesh that bullets had torn from it, but it didn't pause to do so. Although the thing was not fast, it was too fast for Heather's taste, too fast by half. It seemed to be racing up the damned stairs. In spite of her shaky hands, she finally unscrewed the stubborn cap on.the spout of the fuel can. Held the container by its handle. Used her other hand to tip the bottom. A pale gush of gasoline arced out of the spout. She swung the can left and right, saturating the carpet along the width of the steps, letting the stream splash down the entire top flight. On the first step below the landing, the Giver appeared in the wake of its shadow, a demented construct of filth and slithering sinuosities. Heather hastily capped the gasoline can. She carried it a short distance along the hall, set it out of the way, and returned to the stairs. The Giver had reached the landing. It turned to face the second flight. Heather fumbled in the jacket pocket where she thought she had stowed the matches, found spare ammo for both the Uzi and the Korth, no matches. She tried another zipper, groped in the pocket--more cartridges, no matches, no matches. On the landing, the dead man raised his head to stare at her, which meant the Giver was staring too, with eyes she couldn't see. Could it smell the gasoline? Did it understand that gasoline was flammable? It was intelligent. Vastly so, apparently. Did it grasp the potential for its own destruction? A third pocket. More bullets. She was a walking ammo dump, for God's sake. One of the cadaver's eyes was still obscured by a thin yellowish cataract, gazing between lids that were sewn half shut. The air reeked of gasoline. Heather had difficulty drawing a clear breath, she was wheezing. The Giver didn't seem to mind, and the corpse wasn't breathing. Too many pockets, Jesus, four on the outside of the jacket, three inside, pockets and more pockets, two on each leg of her pants, all of them zippered. The other eye socket was empty, partially curtained by shredded lids and dangling strands of mortician's thread. Suddenly the tip of a tentacle extruded from inside the skull. With an agitation of appendages, like the tendrils of a black sea anemone lashed by turbulent currents, the thing started up from the landing. Matches. A small cardboard box, wooden matches. Found them. Two steps up from the landing, the Giver hissed softly. Heather slid open the box, almost spilled the matches. They rattled.against one another, against the cardboard. The thing climbed another step. When his mom told him to go to the bedroom, Toby didn't know if she meant her bedroom or his. He wanted to get as far as possible from the thing coming up the front stairs, so he went to his bedroom at the end of the hallway, though he stopped a couple of times and looked back at her and almost returned to her side. e didn't want to leave her there alone. She was his mom. He hadn't seen all of the Giver, only the tangle of tentacles squirming around the edge of the front door, but he knew it was more than she could handle. It was more than he could handle too, so he had to forget about doing anything, didn't dare think about it. He knew what had to be done, but he was too scared to do it, which was all right, because even heroes were afraid, because only insane people were never ever scared. And right now he knew he sure wasn't insane, not even a little bit, because he was scared bad, so bad he felt like he had to pee. This thing was like the Terminator and the Predator and the alien from Alien and the shark from Jaws and the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and a bunch of other monsters rolled into one-- but he was just a kid. Maybe he was a hero too, like his dad said, even if he didn't feel like a hero, which he didn't, not one bit, but if he was a hero, he couldn't do what he knew he should do. He reached the end of the hall, where Falstaff stood trembling and whining. "Come on, fella," Toby said. He pushed past the dog into his bedroom, where the lamps were already bright because he and Mom had turned on just about every lamp in the house before Dad left, though it was daytime. "Get out of the hall, Falstaff. Mom wants us out of the hall. Come on!" The first thing he noticed, when he turned away from the dog, was that the door to the back stairs stood open. It should have been locked. They were making a fortress here. Dad had nailed shut the lower door, but this one should also be locked. Toby ran to it, pushed it shut, engaged the dead bolt, and felt better. At the doorway, Falstaff had still not entered the room. He had stopped whining. He was growling. Jack at the ranch entrance. Pausing only a moment to recover from the first and most arduous leg of the journey. Instead of soft flakes, the snow was coming down in sharp-edged crystals, almost like grains of salt. The wind drove it hard enough to.sting his exposed forehead. A road crew had been by at least once, because a four-foot-high wall of plowed snow blocked the end of the driveway. He clambered over it, onto the two-lane. Flame