Magic Time

Chapter Twenty-Eight

To Cal, the Wishart house looked like nothing so much as a pale reflection seen within dusky glass, a wavering mirage, elusive and then gone.

And yet he was staring right at it.

Peering out the window in Wilma Hanson’s front room, the crackling pine in the fireplace banishing the fog chill from his bones, Cal sensed or imagined-he couldn’t be sure which-shame emanating from that house, a shrinking from even the moon’s fading light.

Behind him, Goldie sat cross-legged in the corner, welcoming Wilma Hanson’s regiment of cats as they brushed against him, burnished him, while Doc and Colleen stood by the hearth with Wilma. Their voices were soft, their conversation banal. It was a breathing space, a tiny harbor in a great, unyielding storm.

Leading them to her home over rutted dirt paths, through the slumbering dark of town streets, Wilma had told of the comatose children and the old ones, the sense of their being drained like rivulets of water coursing to the sea, drawn inescapably toward the Wishart home.

“Even the power held in the land is being fed on,” Wilma had said, on the move, tensing against the pulse of the night that only she could sense, “the ghosts of this town’s history….”

Cal let the voices behind him blur to a comfortable drone, let himself float on the scent of woodsmoke, the taste of mountain air, the homey warmth of the room about him; all the subtle sounds and smells that brought home back to him. And he was a boy again in Hurley, his infant sister dozing in the far room, his mother a watchful presence to shield them from the chaos of the world.

Then he heard a soft shifting above him and looked toward the attic. Toward Tina.

They-he-had locked her there.

After her emergence from the fog, her headlong flight toward town, she was passive, seemed hardly aware of them. She allowed herself to be led to Applby Lane, not even glancing at the Wishart House as they passed it, only slowing almost imperceptibly.

But Cal noted her radiance growing ever brighter, her tread barely brushing the ground. She was regaining her strength, would soon have it all, and then none of them could hope to stop her.

So, in this brief span while she still mutely acquiesed, Cal agreed to imprison her in the one room with no windows, with a door they could bar.

While the house next door shimmered and waited.

From above, another thud, louder than before.

He turned toward the hearth, saw his companions in the Rembrandt light of the fire. His glance caught the photos on the mantel of Wilma’s sisters and their families, of her students.

“Have you lost many you were close to?” he asked.

“Well, it’s a very small town.”

“Those men,” Doc said. “The changed ones outside. Why did it kill them?”

“One of my friends, the one who-” Wilma stopped as though about to reveal more of her heart than she wished. “He said something got into his mind, was telling him to kill Bob.”

Bob Wishart. Bob, whom Wilma had thought should be dead already, dead when the machines went down. But who, at least in the minds of the changed ones, was very much alive.

“And you’re sure Dr. Wishart hasn’t been here in months?” Cal asked.

Wilma nodded as Colleen broke in, “But why the stay-at-home brother? The handyman? Why kill Bob, if he isn’t dead already? What could he have to do with draining the town?”

“Somehow,” Wilma said, “I have a feeling that whatever’s compelling those attacks doesn’t care about the town, about any of us.”

Cal began, “But why would the changed ones-”

“Because,” Goldie broke in from his cat-contented corner, “it told them to. Because you open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”

Cal stared. It was what Tina had said, in the fog. Goldie turned to him, somber. “There’s two pieces to this. Here and the big one. The real one. It’s not here your sister’s being pulled. It’s through here. To the other. The maw.”

Cal looked again at the Wishart house, as though he could see it now, even through Wilma’s walls. The brothers used to speak via computer; was Bob some secret whiz kid who had something to do with the Source Project without anyone’s knowing?

But Wilma had known the twins all their lives, and Bob had shown no such aptitude. Fred had been the brains of the two, Bob-with his over-keen sensitivities-the heart.

Besides, Bob had been in a coma for months, long before-

Another thud from above-loud, startling. Through the doorway to the dining room, Cal could see the hanging lamp shudder.

Then a crash. Tina, unseen, thrusting herself against the barred attic door.

Answers or no, they were out of time. Cal had to get into that house now, to see.

Hurriedly, he said to Wilma, “We’ll need something to use for shields-and the most direct route through the house to Bob.”

Wilma was shaking her head, even before he’d finished speaking. “You don’t understand. You have no way to know what it can do.”

Cal reached out, grasped her hands. “You had nothing but speed, no protection. And those poor dead ones out there, they had nothing at all. Besides-”

From above, another crash. Cal winced, but his voice was strong. “We have no options.”

The cats’ eyes, huge and yellow and haughty, followed Wilma as she rose and fetched paper to draw the floor plan.

From her station on the second-floor landing, Wilma could see Cal Griffin and his companions moving slowly toward the Wishart house. The moon hung low in the sky, its light glinting off the makeshift shields they carried, fashioned from the corrugated tin of her storage shed, the leather straps from her scrap room.

The impacts resounding from the attic just above her were coming with less frequency, less force. Wilma had volunteered to stand guard over Griffin’s sister, and, at first, the child’s blows against the thick oak walls and door had been so frenzied that, special powers or no, Wilma had felt certain the girl was harming herself. Now, with the sounds weakening, Wilma hoped it was a sign of resignation rather than serious injury.

