Jessie walked slowly and carefully across the room on her trembling legs, once again holding out her left hand to steady her balance. The hallway beyond the bedroom door was a carousel of moving shadows with the door to the guest bedroom standing open on the right and the small spare room Gerald used as a study standing open on the left. Farther down on the left was the archway which gave on the kitchen and living room. On the right was the unlatched back door... the Mercedes ... and maybe freedom.
Fifty steps, she thought. Can't be any more than that, and it's probably less. So get going, okay?
But at first she just couldn't. Bizarre as it would undoubtedly seem to someone who hadn't been through what she had been through during the last twenty-eight hours or so, the bedroom represented a kind of dour safety to her. The hallway, however... anything might be lurking out there. Anything. Then something which sounded like a thrown stone thudded against the west side of the house, just outside the window. Jessie uttered her own small howl of terror before realizing it was just the branch of the hoary old blue spruce out there by the deck.
Get hold of yourself, Punkin said sternly. Get hold of yourself and get out of here.
She tottered gamely onward, left arm still out, counting steps under her breath as she went. She passed the guest bedroom at twelve. At fifteen she reached Gerald's study, and as she did, she began to hear a low, toneless hissing sound, like steam escaping a very old radiator. At first Jessie did not associate the sound with the study; she thought she was making it herself. Then, as she was raising her right foot to make the sixteenth step, the sound intensified. This time it registered more clearly, and Jessie realized she couldn't be the one making it, because she was holding her breath.
Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head toward the study, where her husband would never again work on legal briefs while he chain-smoked Marlboros and sang old Beach Boys hits under his breath. The house was groaning around her like an old ship plowing through a moderately heavy sea, creaking in its various joints as the wind shouldered against it with cold air. Now she could hear a clapping shutter as well as the banging door, but these sounds were somewhere else, in some other world where wives were not handcuffed and husbands did not refuse to listen and night-creatures did not stalk. She could hear the muscles and tendons in her neck creaking like old bedsprings as she turned her head. Her eyes throbbed in their sockets like chunks of hot charcoal.
I don't want to look! her mind screamed. I don't want to look, I don't want to see!
But she was helpless not to look. It was as if strong invisible hands were turning her head while the wind gusted and the back door banged and the shutter clapped and the dog once more sent its desolate, bone-chilling howl spiralling into the black October sky. Her head turned until she was looking into her dead husband's study, and yes, sure enough, there it was, a tall figure standing beside Gerald's Eames chair and in front of the sliding glass door. Its narrow white face hung in the darkness like a stretched skull. The dark, squarish shadow of its souvenir case squatted between its feet.
She drew in breath to scream with, but what came out was a sound like a teakettle with a broken whistle: "Huhhh-aaahhhhhhh."
Only that and nothing more.
Somewhere, in that other world, hot urine was running down her legs; she had wet her pants for a second record-breaking day. The wind gusted in that other world, making the house shiver on its bones. The blue spruce knocked its branch against the west wall again. Gerald's study was a lagoon of dancing shadows, and it was once more very difficult to tell what she was seeing ... or if she was in fact seeing anything at all.
The dog raised its keen, horrified cry again and Jessie thought: Oh, you're seeing it, all right. Maybe not as well as the dog out there is smelling it, but you are seeing it.
As if to remove any lingering doubts she might have had on this score, her visitor poked its head forward in a kind of parody of inquisitiveness, giving Jessie a clear but mercifully brief look at it. The face was that of an alien being that has tried to mimic human features without much success. It was too narrow, for one thing--narrower than any face Jessie had ever seen in her life. The nose seemed to have no more thickness than a butter-knife. The high forehead bulged like a grotesque garden bulb. The thing's eyes were simple black circles below the thin upside-down V's of its brows; its pudgy, liver-colored lips seemed to be simultaneously pouting and melting.
No, not melting, she thought with the bright narrow lucidity that sometimes lives, like the glowing filament in a lightbulb, within a sphere of complete terror. Not melting, smiling. It's trying to smile at me.