flared off the match head. For an instant Heather expected the fumes to explode, but they weren't sufficiently concentrated to be combustible. The parasite and its dead host climbed another step, apparently oblivious of the danger--or certain that there was none. Heather stepped back, out of the flash zone, tossed the match. Continuing to back up until she bumped into the hallway wall, watching the flame flutter in an arc toward the stairwell, she had a seizure of manic thoughts that elicited an almost compulsive bark of mad laughter, a single dark bray that came dangerously close to ending in a thick sob: Burning down my own house, welcome to Montana, beautiful scenery and walking dead men and things from other worlds, and here we go, flame falling, may you.burn in hell, burning down my own house, wouldn't have to do that in Los Angeles, other people will do it for you there. WHOOSH! The gasoline-soaked carpet exploded into flames that leaped all the way to the ceiling. The fire didn't spread through the stairwell, it was simply everywhere at once. Instantaneously the walls and railings were as fully involved as the treads and risers. A stinging wave of heat hit Heather, forcing her to squint. She should at once have moved farther away from the blaze because the air was nearly hot enough to blister her skin, but she had to see what happened to the Giver. The staircase was an inferno. No human being could have survived in it longer than a few seconds. In that swarming incandescence, the dead man and the living beast were a single dark mass, rising another step. And another. No screams or shrieks of pain accompanied its ascent, only the roar and crackle of the fierce fire, which was now lapping out of the stairwell and into the upstairs hallway. As Toby locked the stairhead door and turned from it, and as Falstaff growled from the threshold of the other door, orange-red light flashed through the hall behind the dog. His growl spiraled into a yelp of surprise. Following the flash were flickering figures of light that danced on the walls out there: reflections of fire. Toby knew that his mom had set the alien on fire-- she was tough, she was smart--and a current of hope thrilled through him. Then he noticed the second wrong thing about the bedroom. The drapes.were closed over his recessed bed. He had left them open, drawn back to both sides of the niche. He only closed them at night or when he was playing a game. He had opened them this morning, and he'd had no time for games since he'd gotten up. The air had a bad smell. He hadn't noticed it right away because his heart was pounding and he was breathing through his mouth. He moved toward the bed. One step, two. The closer he drew to the sleeping alcove, the worse the smell became. It was like the odor on the back stairs the first day they'd seen the house, but a lot worse
. He stopped a few steps from the bed. He told himself he was a hero. It was okay for heroes to be afraid, but even when they were afraid, they had to do something. At the open door, Falstaff was just about going crazy. Blacktop was visible in a few small patches, revealed by the flaying wind, but most of the roadway was covered by two inches of fresh powder. Numerous drifts had formed against the snow walls thrown up by the plow. Judging by the available signs, Jack figured the crew had made a circuit through this neighborhood about two hours ago, certainly no more recently than an hour and a half. They were overdue to make another pass. He turned east and hurried toward the Youngblood spread, hopeful of encountering a highway-maintenance crew before he had gone far. Whether they were equipped with a big road grader or a salt-spreading truck with a plow on the front--or both--they would have microwave communications with their dispatcher. If he could persuade them that his story was not just the raving of a lunatic, he might be able to convince them to take him back to the house to get Heather and Toby out of there. Might be able to persuade them? Hell, he had a shotgun. For sure, he'd convince them. They'd plow the half-mile driveway clean as a nun's conscience to the front door of Quartermass Ranch, smiles on their faces from start to finish, as jolly as Snow White's short protectors, singing "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go" if that's what he wanted them to do. Impossible as it seemed, the creature on the stairs appeared even more grotesque and frightful in the obscuring embrace of fire, with smoke seething from it, than it had been when she'd had a clear look at its every feature..Yet another step it rose. Silently, silently. Then another. It ascended out of the conflagration with all the panache of His Satanic Majesty on a day trip out of hell. The beast was burning, or at least the portion of it that was Eduardo Fernandez's body was being consumed, and yet the demonic thing climbed one more step. Almost to the top now. Heather couldn't delay any longer. The heat was unbearable. She'd already exposed her face too long and would