Poor child, with those distant, hungering eyes. So like Wilma’s students, particularly the ones who had remained in Boone’s Gap, settling into the life of not-enough.

Until the Change, Wilma had told herself that she’d chosen wisely when she had returned from college to stay, embracing the safe and the familiar; told herself that withdrawing from Hank’s affections all those years back had been about valuing the solid, stable life she’d worked so hard to craft.

But what had she chosen, really? What bargain had she struck?

Wilma felt a silken pressure against her leg, saw Imp brushing up against her, seeking reassurance. She spied Mortimer and Theodora and the others crouched nearby, tremulous and watchful, unnerved by the unaccustomed intrusions.

Wilma reached down to stroke Imp. As the others drew close, she brought her heightened senses once more to the struggles within her house, and without.

Cal led the way, the long weeds rustling and whispering around their knees and across the six-foot tin shields. It was only when they got within a few yards of the Wishart house that he was able, suddenly, to see the place clearly in the flare of Doc’s lantern. The stink of decay, of things unidentifiable and terrifying, grew stronger as they approached.

Doc whispered, “Ty shto ahuyel.”

And Cal could feel it. Whatever was inside screamed at them, hurling against them its power and its will: Stay out of here! Stay out! Stay out!

He shifted his sword in his hand, signaled them into formation. They had shaped the pieces of tin so that, when joined, they became a kind of turtle shell. A clumsy solution, but they’d been crippled by lack of tools and time.

Doc, Colleen and Goldie had just taken note of Cal’s gesture, begun to move, when a sudden stench billowed from the open door of the house. Colleen said, “Watch it!” even before the glow of the lantern picked up movement inside. A grunter was getting to its feet, slowly, staggering, and no wonder: dead for a week, rotting, swollen, decayed eyes staring. .

With an inarticulate gluey howl, another grunter corpse launched itself at them out of the weeds beside the porch, a rusted pair of pruning shears in one hand.

Colleen cursed, swung at it with her wrench with a blow that connected in a sodden horrible splat. But Cal knew, maneuvering the bulky shield and slashing at the creature that lumbered from the porch, killing was not the answer. They were dead already. The dispassionate precision that had taken hold during his battle with Stern returned. Cal cut, not at the head or face, but first at the hands, then at the feet.

Goldie was beside him, grappling and shoving at the attacker with makeshift pike and shield, keeping it at bay while Cal hacked. He heard Colleen curse again, and then snarl, “You dead son of a bitch, will you lay down already!” and turned, to see the smashed, reeling remains of the grunter trying to get up to attack again. He cut off the thing’s feet, sickened and hating himself, even knowing it could neither feel nor think.

The two corpses were still trying to crawl after Cal and his friends as they sprang up the porch steps and into the dark of the house, the tin of their four-walled citadel clattering into place. A whirlwind met them. Junk and dust and the very fragments of the house pounded against the reverberating metal. Splintered wood flew with the hideous velocity of crossbow bolts, denting their shields, bruising them, staggering them sideways. Bits of wire and springs writhed beneath their jolting shell, caught and tore at their ankles, stabbed through shoes while the dust of decades billowed into an impenetrable cloud.

Choking, Cal thrust the others out behind him, Doc limping from a shard of wood driven through the muscle of his calf. Back in the blackened, gore-clotted weeds, a yard from where they’d entered, they stood together gasping.

Colleen said, “House, one. New Yorkers, zip.”

Cal rasped out, “Again. Momentum.” He turned to Doc, “You up to it?”

Doc nodded, gray-faced. “Into the reactor.”

They braced. Cal waited a moment, gauging distance and direction. “Now!”

They plunged forward, the boards of the porch buckling and ripping under their feet and the joists underneath spearing up at them. Cal kicked the lock of the inner door with all his strength. It splintered inward and they pounded through as one, grouped beneath their shields.

The lantern Doc held exploded in his hand. He threw it away from him, stumbling, lost them fleetingly in blackness. Goldie cried out, and fireballs whirled into being, illuminating the onrush of missiles: cans and broken glass, iron burners from the stove and pieces of china and plastic sharp as razors. They lurched back together, shields clattering, an instant before the maelstrom. It staggered them, but this time Cal shouted, “Move!”

They battled forward, Cal squinting between the shields’ joining, wavering slits. Dust-thickened moonlight and sputtering, dimming fireballs painted visions suited for a madhouse.

In the corner, the refrigerator heaved and twisted, wrenching itself like a chained bull to get loose. The very baseboards and the moldings of the ceiling undulated and jerked, popping nails, battling to free themselves, to join the killing assault.

The space of the kitchen seemed to distort, twisting under the impact of malevolent will. The walls moved, cupboards gaped. Then, with the speed of a striking snake, the wallpaper pattern hissed out from the walls in gripping loops of thorny rope, and snared Colleen’s foot.