Then it bent over to grasp its case, and its narrow, incoherent face was mercifully lost from view again. Jessie staggered back a step, tried to scream again, and could only produce another loose, glassy whisper. The wind moaning around the eaves was louder.
Her visitor straightened up again, holding the case with one hand and unlatching it with the other. Jessie realized two things, not because she wanted to but because her mind's ability to pick and choose what it would sense had been completely demolished. The first had to do with the smell she had noted earlier. It wasn't garlic or onions or sweat or dirt. It was rotting flesh. The second had to do with the creature's arms. Now that she was closer and could see better (she wished it weren't so, but it was), they impressed her more forcibly--freakish, elongated things that seemed to waver in the wind-driven shadows like tentacles. They presented the case to her as if for her approval, and now Jessie saw it was not a travelling salesman's case but a wicker box that looked like an oversized fisherman's creel.
I've seen a box like that before, she thought. I don't know if it was on some old TV show or in real life, but I have. When I was just a little girl. It came out of a long black car with a door in the back.
A soft and sinister UFO voice suddenly spoke up inside her. Once upon a time, Jessie, when President Kennedy was still alive and all little girls were Punkins and the plastic body-bag had yet to be invented--back in the Time of the Eclipse, let us say--boxes like this were common. They came in all sizes, from Men's Extra Large to Six-Month Miscarriage. Your friend keeps his souvenirs in an old-fashioned mortician's body-box, Jessie.
As she realized this, she realized something else, as well. It was perfectly obvious, once you thought about it. The reason her visitor smelled so bad was because it was dead. The thing in Gerald's study wasn't her father, but it was a walking corpse, just the same.
No ... no, that can't be--
But it was. She had smelled exactly the same thing on Gerald, not three hours ago. Had smelled it in Gerald, simmering in his flesh like some exotic disease which can only be caught by the dead.
Now her visitor was opening the box again and holding it out to her, and once again she saw the golden glitters and diamond flashes amid the heaps of bones. Once again she watched as the narrow dead man's hand reached in and began to stir the contents of the wicker body-box--a box which had perhaps once held the corpses of infants or very small children. Once again she heard the tenebrous click and whisk of bones, a sound like dirt-clogged castanets.
Jessie stared, hypnotized and almost ecstatic with terror. Her sanity was giving way; she could feel it going, almost hear it, and there wasn't a thing on God's green earth she could do about it.
Yes there is! You can run! You have to run, and you have to do it now!
It was Punkin, and she was shrieking... but she was also a long way off, lost in some deep stone gorge in Jessie's head. There were lots of gorges in there, she was discovering, and lots of dark, twisty canyons and caves that had never seen the light of the sun--places where the eclipse never ended, you might say. It was interesting. Interesting to find that a person's mind was really nothing but a graveyard built over a black hollow place with freakish reptiles like this crawling around the bottom. Interesting.
Outside, the dog howled again, and Jessie finally found her voice. She howled with it, a doglike sound from which most of her sanity
had been subtracted. She could imagine herself making sounds like that in some madhouse. Making them for the rest of her life. She found she could imagine that very easily.
Jessie, no! Hold on! Hold onto your mind and run! Run away!
Her visitor was grinning at her, its lips wrinkling away from its gums, once again revealing those glimmers of gold at the back of its mouth, glimmers that reminded her of Gerald. Gold teeth. It had gold teeth, and that meant it was--
It means it's real, yes, but we've already established that, haven't we? The only question left is what you're going to do now. Got any ideas, Jessie? If you do, you better trot them out, because time has gotten awfully short.
The apparition stepped forward, still holding its case open, as if it expected her to admire the contents. It was wearing a necklace, she saw--some weird sort of necklace. The thick, unpleasant smell was growing stronger. So was that unmistakable feeling of malevolence. Jessie tried to take a compensatory step back for the one the visitor had taken toward her, and found that she couldn't move her feet. It was as if they had been glued to the floor.
