At the same moment, a dead grunter inches from Colleen heaved itself up from the floor where it had lain for weeks by the smell, oozing, bones showing through the shreds of its flesh. Cal slashed at it as Colleen wriggled free of her tangling shield, rolling away into the ruins of the kitchen table, which she immediately grasped as a weapon.
The table wheeled and thrashed in her grip. Cal handed off his sword to Doc, jerked Colleen up and back against him, and stamped on her shield’s curving top to stand it upright. She seized it, their circle closed again-and the storm within the house exploded with a screech.
Through the kitchen and down the hall, Wilma had directed them. It’s the door on the left.
Only in the darkness there seemed to be a hundred doors, all banging open and shut, with nothing behind any of them but black. The roaring tempest filled ears and minds, the house rocked on its foundation with a violence that wrung groans from the wood and brick and nails.
A voice screaming: GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT. Screaming in terror.
It was afraid.
Mortally afraid.
Images of icy water, of screaming voices, of blue sparks swirling out of emptiness. .
Doc yelled, “Cal!” as he went down. Cal, wrenching at the single door that hadn’t slammed open and shut, turned back. A sliver of floorboard had speared Doc from below, piercing his thigh.
Colleen, shifting her shield to shelter them both, was already dragging the physician back to the outer door. Goldie, standing alone and vulnerable in the no-man’s land between, looked to Cal, questioning.
The knob was in Cal’s hand, held shut, it seemed, not by a lock but by an invisible other on the opposite side.
With a desperation, a rage beyond his own comprehension, Cal jerked back. The door gave. Only a few inches. Only for an instant.
Two faces turned toward him. Identically featured and yet so different as to chill. Moonlit phantoms in blackness.
One substantial. . and one like a reflection in glass.
The knob leapt from Cal’s hand; the door slammed shut.
Cal dove for Goldie just as a huge serving dish sliced his way, grabbed him by the back of his vest and pulled him back. Cal stumbled, parrying objects with his sword. Staggering through the onslaught of the porch, they finally burst back into the damp night outside.
Doc was gasping, sprawled amid the devil grass, holding his thigh, blood spurting between his fingers, the gouge far worse than the earlier slash on his calf. Cal ripped off his bloody, grime-black shirt, removed the cleaner T-shirt beneath and folded it swiftly into a pressure bandage. A little distance from them lay the corpses of the two grunters. Cal suspected they’d rear to life again the moment anyone took a step toward the house, but they were quiet now.
Thunder growled overhead, and the air was thick with the smell of lightning and wind. Cal, Goldie and Colleen bent over Doc, getting in each other’s way trying to secure the bandage, to check him for other wounds. He waved them off impatiently.
“Don’t fuss over me; I’m all right. If I were to start dying, I would tell you.”
“We’re lucky any of us got out of there in one piece,” said Colleen, rising shakily and stepping toward the spare lantern they’d left on the curb.
“I don’t think it was luck.” Cal stared at the Wishart house, silent now, watchful. “It could have killed us any time it wanted.”
“Then what do you think it was?”
“Mercy. It did only what it needed to drive us away. Just like with Miss Hanson.”
“Only? Cal, that was the old college try.”
“No.” Doc said struggling to his feet, hissing through pain-clenched teeth. “I concur with Calvin. Our shields were down a dozen times. On any one of those occasions-” He tried to put weight on the bad leg, nearly fell. Goldie caught him under one arm.
“Guys, I know I’m the pessimist in the group, but what’s this?” The sweep of Colleen’s hand took in the mutilated grunter forms. “Ethnic cleansing?”
The answer came from the shadows. “Nothing short of death could have stopped them, once the voice got into their minds.” Wilma Hanson came up beside them with her gliding, soundless step. Seeing them up close, she put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my heavens.”
“You should see the house,” Goldie said.
“How’s my sister?” Cal asked.
“Quiet.” Concern etched Wilma’s brow. “For quite some time now.”
When Wilma Hanson unlocked the door and Cal stepped within, he found his sister in a state of semiconsciousness, distressingly sallow and drawn.
But also, in some inexplicable way, more human.
The attic was a ruin. Boxes of Christmas decorations were upended, board games scattered, their pieces intermingled-the Game of Life, Candyland, Mystery Date. A tangle of quilts and outgrown clothes had erupted from careful folds to take wing and land where they might.
It was an echo of the Wishart house, as if a hurricane had burst from the center of the room, then retreated. And indeed it had, Cal reflected, threading his fingers through the silk of Tina’s hair. Thunder had entered her. The storm child.
“Two faces.” Doc sat slumped on an apple crate, spectral in the amber light from the lantern on the floor, its radiance casting long shadows up the walls and slanting ceiling. “You’re sure?”
Cal nodded. “The one on the bed, the one that looked real, he. . I dunno. There was this quality of, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Like he was shocked. Sorry for me.”
“And the other?” Doc asked.
“The other. . it’s weird, he was so much clearer, even though I could see right through him. He seemed. . outraged. Only it wasn’t, ‘How dare you!’ It was more like terror. At least, that’s the vibe I got.”
“You’re our Lionel Hampton, man.” Goldie glanced up from the battered 1964 Sears catalogue he’d been leafing through. “Our king of vibes.”
“Unidentical identical twins,” Colleen muttered.
Wilma crossed to one of the few cartons still intact and retrieved an old photo album. Flipping to the page, she held it open. Cal regarded the bleached color photograph. Wilma radiant with youth and youth’s near-infinite possibility, Wilma with the twins.
Cal’s eyes went to Fred. Even then, it could be detected: the tighter set of his mouth, the opaque quality of the eyes, the hunched, defended posture.
Cal murmured, “It’s him.”
“I guess it makes a kind of sense,” Wilma sighed. “They were so close-”
“Close?” Colleen looked up. “Didn’t you say Fred hadn’t visited in all the months since the accident?”
Wilma hesitated, uncertain. “Survivor guilt.” Everyone turned to Doc. His eyes evaded, and he fought to keep his voice even. “You cannot bring them back, cannot undo the tragedy of it, so you try to avoid it, not think of it-all the while thinking of nothing else.”
Wilma nodded. “When all the machines stopped, Bob should have. . Fred must have found a way to prevent it.”
Colleen said, “The Source Project.”
Cal answered Wilma’s questioning glance with, “What Dr. Wishart was working on.”
Again, Wilma hesitated. Then she asked, “Is he draining the town?”
“Would he?” Doc asked. “The Fred you know, would he be capable of such an act?”
Wilma thought, yes. But how could she possibly make such an accusation against a friend? It felt like a betrayal. Then, like nonsense. Carefully, she offered, “Arleta is- was-a fearful woman, and she instilled that in them. We all worried about how much the boys depended on each other once, well… once Arleta stopped allowing company.” Then she added, oddly protective, “She just didn’t want anything from the outside world coming in.”