"My own. My children!"
Through the image of his mother, as if this were her skeleton, he saw the creature rear up, its shriveled wings beating against the fetid air.
Joe said, "What, are you going to kill me now? Go ahead, damn it, just do it! You've taken everything away from me, you hear me? Everything! My wife, my son, my daughter, my little girl, how—you could do that to a little girl!" He could no longer weep. All he could do was scream and slam his fist into the rock floor.
When he quieted down, his mother said, "They are all here, for they are in my blood, they live, Joe, all of them, and Melissa, too. I will give you a taste."
From between her lips, a proboscis shot out and fell across his neck. He felt a brief, sharp pain at his throat. He wondered if this was what mainlining heroin was like, for suddenly he felt lighter, and happier, and he was sitting on a grassy knoll with Jenny, who held Hillary on her knee. Out by the river, Aaron was catching a Frisbee that Joe himself had just tossed him.
Jenny looked up at Joe and said, "It's about time you relaxed and enjoyed your surroundings a little, Joe."
But it was no longer Jenny, but Melissa, settling Hillary down on the grass, turning, standing, reaching for Joe, pressing her lips against his ear and whispering, no one dies here, Joe. No one.
Joe bit down as hard as he could on his tongue. The pain jolted him back into the golden aura of the creature. "It's all a fake," Joe spat out. "It's a show so that I'll give you what you want. Did you do this to the kids? Did you take Patty Glass and get her to see her folks? Or my son—did you let him think he was going to join Mommy in heaven? Is that why you started out with children? Because they're easy. But adults, we're harder. We aren't so happy to give up our lives, are we? We're not so easily fooled."
His mother came closer to him, kneeling beside him. "Children believe, Joe. Their belief gives them power. Their power gives me strength. You believe, too, Joe, no matter how you fight it. You believe in me, don't you?"
"No," Joe said. "I don't believe you have any real power, if that's what you mean. I believe you prey on the weak and the young. Like a jackal. You know about jackals? They go for carcasses, too, and children, and the sick, and the helpless. Maybe you're just a jackal, or worse. Maybe your own kind imprisoned you here so that they would never have to deal with you again."
His mother's breath was sweet, like apple blossoms. She stroked his scalp. "Oh, my baby. You were the only one I spoke through. I trusted you because I knew you believed. I could drink your blood now, Joe, if I so choose. I could take the life from you. My sweet baby boy."
"Then do it. Do it!" Joe shouted, wrenching his neck—the pain was white hot as a sucker tore at the flesh around his jaw. "Do it right now and when my blood is inside you, you bastard, I will make you suffer through eternity for what you've done to everything I've ever loved!"
He drew himself to the creature and when he was close enough, it was no longer a monster or his mother, but Melissa stroking his scalp as he lay, head in her lap, in the back of his truck. The sky was purple. Night was coming. Melissa had daisies pressed into her tangled hair. She smiled at him and he grinned because he had never been so in love in all his life as when he'd been a teenager, never had he felt such an incorruptible bond of love. Her smile broke apart and she said, "Just think, we're getting married soon and we'll get the hell out of here and you'll write novels and I'll do... whatever it is I'm going to do."
She brought her hand down to his chin. She rubbed her fingers against it. "You cut yourself shaving? You've got a scar."
"Oh, probably," he said, caught up in the vision, and then, feeling the soreness on his neck, "You're not Melissa, though, are you? You are a phantom, a delusion. You're just that thing in the mine, sucking my blood out."
She giggled. "You're right. But you don't mind, do you? It's not so bad. If you needed human blood to escape from your prison and find your only child, wouldn't you make some sacrifices?"
"I guess so. But you want to know something?"
Melissa raised her eyebrows, as if she couldn't tell what was on his mind.
