The Mist

VI. Further Discussion. Mrs. Carmody. Fortifications. What Happened to the Flat- Earth Society.

The next four hours passed in a kind of dream. There was a long and semihysterical discussion following Brown's confirmation, or maybe the discussion wasn't as long as it seemed; maybe it was just the grim necessity of people chewing over the same information, trying to see if from every possible point of view, working it the way a dog works a bone, trying to get at the marrow. It was a slow coming to belief. You can see the same thing at any New England town meeting in March.

There was the Flat-Earth Society, headed by Norton. They were a vocal minority of about ten who believed none of it. Norton pointed out over and over again that there were only four witnesses to the bag-boy being carried off by what he called the Tentacles from Planet X (it was good for a laugh the first time, but it wore thin quickly; Norton, in his increasing agitation, seemed not to notice). He added that he personally did not trust one of the four. He further pointed out that fifty percent of the witnesses were now hopelessly inebriated. That was unquestionably true. Jim and Myron LaFleur, with the entire beer cooler and wine rack at their disposal, were abysmally shitfaced. Considering what had happened to Norm, and their part in it, I didn't blame them. They would sober off all too soon.

Ollie continued to drink steadily, ignoring Brown's protests. After a while Brown gave up, contenting himself with an occasional baleful threat about the Company. He didn't seem to realize that Federal Foods, Inc., with its stores in Bridgton, North Windham, and Portland, might not even exist anymore. For all we knew, the Eastern Seaboard might no longer exist. Ollie drank steadily, but didn't get drunk. He was sweating it out as rapidly as he could put it in.

At last, as the discussion with the Flat-Earthers was becoming acrimonious, Ollie spoke up. «If you don't believe it, Mr. Norton, that's fine. I'll tell you what to do. You go on out that front door and walk around to the back. There's a great big pile of returnable beer and soda bottles there. Norm and Buddy and I put them out this morning. You bring back a couple of those bottles so we know you really went back there. You do that and I'll personally take my shirt off and eat it.»

Norton began to bluster.

Ollie cut him off in the same soft, even voice. «I tell you, you're not doing anything but damage talking the way you are. There's people here that want to go home and make sure their families are okay. My sister and her year-old daughter are at home in Naples right now. I'd like to check on them, sure. But if people start believing you and try to go home, what happened to Norm is going to happen to them.»

He didn't convince Norton, but he convinced some of the leaners and fence sitters-it wasn't what he said so much as it was his eyes, his haunted eyes. I think Norton's sanity hinged on not being convinced, or that he thought it did. But he didn't take Ollie up on his offer to bring back a sampling of returnables from out back. None of them did. They weren't ready to go out, at least not yet. He and his little group of Flat-Earthers (reduced by one or two now) went as far away from the rest of us as they could get, over by the prepared-meats case one of them kicked my sleeping son in the leg as he went past, waking him up.

I went over, and Billy clung to my neck. When I tried to put him down, he clung tighter and said, «Don't do that, Daddy. Please.»

I found a shopping cart and put him in the baby seat. He looked very big in there. It would have been comical except for his pale face, the dark hair brushed across his forehead just above his eyebrows, his woeful eyes. He probably hadn't been up in the baby seat of the shopping cart for as long as two years. These little things slide by you, you don't realize at first, and when what has changed finally comes to you, it's always a nasty shock.

Meanwhile, with the Flat-Earthers having withdrawn, the argument had found another lightning rod-this time it was Mrs. Carmody, and understandably enough, she stood alone.

In the faded, dismal light she was witchlike in her blazing canary pants, her bright rayon blouse, her armloads of clacking junk jewelry — copper, tortoiseshell, adamantine-and her thyroidal purse. Her parchment face was grooved with strong vertical lines. Her frizzy gray hair was yanked flat with three horn combs and twisted in the back. Her mouth was a line of knotted rope.

«There is no defense against the will of God. This has been coming. I have seen the signs. There are those here that I have told, but there are none so blind as those who will not see.»