probably wind up with a mild burn. The hungry fire ate across the hallway ceiling, licking at the plaster overhead, and her position was perilous. Besides, the Giver was not going to collapse backward into the furnace below, as she had hoped. It would reach the second floor and open its arms to her, its many fiery arms, seeking to enfold and become her. Heart thudding furiously, Heather hurried a few steps along the hall to the red can of gasoline. She snatched it up with one hand. It felt light. She must have used three of the five gallons. She glanced back. The stalker came out of the stairwell, into the hallway. Both the colpse and the Giver were ablaze, not merely a smoldering gnarl of charred organisms but a dazzling column of tempestuous flames, as if their entwined bodies had been constructed of dry tinder. Some of the longer tentacles coiled and lashed like whips, casting off streams and gobs of fire that spattered against the walls and floor, igniting carpet and wallpaper. As Toby took one more step toward the curtained bed, Falstaff finally dashed into the room. The dog blocked his path and barked at him, warning him to back off. Something moved on the bed behind the drapes, brushing against them, and each of the next few seconds was an hour to Toby, as if he had shifted into super-slow-mo. The sleeping alcove was like the stage of a puppet theater just before the show began, but it wasn't Punch or Judy back there, wasn't Kukla or Ollie, wasn't any of the Muppets, nothing you'd ever find on Sesame Street, and this wasn't going to be a funny program, no laughs in this weird performance. He wanted to close his eyes and wish it away. Maybe, if you just didn't believe in it, the thing wouldn't exist. It was stirring the drapes again, bulging against them, as if to say, Hello there, little boy. Maybe you had to believe in it just like you had to believe in Tinker Bell to keep her alive. So if you closed your eyes and thought good thoughts about an empty bed, about air that smelled of freshbaked cookies, then the thing wouldn't be there any more, and neither would the stink. It wasn't a perfect plan, maybe it was even a dumb plan, but at least it was something to do. He had to have something to do or he was going to go nuts, yet he couldn't take one more step toward the bed, not even if the retriever hadn't been blocking his way, because he was just too scared. Numb. Dad hadn't said anything about heroes going numb. Or spitting up. Did heroes ever spit up? Because he felt as if he was going to spew. He couldn't run, either, because he'd have to turn his back to the bed. He wouldn't do that, couldn't do that. Which meant that closing his eyes and wishing the thing away was the plan, the best and only plan--except he was not in a billion years going to close his eyes. Falstaff remained between Toby and the alcove but turned to face whatever waited there. Not barking now. Not growling or whimpering. Just waiting, teeth bared, shuddering in fear but ready to fight. A hand slipped between the drapes, reaching out from the alcove. It was mostly bone in a shredded glove of crinkled leathery skin, spotted with mold. For sure, this couldn't really be alive unless you believed in it, because it was more impossible than Tinker Bell, a hundred million times more impossible. A couple of fingernails were still attached to the decaying hand, but they had turned black, looked like the gleaming shells of fat beetles. If he couldn't close his eyes and wish the thing away, if he couldn't run, he at least had to scream for his mother, humiliating as that would be for a kid who was almost nine. But then she had the machine gun, after all, not him. A wrist became visible, a forearm with a little more meat on it, the ragged and stained sleeve of a blue blouse or dress. "Mom!" He shouted the word but heard it only in his head, because no sound would escape his lips. A red-speckled black bracelet was around the withered wrist. Shiny. New-looking. Then it moved and wasn't a bracelet but a greasy worm, no, a tentacle, wrapping the wrist and disappearing along the underside of the rotting arm, beneath the dirty blue sleeve. "Mom, help!" Master bedroom. No Toby. Under the bed? In the closet, the bathroom? No, don't waste time looking. The boy might be hiding but not the dog. Must've gone to his own room. Back into the hall. Waves of heat. Wildly leaping light and shadows. The crackle-sizzle-growl-hiss of fire. Other hissing. The Giver looming. Snap-snap-snapsnap, the furious whipping of fiery tentacles. Coughing on the thin but bitter smoke, heading toward the rear of the house, the can swinging in her left hand. Gasoline sloshing. Right hand empty. Shouldn't be empty. Damn! She stopped short of Toby's room, turned to peer back into the fire and smoke. She'd forgotten the Uzi on the floor near the head of the steps. The twin magazines were empty, but her zippered ski-suit pockets bulged with spare ammunition. Stupid. Not that guns were of much use against the freaking thing. Bullets didn't harm it, only delayed