Colleen went down hard, both hands encumbered, corrugated tin slamming the floor beneath her forearm as her wrench sailed into an ebony void.

Their circle was broken. All about them, shards of broken dishes, scattered and corkscrewed silverware, smashed window glass slowly rose from their resting places and began to swirl in a large but closing ring, increasing into a howling, savage storm.

At the same moment, a dead grunter inches from Colleen heaved itself up from the floor where it had lain for weeks by the smell, oozing, bones showing through the shreds of its flesh. Cal slashed at it as Colleen wriggled free of her tangling shield, rolling away into the ruins of the kitchen table, which she immediately grasped as a weapon.

The table wheeled and thrashed in her grip. Cal handed off his sword to Doc, jerked Colleen up and back against him, and stamped on her shield’s curving top to stand it upright. She seized it, their circle closed again-and the storm within the house exploded with a screech.

Through the kitchen and down the hall, Wilma had directed them. It’s the door on the left.

Only in the darkness there seemed to be a hundred doors, all banging open and shut, with nothing behind any of them but black. The roaring tempest filled ears and minds, the house rocked on its foundation with a violence that wrung groans from the wood and brick and nails.

A voice screaming: GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT. Screaming in terror.

It was afraid.

Mortally afraid.

Images of icy water, of screaming voices, of blue sparks swirling out of emptiness. .

Doc yelled, “Cal!” as he went down. Cal, wrenching at the single door that hadn’t slammed open and shut, turned back. A sliver of floorboard had speared Doc from below, piercing his thigh.

Colleen, shifting her shield to shelter them both, was already dragging the physician back to the outer door. Goldie, standing alone and vulnerable in the no-man’s land between, looked to Cal, questioning.

The knob was in Cal’s hand, held shut, it seemed, not by a lock but by an invisible other on the opposite side.

With a desperation, a rage beyond his own comprehension, Cal jerked back. The door gave. Only a few inches. Only for an instant.

Two faces turned toward him. Identically featured and yet so different as to chill. Moonlit phantoms in blackness.

One substantial. . and one like a reflection in glass.

The knob leapt from Cal’s hand; the door slammed shut.

Cal dove for Goldie just as a huge serving dish sliced his way, grabbed him by the back of his vest and pulled him back. Cal stumbled, parrying objects with his sword. Staggering through the onslaught of the porch, they finally burst back into the damp night outside.

Doc was gasping, sprawled amid the devil grass, holding his thigh, blood spurting between his fingers, the gouge far worse than the earlier slash on his calf. Cal ripped off his bloody, grime-black shirt, removed the cleaner T-shirt beneath and folded it swiftly into a pressure bandage. A little distance from them lay the corpses of the two grunters. Cal suspected they’d rear to life again the moment anyone took a step toward the house, but they were quiet now.

Thunder growled overhead, and the air was thick with the smell of lightning and wind. Cal, Goldie and Colleen bent over Doc, getting in each other’s way trying to secure the bandage, to check him for other wounds. He waved them off impatiently.

“Don’t fuss over me; I’m all right. If I were to start dying, I would tell you.”

“We’re lucky any of us got out of there in one piece,” said Colleen, rising shakily and stepping toward the spare lantern they’d left on the curb.

“I don’t think it was luck.” Cal stared at the Wishart house, silent now, watchful. “It could have killed us any time it wanted.”

“Then what do you think it was?”

“Mercy. It did only what it needed to drive us away. Just like with Miss Hanson.”

“Only? Cal, that was the old college try.”

“No.” Doc said struggling to his feet, hissing through pain-clenched teeth. “I concur with Calvin. Our shields were down a dozen times. On any one of those occasions-” He tried to put weight on the bad leg, nearly fell. Goldie caught him under one arm.

“Guys, I know I’m the pessimist in the group, but what’s this?” The sweep of Colleen’s hand took in the mutilated grunter forms. “Ethnic cleansing?”

The answer came from the shadows. “Nothing short of death could have stopped them, once the voice got into their minds.” Wilma Hanson came up beside them with her gliding, soundless step. Seeing them up close, she put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my heavens.”

“You should see the house,” Goldie said.

“How’s my sister?” Cal asked.

“Quiet.” Concern etched Wilma’s brow. “For quite some time now.”

When Wilma Hanson unlocked the door and Cal stepped within, he found his sister in a state of semiconsciousness, distressingly sallow and drawn.

But also, in some inexplicable way, more human.

The attic was a ruin. Boxes of Christmas decorations were upended, board games scattered, their pieces intermingled-the Game of Life, Candyland, Mystery Date. A tangle of quilts and outgrown clothes had erupted from careful folds to take wing and land where they might.

It was an echo of the Wishart house, as if a hurricane had burst from the center of the room, then retreated. And indeed it had, Cal reflected, threading his fingers through the silk of Tina’s hair. Thunder had entered her. The storm child.

“Two faces.” Doc sat slumped on an apple crate, spectral in the amber light from the lantern on the floor, its radiance casting long shadows up the walls and slanting ceiling. “You’re sure?”

Cal nodded. “The one on the bed, the one that looked real, he. . I dunno. There was this quality of, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Like he was shocked. Sorry for me.”

