Jack wondered what in the hell he was talking to and whether he was making more sense to it than it was making to him. He began to doubt that he was even awake. Maybe he'd taken a nap. If he wasn't insane, perhaps he was asleep.
Snoring in the armchair in the study, a book in his lap.
Maybe Heather had never come to tell him Toby was in the cemetery, in which case all he had to do was wake up.
The breeze felt real. Not like a dream wind. Cold, piercing. And it had picked up enough speed to give it a voice. Whispering in the grass, soughing in the trees along the edge of the higher woods, keening softly, softly.
The Toby-thing said, "Suspended."
"What?"
"Different sleep."
Jack glanced at the graves. "No."
"Waiting."
"No."
"Puppets waiting."
"No. Dead."
"Tell me their secret."
"Dead."
"The secret."
"They're just dead."
"Tell me."."There's nothing to tell."
The boy's expression was still calm, but his face was flushed. The arteries were throbbing visibly in his temples, as if his blood pressure had soared off the scale.
"Tell me!"
Jack was shaking uncontrollably, increasingly frightened by the cryptic nature of their exchanges, worried that he understood even less of the situation than he thought he did and that his ignorance might lead him to say the wrong thing and somehow put Toby into even greater danger than he already was.
"Tell me!"
Overwhelmed by fear and confusion and frustration, Jack grabbed Toby by the shoulders, stared into his strange eyes.
"Who are you?"
No answer.
"What's happened to my Toby?"
After a long silence: "What's the matter, Dad?"
Jack's scalp prickled. Being called
"Dad" by this thing, this hateful intruder, was the worst affront yet.
"Dad?"
"Stop it."
"Daddy, what's wrong?"
But he wasn't Toby. No way. His voice still didn't have its natural inflections, his face was slack, and his eyes were wrong.
"Dad, what're you doing?"
The thing in possession of Toby apparently hadn't realized that its masquerade had come undone. Until now it had thought that Jack believed he was speaking with his son. The parasite was struggling to improve its performance.
"Dad, what did I do? Are you mad at me? I didn't do anything, Dad, really I didn't."
"What are you?" Jack demanded.
Tears slid from the boy's eyes. But the nebulous something was behind the tears, an arrogant puppetmaster confident of its ability to deceive… "Where's Toby? You sonofabitch, whatever the hell you are, give him back to me."
Jack's hair fell across his eyes. Sweat glazed his face. To anyone coming upon them just then, his extreme fear would appear to be dementia. Maybe it was. Either he was talking to a malevolent spirit that had taken control of his son or he was insane. Which made more sense?
"Give him to me I want him back!"
"Dad, you're scaring me," the Toby-thing said, trying to tear loose of him.
"You're not my son."
"Dad, please!"
"Stop it! Don't pretend with me-you're not fooling me, for Christ's sake!"
It wrenched free, turned, stumbled to Tommys headstone, and leaned against the granite.
Toppled onto all fours by the force with which the boy broke away from him, Jack said fiercely, "Let him go!"
The boy squealed, jumped as if surprised, and spun to face Jack.
"Dad! What're you doing here?"
He sounded like Toby again.
"Jeer, you scared me!
What're you sneaking in a cemetery for? Boy, that's not funny!" They weren't as close as they had been, but Jack thought the child's eyes no longer seemed strange, Toby peared to see him again.
"Holy Jeer, on your hands and knees, sneaking in a cemetery." The boy was Toby again, all right. The thing that had controlled him was not a good enough actor to be this convincing. Or maybe he had always been Toby. The unnerving possibility of madness and delusion confronted Jack again.
"Are you all right?" he asked, rising onto his knees once more, wiping his palms on his jeans.
"Almost pooped my pants," Toby said, and giggled.
What a marvelous sound. That giggle. Sweet music. Jack clasped his hands to his thighs, squeezing hard, trying to stop shaking.
"What're you " His voice was quavery. He cleared his throat.
"What are you doing up here?" The boy pointed to the Frisbee on the dead grass. "Wind caught the flying saucer." Remaining on his knees,Jack said, "Come here." Toby was clearly dubious. "Why?"
"Come here, Skipper, just come here."
"You going to bite my neck?"
"What?"
"You going to pretend to bite my neck or do something and scare me again, like sneaking up on me, something weird like that?" Obviously, the boy didn't remember their conversation while he'd been possessed. His awareness of Jack's arrival in the graveyard began when, startled, he'd spun away from the granite marker. Holding his hands out, arms open, Jack said, "No, I'm not going to do anything like that. Just come here."
Skeptical and cautious, puzzled face framed by the red hood of the ski suit, Toby came to him. Jack gripped the boy by the shoulders, looked into his eyes.
Blue-gray. Clear. No smoky spiral under the color. "What's wrong?"
Toby asked, frowning. "Nothing. It's okay." while first, you and me?
A Frisbee's more fun with. Frisbee tossing, hot chocolate.
Normality hadn't erely returned to the day, it had crashed down like a weight. Jack doubted he could have convinced anyone that he and Toby had so recently been deep in the muddy river of the supernatural.
His own fear and his perception of uncanny forces were fading so rapidly that already he could not quite recall the power of what he'd felt.
Hard gray sky, every scrap of blue chased way beyond the eastern horizon, trees shivering in the frigid breeze, brown grass, velvet shadows, Frisbee games, hot chocolate: the whole world waited for the first spiraling flake of winter, and no aspect of the November day admitted the possibilities of ghosts, disembodied entities, possession, or any other-worldly Compulsively, he pulled the boy close, hugged him.
"Dad?" henomena whatsoever.
"You don't remember, do you?"
"Huh?"
"Good."
"Your heart's really wild," Toby said. "That's all right, I'm okay, everything's okay."
"I'm the one scared poopless. Boy, I sure owe you one!" Jack let go of his son and struggled to his feet. The sweat on his face felt like.a mask of ice. He combed his hair back with his fingers, wiped his face with both hands, and blotted his palms on his jeans. "Let's go back to the house and get some hot chocolate."
Picking up the Frisbee, Toby said, "Can't we play "Can we, Dad?" Toby asked, brandishing the Frisbee. "all right, for a little while. But not here. Not in this " It would sound so stupid to say not in this graveyard. Might as well segue into one of those grotesque Stepin Fetchit routines from old movies, do a double take and roll his eyes and shag his arms at his sides and howl, Feets don't fail me now.
Instead, he said, " not so near the woods. Maybe down there closer to the stables." Carrying the flying-saucer Frisbee, Toby sprinted between the gateless posts, out of the cemetery. "Last one there's a monkey!"
Jack didn't chase after the boy. Hunching his shoulders against the chill wind, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he stared at the four graves, again troubled that only Quartermass's plot was flat and grass-covered. Freakish thoughts flickered in his mind. Scenes from old Boris Karloff movies. Graverobbers and ghouls. Desecration.
Satanic rituals in cemeteries by moonlight. Even considering the experience he'd just had with Toby, his darkest thoughts seemed too fanciful to explain why only one grave of four appeared long undisturbed, however, he told himself that the explanation, when he learned it, would be perfectly logical and not in the least creepy.