it. But at least the Uzi had been something, a lot more firepower than the .38 at her hip. She couldn't go back. Hard to breathe. Getting harder. The fire sucking up all the oxygen. And the burning, lashing apparition already stood between her and the Uzi. Crazily, Heather had a mental flash of Alma Bryson loaded down with weaponry: pretty black lady, smart and kind, cop's widow, and one tough damned bitch, capable of handling anything. Gina Tendero, too, with her black leather pantsuit and red-pepper Mace and maybe an unlicensed handgun in her purse. If only they were here now, at her side. But they were down there in the City of Angels, waiting for the end of the world, ready for it, when all the time the end of the world was starting here in Montana. Billowing smoke suddenly gushed out of the flames, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, dark and churning. The Giver vanished. In seconds Heather was going to be completely blinded. Holding her breath, she stumbled along the wall toward Toby's room. She found his door and crossed the threshold, out of the worst of the smoke, just as he screamed. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO With the Mossberg twelve-gauge gripped in both hands, Jack moved eastward at an easy trot, in the manner of an infantryman in a war zone. He hadn't expected the county road to be half as clear as it was, so he was able to make better time than planned. He kept flexing his toes with each step. In spite of -two pairs of heavy socks and insulated boots, his feet were cold and getting colder. He needed to keep full circulation in them. The scar tissue and recently knitted bones in his left leg ached dully from exertion, however, the slight pain didn't hamper him. In fact, he was in better shape than he had
realized. Although the whiteout continued to limit visibility to less than a hundred feet, sometimes dramatically less, he was no longer at risk of becoming disoriented and lost. The walls of snow from the plow defined a well-marked path. The tall poles along one side of the road carried telephone and power lines, and served as another set of route markers. He figured he had covered nearly half the distance to Ponderosa Pines, but his pace was flagging. He cursed himself, pushed harder, and picked up speed. Because he was trotting with his shoulders hunched against the battering wind and his head tucked down to spare himself the sting of the hard-driven snow, looking only at the roadway immediately in front of him, he did not at first see the golden light but saw only the reflection of it in the fine, sheeting flakes. There was just a hint of yellow at first, then suddenly he might have been running through a storm of gold dust rather than a blizzard. When he raised his head, he saw a bright glow ahead, intensely yellow at its core. It throbbed mysteriously in the cloaking veils of the storm, the source obscured, but he remembered the light in the trees of which Eduardo had written in the tablet. It had pulsed like this, an eerie radiance that heralded the opening of the doorway and the arrival of the traveler. As he skidded to a halt and almost fell, the pulses of light grew rapidly brighter, and he wondered if he could hide in the drifts to one side of the road or the other. There were no throbbing bass sounds like those Eduardo had heard and felt, only the shrill keening of the wind. However, the uncanny light was everywhere, dazzling in the sunless day: Jack standing in ankle-deep gold dust, molten gold streaming through the air, the steel of the Mossberg glimmering as if about to be transmuted into bullion. He saw multiple sources now, not one light but several, pulsing out of sync, continuous yellow flashes overlaying one another. A sound above the wind. A low rumble. Building swiftly to a roar. A heavy engine. Through the whiteout, tearing apart the obscuring veils of snow, came an enormous machine. He found himself standing before an oncoming road grader adapted for snow removal, a brawny skeleton of steel with a small cab high in the center of it, pushing a curved steel blade taller than he was. Entering the cleaner air of Toby's room, blinking away tears wrung from her by the caustic smoke, Heather saw two blurry figures, one small and one not. She desperately wiped at her eyes with her free hand, squinted, and understood why the boy was screaming. Towering over Toby was a grotesquely decomposed corpse, draped in fragments of a rotted blue garment, bearing another Giver, aswarm with agitated black appendages. Falstaff sprang at the nightmare, but the writhing tentacles were quicker than they had been before, almost faster than the eye. They whipped out, snared the dog in mid-leap, and flicked him away as casually and efficiently as a cow's tail might deal with an annoying fly. Howling in terror, Falstaff flew across the room, slammed into the wall beside the window, and dropped to the floor with a squeal of pain. The .38 Korth was in Heather's hand though she didn't remember having drawn it. Before she could squeeze