"Resist?"
"We resist it."
"And that's new to it?"
"Yeah. Never before."
"Everything else lets it in," Heather said. Toby nodded. "Except people." Chalk one up for human beings, Jack thought.
Good old Homo sapiens, bullheaded to the last. We're just not happy-go-lucky enough to let the puppetmaster jerk us around any way it wants, too uptight, too damned stuborn to love being slaves.
"Oh," Toby said quietly, more to himself than to hem or to the entity controlling the computer. "I see."
"What do you see?" Jack asked. Interesting."
"What's interesting?"
"The how." Jack looked at Heather, but she didn't seem to be tracking the enigmatic conversation any better than he was. "It senses," Toby said. "Toby?"
"Let's not talk about this," the boy said, glancing away from the screen for a moment to give Jack what seemed to be an imploring or warning look. "Talk about what?"
"Forget it," Toby said, gazing at the monitor again.
"Forget what?"
"I better be good. Here, listen, it wants to know." Then, with a voice as muffled as a sigh in a handkerchief, forcing Jack to lean closer, Toby seemed to change the subject: "What were they doing down there?" Jack said, "You mean in the graveyard?"
"Yeah."
"You know."
"But it doesn't. It wants to know."
"It doesn't understand death," Jack said. "No."
"How can that be?"
"Life is," the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged to the creature with which he was in contact. "No meaning. No.beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is."
"Surely this isn't the first world it's ever found where things die,"
Heather said. Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely.
"They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it can't know them." can use them, but it can't know them. A few pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the truth. A monstrous, terible portion of the truth. Jack remained crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly,
"Use them?"
"But it can't know them." How does it use them?"."Puppets." Heather gasped. "The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell,the back staircase." Though Jack wasn't entirely sure what she was talking about, he knew that she'd realized what was out e on the Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in beyond, this thing that could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out e. Toby whispered, "But it can't know them. Not even as much as it can know us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to know them. Become them. And they resist." Jack had heard enough. Far too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master switch to off, and the screen blanked. "It's going to come for us,"
Toby said, and then he Ucended slowly out of his half-trance.
Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it had been able to reach into the room, it couldn't have made Jack any colder than he already was. Toby swiveled in the office chair to direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father. The dog came out of the corner. Though no one was touching it, the master switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.
Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff. The screen gushed with vile and squirming colors. Heather stooped, grabbed the power cord, and tore it out of the wall socket. The monitor went dark again, stayed dark.
"It won't stop," Toby said, getting up from the chair. Jack turned to the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours, fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep where the wind chose to pile it.
Either the first storm had stalled, instead of moving farther eastward, or the second had blown in even sooner than expected overlapping the first. "It won't stop," Toby repeated solemnly. He wasn't talking about the snow.
Heather pulled him into her arms, lifted and held him as tightly and protectively as she would have held an infant. Everything becomes me.
Jack didn't know all that might be meant by those words, what horrors they might encompass, but he knew Toby was right. The thing wouldn't stop until it had become them and they'd become part of it… Condensation had frozen on the inside of the lower panes in the French window.
Jack touched the glistening with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with fear that ice felt no colder than his own skin. Beyond the kitchen windows, the white world was filled with cold motion, the relentless angular descent of driven snow. Restless, Heather moved continuously back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the pearance of a monstrously corrupted intruder in that otherwise sterile landscape.
They were dressed in the new ski suits they'd bought the previous morning, prepared to get out of the house quickly if they came under attack and found their prison indefensible. The loaded Mossberg twelve-gauge lay on the table.
Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the gun in the event that something-don't even think about what it might be launched an assault on the house. The Micro Uzi and the Korth.38 were on the counter by the sink.
Toby sat at the table, sipping hot chocolate from a mug, and the dog was lying at his feet. The boy was no longer in a trance state, was entirely disconnected from the mysterious invader of dreams, yet he was uncharacteristically subdued.? Although Toby had been fine yesterday afternoon and evening, following the apparently far more extensive assault he had suffered in the graveyard, Heather worried about him. He had come away from that first experience with no conscious memory of it, but the trauma of total mental enslavement had to have left scars deep in the mind, the effects of which might become evident only over a period of weeks or months. And he did remember the second attempt at control, because this time the puppetmaster hadn't succeeded in either dominating him or repressing the memory of the telepathic invasion. The encounter she'd had with the creature in a dream the night before last had been frightening and so repulsive that she had been overcome with nausea.
Toby's experiences with it, much more intimate than her own, must have been immeasurably more terrifying and affecting.
Moving restively from one window to the other, Heather stopped behind Toby's chair, put her hands on his thin shoulders, gave him a squeeze, smoothed his hair, kissed the top of his head. Nothing must happen to him. Unbearable to think of him being touched by that thing, whatever it was and whatever it might look like, or by one of its puppets.
Intolerable. She would do anything to prevent that. Anything. She would die to prevent it.
Jack looked up from the tablet after quickly reading the first three or four pages. His face was as white as the snowscape. "Why didn't you tell me about this when you found it?"
"Because of the way he'd hidden it in the freezer, I thought it must be personal, private, none of our business. Seemed like something only.Paul Youngblood ought to see."
"You should've showed it to me."
"Hey, you didn't tell me about what happened in the cemetery," she said, "and that's a hell of a lot bigger… "I'm sorry." You didn't share what Paul and Travis told you. that was wrong. But now you know everything. yes, finally." She had been furious that he'd withheld such things from her, but she hadn't been able to sustain her anger, she could not rekindle it now. Because, of course she was equally guilty. She'd not told him about the unease she'd felt during the entire tour of the property yesterday afternoon. The premonitions of violence and the unprecedented intensity of her nightmare. Certain that something had been in the back stairwell she'd gone into Toby's room the night before all the years they had been married, there had not been as many gaps in their communication with each-other since they'd come to Quartermass Ranch. They wanted their new life not merely to work but to be ct, and they had been unwilling to express doubts observations. For that failure to reach out to each, though motivated by the best intentions, they might pay with their lives.