“And the other?” Doc asked.

“The other. . it’s weird, he was so much clearer, even though I could see right through him. He seemed. . outraged. Only it wasn’t, ‘How dare you!’ It was more like terror. At least, that’s the vibe I got.”

“You’re our Lionel Hampton, man.” Goldie glanced up from the battered 1964 Sears catalogue he’d been leafing through. “Our king of vibes.”

“Unidentical identical twins,” Colleen muttered.

Wilma crossed to one of the few cartons still intact and retrieved an old photo album. Flipping to the page, she held it open. Cal regarded the bleached color photograph. Wilma radiant with youth and youth’s near-infinite possibility, Wilma with the twins.

Cal’s eyes went to Fred. Even then, it could be detected: the tighter set of his mouth, the opaque quality of the eyes, the hunched, defended posture.

Cal murmured, “It’s him.”

“I guess it makes a kind of sense,” Wilma sighed. “They were so close-”

“Close?” Colleen looked up. “Didn’t you say Fred hadn’t visited in all the months since the accident?”

Wilma hesitated, uncertain. “Survivor guilt.” Everyone turned to Doc. His eyes evaded, and he fought to keep his voice even. “You cannot bring them back, cannot undo the tragedy of it, so you try to avoid it, not think of it-all the while thinking of nothing else.”

Wilma nodded. “When all the machines stopped, Bob should have. . Fred must have found a way to prevent it.”

Colleen said, “The Source Project.”

Cal answered Wilma’s questioning glance with, “What Dr. Wishart was working on.”

Again, Wilma hesitated. Then she asked, “Is he draining the town?”

“Would he?” Doc asked. “The Fred you know, would he be capable of such an act?”

Wilma thought, yes. But how could she possibly make such an accusation against a friend? It felt like a betrayal. Then, like nonsense. Carefully, she offered, “Arleta is- was-a fearful woman, and she instilled that in them. We all worried about how much the boys depended on each other once, well… once Arleta stopped allowing company.” Then she added, oddly protective, “She just didn’t want anything from the outside world coming in.”

Cal gazed down at his sister, her eyes closed, the points of her ears peeking out between fine strands. It’s what he’d wanted for her. A bubble of safety. A line of defense between her and what he’d increasingly come to see as an assaultive world.

“It could be about more than just keeping his brother alive.” Cal’s gaze lingered on Tina, on the long pale lashes of her closed eyes. “Fred could be hanging on to Bob to keep hold of himself somehow, remind himself of who he is.”

“Or maybe just hold on,” Goldie said, not looking up from the catalogue. “I believe Fred’s a wanted man. By the Big Kahuna. The one wanting to chow down on all us tweaked ones. Source-zilla.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colleen snapped. “It’s all goddam guesses.”

Turning to Wilma, Doc asked, “The energy drain. The sickness. How bad?”

“The children are getting weaker. Some of the old people, too. A few, we can’t rouse anymore.” She drew in a sharp breath. “And it’s spreading.”

“Calvin,” Doc said quietly, “whatever is sapping these people, there is a battle: Fred, clinging to Bob, and something else absolutely determined to break his grip. And soon I think, very soon, more than just those creatures will start to die, unless the deadlock is broken somehow.”

Wilma drew her shoulders back. “Well, we survived company thugs. We survived cave-ins. We’ve even survived the damn economy.” Turning to her guests, she inquired, “So what do we need to do to get these battlers the hell out?”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Colleen said softly, “We kill it. Even though it kicked our ass. We find some way to kill it.” It occurred to Cal that she was calling Fred Wishart it rather than he to distance herself.

In the dust gloom of the attic, they contemplated how precisely they might destroy something that only one of them had even been able to glimpse. But to Cal, it was not the doing of the thing but the act itself that disquieted him. For in annihilating what dwelt in that shattered house, might they possibly destroy not just the illness but the cure?

“No,” he said at last to the others. “We need to know more.”

“Right,” said Colleen. “We’ll commission a study.”

“Like you said, it’s all guesses,” Cal replied. “Only doesn’t it feel like Goldie’s right, that Wishart’s fighting the same fight we are, that we’ve got a common enemy? And even if that guess is wrong, Wishart’s still our only link to- what did you call it?”

Cal’s eyes were on Goldie, but it was Doc who responded, “ ‘The real one.’ ”

“Look. I want to shotgun this nightmare out of existence, too. But we’ve got to try another way.”

He added, with the certainty of a decision already made, “What Tina felt, and what I felt from Fred Wishart once we got close, was fear. Panic. And you don’t approach that with aggression, you approach it with-”

“Hold it, hold it.”

“Colleen. .”

“Tina also came up with ‘crazy,’ right? Any hands here on how we should be approaching that?”

“Sometimes,” Goldie murmured, “you talk to a crazy like he’s okay, and he can become okay.”

“No, no, no-”

Cal cut in over Colleen. “Fred Wishart is terrified and he’s alone. . so alone is how I need to go in there.”

“Cal?”