the trigger, the new Given-or the new aspect of the only Giver, depending on whether there was one entity with many bodies or, instead, many individuals--snared Toby in three oily black tentacles. It lifted him off the floor and drew him toward the leering grin of the long-dead woman, as if it wanted him to plant a kiss on her. With a cry of outrage, furious and terrified in equal measure, Heather rushed the thing, unable to shoot from even a few steps away because she might hit Toby. Threw herself against it. Felt one of its serpentine arms--cold even through her ski suit--curling around her waist. The stench of the corpse. Jesus. The internal organs were long gone, and extrusions of the alien were squirming within the body cavity. The head turned toward her, face-to-face, red-stipled black tendrils with spatulate tips flickering like multiple tongues in the open mouth, bristling from the bony nostrils, the eye sockets. Cold slithered all the way around her waist now. She jammed the .38 under the bony chin, bearded with graveyard moss. She was going for the head as if the head still mattered, as if a brain still packed the cadaver's cranium, she could think of nothing else to do. Toby screaming, the Giver hissing, the gun booming, booming, booming, old bones shattering to dust, the grinning skull cracking off the knobby spine and lolling to one side, the gun booming again-she lost count--then clicking, the maddening clicking of the hammer on empty chambers. When the creature let go of her, Heather almost fell on her ass because she was already straining so hard to pull loose. She dropped the gun, and it bounced across the carpet. The Giver collapsed in front of her, not because it was dead but because its puppet, damaged by gunfire, had broken apart in a couple of key places and now provided too little support to keep its soft, heavy master erect. Toby was free too. For the moment. He was white-faced, wide-eyed. He'd bitten his lip. It was bleeding. But otherwise he seemed all right. Smoke was beginning to roil into the room, not much, but she knew how abruptly it could become blindingly dense. "Go!" she said, shoving Toby toward the back stairs. "Go, go, go!" He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, and so did she, both of them reduced by terror and expediency to the locomotion of infancy. Got to the door. Pulled herself up against it. Toby at her side. Behind them was a scene out of a madman's nightmare: The Giver sprawled on the floor, resembling nothing so much as an immensely complicated octopus, although stranger and more evil than anything that had ever lived in the seas of Farth, a tangle of wriggling ropy arms. Instead of trying to reach for her and Toby, it was struggling with the disconnected bones, attempting to pull the moldering corpse together and lever itself erect on the damaged skeleton. She wrenched the doorknob, yanked. The stairhead door didn't open. Locked. On the shelf behind the alcove bed, Toby's clock radio came on all by itself, and rap music hammered them at full volume for a second or two. Then that other music. Tuneless, strange, but hypnotic. "No!" she told Toby as she struggled with the dead bolt turn. It was maddeningly stiff. "No! Tell it no!" The lock hadn't been stiff before, damn it. At the other door, the first Giver lurched out of the burning hall and through the smoke, into the room. It was still wrapped around and through what was left of Eduardo's charred corpse. Still afire. Its dark bulk was diminished. Fire had consumed part of it. The thumb-turn twisted slowly, as if the lock mechanism was rusted. Slowly. Slowly. Then: clack. But the bolt snapped into the jamb again before she could pull open the door. Toby was murmuring something. Talking. But not to her. "No!" she shouted. "No, no! Tell it no!" Grunting with the effort, Heather twisted the bolt open again and held tightly to the thumb-turn. But she felt the lock being reengaged against her will, the shiny brass slipping inexorably between her thumb and forefinger. The Giver. This was the same power that could switch on the radio. Or animate a corpse. She tried to turn the knob with her other hand, before the bolt slammed into the striker plate again, but now the knob was frozen. She gave up. Pushing Toby behind her, putting her back to the door, she faced the two creatures. Weaponless. The road grader was painted yellow from end to end. Most of the massive steel frame was exposed, with only the powerful diesel engine and the operator's cab enclosed. This no-frills worker drone looked like a big exotic insect. The grader slowed when the driver realized that a man was standing in the middle of the road, but Jack figured the guy might speed up again at first sight of the shotgun. He was prepared to run alongside the machine and board it while it was on the move. But the driver brought it to a full stop in spite of the gun. Jack ran around to the side where he could see a door on the cab about ten feet off the ground. The grader sat high on five-foot-tall tires with rubber that looked heavier and tougher than tank tread, and the guy up there was not likely to open his door and come down for a chat. He would probably just roll down his : window, keep some distance between them, have a shouted conversation above the shrieking wind--and if he heard something he didn't like, he'd tramp the accelerator and haul ass out of there. In the event that the driver wouldn't listen to reason, or wanted to waste too much time with questions, Jack was ready to climb up to the door and do whatever he had to do to get control of the grader, short of killing someone. To his surprise, the driver opened his door all the
