While the Giver was rushing into his mind, confident of overwhelming it, Toby turned the tables… He imagined that his own mind was a colossal weight, a billion trillion tons, even heavier than that, more than the weight of all the planets in the solar system combined, and even a zillion times heavier than that, pressing down on the mind of the Giver, so much weight, crushing it, flattening it into a thin pancake and holding it there, so it could think fast and furiously but could not act on its thoughts.
The thing let go of Heather's ankle. All of its sinuous and agitated appendages retracted and curled into one another, and it went still, like a massive ball of glistening intestines, four feet in diameter.
The other one lost control of the burning corpse with which it was entwined.
Parasite and dead host collapsed in a heap and were also motionless.
Heather stood in stunned disbelief, unable to understand what had happened.
Smoke churned into the room.
Toby had opened the dead bolt and the stairhead door. Tugging at her, he said, "Quick, Mom."
Beyond confusion, in a state of utter baffflement, she followed her son and the dog into the back stairwell and pulled the door shut, cutting off the smoke before it reached them.
Toby hurried down the stairs, the dog at his heels, and Heather plunged after him as he followed the curving wall out of sight.
"Honey, wait!"
"No time," he called back to her.
"Toby!"
She was terrified about descending the stairs so recklessly, not knowing what might be ahead, assuming another of those things had to be somewhere near at hand. Three graves had been disturbed at the cemetery.
In the vestibule at the bottom, the door to the back porch was still nailed shut. The door in the kitchen was wide open, and Toby was waiting for her with the dog.
She would have thought her heart couldn't have beat any faster or slammed any harder than it did on the way down those stairs, but when she saw Toby's face, her pulse quickened and each lub-dub was so forceful that it sent a throb of dull pain across her breast.
If he had been pale with fear, he was now a far whiter shade of pale.
His face didn't look like that of a living boy so much as like a death mask of a face, rendered now in cold hard plaster as colorless as powdered lime. The whites of his eyes were gray, one pupil large and.the other just a pinpoint, and his lips were bluish. He was in the grip of terror, but it wasn't terror alone that drove him. He seemed strange, haunted-and then she recognized the same fey quality that he'd exhibited when he'd been in front of the computer this morning, not in the grip of the Giver but not entirely free. Between, he had called it.
"We can get it," he said.
Now that she recognized his condition, she could hear the same flatness in his voice that she had heard this morning when he'd been in the thrall of that storm of colors on the IBM monitor.
"Toby, what's wrong?"
"I've got it."
"Got what?"
"It."
"Got it where?"
"Under."
Her heart was exploding.
"Under?"
"Under me."
Then she remembered, blinked. Amazed.
"It's under you?"
He nodded.
So pale.
"You're controlling it?"
"For now."
"How can that be?" she wondered.
"No time. It wants loose. Very strong. Pushing hard."
A glistening beadwork of sweat had appeared on his brow. He chewed his lower lip, drawing more blood.
Heather raised a hand to touch him, stop him, hesitated, not sure if touching him would shatter his control.
"We can get it," he repeated.
Harlan damn near drove the grader into the house, halting the plow inches from the railing, casting a great crashing wave of snow onto the.front porch.
He leaned forward in his seat to let Jack squeeze out of the storage area behind him. "You go, take care of your people. I'll call the depot, get a fire company out here."
Even as Jack went through the high door and dismounted from the grader, he heard Harlan Moffit on the cellular system, talking to his dispatcher.
He had never known fear like this before, not even when Anson Oliver had opened fire at Arkadian's service station, not even when he'd realized something was speaking through Toby in the graveyard yesterday, never a fear half this intense, with his stomach knotted so tightly it hurt, a surge of bitter bile in the back of his throat, no sound in the world but the pile-driving thunder of his own heart.
Because this wasn't just his life on the line.
More important lives were involved here. His wife, in whom his past and future resided, the keeper of all his hopes. His son, born of his own heart, whom he loved more than he loved himself, immeasurably more.
From outside, at least, the fire appeared to be confined to the second floor.
He prayed that Heather and Toby weren't up there, that they were on the lower floor or out of the house altogether.
He vaulted the porch railing and kicked through the snow that had been thrown up against the front wall by the plow. The door was standing open in the wind.
When he crossed the threshold, he found tiny drifts beginning to form among the pots and pans and dishes that were scattered along the front hall.
No gun. He had no gun. He'd left it in the grader. Didn't matter.
If they were dead, so was he.
Fire totally engulfed the stairs from the first landing upward, and it was swiftly spreading down from tread to tread toward the hallway, flowing almost like a radiant liquid. He could see well because drafts were sucking nearly all the smoke up and out the roof: no flames in the study, none beyond the living-room or dining-room archways.
"Heather! Toby!"
No answer.
"Heather!"
He pushed the study door all the way open and looked in there, just to be sure… "Heather!"
From the archway he could see the entire living room. Nobody. The dining-room arch.
"Heather!"
Not in the dining-room, either.
He hurried back through the hall, into the kitchen.
The back door was shut, though it had obviously been opened at some point, because the tower of housewares had been knocked down.
"Heather!"
"Jack!"
He spun around at the sound of her voice, unable to figure where it had come from.
"HEATHER!"
"Down here-we need help!"
The cellar door was ajar. He pulled it open, looked down.
Heather was at the landing, a five-gallon can of gasoline in each hand.
"We need all of it, Jack."
"What're you doing? The house is on fire! Get out of there!"
"We need the gasoline to do the job."
"What're you talking about?"
"Toby's got it."
"Got what?" he demanded, going down the steps to her.
"It. He's got it. Under him," she said breathlessly.
"Under him?" he asked, taking the cans out of her hands.
"Like he was under it in the graveyard."
Jack felt as if he'd been shot, not the same pain but the same impact as a bullet in the chest. "He's a boy, a little boy, he's just a little boy, for Christ's sake!": "He paralyzed it, the thing itself and all its surrogates. You should've seen! He says there isn't much time. The goddamned thing is strong, Jack, it's powerful. Toby can't keep it under him very long, and when it gets on top, it'll never let him go. It'll hurt him, Jack… It'll make him pay for this. So we have to get it first. We don't have time to question him, second-guess him, we just do what he says."
She turned away from him, retreated down the lower steps.
"I'll get two more cans."
"The house is on fire!" he protested.
"Upstairs. Not here yet."