The soft voice turned them all. It was Tina, eyes barely open. He knelt quickly beside her, taking her hand. It felt cold, but her fingers tightened about his.

“You okay?” he asked. She nodded and snuggled against him.

Wilma leaned close. “Cal, you’re tired, and you’re not thinking. I went in only with concern, knowing them, and totally unescorted.”

“I know.” Cal stroked silken hair. “But it’s not just aggression that fuels fear, it’s. . well. Wishart wanted to scare you, and he did.”

Doc asked, “Calvin, are you imagining you’re going to be able to go back in there and not be afraid?”

“Hell, why would he be afraid? “ Colleen answered for him. “Our boy here likes the idea of wearing a Frigidaire for a hat.”

Cal turned his gaze back to Tina. Her exhaustion appeared to have brought her back to herself, and him, at least for now.

“Tina?” His voice was almost a whisper. “Tina?”

Her eyes fluttered open.

“We’ve never broken our word, have we?”

Her expression clouded.

“I need to break it now. I need to try something that may mean I won’t be able to come back to you.”

“That’s not the deal,” she said in alarm, drawing back, rousing herself. “I can help you, like in the fog with the hornets.”

“Tina. .”

“You need me, to talk to Dr. Wishart. To get through, beneath. I’m the one plugged into Mutant Central.”

She had heard them, all of them, talking, he realized. But had she forgotten, was she unaware of her imprisonment in the attic?

The others were silent, empty of suggestion. Wilma drew Cal away from Tina, out of earshot.

“I can’t tell you what to do. That child, though… she has a gift. Maybe she has it for a reason.”

“If that thing gets hold of her-” Cal protested.

“Something’s got hold of a lot of children in this town. They’re dying of it.” Wilma sighed. “I can’t tell you, but I can ask: Give all those other children their chance.”

Her hand in his was warm in the night air, and weightless. A dragonfly, Tina flowed beside him toward the Wishart house. The light about her had returned, its pastel mists veiling her.

At the perimeter of the gouged, ravaged front yard, Cal halted and released her hand. The scattered, butchered remains of the grunters lay cold and insensate among the weeds.

Deliberately, Cal drew his sword and stuck it point first into the damp earth. Then he unclasped his belt and scabbard, laid them alongside it. He straightened and looked at his sister, into the sapphire flame of her eyes, saw her disquiet and her resolve. He took her hand, turned back toward the house.

“Dr. Wishart, please. We need to talk with you.”

He had tried for a normal tone, but his voice sounded harsh to his ears, invasive. He tensed, waiting. But all was stillness, save for the cicada hum.

We’re not going to hurt you. Cal aimed the thought toward the house, made a mantra of it. He pressed away what Wishart had tried to do to him, locked his fear behind a door in his mind.

He took a hesitant step onto the ruined lawn.

NO. The word, forceful and blunt, came at them. Cal flinched, and he saw Tina wince with it, wondered how much louder it seemed to her.

The body pieces of what had once been the sons and husbands and fathers of the town did not stir. Warily, Cal moved past them and, with Tina, climbed the broken steps of the porch.

In the porch, the battered, bloodstained corpses of the books heaved and fluttered as if blown by a breath but did not fly at them. There was a sound, a deep creaking groan, like the whole house shifting on its timbers. A sense of watching, of waiting, rose from the walls, from the air about them.

They crossed the porch, stepped through the place where the kitchen door had been torn from its hinges, and entered the house.

Wilma had finally gotten the Russian doctor to agree to lie down, but only when she had positioned her sofa by the front window so that he could monitor the progress of Griffin and his sister toward the Wishart house. Under his guidance, Wilma had redressed his wound-the impromptu bandage was soaked through-and washed the blood from his face, the doctor all the while protesting impatiently. But now, at last, he lay quiet and watchful.

Wilma glanced out the window, saw that Griffin and his sister had crossed the Wishart porch with nothing rising to bar their way. A promising first step. She said a silent prayer as they vanished into the house.

Wilma stepped onto her own porch. Goldman and the Brooks woman stood rigid, gazing toward the Wishart house, seeing only darkness, hearing only the vague sounds of the fading night.

Pausing behind them, Wilma caught a scent on the air, or thought she did, distant and elusive, of coal and earth and blood, heard a soft rustling in the woods that might have been wind. It brought Hank to her thoughts. Since they had been attacked, since he had thrown himself at the grunters and yelled for her to run, she had heard nothing of him, seen no sign. Had they killed him? Or had he managed, through the ferocity of his attack and his fleetness, to get away?

She had seen no blood at the site, and that had heartened her. But thinking on it now, it seemed strange. Hank had been outnumbered, surrounded. Surely they would have drawn some of his blood, or he theirs. In all their previous attacks, they had proven unrelentingly murderous. If they spared him, what possibly could have been their motive?

Puzzling over it, Hank’s struggled words came back to her. They know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to-

To what?

And then, with a chilling certainty she could not have explained, Wilma thought she knew.

To lead them.

