At the bottom of the steps, the corpse stopped and gazed up at her. Its face was only slightly swollen, though darkly empurpled, mottled with yellow here and there, a crust of evil green under its clogged nostrils. One eye was missing. The other was covered with a yellow film; it bulged against a half-concealing lid that, though sewn shut by a mortician, had partially opened when the rotting threads had loosened.
Heather heard herself muttering rapidly, rhythmically. After a moment she realized that she was feverishly reciting a long prayer she had learned as a child but had not repeated in eighteen or twenty years. Under other circumstances, if she had made a conscious effort to recall the words, she couldn’t have come up with half of them, but now they flowed out of her as they had when she’d been a young girl kneeling in church.
The walking corpse was less than half the reason for her fear, however, and far less than half the reason for the acute disgust that knotted her stomach, made breathing difficult, and triggered her gag reflex. It was gruesome, but the discolored flesh was not yet dissolving from the bones. The dead man still reeked more of embalming fluid than of putrescence, a pungent odor that blew up the staircase on a cold draft and instantly reminded Heather of long-ago high-school biology classes and slippery specimen frogs fished from jars of formaldehyde for dissection.
What sickened and repelled her most of all was the Giver that rode the corpse as it might have ridden a beast of burden. Though the light in the hallway was bright enough to reveal the alien clearly, and though she might have wanted to see less of it rather than more, she was nevertheless unable to precisely define its physical form. The bulk of the thing appeared to hang along the dead man’s back, secured by whiplike tentacles—some as thin as pencils, some as thick as her own forearm—that were firmly lashed around the mount’s thighs, waist, chest, and neck. The Giver was mostly black, and such a deep black that it hurt her eyes to stare at it, though in places the inky sheen was relieved by blood-red speckles.
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.
“It’s never afraid,” Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound depths of his own fear.
“Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!”
The boy ran, and the dog went with him.
At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road, he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and blowing snow as obscuring as fog at sea.
Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway.
Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the Giver itself or one of the surrogates that it had mined from the graveyard. He continually scanned left and right, ready to pump out every round in the shotgun to bring down anything that rushed him.
He was glad that he had worn sunglasses. Even with shades, he found the unrelieved brightness inhibiting. He strained to see through the wintry sameness to guard against attack and to make out familiar details of the terrain that would keep him on the right track.
He dared not think about Heather and Toby. When he did so, his pace slowed and he was nearly overcome by the temptation to go back to them and forget about Ponderosa Pines. For their sake and his own, he blocked them from his thoughts, concentrated solely on covering ground, and virtually became a hiking machine.
The baleful wind shrieked without surcease, blew snow in his face, and forced him to bow his head. It shoved him off his feet twice—on one occasion causing him to drop the shotgun in a drift, where he had to scramble frantically to find it—and became almost as real an adversary as any man against whom he’d ever been pitted. By the time he reached the end of the private lane and paused for breath between the tall stone posts and under the arched wooden sign that marked the entrance to Quartermass Ranch, he was cursing the wind as if it could hear him.
He wiped one gloved hand across the sunglasses to scrape off the snow that had stuck to the lenses. His eyes stung as they sometimes did when an opthalmologist put drops in them to dilate the pupils prior to an examination. Without the shades, he might already have been snowblind.
He was sick of the taste and smell of wet wool, which flavored the air he drew through his mouth and scented every inhalation when he breathed through his nose. The vapor he exhaled had thoroughly saturated the fabric, and the condensation had frozen. With one hand he massaged the makeshift muffler, cracking the thin, brittle ice and crumbling the thicker layer of compacted snow; he sloughed it all away so he could breathe more easily than he’d been able to breathe for the past two or three hundred yards.
Though he found it difficult to believe that the Giver didn’t know he had left the house, he had reached the edge of the ranch without being assaulted. A considerable trek remained ahead, but the greatest danger of attack would have been in the territory he had already covered without incident.
Maybe the puppetmaster was not as omniscient as it either pretended or seemed to be.
A distended and ominous shadow, as tortured as that of a fright figure in a fun house, rose along the landing wall: the puppetmaster and its decomposing marionette laboring stiffly but doggedly toward the top of the first flight of stairs. As the thing ascended, it no doubt absorbed the fragments of strange flesh that bullets had torn from it, but it didn’t pause to do so.
Although the thing was not fast, it was too fast for Heather’s taste, too fast by half. It seemed to be racing up the damned stairs.
In spite of her shaky hands, she finally unscrewed the stubborn cap on the spout of the fuel can. Held the container by its handle. Used her other hand to tip the bottom. A pale gush of gasoline arced out of the spout. She swung the can left and right, saturating the carpet along the width of the steps, letting the stream splash down the entire top flight.
On the first step below the landing, the Giver appeared in the wake of its shadow, a demented construct of filth and slithering sinuosities.
Heather hastily capped the gasoline can. She carried it a short distance along the hall, set it out of the way, and returned to the stairs.
The Giver had reached the landing. It turned to face the second flight.
Heather fumbled in the jacket pocket where she thought she had stowed the matches, found spare ammo for both the Uzi and the Korth, no matches. She tried another zipper, groped in the pocket—more cartridges, no matches, no matches.
On the landing, the dead man raised his head to stare at her, which meant the Giver was staring too, with eyes she couldn’t see.
Could it smell the gasoline? Did it understand that gasoline was flammable? It was intelligent. Vastly so, apparently. Did it grasp the potential for its own destruction?
A third pocket. More bullets. She was a walking ammo dump, for God’s sake.
One of the cadaver’s eyes was still obscured by a thin yellowish cataract, gazing between lids that were sewn half shut.
The air reeked of gasoline. Heather had difficulty drawing a clear breath; she was wheezing. The Giver didn’t seem to mind, and the corpse wasn’t breathing.
Too many pockets, Jesus, four on the outside of the jacket, three inside, pockets and more pockets, two on each leg of her pants, all of them zippered.
The other eye socket was empty, partially curtained by shredded lids and dangling strands of mortician’s thread. Suddenly the tip of a tentacle extruded from inside the skull.
With an agitation of appendages, like the tendrils of a black sea anemone lashed
by turbulent currents, the thing started up from the landing.
Matches.
A small cardboard box, wooden matches. Found them.
Two steps up from the landing, the Giver hissed softly.
Heather slid open the box, almost spilled the matches. They rattled against one another, against the cardboard.
The thing climbed another step.
When his mom told him to go to the bedroom, Toby didn’t know if she meant her bedroom or his. He wanted to get as far as possible from the thing coming up the front stairs, so he went to his bedroom at the end of the hallway, though he stopped a couple of times and looked back at her and almost returned to her side.
He didn’t want to leave her there alone. She was his mom. He hadn’t seen all of the Giver, only the tangle of tentacles squirming around the edge of the front door, but he knew it was more than she could handle.
It was more than he could handle too, so he had to forget about doing anything, didn’t dare think about it. He knew what had to be done, but he was too scared to do it, which was all right, because even heroes were afraid, because only insane people were never ever scared. And right now he knew he sure wasn’t insane, not even a little bit, because he was scared bad, so bad he felt like he had to pee. This thing was like the Terminator and the Predator and the alien from Alien and the shark from Jaws and the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and a bunch of other monsters rolled into one—but he was just a kid. Maybe he was a hero too, like his dad said, even if he didn’t feel like a hero, which he didn’t, not one bit; but if he was a hero, he couldn’t do what he knew he should do.