Soulstorm.

McNeely felt the muscles of his jaw grow rigid.

It is not gone.

"Stop it, d.a.m.n you! Stop toying with me!"

We enjoy toying with you. And with the others.

"What do you . . ."

When you first came. The voices. The visions. The dreams. The woman speaking what she truly felt to her husband.

"You did all that?"

We did.

"Why?"

To explore you. To see what you feared, thought. What you desired.

George McNeely felt utterly naked, like a victim in the shower in one of those mindless slasher movies, eyes blinded by soap, with the black shadow looming larger through the opacity of the plastic curtain. But instead of seeing only his body, the grinning slasher saw through to his soul, seeing and relishing every G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing he"d ever wanted to hide, laughing out loud at every secret he"d ever had. The thought was unbearable. He pushed it away by going back to something the voice had said earlier.

"You said that . . . Neville hates us . . . Gabrielle and Kelly and me. Why did he ... does he hate us so much?" So much that that hate still survives, he thought, but did not voice it.

He hated you from the start. That was why he brought you here.

"Why he ..."

You had done something to a relative in a battle. Wickstrom harmed a cousin. c.u.mmings destroyed a friend. Neville hates you for that. He wants to destroy you.

"That was why he chose us?"

He wanted to set his courage against yours.

"But why Gabrielle?"

His hate for her has come since he has been with us. Since you have f.u.c.ked her.

McNeely grimaced at the word. "How do you ..."

Know all this? You forget. He is not only with us. He is us.

"That means that"-McNeely"s face grew stern-"that you want to destroy us too."

No. Far from it. We need you.

"Oh, yes! To help you escape!"

Yes.

"Do you honestly think that . . ." McNeely stiffened, his head suddenly pinioned in an att.i.tude of listening.

What is wrong?

"I thought I heard . . ." The creak of a door, slow and subtle, as though Wickstrom or Gabrielle had sneaked quietly down the steps, and even now stood on the other side of the slightly ajar fire chamber door, through which a weak slice of light shone sickly from the main part of the cellar.

What?

How can it not know? thought McNeely. I"m sure I heard ...

Then the door slashed fully open and nightmare burst in.

At first McNeely thought he had simply gone mad, that nothing that looked like that would be capable of locomotion in the real world. But The Pines was not the real world, and the remnant of humanity before him was most definitely moving, cannoning toward him with a force that smashed him to the hard concrete floor before he could raise an arm to defend himself. He struggled to make himself fight back, to grasp, the arms and fists that were pummeling his face and head with hammerlike strength, to twist and roll and throw off the fetid half-decayed lich that straddled him like some frenzied lover. But fear had crushed his heart with a grip of ice, and horror had thrown his stomach into rebellion so that his nose and mouth filled in seconds with his own vomit until his breath was gone and his strength was stolen, leaving him as malleable as a half-dead puppy, his lungs clenched with a grasp past breaking, as had been the lungs of David Neville, who now ceased his blows and grabbed McNeely"s thick neck like a drowning sailor grabs a hawser.

The eyes that Seth c.u.mmings had squeezed from their sockets had shriveled into little more than parched yellow grapes, but there was enough left to burn with a hatred that stunned McNeely even more than the physical attack. The lolling tongue, now black with old blood, had fallen away in places like a rotting sponge that dripped venom onto McNeely"s lips. Still horribly distorted from c.u.mmings"s fatal embrace, the upper chest and shoulders seemed huge, a grotesque balloon filled with noxious gases in the shape of muscles monstrously rigid, decaying muscles with strength enough to drive their force down the yellow-white arms into the stinking wrists and fingers that embraced the neck of George McNeely, stopping the blood, stopping the air so that McNeely choked on the contents of his stomach that his own muscles kept sending up to his throat in involuntary mindless frenzy.

The raisin eyes grew brighter and brighter, burrowing like rats through McNeely"s own eyes, deep, deep into his brain, a burning brightness that suddenly faded, dimmed, and was extinguished completely, plunging George McNeely into the deepest blackness he had ever known.

He regained consciousness slowly and painfully. The first thing of which he was aware was the hot stinging ache in his throat, as though fire had seared it and it now lay caked in salt. He actually thought that he was dead, and found himself hoping that he would not be in The Pines for all eternity, but would be in that place where love survives.

George Soft voice. Gabrielle? Has she joined me? Are we together?

He coughed, bringing up a gobbet of half-digested food that had lodged in his trachea. The taste of it told him he was not dead. Other sensations followed: the tingling of his face where Neville"s fists had scored the flesh, the pounding roar at the back of his head where he"d struck the floor, that dank, rich odor that cut like a razor through the scent of the vomit drying in his nostrils, and finally the dead weight that pressed down upon his tortured chest. When he was conscious enough to recognize it for what it was, he struggled to push it off, but his strength was not yet sufficient. He let his head fall back and took deep racking breaths. The second attempt was successful. Neville"s body did not so much roll off him as slide off. McNeely turned his head away and shut his eyes.

