“Hot damn,” she says, her voice hoarse from a night of screams. “Hot damn, look who made it.”
“What are you doing, Nova?” he asks as gently as he can.
“Just giving it some time, that’s all. Because that’s all she needs. Time.”
“It ain’t a she!” Willie barks. “It’s all sorts of people in one. It don’t know what it is.”
Nova ignores her father’s cry, blinks madly, and tries to study Blake closely.
“So what’d you do, Blake? You outrun them?”
“No.”
“Burn them?”
Blake shakes his head. “Where’s the key, Nova?”
“She swallowed it,” Willie wails. “I tol’ you. I’ll cut you free, girl. I’m gonna get an axe and cut you free if you don’t stop this—”
“I don’t have to stop nothing!” Nova’s rage is pushing her voice past its limits. She is oblivious to the sliver of drool dripping from one corner of her mouth. “You just have to wait. You just have to put your guns down and wait, Daddy!”
Her outburst silences them but not the tumult inside the shed. Now that he’s close enough, Blake can hear what sounds like the persistent flight of some trapped winged creature. The roof jumps, and then a sidewall, and then the door.
“Seriously,” Nova says. “Seriously… how are you… alive?”
“You were right.”
“About what?”
“It made a difference. That I said no. You were right, Nova. It made a big difference.”
“Well, good.” The smile that breaks across Nova’s face brings tears to her eyes; his words were a ray of sunshine in a long nightmare of seemingly impenetrable darkness. And he feels himself smiling as well, and then he’s blinking back tears too. “Well, that’s real good, Blake.”
“Yeah. It is… I hope.”
“It’s her, Blake,” Nova whispers, jaw quivering. “It’s Virginie.”
“It’s not her!” Willie roars.
“It’s her,” Blake says quietly.
They both stare at him as if they’re sure that whatever he’s just experienced outside of Spring House has endowed him with this knowledge and the confidence with which he has expressed it. But for Willie it’s still not enough. “Then she’s evil. Then she’s the one who killed those boys! She’s the one who took Miss Caitlin and went to that motel and killed all those poor people. They in her now, those people. They in her now!”
“Blood gets spilled every time a baby’s born,” Blake says. “It doesn’t make the baby evil.”
“Does that thing sound like a baby to you?” Willie asks.
What happens next comes so quickly neither Nova nor Willie has time to process it. There’s a brief flash of light that moves so fast Blake is confident he’s the only one who saw the trail it made as it swept from behind him and across Nova’s wrists. And he was able to see it only because he was expecting it. Then Nova’s wrists slip free of the chain that’s been cut in half. Its heavy links fall to the mud on either side of her with wet thuds; the broken padlock tumbles free, and suddenly she is lowering her arms in front of her in disbelief.
When Blake extends his hand, she takes it in a daze. He lifts her to her feet, and the door to the shed swings open behind her. Once he’s tucked Nova behind him, Blake steps forward into the darkness.
35
Willie and his men must have emptied the shed of most of its supplies before the creature inside emerged from the ground. Whatever the thing is, it’s down on all fours like a dog, its bent, misshapen limbs shuddering. The pale morning light falls in thin slats across its back, which appears to be changing color with liquid speed. He can make out two contrasting skin tones, one after the other. First he sees the same rich brown of Nova’s and Willie’s flesh, then, a few quivering seconds later, the pale and red-blotched skin tone of some white person. They pulse across the thing’s outer shell in alternating waves, each with the same brilliance as the luminescence Blake saw in the death-marker blossoms Nova could not burn.
The creature rockets toward the ceiling. For a second, it looks as if the thing has propelled itself skyward on its hind legs. But they are long and tendril-like, incapable of supporting the creature’s full weight. The head, which Blake sees for the first time, is vaguely human in shape, but the features are a riot of indecisive transformations, undulations involving musculature and bone. And now the head is thrown back on its long neck, gazing upside down at Blake from the ceiling with wide, expectant eyes and a yawning mouth. The face of a man is there for an instant, a man Blake doesn’t recognize—someone from the motel, he figures. But then it leaves like a reflection on water that’s been sliced by a skipping stone; the eyes ripple and are gone, leaving socketless caverns of molten bone.
When the creature screams, the sound is so deafening Blake’s hands fly to his ears. He hits the dirt floor knees-first. In time with the terrible intermingling cries, two tendrils of insects fly from the creature’s half-formed nostrils, tumbling across the empty interior of the shed, bouncing over bare shelves before flying through the cracks in the ceiling and walls.
Shedding. It’s the only word Blake can think of to describe what he’s witnessing—the lavalike transformations of skin and bone, the entangled screams, the sudden rocketing skyward followed by the eruption of insects from the creature’s nose. It’s just as Willie said: all the spirits within this creature are fighting for control. All traces of the man he glimpsed seconds before are gone now, and when the creature flips and lands on all fours on the floor a few feet away, Blake finds himself staring into Caitlin’s eyes. The rest of her body is a spindly, shuddering mess of naked pale flesh, and her great yawning mouth has no lips, just ragged borders of skin that flap like rubber casing around an air duct.
“Caitlin!” Blake screams.
The eyes meet his, the same eyes that greeted him when he came to in the hospital room after being beaten by John’s killers, the same eyes that turned to him in agony and despair when the bugs came for her. Even as the rest of the body shudders and molts and transforms, the vestiges of Caitlin’s spirit stare out at him from this impossible war between flesh and dueling spirits.
The sound of her name, and the familiar voice that just screamed it, intensifies Caitlin’s hold on the hovering riot of flesh and bone. Blake has the sense that he has just called Caitlin further into being, and he doesn’t know if that’s what he wants.
The creature rises, but without the same mad propulsion with which it rocketed to the ceiling only moments before. Caitlin’s long nose begins to take shape on the creature’s face, her eyes—too large to be human but still distinctly hers—widen and grow even larger, and the vague outlines of human lips resolve around the edges of her yawning mouth. Birdlike breasts swell on her chest. He sees her legs for the first time, which dangle behind her like broken tree limbs.
“Caitlin?” Blake asks.
“AmIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIpretty?”
The words sound like whale song filtered through the same grinding buzz of insects that has terrorized them for most of this long, awful cycle of slaughter and rebirth.
“Let her go!” Nova screams.
When Blake looks over his shoulder, he sees Willie and the other men holding Nova back. Their combined effort has dragged her several feet away from the door to the shed.