Falstaff lay in the corner farthest from any window, the warmest spot.in the room. Occasionally he lifted his noble head, sniffing the air or listening, but mostly he lay on his side, staring across the room at floor level, yawning.
Time passed slowly. Heather repeatedly checked the wall clock, certain that at least ten minutes had gone by, only to discover that a mere two minutes had elapsed since she'd last looked. The two-mile walk to Ponderosa Pines would take maybe twenty-five minutes in fair weather.
Jack might require an hour or even an hour and a half in the storm, allowing for the hard slogging through knee-deep snow, detours around the deeper drifts, and the incessant resistance of the gale-force wind.
Once there, he should need half an hour to explain the situation and marshal a rescue team. Less than fifteen minutes would be required for the return trip even if they had to plow open some snowbound stretches of road and driveway. At most he ought to be back in two hours and fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour sooner than that.
The dog yawned. Toby was so still he might have been asleep sitting up. They had turned the thermostat down so they could wear their ski suits and be ready to desert the house without delay if necessary, yet the place was still warm. Her hands and face were cool, but sweat trickled along her spine and down her sides from her underarms. She unzipped her jacket, though it interfered with the hip holster when it hung loose.
When fifteen minutes had passed uneventfully, she began to think their unpredictable adversary would make no move against them. Either it didn't realize they were currently more vulnerable without Jack or it didn't care.
From what Toby had said, it was the very definition of arrogance-never afraid-and might operate always according to its own rhythms, plans, and desires.
Her confidence was beginning to rise-when Toby spoke quietly and not to her.
"No, I don't think so."
Heather stepped away from the window.
He murmured, "Well maybe."
"Toby?" she said.
As if unaware of her, he stared at the Game Boy screen. His fingers weren't moving on the controls. No game was under way: shapes and bold colors swarmed across the miniature monitor, similar to those she had seen twice before.
"Why?" he asked.
She put a hand on his shoulder… "Maybe," he said to the swirling colors on the screen. Always before, responding to this entity, he had said "no." The "maybe" alarmed Heather.
"Could be, maybe," he said.
She took the earphones off him, and he finally looked up at her.
"What're you doing, Toby?"
"Talking," he said in a half-drugged voice.
"What were you saying "maybe" to?"
"To the Giver," he explained.
She remembered that name from her dream, the hateful thing's attempt to portray itself as the source of great relief, peace, and pleasure.
"It's not a giver. That's a lie. It's a taker. You keep saying "no" to it."
Toby stared up at her.
She was shaking. "You understand me, honey?"
He nodded.
She was still not sure he was listening to her. "You keep saying "no," nothing but "no."
"All right."
She threw the Game Boy in the waste can. After a hesitation, she took it out, placed it on the floor, and stomped it under her boot, once, twice. She rammed her heel down on it a third time, although the device was well crunched after two stomps, then once more for good measure, then again just for the hell of it, until she realized she was out of control, taking excess measures against the Game Boy because she couldn't get at the Giver, which was the thing she really wanted to stomp.
For a few seconds she stood there, breathing hard, staring at the plastic debris. She started to stoop to gather up the pieces, then decided to hell with it. She kicked the larger chunks against the wall.
Falstaff had become interested enough to get to his feet. When Heather returned to the window at the sink, the retriever regarded her curiously, then went to the trashed Game Boy and sniffed it as if trying to determine why it had elicited such fury from her.
Beyond the window, nothing had changed. A winddriven avalanche of snow obscured the day almost as thoroughly as a fog rolling off the Pacific could obscure the streets of a California beach town.
She looked at Toby. "You okay?"."Yeah."
"Don't let it in."
"I don't want to."
"Then don't. Be tough. You can do it."
On the counter under the microwave, the radio powered up of its own accord, as if it incorporated an alarm clock set to provide five minutes of music prior to a wake-up buzzer. It was a big multiple-spectrum receiver, the size of two giant-economy-size boxes of cereal, and it pulled in six bands, including domestic AM and FM, however, it was not a clock and could not be programmed to switch itself on at a preselected time. Yet the dial glowed with green light, and strange music issued from the speakers.
The chains of notes and overlapping rhythms were not music, actually, just the essence of music in the sense that a pile of lumber and screws amounted to the essence of a cabinet. She could identify a symphony of instruments-flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns of all kinds, violins, timpani, snare drums-but there was no melody, no identifiable cohesive structure, merely a sense of structure too subtle to quite hear, waves of sound that were sometimes pleasant and sometimes jarringly discordant, now loud, now soft, ebbing and flowing.
"Maybe," Toby said.
Heather's attention had been on the radio. With surprise, she turned to her son.
Toby had gotten off his chair. He was standing by the table, staring across the room at the radio, swaying like a slender reed in a breeze only he could feel. His eyes were glazed. "Well yeah, maybe maybe "
The unmelodious tapestry of sound coming from the radio was the aural equivalent of the ever-changing masses of color that she had seen swarming across the television, computer, and Game Boy screens: a language that evidently spoke directly to the subconscious.
She could feel the hypnotic pull of it herself, although it exerted only a small fraction of the influence on her that it did on Toby.
Toby was the vulnerable one. Children were always the easiest prey, natural victims in a cruel world.
" I'd like that nice pretty," the boy said dreamily, and then he sighed.
If he said "yes," if he opened the inner door, he might not be able to evict the thing this time. He might be lost forever.
"No!" Heather said… Seizing the radio cord, she tore the plug out of the wall socket hard enough to bend the prongs. Orange sparks spurted from the outlet, showered across the counter tile.
Though unplugged, the radio continued to produce the mesmerizing waves of sound.
She stared at it, aghast and uncomprehending.
Toby remained entranced, speaking to the unseen presence, as he might have spoken to an imaginary playmate. "Can I? Hmmm? Can I will you will you?"
The damn thing was more relentless than the drug dealers in the city, who did their come-on shtick for kids at schoolyard fences, on street corners, in videogame parlors, outside movie theaters, at the malls, wherever they could find a venue, indefatigable, as hard to eradicate as body lice.
Batteries. Of course. The radio operated off either direct or alternating current.
" maybe maybe "
She dropped the Uzi on the counter, grabbed the radio, popped open the plastic cover on the back, and tore out the two rechargeable batteries.
She threw them into the sink, where they rattled like dice against the backboard of a craps table. The siren song from the radio had stopped before Toby acquiesced, so Heather had won that roll. Toby's mental freedom had been on the come line, but she had thrown a seven, won the bet. He was safe for the moment.