George ...

The voice was weak but insistent. When he looked, the face was there. But now it seemed less distinct, as though it were peering through seawater.

"You . . ." He coughed, spat on the floor.

George ...

"You did that," he snarled.

We were not responsible.

"Bulls.h.i.t! Who was?"

We saved you. Neville would have killed you. But we brought him back.

McNeely frowned and tried to think. What had stopped Neville after he"d blacked out?

We did.

"Get out of my mind!"

You"re upset. . . .

"Hah!" It was too much. He started to laugh. For as bizarre and grotesque as this was, some cynical corner of his mind still saw humor in it. "Hah! I"m upset? f.u.c.king right on! Oh, Jesus! Oh . . ." He leaned against the wall and laughed until he started coughing again and the tears ran. The spasm shook him and he pressed his palms against the wall until he felt in control. Then he looked at the face again. It was so G.o.dd.a.m.ned expressionless. "All right," he said, a bitter smile wrenching the corners of his mouth upward. "Now you just tell me what"-his hands fluttered wildly in the air-"that"-they gestured, shaking, to Neville"s decaying corpse-"was all about? Accident? Quality control f.u.c.k-up?"

An accident. He broke away from us.

"Neville did?"

He and others.

McNeely"s jaw dropped open. "Others?"

There are those of us, as in any group, who lack a sense of organization. Neville is one of these. There are others. They are easily swayed. Neville, being dead such a short time, retains much power.

"What do you mean, power?"

Life force. Will. That which survives. They went with him. Broke away from us.

"You mean that what attacked me wasn"t just Neville? That it was dozens of others as well?"

It paused a second too long. Perhaps.

McNeely"s eyes widened. "Dozens, h.e.l.l. Thousands. Maybe millions, isn"t that right?"

The voice said nothing. The eyes stared blankly ahead.

"It went crazy," McNeely went on, not knowing whether what he said was truth or lies, but filled with the sense of knowing. "It went mad with the urge to kill that Neville brought to it, and it went with Neville into his body to kill me. And then Kelly and even Gabrielle. And you stopped it-or you stopped yourselves, that part of yourselves that"s mad."

It is ... something, like that.

"Holy Christ, what are you?" He looked at the face, wondering how he had ever seen G.o.dhood in it, how he had ever asked it for what it had given him.

What do we seem?

"All the evil in the world," McNeely said with quiet awe. "And all the madness."

You knew that. You knew from the beginning.

Its voice was calm, and in its words and the truth of them there was, to McNeely, the greatest horror of all.

"I"m going upstairs," he said. "I"m going upstairs and going to sleep." He tried to make his mind a blank, and turned and walked zombielike out of the room. He knew he should have moved the body back into the wine cellar, but he could not bear to, not now. He was stuffed too full of horror to face any more. Bed, he thought, emblazoning the concept in the front of his brain. Soft, soft bed. Warm and safe. Sleep.

He approached self-hypnosis. Every emotion within him wanted him to scream, to cry out No!, to deny the thing that smiled in his face, to attack it even though he would only be thrashing the stinking air of the fire chamber. But he could not bring himself to a.s.sault so much power, so much evil. Not now, when he knew so little.

And yet so much.

Time was what he needed. He would have to stall it, keep it thinking he was thinking, considering. For as long as it knew there was a possibility of his accepting it, it might not attempt to force him: Evil was like a cancer cell. It grew in its own, metastasizing over and over again until the organism was riddled with the disease. So it must have happened with c.u.mmings, and so the thing would think it would happen with him. But it would not. He would not let it.

Or had it already?

No! Safe warm bed, soft sleep, sleep . . .

He struggled to suppress the thought that had so viciously sprung to the forefront of his consciousness, trying to force it down to a nearly visceral level, where he could deal with it unheard by the thing that peered into him. Dismiss it, he thought, hide it, banish it, and he wondered whether he wanted to hide it from the ent.i.ty or from himself.

He succeeded in keeping his thoughts blank until he reached c.u.mmings"s old suite, where he showered off the blood and the stench that had resulted from the attack in the cellar. Then he padded down the hall and into the suite he shared with Gabrielle, slipping into the bed where she still slept peacefully. As he lay there, staring into the darkness, he knew that he must think, consciously and logically, of what had happened and had yet to happen. Then, perhaps, when he formed the outlines of a plan, he could smother it under duplicitous thoughts, could learn how by then.

Gabrielle"s body was warm, almost feverishly so, and he pressed his own body into her, stealing her warmth to soothe his own chilled flesh. What he had seen and heard in the cellar was nearly incomprehensible, but it was true. He had experienced enough firsthand to be sure of that.

Slowly his memory brought forth all the strange, formerly inexplicable events that had occurred since they had come to The Pines. There was that first booming laugh as the doors and windows had slammed shut-what else but a laugh of triumph? Perhaps not from the total ent.i.ty, but only from that part of it that embodied-what was it the voice had called it?-need. The madmen. Yet they were all mad. The sane madmen and the mad madmen. McNeely shivered on the verge of laughter again at the absurdity of the thought.