way, leaned out, and looked down. He was a chubby guy with a full beard and longish hair sprouting under a John Deere cap. He shouted over the combined roar of the engine and the storm: "You got trouble?" "My family needs help!" "What kind of help?" Jack wasn't even going to try to explain an extraterrestrial encounter in ten words or less. "They could die, for God's sake!" "Die? Where?" "Quartermass Ranch!" "You the new fella?" "Yeah!" "Climb on up!" The guy hadn't even asked him why he was carrying a shotgun, as if everyone in Montana went nearly everywhere with a pistol-grip, pump-action twelve-gauge. Hell, maybe everyone did. Holding the shotgun in one hand, Jack hauled himself up to the cab, careful where he placed his feet, not foolish enough to try to leap up like a monkey. Dirty ice was crusted on parts of the frame. He slipped a couple of times but didn't fall. When Jack arrived at the open door, the driver reached for the shotgun to stow it inside. He gave it to the guy, even though for a moment he worried that, relieved of the Mossberg, he would get a boot in the chest and be knocked back to the roadway. The driver was a good Samaritan to the end. He stowed the gun and said, "This isn't a limousine, only one seat, kinda cramped. You'll have to swing in here behind me." The niche between the driver's seat and the back wall of the cab was less than two feet deep and five feet wide. The ceiling was low. A couple of rectangular toolboxes were on the floor, and he had to share the space with them. While the driver leaned forward, Jack squirmed headfirst into that narrow storage area and pulled his legs in after himself, sort of half lying on his side and half sitting. The driver shut the door. The rumble of the engine was still loud, and so was the whistling wind. Jack's bent knees were behind the driver, and his body was in line with the gearshift and other controls to the right of the man. If he leaned forward only inches, he could speak directly into his rescuer's ear. "You okay?" the driver asked. "Yeah." They didn't have to shout inside the cab, but they did have to raise their voices. "So tight in here," the driver said, "we may be strangers now, but by the time we get there, we'll be ready for marriage." He put the grader in gear. "Quartermass Ranch, all the way up at the main house?" "That's right." The grader lurched, then rolled smoothly forward. The plow made a cold scraping sound as it skimmed the blacktop. The vibrations passed through the frame of the grader, up through the floor, and deep into Jack's bones. Weaponless. Her back to the stairhead door. Fire was visible through the smoke at the hall doorway. Snow at the windows. Cool snow. A way out. Safety. Crash through the window, no time to open it, straight , through, onto the porch roof, roll to the lawn. Dangerous. Might work. Except they wouldn't make it that far without being dragged down. The volcanic eruption of sound from the radio was deafening. Heather couldn't think. The retriever shivered at her side, snarling and snapping at the demonic figures that threatened them, though he knew as well as she did that he couldn't save them. When she'd seen the Giver snare the dog, pitch him away, and then grab Toby, Heather had found the .38 in her hand with no memory of having drawn it. At the same time, also without realizing it, she had dropped the can of gasoline; now it stood across the room, out of reach. Gasoline might not have mattered, anyway. One of the creatures was already on fire, and that wasn't stopping it. Bodies are. Eduardo's burning corpse was reduced to charred bone, bubbling fat. All the clothes and hair had gone to ashes. And there was barely enough of the Giver left to hold the bones together, yet the macabre assemblage lurched toward her. Apparently, as long as any fragment of the alien body remained alive, its entire consciousness could be exerted through that last quiverring scrap of flesh. Madness. Chaos. The Giver was chaos, the very embodiment of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and malignancy, and madness. Chaos in the flesh, demented and strange beyond understanding. Because there was nothing to understand. That was what she believed of it now. It had no explicable purpose of existence. It lived only to live. No aspirations. No meaning except to hate. Driven by a compulsion to Become and destroy, leaving chaos behind it. A draft pulled