«Well, what are you saying? What are you proposing?» Mike Haden broke in impatiently. He was a town selectman, although he didn't look the part now, in his yachtsman's cap and saggy-seated Bermudas. He was sipping at a beer; a great many men were doing it now. Bud Brown had given up protesting, but he was indeed taking names-keeping a rough tab on everyone he could.

«Proposing?» Mrs. Carmody echoed, wheeling toward Haden. «Proposing? Why, I am proposing that you prepare to meet your God, Michael Haden.» She gazed around at all of us. «Prepare to meet your God!»

«Prepare to meet shit,» Myron LaFleur said in a drunken snarl from the beer cooler. «Old woman, I believe your tongue must be hung in the middle so it can run on both ends.»

There was a rumble of agreement. Billy looked around nervously, and I slipped an arm around his shoulders.

«I'll have my say!» she cried. Her upper lip curled back, revealing snaggle teeth that were yellow with nicotine. I thought of the dusty stuffed animals in her shop, drinking eternally at the mirror that served as their creek. «Doubters will doubt to the end! Yet a monstrosity did drag that poor boy away! Things in the mist! Every abomination out of a bad dream! Eyeless freaks! Pallid horrors! Do you doubt? Then go on out! Go on out and say howdy-do!»

«Mrs. Carmody, you'll have to stop,» I said. «You're scaring my boy.»

The man with the little girl echoed the sentiment. She, all plump legs and scabby knees, had hidden her face against her father's stomach and put her hands over her cars. Big Bill wasn't crying, but he was close.

«There's only one chance,» Mrs. Carmody said.

«What's that, ma'am?» Mike Haden asked politely.

«A sacrifice,» Mrs. Carmody said-she seemed to grin in the gloom. «A blood sacrifice.»

Blood sacrifice — the words hung there, slowly turning. Even now, when I know better, I tell myself that then what she meant was someone's pet dog — there were a couple of them trotting around the market in spite of the regulations against them. Even now I tell myself that. She looked like some crazed remnant of New England Puritanism in the gloom … but I suspect that something deeper and darker than mere Puritanism motivated her. Puritanism had its own dark grandfather, old Adam with bloody hands.

She opened her mouth to say something more, and a small, neat man in red pants and a natty sport shirt struck her openhanded across the face. His hair was parted with ruler evenness on the left. He wore glasses. He also wore the unmistakable look of the summer tourist.

«You shut up that bad talk,» he said softly and tonelessly.

Mrs. Carmody put her hand to her mouth and then held it out to us, a wordless accusation. There was blood on the palm. But her black eyes seemed to dance with mad glee.

«You had it coming!» a woman cried out. «I would have done it myself!»

«They'll get hold of you,» Mrs. Carmody said, showing us her bloody palm. The trickle of blood was now running down one of the wrinkles from her mouth to her chin like a droplet of rain down a gutter. «Not today, maybe. Tonight. Tonight when the dark comes. They'll come with the night and take someone else. With the night they'll come. You'll hear them coming, creeping and crawling. And when they come, you'll beg for Mother Carmody to show you what to do.»

The man in the red pants raised his hand slowly.

«You come on and hit me,» she whispered, and grinned her bloody grin at him. His hand wavered. «Hit me if you dare.» His hand dropped. Mrs. Carmody walked away by herself. Then Billy did begin to cry, hiding his face against me as the little girl had done with her father.

«I want to go home,» he said. «I want to see my mommy.,

I comforted him as best I could. Which probably wasn't very well.

The talk finally turned into less frightening and destructive channels. The plate-glass windows, the market's obvious weak point, were mentioned. Mike Haden asked what other entrances there were, and Ollie and Brown quickly ticked them off-two loading doors in addition to the one Norm had opened. The main IN'OUT doors. The window in the manager's office (thick, reinforced glass, securely locked).

Talking about these things had a paradoxical effect. It made the danger seem more real but at the same time made us feel better. Even Billy felt it. He asked if he could go get a candy bar. I told him it would be all right so long as he didn't go near the big windows.