"I know something about you that you don't even know. I know about believing in things. If I believe in this vision of you, and being in the truck, I am at your mercy. The old guy was right—Virgil was right. But the reason why you've mainly gone after children before now is that you could use their belief. But see, I know something you don't. I have an imagination like a child, but I have the mastery of someone who can shape my imagination. I can believe what I want. And what I believe right now is that you may be drinking my blood, but I am drinking yours in return. And your blood is belief, that's why the crosses can keep you down, that's why you can be imprisoned. It's not because you are some Christian devil, it's because it's part of your makeup to believe in everything, isn't it? You can't not believe."
Melissa's flesh began running, bleeding skin against her nose, her eyes dribbling together like runny eggs.
It was his mother again. Anna Gardner brought her face close to his. Pressed her lips against his lips.
Opened his lips with her tongue.
He pushed her away.
"You can't not believe. So here is my religion, here is my belief," Joe gasped, and felt it to be true in his innermost being. "I believe that my blood is poison to your kind. I believe that it is like drinking your own child's blood, I believe you are burning your throat with my blood, fucker!"
The vision raked itself away and he was again in the sputtering light of the cavern. Above him, the creature's body pumped and had sent shoots of its own flesh into him, into his arms, legs, stomach, thighs, forehead, neck, and through the peristaltic pulsing of the fleshy shoots, Joe knew that the creature would quickly drain him of blood in minutes.
I'm going to die, die, die.
And then, something rose up in his memory, the little boy who lived within him, dormant all these years, the little boy who had somehow managed to terrify this creature before:
King Joe Dragonheart. He saw the boy, eleven, with a crown on his head, a knight's armor on, a flaming sword of valor and belief in his hands—
He was no longer face to face with the creature, It was now a dragon, breathing fire, Its long neck wriggling as It regained Its strength—
I need more belief, I need more belief—
King Joe Dragonheart felt her, suddenly, not a voice, not even a face, but her, Melissa, inside him as if she had never died, and Hopfrog, too, there with him, not grown-up, but as they were kids, brave and faithful, in the Feely barn, enveloped in the gold light. What struck Joe like lightning next, what illuminated the mystery of his existence, was the simple fact: we turned the dragon's own belief back on it... we reversed its own power...
He felt weak, but he kept the thought in his mind, the belief that became belief, not just his own, but King Joe Dragonheart's, and Melissa's, and Hopfrog's, all of their power as children—the light within him created a world in which he was more powerful than the alien, powerful light strength—
Joe imagined the children helping him, too, all the dead and lost children throughout the history of Colony, coming back with a united belief in the destruction of this fiend—I am your betrayer, I am the one who has come to end your suffering.
And then, Joe realized he was about to pass out.
He prayed that his blood sacrifice was the venom for which there would be no antidote. (I am a snake, a cobra, a rattler, and you milk your own doom, you press my teeth against your skin and draw into your veins the last of me, which is the last of you, like karma, like justice, his mind railed as he slipped into darkness, and then he barely saw his son, Aaron, shouting at the creature, I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you do bounces off me and sticks to you, until Aaron and the world and all of life, apparently, was snuffed out.)
And when the light came up for Joe Gardner, he was kind of hoping he'd be in heaven, or at least somewhere warm. Instead, he was right back with that Thing, its thousand eyes watching
him, its limbs scrambling in the earth trying to move, its wings beating against the stale air.
The creature was fading, as if it had lost any power it had ever possessed.
It cried out, "My children, my children!" and then the words became some otherworldly language, a language of flickering lights and sparks and gasps.
Joe had no energy left.
He watched as the light around the creature faded, and when he was sure it was dead, when the wings had stilled beside its body, he opened his mouth to cry out for help, but his voice failed him.
What had been the creature, the Beast, became as insubstantial as light itself.
Joe watched as a flash of light burst, small and feeble from the place where the creature had been trapped.
He too, waited to die, happy, at least, that he had saved Tad and Becky.
7
When he awoke again, it was Becky, with a spike in her hand, leaning over him.
She said, "Joe? Joe?"
