He was screaming at the top of his lungs now, but he couldn"t hear himself above the thunderous roar of the antigravity avalanche. The boulders exploded over the crest and rained down around him with earsplitting force. Splinters of stone broke from them and gouged him, drew more blood, but he was not crushed as he expected. Two, three, half a dozen, ten boulders slammed down around him and piled up above him, though he was not struck by anything other than the shards cast off by each jarring impact.
Then the rocks were still.
Tolbeck waited, breathless with terror.
Gradually, he became aware of the cold again. And the wind.
Feeling around, he discovered that the boulders had piled on all sides and had stacked up overhead, forming a rude tomb. They were too heavy to be shoved out of the way. There were c.h.i.n.ks in the tomb, hundreds of them, and a few admitted the moon"s radiant gaze. The wind whistled and moaned and hissed at other openings, but no hole large enough to permit Tolbeck to escape.
In essence, though air could still reach him, he had been buried alive.
For a moment his terror swelled, but then he thought of what had happened to McCaffrey and Hoffritz and some of the others, and this death seemed almost merciful. The cold was painful again, as if some rodent with teeth of ice were chewing on his guts and nibbling on his bones. But that would pa.s.s, and quickly. In a few more minutes he would grow numb again, and this time the numbness would last. The blood had already begun to drain inward, away from his freezing skin, in a desperate effort to protect vital organs. The blood supply to his brain would be reduced as well, to a minimal maintenance level, and he would become drowsy. He would go to sleep and never wake up. Not so bad. Not as bad as what had been done to Ernie Cooper and the others.
He relaxed, resigned to death, afraid of it but willing to face it now that he knew it would not be too painful.
But for the wind, the winter night was silent.
With great weariness, Tolbeck curled up in his tomb and closed his eyes.
Something grabbed his nose, pinched and twisted it so hard that tears burst from his eyes.
He blinked, flailed out, struck empty air.
Something clawed at his ear. Something unseen.
"No," he pleaded.
Something poked him hard in the right eye, and the pain was so excruciating that he knew he had been blinded. The psychogeist had slipped through the c.h.i.n.ks and had joined him in his makeshift tomb of winter-chilled stone. His death would not be easy, after all.
During the night, Laura woke and did not know where she was. A lamp with a c.o.c.ked shade cast faint amber light, created odd and menacing shadows. She saw a bed beside her own. In it, Dan Haldane was sleeping, fully clothed.
The motel. They were hiding out, holed up in a motel room.
Still fuzzy-minded and having trouble keeping her eyes open, she turned over and looked at Melanie, and then she realized what had awakened her. The air temperature was plummeting, and Melanie was squirming weakly under the covers, softly sobbing, murmuring in fear.
Within the room there was now a ... presence, something either more or less than human but unquestionably alien, invisible yet undeniable. In her drowsiness, Laura was more acutely aware of the ent.i.ty than she had been when it had twice intruded into her kitchen or when it had earlier visited this very room. Freshly roused from sleep, she was still largely guided by her subconscious, which was far more open to these fantastic perceptions than was the conscious mind, which, by comparison, was conservative and a vigilant doubting Thomas. Now, although she still had no idea what the thing was, she could sense it drifting across the room and hovering above Melanie.
Suddenly Laura was certain that her daughter was about to be beaten to death before her eyes. With a panic that was half like the dreamy terror in a nightmare, she started to get up, shivering, each exhalation instantly transformed to frost. Even as she pushed the covers aside, however, the air grew warm again, and her daughter quieted. Laura hesitated, watching the child, glancing around the room, but the danger - if there had been any - seemed to have pa.s.sed.
She could no longer sense the malignant ent.i.ty.
Where had it gone?
Why had it come and then left within seconds?
She slipped back under the covers again and lay facing Melanie. The girl was terribly drawn, thin, and frail.
I"m going to lose her, Laura thought. It"s going to come for her sooner or later, and It"s going to kill her like It killed the others, and I won"t be able to do a d.a.m.ned thing to stop It because I won"t even be able to understand where It comes from or why It wants her or what It is.
For a while she huddled miserably under the covers, draped not only in blankets and sheets but in despair. Nevertheless, it was not in her nature to surrender easily to anyone or anything, and gradually she convinced herself that reason ruled the world and that all things, no matter how mysterious, could eventually be examined and understood if one only applied wit and logic to the problem.
