Night still reigned, but a faint gray light in the east hinted at the pending coronation of a new day. Striving to quell his nausea, Jack stood in just his underwear until his shivering was a greater concern than his queasiness. The bedroom was warm. The chill was internal.
Nevertheless, he went to his closet, quietly slid the door open, slipped a pair of jeans from a hanger, pulled them on, then a shirt.
Awake, he could not sustain the explosive terror that had blown him out of the dream, but he was still shaky, fearful-and worried about Toby.
He left the master bedroom, intending to check on his son. Falstaff was in the shadowy upstairs hall, staring intently through the open door of the bedroom next to Toby's, where Heather had set up her computers. An odd, faint light fell through the doorway and glimmered on the dog's coat. He was statue-still and tense. His blocky head was held low and thrust forward. His tail wasn't wagging. As Jack approached, the retriever looked at him and issued a muted, anxious whine.
The soft clicking of a computer keyboard came from the room. Rapid typing.
Silence. Then another burst of typing.
In Heather's makeshift office, Toby was sitting in front of one of the computers. The glow from the monitor, which faced away from Jack, was the only source of light in the former bedroom, far brighter than the reflection that reached the hallway, it bathed the boy swiftly changing shades of blue and green and purple, a sudden splash of red, orange, then blue and green.
At the window behind Toby, the night remained deep because the gray insistence of dawn could not yet be seen from that side of the house… Barrages of fine snow flakes tapped the glass and were briefly transformed into blue and green sequins by the monitor light.
Stepping across the threshold, Jack said, "Toby?" The boy didn't glance up from the screen. His small hands flew across the keyboard, eliciting a furious spate of muffled clicking. No other sound issued from the machine none of the usual beeps or burbles. Could Toby type?
No. At least, not like this, not with such ease and speed. The boy's eyes glimmered with distorted images of the display on the screen before him: violet, emerald, a flicker of red.
"Hey, kiddo, what're you doing?"
He didn't respond to the question.
Yellow, gold, yellow, orange, gold, yellow-the light… shimmered not as if it radiated from a computer screen but as if it was the glittering reflection of summer sunlight bouncing off the rippled surface of a pond, spangling his face.
Yellow, orange, umber, amber, yellow
At the window, spinning snowflakes glimmered like gold dust, hot sparks, fireflies. Jack crossed the room with trepidation, sensing that normality had not returned when he'd awakened from the nightmare.
The dog padded behind him.
Together, they rounded one end of the L-shaped work area and stood at Toby's side. A riot of constantly changing colors surged across the computer screen from left to right, melting into and through one another, now fading, now intensifying, now bright, now dark, curling, pulsing, an electronic kaleidoscope in which none of the ceaselessly transfigured patterns had straight edges. It was a full-color monitor.
Nevertheless, Jack had never seen anything like this before.
He put a hand on his son's shoulder.
Toby shuddered.
He didn't look up or speak, but a subtle change in his attitude implied that he was no longer as spellbound by the display on the monitor as he had been when Jack first spoke to him from the doorway.
His fingers rattled the keys again.
"What're you doing?" Jack asked.
"Talking."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
…Masses of yellow and pink, spiraling threads of rippling ribbons of purple and blue. The shapes, patterns, and rhythms of change were mesmerizing when they combined in beautiful and graceful ways-but also when they were ugly and chaotic.
Jack sensed movement in the room, but he had to make an effort to look up from the compelling protomic images on the screen. Heather stood in the doorway, wearing her quilted red robe, hair tousled. She didn't ask what was happening. if she already knew. She wasn't looking directly at Jack or Toby but at the window behind them. Jack turned and saw showers of snowflakes repeatedly changing color as the display on the monitor continued its rapid and fluid metamorphosis.
"Talking to whom?" he asked Toby.
After a hesitation, the boy said, "No name."
His voice was not flat and soulless as it had been in the graveyard but neither was it quite normal.
"Where is he?" Jack asked.
"Not he."
"Where is she?"
"Not she."
Frowning, Jack said, "Then what?"
The boy said nothing, gazed unblinking at the screen.
"It?" Jack wondered.
"All right," Toby said.
Approaching them, Heather looked strangely at Jack.
"It?"
To Toby, Jack said, "What is it?"
"Whatever it wants to be."
"Where is it?"
"Wherever it wants to be," the boy said cryptically.
"What is it doing here?"
"Becoming."
Heather stepped around the table, stood on the other side of Toby, and stared at the monitor… "I've seen this before."
Jack was relieved to know the bizarre display wasn't unique, therefore not necessarily related to the experience in the cemetery, but Heather's demeanor was such that his relief was extremely short-lived.
"Seen it when?"
"Yesterday morning, before we went into town. On the TV in the living room.
Toby was watching it sort of enraptured like this. Strange."
She shuddered and reached for the master switch.
"Shut it off."
"No," Jack said, reaching in front of Toby to stay her hand. "Wait.
Let's see."
"Honey," she said to Toby, "what's going on here, what kind of game is this?"
"No game. I dreamed it, and in the dream I came in then I woke up and I was here, so we started talking-"
"Does this make any sense to you?" she asked Jack.
"Yes. Some."
"What's going on, Jack?"
"Later."
"Am I out of the loop on something? What is this all about?" When he didn't respond, she said, "I don't like this."
"Neither do I," Jack said. "But let's see where it ads, whether we can figure this out."
"Figure what out?" The boy's fingers pecked busily at the keys.
Although no words appeared on the screen, it seemed as if new colors and fresh patterns appeared and progressed in a rhythm that matched his typing.
"Yesterday, on the TV I asked Toby what it was," Heather said.
"He didn't know. But he said he liked it." Toby stopped typing. The colors faded, then suddenly intensified and flowed in wholly new patterns and shades… "No," the boy said.
"No what?" Jack asked. "Not talking to you.
Talking to it." And to the — screen, he said, "No. Go away." Waves of sour green. Blossoms of blood red appeared at random points across the screen, turned black, flowered into red again, then wilted, streamed, a viscous pus yellow. The endlessly mutagenic display dazed Jack when he watched it too long, and he could understand how it could completely capture the immature mind of an eight-year-old boy, hypnotize him.
As Toby began to hammer the keyboard once more, the colors on the screen faded-then abruptly brightened again, although in new shades and in yet more varied and fluid forms.
"It's a language," Heather exclaimed softly. For a moment Jack stared at her, uncomprehending. She said, "The colors, the patterns. A language." He checked the monitor. "How can it be a language?"
"It is," she insisted. "There aren't any repetitive shapes, nothing that could be letters, words."