It means to kill you, toots, Ruth said, and Jessie understood this was true. Are you going to let it? There was no anger or sarcasm in Ruth's voice now, only curiosity. After all that's happened to you, are you really going to let it?
The dog howled. The hand stirred. The bones whispered. The diamonds and rubies Rashed their dim night-fire.
Hardly aware of what she was doing, let alone why she was doing it, Jessie grasped her own rings, the ones on the third finger of her left hand, with the wildly trembling thumb and forefinger of her right. The pain across the back of that hand as she squeezed was dim and distant. She had worn the rings almost constantly across all the days and years of her marriage, and the last time she'd taken them off, she'd had to soap her finger. Not this time. This time they slid off easily.
She held her bloody right hand out to the creature, who had now come all the way to the bookcase just inside the entrance to the study. The rings lay on her palm in a mystic figure eight below the makeshift sanitary napkin bandage. The creature stopped. The smile on its pudgy, misshapen mouth faltered into some new expression which might have been anger or only confusion.
"Here," Jessie said in a harsh, choked growl. "Here, take them. Take them and leave me alone."
Before the creature could move, she threw the rings at the open case as she had once thrown coins at the EXACT CHANGE baskets on the New Hampshire Turnpike. There was less than five feet between them now, the mouth of the case was large, and both rings went in. She distinctly heard the double click as her wedding and engagement bands fell against the bones of strangers.
The thing's lips wrinkled back from its teeth again, and it once more began to utter that sibilant, creamy hiss. It took another step forward, and something--something which had been lying stunned and unbelieving on the floor of her mind--awoke.
"No!" she screamed. She turned and went lurching up the hallway while the wind gusted and the door banged and the shutter clapped and the dog howled and it was right behind her, it was, she could hear that hissing sound, and at any moment it would reach out for her, a narrow white hand floating at the end of a fantastic arm as long as a tentacle, she would feel those rotting white fingers close on her throat--
Then she was at the back door, she was opening it, she was spilling out onto the stoop and tripping over her own right foot; she was falling and somehow reminding herself even as she went down to turn her body so she would land on her left side. She did, but still hit hard enough to see stars. She rolled over onto her back, lifted her head, and stared at the door, expecting to see the narrow white face of the space cowboy loom behind the screen. It didn't, and she could no longer hear the hissing sound, either. Not that those things meant much; it could hurtle into view at any second, seize her, and tear her throat out.
Jessie struggled to her feet, managed one step, and then her legs, trembling with a combination of shock and blood-loss, betrayed her and spilled her back to the planks next to the wire-covered compartment which held the garbage. She moaned and looked up at the sky, where clouds filigreed by a moon three-quarters full were racing from west to east at lunatic speed. Shadows rolled across her face like fabulous tattoos. Then the dog howled again, sounding much closer now that she was outside, and that provided the tiny bit of extra incentive she needed. She reached up to the garbage compartment's low sloped top with her left hand, felt around for the handle, and used it to haul herself to her feet. Once she was up, she held the handle tightly until the world stopped swaying. Then she let go and walked slowly toward the Mercedes, now holding out both arms for balance.
How like a skull the house looks in the moonlight! she marvelled following her first wide-eyed, frantic look back. How very like a skull! The door is its mouth, the windows are its eyes, the shadows of the trees are its hair ...
Then another thought occurred, and it must have been amusing, because she screamed laughter into the windy night.
And the brain--don't forget the brain. Gerald's the brain, of course. The house's dead and rotting brain.
She laughed again as she reached the car, louder than ever, and the dog howled in answer. My dog has fleas, they bite his knees, she thought. Her own knees buckled and she grabbed the doorhandle to keep from falling down in the driveway, and she never stopped laughing as she did it. Exactly why she was laughing was beyond her. She might understand if the parts of her mind which had shut down in self-defense ever woke up again, but that wasn't going to happen until she got out of here. If she ever did.