Hank, with his cool head and audacious nerve, his relentlessness and grit. The voice in his head had been working on him, striving to fill him with an irresistible desire to kill Bob Wishart. What if it had overwhelmed him at last, as it had Joe Rance and Eddie Dayton and the others like him? But more than that, what if Hank-who alone had kept his wits about him even as he changed and had led his team, what remained of them, to the surface and safety-what if Hank retained his ability to strategize?

Not for him the unreasoning frontal attack doomed to failure. No, he would watch and wait for his moment, until the dark intelligence in the house was distracted, its attention focused on. .

Other visitors.

The scent was stronger, unmistakable now, wafting from the trailer park that bordered both her home and the Wisharts. And the sound, louder and most definitely not the wind.

Wilma stepped in front of Goldie and Colleen, both unaware of what was urgently, oppressively clear to her.

“We’ve got trouble,” she said.

GET OUT GET OUT. It came like a blow, and Cal stepped back. Tina’s fingers closed tight around his, and he felt her trembling. In its corner, the refrigerator jerked threateningly. Cupboard doors slammed in manic rage, their contents long since smashed to nothing.

GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.

“Can you reach him, Tina?” Cal fought not to shout over the shriek in his mind.

“I’m trying.” She struggled to get the words out, a pulse twitching at the corner of her eye, her breath coming in short gasps. “But there’s something else in here pulling at me.”

He could hear the panic in her voice, and he tried to will into her what calm he retained. Whether coincidence or not, she seemed to gather strength. She closed her eyes and concentrated, her feet drifting down to graze the floor.

The scream in his mind eased back.

The refrigerator quivered and was still. The cupboards lapsed into silence. They walked forward more quickly now, into the lightless pit of the hallway, the faint illumination that radiated from Tina’s flesh magnified eerily by the dust.

The door of the far bedroom on the left was shut, blue-green light leaking out along its frame.

We’re not going to harm you, we’re not-

From the edge of his vision, Cal caught the blur of a dark object hurtling toward them. Tina saw it, too; her aura flared up to field it.

“Don’t,” Cal called to her. She caught his meaning-do nothing that might be perceived as a threat-and faded her aura back, rendering it insubstantial. Cal blocked the object, a black Bakelite telephone, with his forearm. Pain shot up his arm as the phone rebounded, bounced off a wall and lay motionless.

There was a quaking beneath his feet, he could hear cracks splintering along the walls on either side of him, and the whole house seemed to moan.

You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe, but Cal could feel fear rising to engulf the universe, and he felt his own fear in answer.

In the flickering light of Tina’s glow, Cal could see the picture frames lurching and slamming against the walls to get free, the carpeting tearing itself up. Tina was shaking, her hair whipping about as in a gale. Her eyes were huge, desperate, as she strained to stay focused amid the assault of clashing wills.

“Cal-Cal-I-!”

And then it was as if something deep within the house snapped, and there was a roaring that went on and on. The dead bulb in the fixture overhead ruptured, spewing glass. Cal instinctively moved to shield his sister. Picture frames tore free, and yellow pages shuddered up and catapulted at them. He batted them aside wildly, shouting. Then he felt a tingling on his skin and his eyes were dazzled as Tina’s luminescence flared out to enfold him, and relief and disappointment flooded him.

Magazines reared like hawks, struck the incandescence and were rebuffed, a side table came swinging up to shatter. Medicine bottles launched themselves, exploded against the barrier; pills and glass shrapneled against the bubble and fell back.

And over the deafening fear-rage bellow, another noise, rumbling from deep within the walls, a cracking, crashing, ripping nightmare of a sound. Chunks of plaster burst from the wall, and a thick timber shot out of the opening, piercing Tina’s barrier. It caught her a glancing blow on the side of the head, like a giant flicking a finger. She cried out and crumpled, her radiance damping down to nothing, leaving them defenseless.

The very air seemed to vibrate with triumph as the onslaught intensified, a cannonade of pens and paperweights and metal trays raining down on them. Cal fell on his sister, covering her with his body, taking the brunt of it. An aluminum medicine cart crashed into him, a heavy wall clock, a radio. He cried out at the spiderweb agony of cracking ribs. Doors along each wall were flinging themselves open and shut, laboring to tear themselves from their hinges. A bookcase tumbled toward him, scattering heavy volumes and figurines, which tore and shattered yet still bounded forward to expend their fury on him.

Cal curled into a tight ball around his sister, unmoving beneath him, and he knew it was the end and there was nothing he could do. One of the doors shrieked loose and cartwheeled through the air, smashing down on him with mad exultation, and he screamed, and in the scream was the entirety of his failure and his love and how he would give anything, do anything to save her, to consume himself and all the world if only, only-

Oh God oh God oh God, for God’s sake, please, please, please, don’t hurt her!

And in the deafening silence that followed, he couldn’t say whether he had screamed it or just thought it.

But the response was immediate, as all the objects dropped lifeless to the carpet, the quivering of floor and walls and ceiling halted, and the dust hung mute in the air.

Beneath him, Tina was breathing in quick gasps, moaning softly. Cal rose, pushing the heaped debris and remnant of door aside. The motion sent white-hot needles coursing up his side, and he nearly blacked out. But he inhaled slowly, pushed the vertigo down.

