If there's a bear out there, he'll just have to wait till tomorrow."
Together, he and Falstaff climbed back to his room.
Dirt was scattered on the stairs. He'd felt it under his bare feet on the way down, now he felt it going up. On the high landing, he stood on his right leg and brushed the bottom of his left foot, stood on his left foot and ushed off his right. Crossed the threshold. Closed the.-door. Locked it. Switched off the stair light. Falstaff was at the window, gazing out at the backyard, and Toby joined him.
The snow was coming down so hard there would probably be nine feet of it by morning, maybe sixteen. The porch roof below was white. The ground was white everywhere, as far as he could see, but he couldn't see all that far because the snow was really coming down. He couldn't even see the woods. The caretaker's house was swallowed by whipping white clouds of snow. Incredible. The dog dropped to the floor and trotted away, but Toby watched the snow awhile longer.
When he began to get sleepy, he turned and saw that Falstaff was sitting — in the bed, waiting for him. Toby slipped under the blankets, keeping the retriever on top of them. Letting the dog under the blankets was going one step too far. Infallible eight-year-old-boy instinct told him as much. If Mom or Dad found them like that-boy head on one pillow, dog head on the other pillow, covers pulled up to their chins-there would be big trouble.
He reached for the draw cord to shut the drapes, so he and Falstaff could go to sleep on a train, crossing Alaska in the dead of winter to get to the gold rush country and stake a claim, after which they'd change Falstaffs name to White Fang. But as soon as the drapes began to close, the dog sprang to its feet on the mattress, ready to leap to the floor. "Okay, all right, pleez," Toby said, and he pulled the drapes wide open. The retriever settled beside him again, lying so he was facing the door at the head of the back stairs. "Dumb dog," Toby muttered from the edge of sleep. "Bears don't have door keys."
In the darkness, when Heather slid against him, smelling faintly of soap from her hot bath, Jack knew he'd have to disappoint her. He wanted her, needed her, God knew, but he remained obsessed with his experience in the cemetery. As the memory grew rapidly less vivid, as it became increasingly difficult to recall the precise nature and intensity of the emotions that had been part of the encounter, he turned it over and over more desperately in his mind, examining it repeatedly from every angle, trying to squeeze sudden enlightenment from it before it became, like all memories, a dry and faded husk of the actual experience. The conversation with the thing that had spoken through Toby had been about death-cryptic, even inscrutable, but definitely about death. Nothing was as certain to dampen desire as brooding about death, graves, and the moldering bodies of old friends.
At least, that's what he thought when she touched him, kissed him, and murmured endearments. Instead, to his surprise, he found that he was not only ready but rampant, not merely capable but full of more vigor than he'd known since long before the shooting back in LA.
She was so giving yet demanding, alternately submissive and aggressive, shy yet all-knowing, as enthusiastic as a bride embarking on a new marriage, velvet and silken and alive, so wonderfully alive.
Later, as he lay on his side and she drifted asleep with her breasts pressed to his back, the two of them a pair of spoons, he understood that making love with her had been a rejection of the frightening yet alluring presence in the cemetery… A day of brooding about death had proved to be a perverse aphrodisiac.
He was facing the windows. The draperies were open. Ghosts of snow whirled past the glass, dancing white phantoms spinning to the music of the fluting wind, waltzing spirits, pale and cold, waltzing and pale, cold and spinning, spinning… in cloying blackness, blindly feeling his way toward the Giver, toward an offer of peace and love, pleasure and joy, an end to all fear, ultimate freedom, his for the taking, if only he could find the way, the path, the truth.
The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Then he understood that the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself.
Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn't have to be.
But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I can't, no, can't, won't, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight, compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with that pressure came the Giver's furious assertion: Everything becomes, everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must submit useless to resist Let it in paradise, paradise, joy forever Let it in. Hammering on his soul.
Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him, ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ- A brief internal sizzle and crack, like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move. Bodies are.
Everything becomes me. Puppets. Surrogates. Jack had never before awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking. Listening to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but an intrusion.
Communication. Contact. n attempt to subvert and overpower his will while he slept Everything becomes me. Those three words were not so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken by the unseen Giver in the dream and by the hate entity that communicated through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and sleeping Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, impedous, hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate. A greasy nausea made Jack gag. He felt cold and dirty inside. Corrupted by the Giver's attempt to seize control and nest within him, even though it.had not been successful. He knew as surely as he had ever known anything in his life that this enemy was reaclass="underline" not a ghost, not a demon, not just the paranoid-schizophrenic delusion of a troubled mind, but a creature of flesh and blood. No doubt infinitely strange flesh.
And blood that might not be recognized as such by any physician yet born. But flesh and blood nonetheless.
He didn't know what the thing was, where it had come from, or out of what it had been born, he knew only that it existed. And that it was somewhere on Quartermass Ranch.
Jack was lying on his side, but Heather was no longer pressed against him. She had turned over during the night. Crystals of snow tick-tick-ticked against the window, like a finely calibrated astronomical clock counting off every hundredth of a second. The wind that harried the snow made a low whirring sound. Jack felt as if he was listening to the heretofore silent and secret cosmic machinery that drove the universe through its unending cycles. Shakily, he pushed back the covers, sat up, stood. Heather didn't wake.