"Becky," he gasped. "I'm alive. I'm Joe. I'm not a vampire. Don't kill me, please."
8
When he awoke a third time, he was above ground, and a light powdery snow was falling from a morning sky.
Becky was looking down at him, as was Tad, who said, "I knew you'd do it. Dad always said you could do anything, if you put your mind to it. He was right about you."
Joe whispered, his voice like a scrape of pain. "It's snowing. Look."
Becky, her eyes circled with dark, her hair greasy and stringy from having come through a nightmare, shushed him. "You're all scarred up, Joe. You've lost some blood. You crawled all that way up the stairs, bleeding the whole time. I thought you were a goner. You need to rest."
"Did it die—that monster?"
"I saw a light, a funnel of light, like a cyclone, and it swept from the house outside," she said, as if she had just undergone a religious conversion and now believed in something larger than life itself.
9
Several hours later, late in the day, he sat up in some sort of rough bed—it seemed to be all straw sticking in his back. He glanced up—it was Old Man Feely's barn.
When he felt a bit stronger, he stood up on unsteady legs and went to find the survivors.
When he found Becky, sitting on the Feely front porch, rocking Tad in her arms, he hugged her and wept. She wept, too.
"Is it over?" she asked.
"I don't know. Its body is destroyed. I think so, anyway. Why take chances?"
"I'm so tired," she said. "I am so damn tired."
"You and Tad sleep for now. It'll be night in a couple of hours. There may be some of the children left. I'll burn them. If others come, I'll be ready for them," Joe said.
But he was exhausted, too, and not even feeling as if he were alive. Inside him, it felt as if something brilliant, some fire, had been sucked from his soul, and now he was just an animal living on instinct. He trusted no one. He walked the mother and child back to the barn, checking to make sure all the crosses were in place.
Tad, who had been feverish, lay down beside his mother in the barn. Joe wrapped them in a blanket and two coats from the trunk of the Buick. One of the coats had been Jenny's. He brought it to his face, pressing into it for brief comfort before laying it across Tad's sleeping body.
Becky whispered, "I almost just want to die. I just don't think I can go on. Not one more night."
Joe wanted to tell her that there was still hope, but he felt that there was none. It was as if the light of the universe had been doused.
He knew that he had to stand watch during this night, in case It was still there.
In case the dragon was not through with them.
He knew that if he were smart, if he were sane anymore, he would get Becky and Tad and get the hell out of that place. But there was something inside him, something he could not name or describe, something which he could only think of as a vague hope, a wish, a prayer for a miracle.
He glanced up at John Feely's workbench, in the shadows. The tools John, and perhaps his father and grandfather, had used for over a century to keep Its creations from multiplying: screwdrivers and mallets and spikes and hacksaws, alongside crucifixes and ankhs fashioned from horseshoes.
The power of belief. Not the creature's belief, but the belief of those who held the instruments. It was not the cross or the ancient symbols which held power, it was John Feely, believing completely in them, having a faith like a child's imagination. Joe remembered a biblical quote: Whosever shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as a child shall never enter therein. That's what it took to stop the monster, a belief so strong as to be nearly incomprehensible.
That's why it took over children. They were fountains of belief, towers of faith. They believed in God and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Bogeyman and Vampires and even the World—they believed so strongly that the World was the right place to be.
It had been the foulest of creatures, to use children, not because of their blood or their flesh, but because of their souls—their souls had been the fuel It used to move through Time, to find Its own children, lost millennia ago, destroyed, no doubt by some early ancestor of man who had been given the gift of belief in order to protect himself from such intruders.
Exhausted, Joe sat down beside the sleepers and wept for all the children who had been lost to It, not the least of them, his own.
Without realizing it, he fell asleep again, and something warned him, a voice buzzing around in his head, that they were still out there, the children, the ones who were left, the ones who were still servants to the devil which he had destroyed.