When he was out of earshot, a man near Mike Haden said, «Okay, what are we going to do about those windows? The old lady may be as crazy as a bedbug, but she could be right about something moving in after dark.»

«Maybe the fog will blow over by then,» a woman said.

«Maybe,» the man said. «And maybe not.»

«Any ideas?» I asked Bud and Ollie.

«Hold on a sec,» the man near Haden said. «I'm Dan Miller. From Lynn, Mass. You don't know me, no reason why you should, but I got a place on Highland Lake. Bought it just this year. Got held up for it, is more like it, but I had to have it.» There were a few chuckles. «Anyway, I saw a whole pile of fertilizer and lawn-food bags down there. Twenty-five-pound sacks, most of them. We could put them up like sandbags. Leave loopholes to look out through …»

Now more people were nodding and talking excitedly. I almost said something, then held it back. Miller was right. Putting those bags up could do no harm, and might do some good. But my mind went back to that tentacle squeezing the dog-food bag. I thought that one of the bigger tentacles could probably do the same for a twenty-five-pound bag of Green Acres lawn food or Vigoro. But a sermon on that wouldn't get us out or improve anyone's mood.

People began to break up, talking about getting it done, and Miller yelled: «Hold it! Hold it! Let's thrash this out while we're all together!»

They came back, a loose congregation of fifty or sixty people in the corner formed by the beer cooler, the storage doors, and the left end of the meat case, where Mr. McVey always seems to put the things no one wants, like sweetbreads and Scotch eggs and sheep's brains and head cheese. Billy wove his way through them with a five-year-old's unconscious agility in a world of giants and held up a Hershey bar. «Want this, Daddy?»

«Thanks.» I took it. It tasted sweet and good.

«This is probably a stupid question,» Miller resumed, «but we ought to fill in the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?»

There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. «I'll try for it, if you want.»

Ollie said, «Right now I don't think that would be a good idea, Mr. Cornell.»

Cornell grunted. «Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make the offer.»

«Well, I didn't really think so,» Dan Miller said. «But I thought-»

«Wait, hold it a minute,» a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an ahhhh-ing sound, as if they had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been blushing, blushed that much the harder. She rooted in her purse again and brought out a box of Smith Wesson ammunition.

«I'm Amanda Dumfries,» she said to Miller. «This gun … my husband's idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I've carried it unloaded for two years.»

«Is your husband here, ma'am?»

«No, he's in New York. On business. He's gone on business a lot. That's why he wanted me to carry the gun.»

«Well,» Miller said, «if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a thirty-eight?

«Yes. And I've never fired it in my life except on a target range once.»

Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. «Okay,» he said. «We got a gun. Who shoots good? I sure don't.»

People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then, reluctantly, Ollie said: «I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt.45 and a Llama. 25.»

«You?» Brown said. «Huh. You'll be too drunk to see by dark.»

Ollie said very clearly, «Why don't you just shut up and write down your names?»

Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut it again.

«It's yours,» Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket, where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.

«Thank you, Mrs. Dumfries,» Miller said.

«Don't mention it,» she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.

«This may be silly, too,» Miller said, turning back to Brown with his clipboard and Ollie with his beer, «but there aren't anything like flamethrowers in the place, are there?»

«Ohhh, shit,» Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had done.

«What is it?» Mike Haden asked.

«Well … until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches. The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust system or whatever. You remember those, Mr. Brown?»

Brown nodded, looking sour.

«Sold out?» Miller asked.

«No, they didn't go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of the case back. What a pisser. I mean … what a shame.» Blushing so deeply he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired into the background again.

We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds of O'Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I met Ollie's eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear. He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying to fend them off with the handles of O'Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way.

«Mike,» Miller said, «why don't you crew this little adventure? I want to talk to Ollie and Dave here for a minute.»

«Glad to.» Haden clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. «Somebody had to take charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town.»

«Does this mean I get a kickback on my taxes? Miller asked. He was a banty little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you can't help liking on short notice and-just maybe-the kind of guy you can't help not liking after he's been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows how to do everything better than you do.

«Noway,» Haden said, laughing.

Haden walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.

