Without Toby to protect, she might not have been able to face this thing, for it was too strange, incomprehensible, just too damned much.
The sight of it dizzied like a whiff of nitrous oxide, brought her to the edge of desperate giddy laughter, a humorless mirth that was perilously close to madness.
Not daring to take her eyes off the corpse or its hideous rider, for fear she would look up to find it one step below her, Heather slowly lowered the five-gallon can of gasoline to the floor of the landing.
Along the dead man's back, at the heart of the churning mass of tentacles, there might have been a central body akin to the sac of a squid, with glaring inhuman eyes and a twisted mouth-but if it was there, she couldn't catch a glimpse of it. Instead, the thing seemed to be all ropy extremities, ceaselessly twitching, curling, coiling, and unraveling. Though oozing and gelatinous within its skin, the Giver occasionally bristled into spiky shapes that made her think of lobsters, crabs, crawfish-but in a blink, it was all sinuous motion once more.
In college, a friend of Heather's-Wendi Felzer-had developed liver cancer and had decided to augment her doctors' treatments with a course of self-healing through imaging therapy. Wendi had pictured her white blood cells as knights in shining armor with magic swords, her cancer as a dragon, and she had meditated two hours a day, until she could see, in her mind, all those knights slaying the beast. The Giver was the archetype for every image of cancer ever conceived, the slithering essence of malignancy. In Wendi's case, the dragon had won. Not a good thing to remember now, not good at all.
It started to climb the steps toward her.
She raised the Uzi.
The most loathsome aspect of the Giver's entanglement with the corpse.was the extent of its intimacy. The buttons had popped off the white burial shirt, which hung open, revealing that a few of the tentacles had pried open the thoracic incision made by the coroner during his autopsy, those red-speckled appendages vanished inside the cadaver, probing deep into unknown reaches of its cold tissues. The creature seemed to revel in its bonding with the dead flesh, an embrace that was as inexplicable as it was obscene.
Its very existence was offensive. That it could be seemed proof that the universe was a madhouse, full of worlds without meaning and bright galaxies without pattern or purpose.
It climbed two steps from the hall, toward the landing.
Three. Four.
Heather waited one more.
Five steps up, seven steps below her.
A bristling mass of tentacles appeared between the dead man's parted lips, like a host of black tongues spotted with blood.
Heather opened fire, held the trigger down too long, used up too much ammunition, ten or twelve rounds, even fourteen, although it was surprising-considering her state of mind-that she didn't empty both magazines. The 9mm slugs stitched a bloodless diagonal line across the dead man's chest, through body and entwining tentacles.
Parasite and dead host pitched backward to the hallway floor below, leaving two lengths of severed tentacles on the stairs, one about eighteen inches long, the other about two feet. Neither of those amputated limbs bled. Both continued to move, initially twisting and flailing the way the bodies of snakes writhe long after they have been separated from their heads.
Heather was transfixed by the grisly sight because, almost at once, the movement ceased to be the result of misfiring nerves and randomly spasming muscles, it began to appear purposeful. Each scrap of the primary organism seemed aware of the other, and they groped toward each other, the first curling down over the edge of a step while the second rose gracefully like a flute-charmed serpent to meet it. When they touched, a transformation occurred that was essentially black magic and beyond Heather's understanding, even though she had a clear view of it.
The two became as one, not simply entwining but melding, flowing together as if the soot-dark silken skin sheathing them was little more than surface tension that gave shape to the oozing protoplasm within.
As soon as the two combined, the resulting mass sprouted eight smaller tentacles, with a shimmer like quick shadows playing across a puddle of water, the new organism bristled into a vaguely crablike-but still eyeless-form, though it was as soft and flexible as ever. Quivering, as if to maintain even a marginally more angular shape required monumental effort, it began to hitch down the steps toward the mothermass from which it had become separated… Less than half a minute had passed from the moment when the two severed appendages had begun to seek each other.
Bodies are.
Those words were, according to Jack, part of what the Giver had said through Toby in the cemetery.
Bodies are.
A cryptic statement then. All too clear now. Bodies are-now and forever, flesh without end. Bodies are- expendable if necessary, fiercely adaptable, severable without loss of intellect or memory and therefore in infinite supply.
The bleakness of her sudden insight, the perception that they could not win regardless of how valiantly they struggled or how much courage they possessed, kicked her across the borderline of sanity for a moment, into madness no less total for its brevity. Instead of recoiling from the monstrously alien creature stilting determinedly down the steps to rejoin its mothermass, as any sane person would have done, she plunged after it, off the landing with a strangled scream that sounded like the thin and bitter grievance of a dying animal in a sawtooth trap, the Micro Uzi thrust in front of her.
Although she knew she was putting herself in terrible jeopardy, unconscionably abandoning Toby at the top of the stairs, Heather was unable to stop. She went down one, two, three, four, five steps in the time that the crablike thing descended two. They were four steps apart when the thing abruptly reversed direction without bothering to turn around, as if front and back and sideways were all the same to it. She stopped so fast she almost lost her balance, and the crab ascended toward her a lot faster than it had descended.
Three steps between them.
Two.
She squeezed the trigger, emptied the Uzi's last rounds into the scuttling form, chopping it into four-five-six bloodless pieces that tumbled and flopped down a few steps, where they lay squirming.
Squirming ceaselessly. Supple and snakelike again. Eagerly and silently questing toward one another.
Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain when it was shot. No shrieks of rage., Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the assault, mocked her hopes of triumph.
At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps again.
Heather's spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed.the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and Falstaff were waiting.
The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked as if he'd sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself: effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn't be brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns.
Toby said, "Do I have to do it? I don't want to."
She didn't know what he meant, didn't have time to ask. "We'll be okay, honey, we'll make it."
From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe-but a cold sound.
She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the gasoline can.
Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned, nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work.