more smoke into the room. The dog hacked, and Heather heard Toby coughing behind her. "Pull your jacket ovel your nose, breathe through your jacket!" But why did it matter whether they died by fire--or in less clean ways? Maybe fire was preferable. The other Giver, slithering on the bedroom floor among the ruins of the dead woman, suddenly shot a sinuous tentacle at Heather, snaring her ankle. She screamed. The Eduardo-thing tottered nearer, hissing. Behind her, sheltered between her and the door, Toby shouted, "Yes! All right, yes!" "Too late," she warned him; "No!" The driver of the grader was Harlan Moffit, and he lived in Eagle's Roost with his wife, Cindi -- with an i -- and his daughters, Luci and Nanci -each of those with an i as well-- and Cindi worked for the Livestock cooperative, whatever that was. They were lifelong residents of Montana and wouldn't live anywhere else. However, they'd had a lot of fun when they'd gone to Los Angeles a couple of years ago and seen Disneyland, Universal Studios and an old brokendown homeless guy being mugged by two teenagers on a corner while they were stopped at a traffic light. Visit, yes; live there, no. All this he somehow imparted by the time they had reached the turnoff at Quartermas Ranch, as he felt obliged to make Jack feel among friends and neighbors in his time of trouble, regardless of what the trouble might be. They entered the private lane at a higher speed than Jack would have thought possible, considering the depth of the snow that had accumulated in the past sixteen hours. Harlan raised the angled plow a few inches to allow the speed. "We don't need to scoop off everything down to bare dirt and maybe risk jamming up on a big bump in the road." The top three quarters of the snow cover plumed to the side. "How can you tell where the lane is?" Jack worried, because the rolling mantle of white blurred definitions. "Been here before. Then there's instinct." "Instinct?" "Plowman's instinct." "We won't get stuck?" "These tires? This engine?" Harlan was proud of his machine, and it really was churning along, rumbling through the untouched snow as if carving its way through little more than air. "Never get stuck, not with me driving. Take this baby through hell if I had to, plow away the melting brimstone and thumb my nose at the devil himself..So what's wrong up there with your family?" "Trapped," Jack said cryptically. "In snow, you mean?" "Yes." "Nothing steep enough around here for an avalanche." "Not an avalanche," Jack confirmed. They reached the hill and headed for the turn past the lower woods. The house should be in view any second. "Trapped in the snow?" Harlan said, worrying at it. He didn't look away from his work, but he frowned as if he would have liked to meet Jack's eyes. The house came into view. Almost hidden by sheeting snow but vaguely visible. Their new house. New life. New future. On fire. Earlier, at the computer, when he'd been mentally linked to the Giver but not completely in its power, Toby had gotten to know it, feeling around in its mind, being nosy, letting its thoughts slide into him while he kept saying "no" to it, and little by little he had learned about it. One of the things he learned was that it had never encountered any species that could get inside its mind the way it could force itself into the minds of other creatures, so it wasn't even aware of Toby in there, didn't feel him, thought it was all one-way communication. Hard to explain. That was the best he could do. Just sliding around in its mind, looking at things, terrible things, not a good place but dark and frightening. He hadn't thought of it as a brave thing to do, only what must be done, what Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock or Luke Skywalker or any of those guys would have done in his place or when meeting a new and hostile intelligent species out on the galactic rim. They'd have taken any advantage, added to their knowledge in any way they could. So did he. No big deal. Now, when the noise coming out of the radio urged him to open the door--just open the door and let it in, let it in, accept the pleasure and the peace, let it in--he did as it wanted, though he didn't let it enter all the way, not half as far as he entered into it. As at the computer this morning, he was now between complete freedom and enslavement, walking the brink of a chasm, careful not to let his presence be known until he was ready to strike. While the Giver was rushing into his mind, confident of overwhelming it, Toby turned the tables. He imagined that his own mind was a colossal
