He looked up at her, twisting his neck on his bowed shoulders, and the white eyes were deadly serious, deathly afraid. “Whether it’s Bob or somethin’ else in that house, in the dreams it’s Bob-Bob crouching in that bedroom of his with all the food in the town and all the dead around him, Andy Hillocher and Sonny and poor old Arleta, all rotting there. Bob, fat and greasy, with that geeky grin of his. .”
“Bob wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Wilma protested. “It isn’t just that he was afraid of his shadow. He’s a genuinely good man, harmless and friendly.”
“I know all that!” Hank’s face screwed with pain. “Dammit, I know! But these voices, this voice, in my head, in my dreams. In my dreams, it’s Bob. And in my dreams, I kill him.”
Wilma was silent, thinking about Tessa and the others. Thinking about the glowing threads of power, the Indian women screaming with their children, their pain as sharp as it had been two and a half centuries before.
After a long time she said, “Don’t do this, Hank.” And yet as she spoke, she saw the sweat on his face and felt his arm shake where her hand closed around his, and she knew he wouldn’t attack the house because he wanted to. Yet she could come up with nothing else to say.
“Don’t do it.” She pressed his hands. “Whatever is telling you this, sending you these dreams-it’s lying. There’s something going on here, Hank, something we don’t understand, but it’s using you. It has no more regard for you than an old-time miner had for the canary that he used to detect gas. A living tool that would drop over dead.”
Hank shook his head, weary and beaten. “I’ve seen into that house in my dreams. There’s a nightmare in there. It’s crazy, alive and strong. And the voice in my head, saying, saying-”
He stopped abruptly, looking up sharply. Wilma heard the grunters, smelled them, before she saw them. They oozed out of the night, gliding on padded feet from around the gutted Simmonds house and its broken-down sheds, resolved from the silhouettes of pine, beech and oak trees, crawled up out of the gorges. Six, eight, ten of them, grasping ax handles, bights of chain, picks rusted with long storage in the mine. They trampled the smartweed as they came, closing in, all of them staring accusingly at Hank.
“I. . wasn’t supposed to tell,” Hank said.
Then, breaking into a shriek like the offended dead, they attacked.
Hank yelled, “No!” and flung himself at them, iron pipe slashing through the air. “Wilma, run!”
“Hank, I. .”
“Run!!!”
Three of them darted around him, snatching at her, and she had no choice but to fall back into what looked like a little band of the mist, like a projection of it.
She heard the confused shouting of Hank and the other grunters muffle and fall away, the clang of metal pipes and the wrenches they used as clubs. Then the slap of bare feet on the hard dirt came to her, and she knew the grunters-a maddened few, at least-had dared enter the fog after her.
She broke into a run but grew aware that the footfalls of her pursuers were slowing, becoming uncertain as the fog enfolded and disoriented them. They stopped, were silent a moment-and then their screams began.
Wilma plunged away, through darkness her night-sighted eyes could not pierce. She stumbled on what felt like a chunk of old machinery-something in the Simmonds yard, she thought-struggled up, clutching twisted, rusty metal that cut into her. Gasping, the sick-damp air leeching the breath from her, she pressed on.
Something blue and flickering rushed at her from among the trees, driving her deeper into the mists. The ground grew rougher, sloping under her feet. Vines and creepers grabbed at her ankles. Lights flickered among the underbrush, fire-balls, she saw, rolling slowly, steadily toward her along the ground, the sight of them lifting the hair from her nape.
All behind her was stillness now. She turned, speculating about heading back the way she’d come, but knowing that whatever had silenced her pursuers still lay between her and town.
Then she heard it. Coming for her, its panting breath sawing the darkness, the crunch of its feet on last year’s brown leaves. Its phosphor-green light, like a swarm of disease mold, punctured the mist, growing larger and more distinct as it approached.
It had no smell, no reek of decay, no tang of electrical discharge, nothing, and somehow that was the most alarming of all.
The thing reared out of the darkness, and she saw it now in all its malformed detail. Not a grunter, no, nor one of the spectral, massacred Indian women. It peered at her with burning, malign eyes like the Wishart house itself, and its flesh writhed.
Gaping up at it, Wilma forced down the cry that threatened to burst from her, channeled that frenzied energy into her legs, twisting away, bolting off blindly through the mist and dark.
She heard it tearing after her, didn’t risk looking back. Deadfall branches clawed her; she stumbled again in potholes, in cold rivulets of what had to be Boone’s Creek.
And, running full out with all the blessed, feral strength humming through her veins, she knew that the thing at her heels was gaining and would have her.
“Oh, man, this doesn’t belong here.”
Goldie had been the first to see it as they had rounded the bend of the two-lane, under the gaunt September moon. The fog stretched across the road like a prison wall, flat and gray and impenetrable.
He pulled his no-speed to a halt and clambered down as Cal, Doc and Colleen drew up alongside. Tentatively, he approached the barrier, inspecting it as wispy tendrils reached out like beckoning fingers.
The others dismounted and joined him. “What do you mean, it doesn’t belong here?” Cal asked.
Goldie shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off it.
Sparkling illumination like starlight shone from behind them, dusting the surface of the fog, and Cal realized that Tina had emerged from the pedicab. She floated to the edge of the mist, contemplating it with trembling agitation, breathing in quick gasps, keen and brittle. Cal had observed this mood rising in her over the past days as she had struggled against the growing clamor in her mind, seen it become as much a part of her as the leggings and too-large denim shirt she wore, the globe of swimming light that emanated from her.
She hovered beside Goldie, peering into the coiling vapor, both of them tantalized with dread.
“Maybe if we wait till morning, it’ll melt away,” Colleen said without conviction, and Cal knew that no one had to tell her it wouldn’t.
Nor that on the other side of it, two miles down the road, lay Boone’s Gap.
Shango had given them a name, and their maps the particulars of distance and direction. But as to what might reside there, this thing that had put the name Wishart into Tina’s mind, that somehow dwelled both to the west and to the south, they knew neither its nature nor its weaknesses. Only that it called ceaselessly to her, ravenously.
They had set off along I-64 that morning, their backs to the rising sun, passing Covington, making good time. Just over the state line, east of White Sulphur Springs, they had encountered the empty husk of a Cadillac El Dorado, scorched and crumpled, with perforations like big teeth marks scoring either side of it, amid the pink flowerbeds of the median. Its license plate read, “West Virginia-Wild, Wonderful.”
But beyond that, the day’s journey had been uneventful. No shadow had swept over them as they headed southwest, no sound of leathery wings had assaulted them. Caldwell and Lewisburg and Smoot had blurred by like dreams. And whatever mysteries lurked in the Lost World Caverns, nothing had emerged to overwhelm and drag them within.