Bending stiffly, hissing against the pain, Cal took his sister’s hands. She was conscious, breathing more evenly now. He helped her to her feet, and she rose shakily, floated up off the floor, glimmering once more.

Slices of misty, first dawn light filtered in through the frame whose door had ripped free and the others where doors hung ajar. Only the far door on the left remained shut, the ghost light seeping along its edges. Tina opened her mouth to frame a question, but Cal motioned her to silence. She leaned in to him, and he put his arm around her as they advanced.

His feet crunching on shards of glass and plastic and ceramic, he stepped to the door, reached for the knob. But before he could grasp it, the door swung open.

Like some lost city of scrap metal amid the wild, the trailer park loomed, silent and dark. Several of the elderly residents had gone missing weeks ago, with hideous gashes in the sides of their motor homes the only indication of what had happened to them. The rest had moved in with friends and relations, where light and numbers kept the night things at bay.

Moving quickly, Goldie and Colleen at her side-Doc having been ordered to stay behind-Wilma could sense the grunters on the other side of the trailers, coming fast toward the Wishart house, could hear their low, eager exhalations.

Too late, Wilma spied the rock hurled from behind a tree, wasn’t fast enough to reach Colleen. It struck the lantern she carried, shattering it, quenching its light.

Then the grunters were on them, more than Wilma would have thought possible, oozing from the brush and low branches, from beneath rusty Winnebagos and corroded Airstreams. A hard, compact form dropped on her from atop one of the dented aluminum structures, and she was rolling with it on the mossy ground as it tore hissing at her. She scratched at its eyes, drove it shrieking away. She cast about in the blur of bodies for her companions, saw them amid the surging, growling forms, flailing wrench and staff and forcing the grotesques back.

But then two more of the devils came at her, and another butted his head into her stomach, and she was dragged down gasping, their fists pummeling her, one of them grabbing her throat. She twisted, tried to claw at them, but their weight was pressing her into the earth, she couldn’t catch her breath, felt herself giving way, the stink of them close on her, their laughter filling her ears.

And then the smell of blood was everywhere, and the taut, heaving grunter on top of her collapsed, hot liquid spilling over her face, and she was released, the other two squealing, running away. A hand reached down to her, and she seized it, climbed to her feet.

The sword he held was still clotted with earth from where it had been plunged into the dirt in front of the Wishart house.

“Sorry to disobey your orders,” Doc said.

Wilma grinned, but there was no time for words, as beyond the press of bodies, she spied a familiar, darting form.

Hank, unmistakably. On the move with a chunk of concrete in his hand, giving low, growling orders, rallying his followers as he vaulted past the others. Rolling and regaining his footing, running as he had as a boy; no, even faster.

Toward the Wishart house.

And Wilma, bounding with her uncanny feline grace, was after him.

Bob Wishart lay immobile on the bed, his eyes closed, still connected to a maze of wires and tubes and useless, dark machinery. Beside him stood his brother, lightly resting a protective hand on Bob in much the same way, Cal realized, that he had his own hand on his sister’s thin shoulders.

Dr. Fred Wishart looked as he had in the flash Cal had glimpsed earlier: pale, translucent, with little indication of the power he wielded. But Cal could see that the tiny flashes of light that made up Wishart’s skin were continually flickering out and reflaring, as if he were in a constant state of disintegration and rebirth, photon by photon. The mighty effort he was expending was consuming him; it took the fuel of the entire town to keep him from being extinguished.

It was he, not the Source, feeding on Boone’s Gap.

Dr. Wishart’s gaze followed them as they entered the room, and there was that same desperate fierceness Cal had seen before, with a new, indefinable note tempering it. Power murmured and flickered in the corners of the room, blue lines of what looked like fire creeping across the floor, slow-moving greenish mists oozing from the walls.

Wishart turned to his twin, spoke in a voice surprisingly melodic and gentle. “Bob?” Cal saw that the two were breathing in unison.

Bob’s eyes fluttered open. Fred nodded toward the doorway, toward him and Tina. Bob turned his head dreamily to them. Barely conscious, hardly moving, he seemed held by a whisper.

“There, you see?” Dr. Wishart said. “No harm.”

Bob looked relieved, and Cal was again struck by the difference between the brothers, the difference that had been branded on them before the Change, before they were grown. The frantic, anguished moment in the hall came to Cal, his despair to save his sister, who knew him best, whom he loved above all. And he understood that it was his need that had spoken to the minds of the unseen twins, had moved Fred to relent, to spare them. . for Bob’s sake, for his gentler nature.

And how much did Bob know of the rest?

Cautiously, Cal inched farther into the room with Tina. “You haven’t told him?” he asked Dr. Wishart. “He doesn’t know about the others?”

Fred Wishart’s gaze darkened. Bob looked at him, perplexed.

“It’s nothing,” Fred told him, too quickly. But his brother’s eyes remained on him, inquiring. “I’m not strong enough. I’m just borrowing from some of the people here. . to keep you alive, to keep us together.”

