GO AWAY!
On the porch his mother’s romances stirred, fluttered their pages. The heavy couches shifted like restless beasts. Weary, aching, Fred felt the inexorable drag of the Source upon him grow stronger, but he knew what was happening and why. They were coming to kill Bob, coming to cut the cord that held him to this place so that he would have nothing to hold him to life. Nothing to be, or do, or want.
Only the Source.
MOTHER!!!
Arleta was in the kitchen when the grunters smashed the windows of the porch. She fell back against the wall, hands pressed over her eyes, as the house shook with the force of the blows against the door. Frantic, Fred caught up whatever could be used as a weapon and threw them at the attackers: the couches smashing through the windows like enraged bulls, the garden hoses wrapping around their legs and twisting, serpentlike, around their necks, squeezing tighter and tighter. The honeysuckle vines crawling and gripping, tripping and dragging down. Pouring, thrusting, flowing down nostrils and throats to suffocate, strangle, pinch off the circulation of the blood. The invaders writhed, screamed, tore at the tangling attackers while the broken glass of the windows rose in furious clouds, slashing and tearing, blood splattering on the grass.
Get out of here! Get out of here! Get out! screamed Fred, exploding phosphor and fire in the air all around the house, blinding the shrieking things held prisoner around the walls. Don’t ever come back! Cans from the cupboard, broken jars from the porch, the toaster and the mixer and the waffle iron swept through the windows in a hammering whirlwind, cutting, gouging, tearing. And on the other side of town Tessa Grant screamed, clawed with blunt tiny fingernails at her own face and arms. Terrible and wonderful, Fred drank and tasted the deaths of the grunters around the walls, sucked the lives and the souls from their ruptured arteries, and the flame in him roared brighter.
GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!
They fled, such as had survived, stumbling over the broken sidewalk that heaved and snapped at their legs, and he drummed them with fragments of the house, the furniture, the keepsakes he had known all his life, ripping at them as they fled.
“Get out! Get out!” Deana Bartolo moaned, twisting frantically in her brother Al’s arms, and Al and his mother stared at one another in terror at the deep hoarse voice that came from the little girl’s lips.
On her front porch in the darkness, Wilma Hanson watched the blue flickering skeletal things run down Applby Avenue, eyes glowing like demon lights. She thought they were the Indian women she’d seen in the woods, old memories of a massacre two centuries ago; the smell of their blood was very strong even from where she sat. The cats smelled it, too, bristling and crowding closer around her chair-and no wonder, she thought-but Carl Souza, hurrying along the sidewalk with a lantern and a makeshift pike, evidently didn’t see them. He stopped in his tracks and set the lantern down, turning this way and that, looking for whatever it was he sensed or smelled or heard, but the things fleeted by him and he didn’t turn his head.
The night was a humming whisper of needles, even after the three surviving grunters fled from the Wishart back porch, scuttered across the lawn and away into the dark.
The cats hissed softly, then turned and darted back into the shelter of the house.
Wilma stood, looked from the white ghostly bulk of the Wishart house to the dark doorway of her own, where the glowing eyes of her friends clustered like a carpet of fireflies. “I’m afraid you all have a point,” she said regretfully. “But Arleta is my friend, and I have to try.”
She went down the steps and across the lawn toward the white house, cautious and listening to the night. There was neither sound nor smell of grunters, but something like greenish foxfire oozed up out of the ground and flowed ahead of her toward the Wishart house, a thin slip like a spectral earthworm; then another, and another. The night had teeth. She felt its breath on her halfway across her own lawn and stopped, knowing whatever was in the Wishart house would let her come no farther.
“Arleta!” she called out, to the gaping black rectangle of the broken porch door. She had little hope, after all this time, that Arleta and Bob still lived, but who knew? Who could know? “Arleta, are you in there? Are you all right?”
She smelled blood inside the house, and death, and a kind of slow steamy rot that probably came from the refrigerator. Her night-sighted eyes could just make out the shape of Arleta where she’d fallen, halfway through the door between the kitchen and the porch. There was a savage gouge on her temple where something had struck her. The heavy breadbox, blood and hair gummed to its corner, lay smashed near the steps. It was clear even from that distance that Arleta was dead.
And Bob? she thought. Was his dead body in there somewhere, still hooked to the machines on which he’d depended during the last few months of semi-life?
Wilma listened-for breathing, for movement, for the barest scratch or twitch of a moving limb, a groping hand. The porch door was a black mouth, the windows above it dead horrified eyes: the whole house was a frozen scream. She had a sense, for a moment, of something inside, crucified but still living, frantic and in pain.
And she felt it change, drawing strength from its own pain. Felt it remember just how strong it could make itself from the life that filled the world all around it.
But that strength changed what it was.
The darkness around her seemed to shift and settle into being something else. Then silence for a long time and the blue wicker of flame in the downstairs bedroom window.
In time, and listening now behind her with all her nerves, ready to bolt at the top of her speed, Wilma walked back to the house. “Hank,” she called, as she mounted the porch steps, padded down the hallway in darkness. “I think you’d better get out here and have a look at this. Tell me what it looks like to you. Hank?”
She pushed open the door of his room.
He was gone.
NEW YORK
Moving with slow deliberation through Tina’s room, Goldie ran his hands over her things, eyes locking on the myriad playbills of The Firebird, Le Sacre du Printemps, Giselle and the rest, the videos of Martha Graham in Appalachian Spring and Patricia McBride in Sleeping Beauty, the signed pointe shoes Tina had so joyously scored backstage from Wendy Whelan after Swan Lake, all the Danskin and Capezio leotards, the Grishko and Sansha slippers, the faux Degas bookends.
He lingered longest, it seemed to Cal, over the big vanity mirror, as he had over the one out in the living room, the glass into which Tina had poured herself, scrutinizing every nuance of movement and position, every ecstatic and agonized pirouette, plie and grand jete. That, and the Nijinsky diary.
Cal found the greater Goldie’s focus, the more he himself fidgeted, wanted to scream. It had taken forever to extricate Goldie from his undercity realm, and Goldie had insisted on hauling along a huge duffel of odd items (“Never know what might come in handy”), then had set about rigging certain “security devices” before entering the building. Cal had protested-Stern had his sister; God only knew what he was doing with her. But Goldie had gone off like a Roman candle, had almost vanished into the open maw of a plundered restaurant’s basement storeroom before Cal had overtaken him, cajoled him to return. All right, Cal had agreed fervently, Goldie could set up any damn thing he desired, but please do it quickly.