"I imagine I'll need a transfusion, too, eventually," she said, and that caused another outburst of laughter. She reached clumsily across to her right pocket with her left hand, still laughing. She was feeling around for the key when she realized the smell was back, and that the creature with the wicker case was standing right behind her.
Jessie turned her head, laughter still in her throat and a grin still twitching her lips, and for a moment she did see those narrow cheeks and rapt, bottomless eyes. But she only saw them because of
(the eclipse)
how afraid she was, not because there was really anything there; the back stoop was still deserted, the screen door a tall rectangle of darkness.
But you better hurry, Goodwife Burlingame said. Yes, you better make like a hockey player while you still can, don't you think?
"Going to make like an amoeba and split," Jessie agreed, and laughed some more as she pulled the key out of her pocket. It almost slipped through her fingers, but she caught it by the oversized plastic fob. "You sexy thing," Jessie said, and laughed hilariously as the door banged and the dead cowboy specter of love came charging out of the house in a dirty white cloud of bone-dust, but when she turned (almost dropping the key again in spite of the oversized fob), there was nothing there. It was only the wind which had banged the door--only that and nothing more.
She opened the driver's door, slid behind the wheel of the Mercedes, and managed to pull her trembling legs in after her. She slammed the door and, as she pushed down the master-lock which locked all the other doors (plus the trunk, of course; there was really nothing in the world quite like German efficiency), an inexpressible sense of relief washed over her. Relief and something else. That something else felt like sanity, and she thought she had never felt anything in her life which could compare with its sweet and perfect return... except for that first drink of water from the tap, of course. Jessie had an idea that was going to end up being the all-time champeen.
How close was I to going mad in there? How close, really?
That might not be a thing you ever want to know for sure, toots, Ruth Neary returned gravely.
No, maybe not. Jessie stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing happened.
The last of the laughter dried up, but she didn't panic; she still felt sane and relatively whole. Think, Jessie. She did, and the answer came almost at once. The Mercedes was getting along in yea
rs (she wasn't sure they ever really got anything so vulgar as old), and the transmission had started doing some annoying little tricks lately, German efficiency or no German efficiency. One of them was a failure to start sometimes unless the driver shoved up on the shift-lever poking out of the console between the bucket seats, and shoved up hard. Turning the ignition key while pushing up on the transmission lever was an operation which would take both hands, and her right was already throbbing horribly. The thought of using it to shove on the transmission lever made her cringe, and not just because of the pain. She was quite sure it would also cause the deep incision across her inner wrist to break open again.
"Please God, I need a little help here," Jessie whispered, and turned the ignition key again. Still nothing. Not even a click. And now a new idea stole into her head like a nasty-tempered little burglar: her inability to start the car had nothing at all to do with the little glitch that had developed in the transmission. This was more of her visitor's work. It had cut the telephone lines; it had also raised the hood of the Mercedes long enough to rip off the distributor cap and throw it into the woods.
The door banged. She glanced nervously in that direction, quite sure that she had seen its white, grinning face in the darkness of the doorway for just a moment. In another moment or two it would come out. It would grab a rock and smash the car window, then take one of the thick slivers of safety glass and--
Jessie reached across her waist with her left hand and shoved the knob of the transmission lever as hard as she could (although it did not, in truth, seem to move much at all). Then she reached clumsily through the lower arc of the steering wheel with her right hand, grasped the ignition key, and turned it again.
More nothing. Except for the silent, chuffing laughter of the monster that was watching her. That she could hear quite clearly, even if only in her mind.
"Please, God, can't I have just one fucking break?" she screamed. The transmission lever wiggled a little under her palm, and when Jessie turned the key over to the Start position this time, the engine roared to life--Ja. mein Fuhrer! She sobbed with relief and turned on the headlights. A pair of brilliant orange-yellow eyes glared at her from the driveway. She screamed, feeling her heart trying to tear itself loose of its plumbing, cram itself into her throat, and strangle her. It was the dog, of course--the stray who had been, in a manner of speaking, Gerald's last client.