weight, a billion trillion tons, even heavier than that, more than the weight of all the planets in the solar system combined, and even a zillion times heavier than that, pressing down on the mind of the Giver, so much weight, crushing it, flattening it into a thin pancake and holding it there, so it could think fast and furiously but could not act on its thoughts. The thing let go of Heather's ankle. All of its sinuous and agitated appendages retracted and curled into one another, and it went still, like a massive ball of glistening intestines, four feet in diameter. The other one lost control of the burning corpse with which it was entwined. Parasite and dead host collapsed in a heap and were also motionless. Heather stood in stunned disbelief, unable to understand what had happened. Smoke churned into the room. Toby had opened the dead bolt and the stairhead door. Tugging at her, he said, "Quick, Mom." Beyond confusion, in a state of utter baffflement, she followed her son and the dog into the back stairwell and pulled the door shut, cutting off the smoke before it reached them. Toby hurried down the stairs, the dog at his heels, and Heather plunged after him as he followed the curving wall out of sight. "Honey, wait!" "No time," he called back to her. "Toby !" She was terrified about descending the stairs so recklessly, not knowing what might be ahead, assuming another of those things had to be somewhere near at hand. Three graves had been disturbed at the cemetery. In the vestibule at the bottom, the door to the back porch was still nailed shut. The door in the kitchen was wide open, and Toby was waiting for her with the dog. She would have thought her heart couldn't have beat any faster or slammed any harder than it did on the way down those stairs, but when she saw Toby's face, her pulse quickened and each lub-dub was so forceful that it sent a throb of dull pain across her breast. If he had been pale with fear, he was now a far whiter shade of pale. His face didn't look like that of a living boy so much as like a death mask of a face, rendered now in cold hard plaster as colorless as powdered lime. The whites of his eyes were gray, one pupil large and the other just a pinpoint, and his lips were bluish. He was in the grip of terror, but it wasn't terror alone that drove him. He seemed strange, haunted--and then she recognized the same fey quality that he'd exhibited when he'd been in front of the computer this morning, not in the grip of the Giver but not entirely free. Between, he had called it. "We can get it," he said. Now that she recognized his condition, she could hear the same flatness in his voice that she had heard this morning when he'd been in the thrall of that storm of colors on the IBM monitor. "Toby, what's wrong?" "I've got it." "Got what?" "It." "Got it where?" "Under." Her heart was exploding. "Under?" "Under me." Then she remembered, blinked. Amazed. "It's under you?" He nodded. So pale. "You're controlling it?" "For now." "How can that be?" she wondered. "No time. It wants loose. Very strong. Pushing hard." A glistening beadwork of sweat had appeared on his brow. He chewed his lower lip, drawing more blood. Heather raised a hand to touch him, stop him, hesitated, not sure if touching him would shatter his control. "We can get it," he repeated. Harlan damn near drove the grader into the house, halting the plow inches from the railing, casting a great crashing wave of snow onto the front porch. He leaned forward in his seat to let Jack squeeze out of the storage area behind him. "You go, take care of your people. I'll call the depot, get a fire company out here." Even as Jack went through the high door and dismounted from the grader, he heard Harlan Moffit on the cellular system, talking to his dispatcher. He had never known fear like this before, not even when Anson Oliver had opened fire at Arkadian's service station, not even when he'd realized something was speaking through Toby in the graveyard yesterday, never a fear half this intense, with his stomach knotted so tightly it hurt, a surge of bitter bile in the back of his throat, no sound in the world but the pile-driving thunder of his own heart. Because this wasn't just his life on the line. More important lives were involved here. His wife, in whom his past and future resided, the keeper of all his hopes. His son, born of his own heart, whom he loved more than he loved himself, immeasurably more. From outside, at least, the fire appeared to be confined to the second floor. He prayed that Heather and Toby weren't up there, that they were on the lower floor or out of the house altogether. He vaulted the porch railing and kicked through the snow that had been thrown up against the front wall by the plow. The door was standing open in the wind. When he crossed the threshold, he found tiny drifts beginning to form among the pots and pans and dishes that were scattered along the front hall. No gun. He had no gun. He'd left it in the grader. Didn't matter. If they were dead, so was he. Fire totally engulfed the stairs from the first landing upward, and it was swiftly spreading down from tread to tread toward the hallway, flowing almost like a radiant liquid. He could see well because drafts were sucking nearly all the smoke up and out the roof: no flames in the study, none beyond the living-room or dining-room archways. "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 and 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.
Dean Koontz - (1994) Page 3