He reached the end of the hall, where Falstaff stood trembling and whining.
"Come on, fella," Toby said.
He pushed past the dog into his bedroom, where the lamps were already bright because he and Mom had turned on just about every lamp in the house before Dad left, though it was daytime.
"Get out of the hall, Falstaff. Mom wants us out of the hall. Come on!"
The first thing he noticed, when he turned away from the dog, was that the door to the back stairs stood open. It should have been locked.
They were making a fortress here. Dad had nailed shut the lower door, but this one should also be locked. Toby ran to it, pushed it shut, engaged the dead bolt, and felt better.
At the doorway, Falstaff had still not entered the room. He had stopped whining.
He was growling.
Jack at the ranch entrance. Pausing only a moment to recover from the first and most arduous leg of the journey.
Instead of soft flakes, the snow was coming down in sharp-edged crystals, almost like grains of salt. The wind drove it hard enough to.sting his exposed forehead.
A road crew had been by at least once, because a four-foot-high wall of plowed snow blocked the end of the driveway. He clambered over it, onto the two-lane.
Flame flared off the match head.
For an instant Heather expected the fumes to explode, but they weren't sufficiently concentrated to be combustible.
The parasite and its dead host climbed another step, apparently oblivious of the danger-or certain that there was none.
Heather stepped back, out of the flash zone, tossed the match.
Continuing to back up until she bumped into the hallway wall, watching the flame flutter in an arc toward the stairwell, she had a seizure of manic thoughts that elicited an almost compulsive bark of mad laughter, a single dark bray that came dangerously close to ending in a thick sob: Burning down my own house, welcome to Montana, beautiful scenery and walking dead men and things from other worlds, and here we go, flame falling, may you.burn in hell, burning down my own house, wouldn't have to do that in Los Angeles, other people will do it for you there.
WHOOSH!
The gasoline-soaked carpet exploded into flames that leaped all the way to the ceiling. The fire didn't spread through the stairwell, it was simply everywhere at once. Instantaneously the walls and railings were as fully involved as the treads and risers.
A stinging wave of heat hit Heather, forcing her to squint. She should at once have moved farther away from the blaze because the air was nearly hot enough to blister her skin, but she had to see what happened to the Giver.
The staircase was an inferno. No human being could have survived in it longer than a few seconds.
In that swarming incandescence, the dead man and the living beast were a single dark mass, rising another step. And another. No screams or shrieks of pain accompanied its ascent, only the roar and crackle of the fierce fire, which was now lapping out of the stairwell and into the upstairs hallway.
As Toby locked the stairhead door and turned from it, and as Falstaff growled from the threshold of the other door, orange-red light flashed through the hall behind the dog. His growl spiraled into a yelp of surprise. Following the flash were flickering figures of light that danced on the walls out there: reflections of fire.
Toby knew that his mom had set the alien on fire- she was tough, she was smart-and a current of hope thrilled through him.
Then he noticed the second wrong thing about the bedroom. The drapes.were closed over his recessed bed.
He had left them open, drawn back to both sides of the niche. He only closed them at night or when he was playing a game. He had opened them this morning, and he'd had no time for games since he'd gotten up.
The air had a bad smell. He hadn't noticed it right away because his heart was pounding and he was breathing through his mouth.
He moved toward the bed. One step, two.
The closer he drew to the sleeping alcove, the worse the smell became.
It was like the odor on the back stairs the first day they'd seen the house, but a lot worse.
He stopped a few steps from the bed. He told himself he was a hero.
It was okay for heroes to be afraid, but even when they were afraid, they had to do something.
At the open door, Falstaff was just about going crazy.
Blacktop was visible in a few small patches, revealed by the flaying wind, but most of the roadway was covered by two inches of fresh powder. Numerous drifts had formed against the snow walls thrown up by the plow.
Judging by the available signs, Jack figured the crew had made a circuit through this neighborhood about two hours ago, certainly no more recently than an hour and a half. They were overdue to make another pass.
He turned east and hurried toward the Youngblood spread, hopeful of encountering a highway-maintenance crew before he had gone far.
Whether they were equipped with a big road grader or a salt-spreading truck with a plow on the front-or both-they would have microwave communications with their dispatcher. If he could persuade them that his story was not just the raving of a lunatic, he might be able to convince them to take him back to the house to get Heather and Toby out of there.
Might be able to persuade them? Hell, he had a shotgun. For sure, he'd convince them. They'd plow the half-mile driveway clean as a nun's conscience to the front door of Quartermass Ranch, smiles on their faces from start to finish, as jolly as Snow White's short protectors, singing "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go" if that's what he wanted them to do.
Impossible as it seemed, the creature on the stairs appeared even more grotesque and frightful in the obscuring embrace of fire, with smoke seething from it, than it had been when she'd had a clear look at its every feature… Yet another step it rose. Silently, silently. Then another. It ascended out of the conflagration with all the panache of His Satanic Majesty on a day trip out of hell.
The beast was burning, or at least the portion of it that was Eduardo Fernandez's body was being consumed, and yet the demonic thing climbed one more step. Almost to the top now.
Heather couldn't delay any longer. The heat was unbearable. She'd already exposed her face too long and would probably wind up with a mild burn. The hungry fire ate across the hallway ceiling, licking at the plaster overhead, and her position was perilous.
Besides, the Giver was not going to collapse backward into the furnace below, as she had hoped. It would reach the second floor and open its arms to her, its many fiery arms, seeking to enfold and become her.
Heart thudding furiously, Heather hurried a few steps along the hall to the red can of gasoline. She snatched it up with one hand. It felt light. She must have used three of the five gallons.
She glanced back.
The stalker came out of the stairwell, into the hallway. Both the colpse and the Giver were ablaze, not merely a smoldering gnarl of charred organisms but a dazzling column of tempestuous flames, as if their entwined bodies had been constructed of dry tinder. Some of the longer tentacles coiled and lashed like whips, casting off streams and gobs of fire that spattered against the walls and floor, igniting carpet and wallpaper.
As Toby took one more step toward the curtained bed, Falstaff finally dashed into the room. The dog blocked his path and barked at him, warning him to back off.
Something moved on the bed behind the drapes, brushing against them, and each of the next few seconds was an hour to Toby, as if he had shifted into super-slow-mo. The sleeping alcove was like the stage of a puppet theater just before the show began, but it wasn't Punch or Judy back there, wasn't Kukla or Ollie, wasn't any of the Muppets, nothing you'd ever find on Sesame Street, and this wasn't going to be a funny program, no laughs in this weird performance.