In the morning she would use hypnotic-regression therapy with Melanie once more, and this time she would press the child harder than she had the first time. There was some danger that Melanie would crack completely if forced to recall traumatic memories before she was ready to handle them, but it was also true that risks had to be taken if the child"s life was to be saved.
What was the door to December? What lay on the other side of it? And what was the monstrous thing that had come through it?
She asked herself those questions again and again, until they flowed through her mind like the endlessly repeated verses of a lullaby, rocking her down into darkness.
When dawn came, Laura was deep asleep and dreaming. In the dream she was standing in front of an enormous iron door, and above the door hung a clock that ticked toward midnight. Only seconds remained before all three hands of the clock would point straight up (tick), at which time the door would open (tick), and something eager for blood would burst out upon her (tick), but she couldn"t find anything with which she could bar the door, and she couldn"t move away from it, could only wait (tick), and then she heard sharp claws sc.r.a.ping at the far side of the door, and a wet s...o...b..ring sound. Tick Tick. Time was running out.
PART FOUR.
IT.
THURSDAY.
8:30 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
33.
Laura was at the small table by the window, where she had sat with Dan last night. Melanie sat across from her, the table between them. The girl was in a hypnotic state; she had been regressed back in time. In every sense but the physical, she was in that Studio City house once more.
Outside, no rain was falling, but the winter day was sunless and somber. The night fog had not lifted. Beyond the motel parking lot, the traffic on the street was barely visible through curtains of gray mist.
Laura glanced at Dan Haldane, who was perched on the edge of one of the beds.
He nodded.
She turned again to Melanie and said, "Where are you, honey?"
The girl shuddered. "The dungeon," she said softly.
"Is that what you call the gray room?"
"The dungeon."
"Look around the room."
Eyes closed, in a trance, Melanie turned her head slowly to the left, then to the right, as if studying the other place in which she believed that she was now standing.
"What do you see?" Laura asked.
"The chair."
"The one with the electric wires and the shock plates?"
"Yes."
"Do they ever make you sit in that chair?"
The girl shuddered.
"Be calm. Relax. No one can hurt you now, Melanie."
The girl quieted.
Thus far, the session had been considerably more successful than the one that Laura had conducted the previous day. This time, Melanie answered directly, forthrightly. For the first time since their reunion in the hospital the night before last, Laura knew for sure that her daughter was listening to her, responding to her, and she was excited by this development.
"Do they ever make you sit in that chair?" Laura repeated.
Eyes closed, the girl fisted her small hands, bit her lip.
"Melanie?"
"I hate them."
"Do they make you sit in the chair?"
"I hate them!"
"Do they make you sit in the chair?"
Tears squeezed out of the girl"s eyes, although she tried to hold them back. "Y-yes Make me ... sit ... hurts ... hurts so bad."
"And they hook you up to the biofeedback machine beside it?"
"Yes"
"Why?"
"To teach me," the girl said in a whisper.
"To teach you what?"
She twitched and cried out. "It hurts! It stings stings!"
"You aren"t in the chair now, Melanie. You"re only standing beside it. You aren"t being shocked now. It doesn"t sting. You"re all right now. Do you hear me?"
The agony faded from the child"s face.
Laura felt sick, but she had to proceed with the session regardless of how painful it was for Melanie, for on the other side of this pain, beyond these nightmare memories, there were answers, explanations, truth.
"When they make you sit in the chair, when they ... hurt you, what are they trying to teach you, Melanie? What are you supposed to learn?"
"Control."
"Control of what?"
"My thoughts," the girl said.
"What do they want you to think?"
"Emptiness."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothingness"
"They want you to keep your mind blank. Is that it?"
"And they don"t want me to feel."
"Feel what?"
"Anything."
Laura looked at Dan. He was frowning and seemed as perplexed as she was.
To Melanie, she said, "What else do you see in the gray room."
"The tank."
"Do they make you go into the tank?"
"Naked."
Tremendous emotion was conveyed in the single word "naked," more than merely shame and fear, an intense sense of utter helplessness and vulnerability that made Laura"s heart ache. She wanted to end the session right then and there, go around the table and hug her daughter, hold the girl tight and close. But if they were to have any hope of saving Melanie, they had to know what she had endured and why; and for the time being, this was the best way they had of discovering what they needed to know.
"Honey, I want you to climb that set of gray steps and go into the tank."
The girl whimpered and shook her head violently, but she didn"t open her eyes or break loose of the trance in which her mother had put her.
"Climb the steps, Melanie."
"No."
"You must do as I say."