I was sure it would slam through the window glass, clutch me in its teeth, and devour me. I watched its body tense, its eyes go deep and wide with hunger—
“Jase? Can you see anything?” Emily called from out front.
The beast gave a sudden unearthly howl and leapt away from the window.
“My God,” I gasped, and then I was running for the living room. “Emily!” I screamed. “No!”
She was just nudging her way past the Christmas tree when the front picture window exploded toward her. She never had a chance to raise the shotgun. There was an implosion of glass and wood frame as the window shattered.
It was over almost before it began. There was a blur of movement—huge yellow eyes, piranha-like teeth, upraised claws, a dark-haired body. Its mouth was open impossibly wide. It made an unearthly sound, something between a scream and a howl of triumph, and Emily was engulfed by the beast.
There was no chance to save her. I had barely taken a step toward her when the thing’s paws had lowered in frightfully swift arcs, talons extended like sabers, and blood exploded around her. Then its teeth were upon her. She didn’t even have time to cry out. The shotgun dropped uselessly to the floor at her feet, followed by her severed arms. Then the rest of her seemed to disappear in a haze of blood and ripped flesh. I saw her dying eyes turn to find Richie, and then she was gone. The monster fell to her corpse like a mongrel crazed with hunger and death lust.
Despite the horror of what I had seen, my only thought was to save my son. I lifted Richie from the couch and ran to the kitchen, throwing open the door to the cellar. I snapped on the light and struggled to secure the door behind me. I felt how flimsy it was; a cheap security lock set into a glued sandwich of wood chip and veneered oak. It would barely hold back a grammar-school child, never mind the raving horror that at this moment stood howling in my living room.
I turned the lock on the outside of the door and closed it nevertheless. Cradling my son, I brought him down and lay him on an old couch that butted one wall of the rumpus room I had put together. I ran to the workshop at the other end of the cellar, grabbed two strong two-by-fours and an armful of wood pieces scattered about along with nails and a hammer.
I bounded up the stairs and pounded the two-by-fours across the door, then nailed the smaller pieces around the circumference. It was the best I could do, but I doubted it would be enough. Sounds still issued from the front room of the house. I returned to the rumpus room to find Richie asleep, his breathing regular.
I put my hand gently on his head. “Oh, Richie,” I said, and suddenly I began to tremble.
Shock is an inefficient biological method of protection. There is a threshold of terror beyond which shock will dissolve and throw the patient into a more heightened reality.
I sat helpless on the edge of the couch, the one my wife and I had bought the week before our marriage, the one we had had our first argument over (a silly fight over fabric, corduroy versus a silky rose pattern she favored; she had won, and for the next year I harbored a barely hidden resentment that sometimes flared into outright ammunition during subsequent fights), and now, though my own death be near, all I could think of was that fight, and how I had acted like a schoolboy after losing. I had once written of that other Emily, Emily Dickinson, transmuting my love for my wife into a feigned bond with the dead poet of Amherst:
~ * ~
Emily—
Do I know you?
Do I really feel
What I believe?
Your life was mine—
Your hundred-year bones
Lie with me now.
Were you tortured, shy?
Or was your anguish deeper still—
A boldness of mind
Encased in dreadful face?
Can I say these things without a lie?
Were your dashes all mistakes—
Archaic device—
Or rather helpless insecurities Caught in vain ice?
~ * ~
And now my own Emily was gone.
It was an inconceivable blow, smitten on an inconceivable night.
In that place beyond shock, I did lose control of myself, then. Life, I decided, was not to be lived without my Emily. The hammer was on the floor next to me; I remember rising, and concluding that it would be best to walk calmly up the steps, remove the impediments to the door’s opening, and throw it wide, inviting my own extinction. And, I remember thinking ironically, in that strange state I was in, if religion be right after all, I would enjoy an immediate reunion with my beloved.
I believe I reached the first step of the cellar stairs before the final image of my wife’s face, as she had turned to Richie, striving for his salvation, rose before me. To do what I contemplated, even in madness, would be a betrayal beyond forgiveness.
And then my son called me, and I dropped the hammer, all thoughts of destruction and betrayal banished.
“Dad,” he murmured. It was a weak summons, but it might as well have been a cry from a mountaintop for the joy and hope it gave me.
I dropped the hammer and rushed back to his side. He was lost behind the swirling, feverish mists of his eyes, but then he found his way back to clarity.
He panted my name and then he added, “They…”
“What is it, Richie?” I held him as he receded to delirium. I could almost feel him fighting unconsciousness.
His eyes cleared, and suddenly he was Richie again. For a moment I thought that he was going to laugh. But his mouth was twisted in terror, and my cry of thanks for the return of my son froze on my lips as he stared wildly into my eyes and pleaded, “Kill me. Oh, God. Dad, kill me!”
His eyes clouded, then closed, and he went limp in my arms.
I thought I had lost him. But his even breath told me that he was asleep. I laid him down and sat stroking his head, thinking of what he had said. Delirium must still hold him. I thought of the beast that had done this to him.
I picked up the hammer, but this time it was to face and kill whatever chose to break through my feeble defenses and try to take my son from me.
CHAPTER 3
Lull
But nothing came. And that was, in many ways, worse than facing the thing that had leapt through the front window of my house.
As the minutes wore on, I realized just how vulnerable we were. There were foundation windows around the cellar, five in all, and any one of them would provide easy entry. One blow would knock any of them inward off their simple hooks and eyes. I thought of the commercials I had so recently sneered at for house shutters—a complete and repulsively antiseptic form of blocking the home out from the rest of the world. Or so I had thought at the time. The commercials showed cheery, mostly older folks pushing a button and then standing back as steel slats rolled down from housings mounted above doors and windows. The home then became a fortress. The commercials had produced disgust in me, a disgust in the cynicism of a people who would happily shut themselves off from the rest of the world. That sort of society would eventually crumble in on itself, as communication between its members degenerated into a paranoid network of purely business contact. The unit-fortress represented to me the ultimate triumph of alienation.
I thought of all my pompous reasoning in that cellar with my son and laughed—at that moment I would have gladly given my right arm for house shutters, followed by my right leg for an electrified fence. Limbs for weapons; by the time I was finished there would have been little left of me.
I thought of boarding the baseboard windows. But I had little left in the way of scrap wood in my workshop. Even if I had, by that time I wondered if it would be wise to make any noise. I had heard nothing from upstairs in nearly an hour. Any noise might merely draw the thing to my son and me. It seemed incredible that it did not know that we were down here, especially after the glare of hateful intelligence I had seen in the thing’s face through the bedroom window. But I was not about to test its aptitude without good reason.