He dreamed that his son came for him and was drinking the first blood from the tip of his finger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IN THE BEGINNING
Joe awoke suddenly, brought to consciousness by a smell.
Another sense, too, something he'd acquired recently, nothing specific, more instinct than sense, something within him that told him his quarry was near. It was as if he had a radar for some of them—maybe if you know them, you sense them, or maybe (heh-heh, my insane friend) they sense you and send out unseen feelers to find you.
He reached for the mallet. It was still there, beneath the rags he'd used as a pillow. His whole body was soaked with sweat from whatever fever dream had been buzzing inside his head. He wiped the back of his neck with his left hand. His neck and legs were sore.
How long had he been asleep? Sleep was a problem. After all he'd been through, his body was wearing him down, forcing him to sleep too much. And he was supposed to be on watch. He had appointed himself the one who would not sleep and the last thing he remembered was he had been sitting up, listening for them, waiting for them. Somehow, he'd been tricked into falling asleep.
He trusted no one now. Joe was careful not to wake the others as he rose up from the straw. Only three of them left. Only three. Me, Tad, Becky. His side still ached from a recent wound. He managed to force the pain down deep into his flesh, to forever pretend that the pain was only a vestige of some past incarnation. Had to bite his lip, too, because when he finally stood, it felt as if his legs would buckle and he'd fall again. He held onto the edge of a wooden post that was draped with chains and hooks.
Blood had dried on one of the larger hooks; blood and some hair. Maybe some skin, too, matted with the hair and blood, or maybe he was so used to the gruesome by now that he imagined it everywhere.
He glanced at the others. He didn't want to alarm them with what he was about to do. He was still not positive that any of them were who they claimed to be. The sleeping forms, wrapped in blankets and straw. They didn't have the smell to them, but he mistrusted his own senses more than anyone or anything.
He moved silently through the workroom, grabbing the tool belt from its peg on the cork wall. He could've taken a gun. There were plenty to go around, a veritable arsenal, but a gun never seemed to do the job right. What he had learned in the past twenty-four hours was that it was not enough just
to do it and walk away—it took some time, it took patience, this kind of job. You had to watch them suffer before you knew they were truly dead.
He hefted a mallet in his right hand, swung it back and forth as if it were an old friend, and walked out the barn door. His palm was sweating around the mallet—he wondered when the mallet would become a part of him, melded into his flesh, until he was, himself, no longer a man, but a function of something higher—a tool of flesh and blood and wood and steel. He had never had much religious sense, but sometimes the voices told him what to do, sometimes he believed what they said. Sometimes he thought he was meant to be here, this time, this place, this hour.
The light was hazy, not dark yet, and he knew that if he was going to kill them it was going to have to be dark, because he wanted to look into their eyes and see the thing that he was killing—not them, but what was behind them, what gave them their inspiration. He tried not to think of them as Them, with a big T, because it was making him nervous as hell to even think about what they were without adding the larger fear to it. What if I'm crazy? What if I'm one of those psycho killers who imagines that everyone else is a them?—a fleeting thought, through his brain; he ignored it.
It would've been almost impossible to find them in daylight, anyway, but at night, hell, they'd come to him. They'd approach as if they were supplicants coming to the altar and he'd just take them out.
Well, it wouldn't be that simple.
He'd probably get some fight out of at least one of them, maybe all. Who wanted to get his head bashed in, anyway? He knew he was crazy, thinking these things, but what was a man to do? He couldn't just let it all go, all the hurt, and give in. When you give in, they get you. When you give in, they take you over and do things to you you don't want done, they get you over to their side, and then everything looks different.
The trees leaned, cowed by the strong wind, as if his arrival had made them bow down. But you're not God, remember that, a voice told him, you're just you, and you're going to look them in the eyes, one at a time, and you're going to have to bash them and spear them and they're going to know you, what you're thinking, they're going to have already half crawled into your brain, punching buttons as if you're a computer until they find out what's on your mind, and then they're going to do whatever they can to stop you.
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