“Lucas,” she whispered, “what are you looking at?”
Then the screams started from outside.
They were coming from Elaine’s house. The sound was so raw, so unfamiliar, that at first Julia didn’t realize it was Elaine. She started for the door but Lucas cried in a high voice, “No—don’t go out there!”
It was a good thing she hesitated, because then, in the window, she saw movement. Something in the yard. Lucas saw it too and backed away from the window.
There was a child out there. Just a small dark shape, moving strangely on the grass. She knew right away that it was the same silhouette she’d seen in the window at Lucas’s house, in the shape of a small boy. But now she could see that something was growing out of its skull, something like gnarled tree branches. Horns, or antlers. The boy-thing had its fingers in its mouth. It was hopping, like a frog, in the dark grass. It was playing. Not the least bit bothered by the long, ragged screams of agony coming from the other house.
“Lucas,” Julia whispered, paralyzed, “who is that?”
“It’s Todd.”
She said, “Your brother Todd is dead.”
“I know.”
Elaine’s screams stopped. They had seemed to go on forever, but it was probably only fifteen or twenty seconds.
The little boy-thing in the yard stopped hopping. It stood and turned toward the big house, and when it did, she got a glimpse of its face in the moonlight—wax-white and strangely bulbous, with large, crazily staring eyes, and a wet mouth that was sucking on itself as if in constant search of a food source. Then shadows covered it again. The glimpse was so shocking, so bizarre, that she wanted to believe she’d imagined it—that her mind had drawn it up from some horror movie she’d seen as a girl.
The lights in Elaine’s house were dark. They’d been on earlier. Now the little boy—Todd—was staring at Elaine’s house as the back door swung open and something—a man-shaped darkness, but larger than a man—emerged.
Julia recognized it, too. It was the thing she’d seen the first time she looked in the boarded-up window of Lucas’s house. The figure that had radiated such malevolence. The one that had whispered to her.
ONE MORE STEP
Now she could see that it, too, had great, gnarled, oak-like antlers. It walked to the little boy (if walked was the right word, because its feet didn’t quite seem to touch the ground) and held out its hand, and the little boy shape seemed to eat, or lap, something out of its hand.
She didn’t have to ask Lucas who it was. She knew.
It was Frank Weaver.
Frank and Todd turned to look at the cottage. Their faces, indistinct in the darkness, were grotesquely, almost clownishly evil.
“Lucas,” she whispered, “what do they want?”
He was so quiet she could barely hear him.
“They’re hungry. They’re always hungry.”
and all they wanted to do was go to town and eat people
They were still just standing out there in the yard, like hateful statues. She understood that they didn’t eat in the normal sense. They didn’t feed on flesh, that wasn’t what he meant. They fed on pain.
“What are they?” she whispered. “How did they get like this?”
“He did it,” Lucas said. “He made it so if they died, they would be like this…” His voice choked off. “He didn’t know that if their bodies stayed in the house, they couldn’t get out.”
“You were feeding them, weren’t you?” she said. “You were keeping them trapped in the house and feeding them.”
“I had to,” Lucas whispered.
“And I let them out,” Julia said.
Lucas didn’t answer. She wanted to ask him why he hadn’t warned her, told her they would be coming. But she knew the answer—it wouldn’t have made any difference. She never would’ve believed him.
She said, “Is there anything we can do?”
He stared out the window, his chin crumpling. “They don’t like the light,” he said. “But the lights are going to go out soon.”
The two figures in the yard were no longer standing still.
The little boy started toward the cottage, still being playful. He took giant, exaggerated tiptoe steps, like a cartoon character sneaking up on someone.
And the huge man strode—floated—after him.
A full-body panic seized her. Once, as a child, she had been dragged and rolled by a wave at the beach. It seemed to go on forever, and as her brain screamed for oxygen and black dots swelled in her vision, she’d felt the same panic: I’m going to die TOO SOON. As in, NOW.
They came toward the cottage with nightmarish slowness—grinning, enjoying themselves, like an obscene parody of a father and son out for a walk—and she knew that when they reached it, her life would end.
“I’ll go with them,” Lucas said faintly. “They came for me. If I go out there, they might not—”
“Shut up,” she hissed. She was trying to think. The lights are going to go out. She knelt and fumbled under the table by the front door—she kept a flashlight there.
A tiny voice in her head screamed at her. Send him out! For fuck’s sake, if he’s the one they want, send him out there—and RUN.
Ignoring it, she turned the flashlight on—a heavy, powerful Maglite with a black metal handle longer than her forearm—barely a second before the lights went out. Darkness surged in on them. The Maglite’s beam swung wildly, bleaching the walls and ceiling. She saw their leering, impossible faces, suddenly right outside the window, pressed up against the glass, looking in. Their eyes had rectangular black pupils, like goats’. The boy gibbered soundlessly, lips moving and puckering.
They’d be on her already, she knew, if not for the Maglite—which had already begun to flicker—
“GIVE HIM TO ME.”
A whisper… but it felt like burning smoke against her eardrum, like steam enveloping her brain. She cried out and recoiled—and then they weren’t at the window anymore but inside, the man-shape in one corner of the room and the boy-shape in another, moving in, and the flashlight died and Lucas was shrieking—
—and Julia was about to scream in someone else’s voice, Take him! Leave me alone!—
Headlights flashed across the front windows. A car was pulling up outside. Frank and Todd weren’t there anymore. A car door slammed. Footsteps came toward the front door.
Julia tried to warn the pizza delivery boy, but he barely had time to ring the doorbell. Then two shapes lunged past the front windows and he started screaming, too.
For a moment she was frozen. Some part of her—was it, though? really?—had been about to do it… about to give Lucas up. A hot wave of shame washed over her.
She heard bones breaking outside—all at once, like a sheet of bubble wrap being twisted—and her paralysis broke. They only had a moment or two.
She pulled Lucas into the kitchen and grabbed a glass salad bowl, a steel pot, and the iron skillet she used for cooking eggs. She arranged them on the linoleum floor in a triangle with herself and Lucas at the center. She started tearing up newspaper and filling them with it. Then she grabbed some matches and lit the newspaper on fire.
“Keep putting paper in,” she told Lucas. “Don’t let the fires die.” They had only three newspapers—today’s, yesterday’s, and the one from the day before. How long would that last?