And killing your neighbors, the people you grew up with, who never did you harm. Cal wanted to hate him, this monster who had mutilated those wretches on the lawn and in the fog, who was even now draining the life from the old and the young and the weak.

But drawing his sister closer to him, holding her there, Cal found he could not.

Cal heard Tina’s soft voice. “You’re killing the town, everyone in it, to keep this going.”

“Fred?” Bob’s voice was tender and mournful, a parched croak, long unused. “Fred, we can’t. .”

“No, Bobby. If I let go, you’ll die-”

“But Fred. .”

Fred’s crystalline-bright eyes flashed on Cal and Tina, and Cal felt himself assailed by a blast of thought. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU DON’T KNOW.

Bob’s troubled gaze, briefly on Cal, returned to his brother. Fred reacted as though to a caress. Damping his anger, he said, “The world-something. . happened. More important than-”

Fred Wishart froze for a moment, buffeted by some internal war he alone was privy to. He continued, ever so gently, “I let go, I’m destroyed, too. Something bad needs me-to be whole. . ”

Bob turned his head on his pillow, looked pleadingly at Cal. “Please. Tell me. What’s happening here?”

Again, thought crashed into Cal, guilty, frantic, desperate, justifying, words all tumbled and overlapping, a jumbled mea culpa and defense. PURE RESEARCH CHANGED OBJECTED CHANGED DEVIL’S BARGAIN CHANGED ME CHANGED NO CHANGE LOVE BOB LOVE NO-

Cal looked at Bob, trying to steady himself, trying to focus through the screaming in his mind.

Desperation-driven, panic-driven madness, Cal could empathize with. But in the face of this howling self-justification, everything in Cal rebelled.

“You should know,” Cal’s low voice trembled, every word a fierce battle, “You have a choice. You have a-”

NO NO NO.

It thundered in Cal’s brain, the room itself shaking, tortured, accusatory.

NO TELL NO BLOCKING DOORWAY BLOCKING HOLDING CLOSED CAN’T OPEN SWALLOW WHOLE SWALLOW ME I CEASE WHO WHAT I AM MONSTER.

Cal battled to respond, to answer in words or thoughts, but the wall against him felt as solid as stone. For Fred Wishart, the continued existence of his fellow beings had fallen to nothing in the face of this higher imperative, his need to cling to Bob.

All in Boone’s Gap were to die.

Cal turned once more to the waiting Bob, clearly screened somehow from Fred’s words. Sensing it might end his own life, Cal struggled to speak.

NO NO NO. It was like a hurricane. Cal staggered back, grasping the doorframe. UNDERSTAND UNDERSTAND BOB DIES IT TAKES ME.

Fred Wishart ran distracted starry fingers through firelight hair, and his wild desolate eyes shifted-boring into Tina.

AND IT TAKES HER.

Cal couldn’t move. He felt as if he were falling away from himself. TAKE HER. Tina. Into the monster’s maw.

Bob’s eyes were on him. Waiting. While, in an instant that would, in the future, seem to stretch on for an eternity, Cal’s voice was still.

Suddenly, the far window exploded inward and a small gray body flung itself through the opening, landing with a springy lightness. It whipped its big head around and spotted Bob, hurled itself toward the bed with a chunk of concrete raised high in its hands.

Cal screamed, “No!” as Fred Wishart’s head snapped up, eyes no longer human, no longer of the living earth at all, a blazing blue horror of darkness. Wishart opened his mouth, and fire poured out, light streamed from his eyes. The whole fabric of the house wrenched and twisted, crushing inward, and the grunter was hurled to the floor, swept into a corner like a bug by a broom.

Glass shattered and more grunters were pouring in, through both windows now. Wishart swung his glare around to them, and they were caught and smashed back, cracking the walls, their necks snapping as they slid limply down.

But now the first grunter was back up, launching himself toward Bob. A heavy respirator lurched from its base, flew killingly through the air at him.

“Hank!” Cal saw that Wilma Hanson had burst in through the hall door. She dove between Hank and the respirator. It caught her hard, driving her back into Hank, ramming them against the wall, both of them splaying unmoving on the floor.

And now Cal was aware of another, oppressive presence tearing into existence in the room, engulfing the air and his mind, a conquering, clamorous disputation of voices.

Fred Wishart cried out, a wail of despair, hands thrashing in denial, refusal, but his concentration had been broken. Shining chaos, darkness that blazed like fire, seized him, collapsing him and capturing him and spinning him away into a whirlpool of nothingness and everything. And in the same unreal, horrific instant Cal saw Bob collapse like a marionette with its strings cut.

“Cal!” Tina tried to cling to him.

He reached frantically for her, but he was hurled back, stunned, into the wall. He saw her swept away, whirling like a glowing milkweed pod, twisting in the air, helpless in the clutch of remorseless power. He thought he screamed her name, later his voice was hoarse from shouting, but he had no recollection of any sound coming out. His whole soul screamed NO! NO! NO! and he reached for her in a nightmare.

And in a nightmare she was gone.