For an instant, Sam knew what it must have been like to be that man with the dog or the little girl’s big brother in their last moments. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Griffin’s sister watching them, horrified and still.
Sam whimpered and prayed it would be quick.
But the pressure on his head did not increase. There was no cracking of bone, no finality. Instead, Stern peered into his eyes, and the gleaming yellow gaze flared brighter, blazed into a white-hot nuclear glare that flooded into him, hushed all the babble in his mind with a vast, powerful will. Sam felt himself fall away, all objection shattered to a mute, distant compliance.
“Say after me,” Stern intoned. “It’s a new world. . ”
WEST VIRGINIA
Half sunk in sleep, Hank listened to Wilma moving around in the house.
The strange darkness of the morning was long gone. He’d been awake when it clouded over the new day. His headache had returned, fit to split his skull, a hammering sense of something, some Voice, shouting at him. Or a dream of someone shouting at him, terrifying, overwhelming, while he cowered before it, naked in this new strange body.
But that dream had fleeted away as quickly as it had come, taking its very memory with it. Later Wilma had come in and told him that lightning had struck again and again around the Wishart house, leaving great patches of burned honeysuckle and charred earth.
Now he heard her go out onto the porch and knew she was sitting on the steps, surrounded by her cats, watching and listening to the strange heat of the afternoon.
Drifting toward sleep, he heard with his new and preter-natural sharpness the footfalls of neighbors passing along Applby Street. No one paused near the white house on the corner, almost as if something prevented them from seeing the place. Considering some of the things Wilma had told him, he didn’t even feel surprised.
Things are not going to be the same, she’d said.
Through the dense weave of the bedroom curtains he could still see a pin-mesh of sun. Even that hurt his eyes. He raised his hands and looked at them. Huge hands, deformed bones growing still larger. The ache in the long bones of his arms informed him that his body still had a few more changes to make.
And Wilma, he thought, with a glimmer of delighted pride. Wilma lithe and strange and fast, Wilma with eyes that, like his, saw in the dark, quick and agile as one of her own cats.
Snotty as a cat, too, he thought, and grinned affectionately to himself. Why the hell hadn’t he ever seen that, in all these years? And yet with a cat’s strange all-accepting softness, unsurprised and undemanding.
Things are not going to be the same.
What was he now? A creature of darkness, like Sonny and Hillocher? But inside he hadn’t changed-had he? The thought that maybe he had, or would later, was a frightening one. Would he turn on his friends and neighbors? Become what Sonny had become?
And what was Wilma now? What were we ever?
But he knew the answer to that. In a way, the sharpening of the differences between them made the differences matter less. She was his friend. She had always been his friend. And she had always been herself.
The thought brought him a measure of peace.
But you have no place in this world, whispered a voice in his mind.
It was a cold voice, and the thing it did to Hank’s heart was a twisting pinch of bitter cold.
You’re different from them. Alien. You’ve always been different and you’re more so now. They will kill you for being different. Wilma won’t protect you.
But she did. Hank argued with the Voice, for it seemed to be a thing coming from outside of him; like the voice that spoke in his head sometimes when he dreamed about the Devil of his Southern Baptist upbringing. She kicked Souza’s butt and got me here.
To be her pet, sneered the Voice. He tried to look where it was coming from-he knew he’d drifted off to sleep and was dreaming-but he couldn’t see it, exactly. His dreams were dreams of darkness, and in the darkness shone a bluish light; the light was a shield, hiding something darker still. To be her pet like one of her fucking cats, so she could run your life the way she runs theirs.
Come off it, thought Hank. Nobody runs a cat’s life and nobody runs mine.
But the doubt was cold in his heart.
You’ll have to kill her, the Voice said reasonably. And the others.
What others? He wanted to simply shut his mind off from the Voice but couldn’t. Wanted to wake up and go outside and talk to Wilma, but the Voice held him in sleep. I don’t want to kill nobody.
But you’ll have to, said the Voice. Or they’ll kill you. Haven’t you realized that yet?
And he saw again the crowd by the gates of the mine, the torches burning in the darkness, the men with their guns and their clubs. Saw their faces and knew them: Carl Souza, Leo Swann, Ed Brackett, Jim Stickley. His cousins Sid and Ernie, and Aunt Claire, faces twisted with revulsion at the sight of him. In his dream they all stooped and picked up stones (That area in front of the shaft was paved, there’s no stones there!). He saw the stones fly toward him, felt them thudding into his flesh. In the dream the men around the tunnel opened fire, bullets whining and pinging against the concrete, tearing like hot bees into his flesh.
No! he thought. It didn’t happen that way!
You’ll have to kill them, said the Voice, and it was hard to see why he shouldn’t.
Who? he asked.
And he thought the Voice smiled.
We’ll tell you, it said. We’ll tell you when the time comes.
“She doesn’t seem to have any fever.” Shannon Grant’s voice trembled as she touched her daughter’s hand. “When she-when she started to get like this, I asked her what was wrong, and she said, ‘It’s all going away. He wants it. It’s all going away.’ ” She swallowed hard, looked pleadingly up into Wilma’s face.
Wilma passed her hand in front of Tessa’s eyes. They neither blinked nor moved, only stared out ahead of her, not blank, precisely, but rapt, gazing into distance. “Tessa?” she said, and the child made no response. “ ‘He wants it.’ ” She turned back to Shannon. “Nothing about who he is? Or what he wants?”
The young mother shook her head, hastily slapped tears from her own cheeks. “Dr. Blair says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her,” she said, naming the only physician in Boone’s Gap. “He says he can’t find anything physical.” Her voice cracked, and she looked quickly away.
“But wait,” said Hazel, in grim imitation of a TV huckster, “there’s more.” She stood in the doorway of Tessa’s tiny bedroom, arms folded, watching her sister and her friend with weariness in her eyes. “Terri Brackett says her son Billy’s the same way. Just staring, no fever, doesn’t move. She says his hands are freezing, and she doesn’t like the way he’s breathing. And Fawn Leary.”
“All this stuff going on,” whispered Shannon despairingly. “The guys in the mines, and Hank and…” She looked at Wilma again, as if she would have said something else, maybe something about why she’d thought getting Wilma to look at Tessa would be helpful, but didn’t.
And Wilma understood.
She passed her hand over Tessa’s dark curls, felt her face and her hands-both noticeably cold-and tilted her head a little, letting her own mind go a bit slack, relaxing into what she was more and more coming to realize was the cat part of her, or the part that was connected to her cats.