«Don't worry about Billy,» I said.

«Man, I've never been so worried in my whole life,» Miller said.

«No,» Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas.

«I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other,» Miller said.

I finished my Hershey bar and got a beer to wash it down with.

«Tell you what I think,» Miller said. «We ought to get half a dozen people to wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine. Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid all ready. If we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches pretty quick.»

I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough-not if you had seen Norm dragged out-but it was better than salt.

«That would give them something to think about, at least,» Ollie said.

Miller's lips pressed together. «That bad, huh?» He said.

«That bad,» Ollie agreed, and worked his beer.

By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A watchman had been placed at each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mop-handle torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of sentries for each one. When four-thirty came around, I was sitting on a pile of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into the mist.

Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull it seemed, and gloomy just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.

«Daddy, do you know what's happening?» Billy asked.

«No, hon,» I said.

He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of his Tuffskin jeans. «Why doesn't somebody come and rescue us?» he asked finally. «The State Police or the FBI or someone?»

«I don't know.»

«Do you think Mom's okay?»

«Billy, I just don't know,» I said, and put an arm around him.

«I want her awful bad,» Billy said, struggling with tears. «I'm sorry about the times I was bad to her.»

«Billy,» I said, and had to stop. I could taste salt in my throat, and my voice wanted to tremble.

«Will it be over?» Billy asked. «Daddy? Will it?»

«I don't know,» I said, and he put his face in the hollow of my shoulder and I held the back of his head, felt the delicate curve of his skull just under the thick growth of his hair. I found myself remembering the evening of my wedding day. Watching Steff take off the simple brown dress she had changed into after the ceremony. She had had a big purple bruise on one hip from running into the side of a door the day before. I remembered looking at the bruise and thinking, When she got that, she was still Stephanie Stepanek, and feeling something like wonder. Then we had made love, and outside it was spitting snow from a dull gray December sky.

Billy was crying.

«Shh, Billy, shh,» I said, rocking his head against me, but he went on crying. It was the sort of crying that only mothers know how to fix right.

Premature night came inside the Federal Foods. Miller and Haden and Bud Brown handed out flashlights, the whole stock, about twenty. Norton clamoured loudly for them on behalf of his group, and received two. The lights bobbed here and there in the aisles like uneasy phantoms.

I held Billy against me and looked out through the loophole. The milky, translucent quality of the light out there hadn't changed much; it was putting up the bags that had made the market so dark. Several times I thought I saw something, but it was only jumpiness. One of the others raised a hesitant false alarm.

Billy saw Mrs. Turman again, and went to her eagerly, even though she hadn't been over to sit for him all summer. She had one of the flashlights and handed it over to him amiably enough. Soon he was trying to write his name in light on the blank glass faces of the frozen-food cases. She seemed as happy to see him as he was to see her, and in a little while they came over. Hattie Turman was a tall, thin woman with lovely red hair just beginning to streak gray. A pair of glasses hung from an ornamental chain-the sort, I believe, it is illegal for anyone except middle-aged women to wear-on her breast.

«Is Stephanie here, David?» she asked.

«No. At home.»

She nodded. «Alan, too. How long are you on watch here?»

«Until six.»

«Have you seen anything?»

«No. Just the mist.»

«I'll keep Billy until six, if you like.»

«Would you like that, Billy?»

«Yes, please,» he said, swinging the flashlight above his head in slow arcs and watching it play across the ceiling.

«God will keep your Steffy, and Alan, too,» Mrs. Turman said, and led Billy away by the hand. She spoke with serene sureness, but there was no conviction in her eyes.

Around five-thirty the sounds of excited argument rose near the back of the store. Someone jeered at something someone else had said, and someone-it was Buddy Eagleton, I think-shouted, «You're crazy if you go out there!»

Several of the flashlight beams pooled together at the center of the controversy, and they moved toward the front of the store. Mrs. Carmody's shrieking, derisive laugh split the gloom, as abrasive as fingers drawn down a slate blackboard.

Above the babble of voices came the boom of Norton's courtroom tenor: «Let us pass, please! Let us pass!»