Then there was the sound of the wind in the trees outside, a sound that Neville had sworn was not possible. We enjoy toying with you. Oh, they had done that royally. The sounds, its preying on Wickstrom"s fears by visiting him with nightmares of agoraphobia, the way it had baited Neville, first with the most deeply suppressed thoughts of the wife who had loved him, and then with the voices Neville had claimed to hear, voices just beyond intelligibility.

And c.u.mmings. What in that name of all that"s holy could it have done for c.u.mmings? What did it grant him, or what did he do that opened himself to it? Was it for power alone? Maybe. c.u.mmings was a fool, McNeely"d seen that quickly. So why had it chosen c.u.mmings to approach first? Another proof of its fallibility? And where was it now? What was its position?

There was the key. How stupid of him not to have thought of it before. Warfare. Treat it like a tactical exercise. Where is the enemy? What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? Know these things and you can defeat it.

But can you ever defeat evil? he thought sadly. Can you ever hope to do anything but wrestle it to a draw until you meet it again on some other battlefield in some other war? He could not destroy it. How do you destroy a thing that"s already dead, that lives forever? A draw would be the best he could hope for. But he would try.

He"d always slept well before a battle, and now was no exception. He dreamed himself back into green jungles with overhanging vines, lianas trailing tendrils down like cool streamers. There were others with him, standing under the huge trees, leaning against their thick boles, but he could not see their faces. They were all in shadow, shaded either by the trees or by the long bills of their fatigue caps. Somehow it didn"t matter that he didn"t know their ident.i.ties. He was merely content to be there with them.

Then suddenly in the dream a sh.e.l.l burst overhead, bathing them and the jungle in the glow of white phosphorus. But instead of momentarily blinding him and fading away until the outlines of sight returned, the stark whiteness remained, allowing him to see fully illuminated the faces of the men with whom he served.

They had no faces. They were blank white masks like the surfaces of eggs, but eggs stunningly white, and one by one they changed their form, becoming thick stalks of white, their uniforms now lit a lime green, now vanishing completely. The stalks broadened, thickened into slabs of purest ivory, until the men around him had become a wall on all sides. He looked up, but the whiteness of the sky had joined seamlessly with the white slabs. He looked down, but the spongy jungle floor had become as hard and white as the walls that now seemed slowly, slowly, to contract toward him. The air had grown thick and viscous, more like a stringy liquid than a gas, and as he struggled to breathe, he thought in a dull, druglike horror. I am in an egg. I am trapped in an egg. And the whiteness all around him continued to draw nearer, making the egg-white air even more dense, so that his lungs were clogged like a drowning man"s. He threw up his arms in agony, but they struck the top of the hard whiteness, which pressed down on him until he was forced to crouch, and finally to wrap his arms around his knees, tuck his head between his shoulders, and a.s.sume the fetal position. The white sh.e.l.l still shrank, and his claustrophobia shrieked out its agony, a hundred, a thousand times worse than the Vietnamese rat cage that had nearly driven him mad.

Now the sh.e.l.l had reached the point where it could no longer maintain its egglike shape without crushing the body of that which it held. So it adapted itself to the fetal shape McNeely had been forced into, pouring itself like white liquid steel along the contours of his body, rolling around knees and elbows, sliding over taut scalp, rippling around b.u.t.tocks and back until he was encased head to foot in an impenetrable carapace of soul-blinding whiteness, screaming his madness through shock-thickened lungs forever and ever and ever. . . .

"George!"

A hairline crack in the sh.e.l.l.

"George! Wake up! George!"

Greater cracks now, a piece of whiteness falling away, comforting darkness beyond.

"Please wake up! George!" Then louder. "Kelly!"

All around him now the sh.e.l.l was cracking, falling outward. There! A foot was free! A hand! He could move his elbow again! The darkness, sweet soothing darkness, was returning.

"Kelly! Oh, George, wake up!"

He could breathe again. Air, not the thick life-soup inside the egg. Eyes opened to dim light. Gabrielle"s face, formed and featured, hung above him like a friendly moon. She gasped in surprise as she saw his opened eyes, as though she had never thought she"d see them again.

"Oh my G.o.d, are you . . . all right?"

He moved his head back and forth slowly, half-expecting his neck to be broken from the nyctalopic ordeal. "I ... yes . . . a dream . . ."

"G.o.d d.a.m.n dreams!" she cried. "G.o.d . . ." A banging on the door interrupted her.

"Hey! Gabrielle! Wickstrom"s voice.

"Come in!" she barked, still full of fury at what had happened to George. The bedroom door opened and Wickstrom stuck his head through. "It"s all right, Kelly. I"m sorry." The apology softened her tone. "George had a nightmare. I couldn"t wake him up."