The man at the loophole next to mine left his place to see what the shouting was about. I decided to stay where I was. Whatever the concatenation was, it was coming my way.

«Please,» Mike Hatlen was saying. «Please, let's talk this thing through.»

«There is nothing to talk about,» Norton proclaimed. Now his face swam out of the gloom. It was determined and haggard and wholly wretched. He was holding one of the two flashlights allocated to the Flat-Earthers. The corkscrewed tufts of hair still stuck up behind his ears like a cuckold's horns. He was at the head of an extremely small procession-five of the original nine or ten. «We are going out,» he said.

«Don't stick to this craziness,» Miller said. «Mike's right. We can talk it over, can't we? Mr. McVey is going to barbecue some chicken over the gas grill, we can all sit down and eat and just-»

He got in Norton's way and Norton gave him a push. Miller didn't like it. His face flushed and then set in a hard expression. «Do what you want, then,» he said. «But you're as good as murdering these other people.»

With all the evenness of great resolve or unbreakable obsession, Norton said: «We'll send help back for you.»

One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve.

«Listen,» Mike Hatlen said. «Mr. Norton — Brent — at least stay for the chicken. Get some hot food inside you.»

«And give you a chance to go on talking? I've been in too many courtrooms to fall for that. You've psyched out half a dozen of my people already.»

«Your people?» Haden almost groaned it. «Your people? Good Christ, what kind of talk is that? They're people, that's all. This is no game, and it's surely not a courtroom. There are, for want of a better word, there are things out there, and what's the sense of getting, yourself killed?»

«Things, you say,» Norton said, sounding superficially amused. «Where? Your people have been on watch for a couple of hours now. Who's seen one?»

«Well, out back. In the-»

«No, no, no,» Norton said, shaking his head. «That ground has been covered and covered. We're going out-»

«No,» someone whispered, and it echoed and spread, sounding like the rustle of dead leaves at dusk of an October evening. No, no, no …

«Will you restrain us?» a shrill voice asked. This was one of Norton's «people,» to use his word-an elderly lady wearing bifocals. «Will you restrain us?»

The soft babble of negatives died away.

«No,» Mike said. «No, I don't think anyone will restrain you.

I whispered in Billy's ear. He looked at me, startled and questioning. «Go on, now,» I said. «Be quick.»

He went.

Norton ran his hands through his hair, a gesture as calculated as any ever made by a Broadway actor. I had liked him better pulling the cord of his chainsaw fruitlessly, cussing and thinking himself unobserved. I could not tell then and do not know any better now if he believed in what he was doing or not. I think, down deep, that he knew what was going to happen. I think that the logic he had paid lip service to all his life turned on him at the end like a tiger that has gone bad and mean.

He looked around restlessly, seeming to wish that there was more to say. Then he led his four followers through one of the checkout lanes. In addition to the elderly woman, there was a chubby boy of about twelve, a young girl, and a man in blue jeans wearing a golf cap tipped back on his head.

Norton's eyes caught mine, widened a little, and then started to swing away.

«Brent, wait a minute,» I said.

«I don't want to discuss it any further. Certainly not with you.

«I know you don't. I just want to ask a favor.» I looked around and saw Billy coming back toward the checkouts at a run.

«What's that?» Norton asked suspiciously as Billy came up and handed me a package done up in cellophane.

«Clothesline,» I said. I was vaguely aware that everyone in the market was watching us now, loosely strung out on the other side of the cash registers and checkout lanes. «It's the big package. Three hundred feet.»

«so?»

«I wondered if you'd tie one end around your waist before you go out. I'll let it out. When you feel it come up tight, just tie it around something. It doesn't matter what. A car door handle would do.»

«What in God's name for?»

«It will tell me you got at least three hundred feet,» I said.

Something in his eyes flickered … but only momentarily. «No,» he said.

I shrugged. «Okay. Good luck, anyhow.»

Abruptly the man in the golf cap said, «I'll do it, mister. No reason not to.»

Norton swung on him, as if to say something sharp, and the man in the golf cap studied him calmly. There was nothing flickering in his eyes. He had made his decision and there was simply no doubt in him. Norton saw it too and said nothing.

«Thanks,» I said.

I slit the wrapping with my pocketknife and the clothesline accordioned out in stiff loops. I found one loose end and tied it around Golf Cap's waist in a loose granny. He immediately untied it and cinched it tighter with a good quick sheet-bend knot. There was not a sound in the market. Norton shifted uneasily from foot to foot.

«You want to take my knife?» I asked the man in the golf cap.

«I got one.» He looked at me with that same calm contempt. «You just see to paying out your line. If it binds up, I'll chuck her.»

«Are we all ready?» Norton asked, too loud. The chubby boy jumped as if he had been goosed. Getting no response, Norton turned to go.

«Brent,» I said, and held out my hand. «Good luck, man.

He studied my hand as if it were some dubious foreign object. «We'll send back help,» he said finally, and pushed through the OUT door. That thin, acrid smell came in again. The others followed him out.

Mike Hatlen came down and stood beside me. Norton's party of five stood in the milky, slow-moving fog. Norton said something and I should have heard it, but the mist seemed to have an odd damping effect. I heard nothing but the sound of his voice and two or three isolated syllables, like the voice on the radio heard from some distance. They moved off.

Hatlen held the door a little way open. I paid out the clothesline, keeping as much slack in it as I could, mindful of the man's promise to chuck the rope if it bound him up. There was still not a sound. Billy stood beside me, motionless but seeming to thrum with his own inner current.

Again there was that weird feeling that the five of them did not so much disappear into the fog as become invisible. For a moment their clothes seemed to stand alone, and then they were gone. You were not really impressed with the unnatural density of the mist until you saw people swallowed up in a space of seconds.

I paid the line out. A quarter of it went, then a half. It stopped going out for a moment. It went from a live thing to a dead one in my hands. I held my breath. Then it started to go out again. I paid it through my fingers, and suddenly remembered my father taking me to see the Gregory Peck film of Moby Dick at the Brookside. I think I smiled a little.

Three-quarters of the line was gone now. I could see the end of it lying beside one of Billy's feet. Then the rope stopped moving through my hands again. It lay motionless for perhaps five seconds, and then another five feet jerked out. Then it suddenly whipsawed violently to the left, twanging off the edge of the OUT door.

Twenty feet of rope suddenly paid out, making a thin heat across my left palm. And from out of the mist there came a high, wavering scream. It was impossible to tell the sex of the screamer.

The rope whipsawed in my hands again. And again. It skated across the space in the doorway to the right, then back to the left. A few more feet paid out, and then there was a ululating howl from out there that brought an answering moan from my son. Hatlen stood aghast. His eyes were huge. One corner of his mouth turned down, trembling.

The howl was abruptly cut off. There was no sound at all for what seemed to be forever. Then the old lady cried out-this time there could be no doubt about who it was.

«Git it offa me!» she screamed. «Oh my Lord my Lord get it-»

Then her voice was cut off, too.

Almost all of the rope abruptly ran out through my loosely closed fist, giving me a hotter burn this time. Then it went completely slack, and a sound came out of the mist — a thick, loud grunt-that made all the spit in my mouth dry up.

It was like no sound I've ever heard, but the closest approximation might be a movie set in the African veld or a South American swamp. It was the sound of a big animal. It came again, low and tearing and savage. Once more … and then it subsided to a series of low mutterings. Then it was completely gone.

«Close the door,» Amanda Dumfries said in a trembling voice. «Please.»

«In a minute,» I said, and began to yank the line back in.

It came out of the mist and piled up around my feet in untidy loops and snarls. About three feet from the end, the new white clothesline went barn-red.

«Death!» Mrs. Carmody screamed. «Death to go out there! Now do you see?»

The end of the clothesline was a chewed and frayed tangle of fiber and little puffs of cotton. The little puffs were dewed with minute drops of blood.

No one contradicted Mrs. Carmody.

Mike Hatlen let the door swing shut.