From a Buick 8 (45 page)

It didn't. I'd already seen what I needed: the coil of yellow rope, still hanging on the wall below the joke sticker and next to a forgotten set of jumper cables. I saw something else, too. Something Curt Wilcox had put up on the shelf near the videocam not long after the E.T. with the lashing pink ropes had made its appearance.

I took this item, stuck it in my back pocket, and grabbed the coil of rope from the wall. Then I banged out again. A dark form loomed up in front of me and I almost screamed. For one mad moment I was sure it was the man in the dark coat and hat, the one with the malformed ear and the Boris Badinov accent. When the boogeyman spoke up, however, the accent was pure Lawrence Welk.

'Dat damn kid came back,' Arky whispered. 'I got half-way home and Yudas Pries' I jus' turned around. I knew it, somehow. I just - '

I interrupted then, told him to stay clear, and ran back around the corner of Shed B with the rope looped over my arm.

'Don' go in dere, Sarge!' Arky said. I think he might've been trying to shout, but he was too scared to get much in the way of volume. 'He's t'rown down gas an' he got a gun, I seen it.'

I stopped beside the door, slipped the rope off my arm, started to tie one end to the stout hook mounted there, then gave the coil of rope to Arky instead.

'Sandy, can you feel it?' he asked. 'An' the radio gone all blooey again, nuttin but static, I heard Steff cussin at it t'rough d'window.'

'Never mind. Tie the end of the rope off. Use the hook.'

'Huh?'

'You heard me.'

I'd held on to the loop in the end of the rope and now I stepped into it, yanked it up to my waist, arid ran it tight. It was a hangman's knot, tied by Curt himself, and it ran shut easily.

'Sarge, you can't do dis.' Arky made as if to grab my shoulder, but without any real force.

'Tie it off and then hold on,' I said. 'Don't go in, no matter what. If we . . .' I wasn't going to say
if we
disappear,
though - didn't want to hear those words come out of my mouth. 'If anything happens, tell Steff to put out a Code D as soon as the static clears.'

'Jesus!' Only from Arky it sounded more like
Yeesus.
'What are you, crazy? Can't you feel it?'

'I feel it,' I said, and went inside. I shook the rope continually as I went to keep it from snagging. I felt
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like a diver starting down to some untried depth, min ling his airhose not because he really thinks minding it will help, but because it's at least something to do, something to keep your mind off the things that may be swimming around in the blackness just beyond the reach of your light.

The Buick 8 sat fat and luxy on its whitewalls, our little secret, humming deep down in the hollows of itself. The pulse was stronger than the humming, and now that I was actually inside I felt it stop its halfhearted efforts to keep me out. Instead of pushing with its invisible hand, it pulled. The boy sat behind the wheel with the gas can in his lap, his cheeks and forehead white, the skin there taut and shiny. As I came toward him, his head turned with robotic slowness on his neck and he looked at me. His gaze was wide and dark. In it was the stupidly serene look of the deeply drugged or the cataclysmically wounded. The only emotion that remained in his eyes was a terrible weary stubbornness, that adolescent insistence that there must be an answer and he must know the answer. He had a right. And that was what the Buick had used, of course. What it had used against him.

'Ned.'

'I'd get out of here if I were you, Sarge.' Speaking in slow, perfectly articulated syllables. 'There's not much time. It's coming. It sounds like footsteps.'

And he was right. I felt a sudden surge of horror. The hum was some sort of machinery, perhaps. The pulse was almost certainly a kind of telepathy. This was something else, though, a third thing. Something was coming.

'Ned, please. You can't understand what this thing is and you certainly can't kill it. All you can do is get yourself sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner. And that'll leave your mother and your sisters on their own. Is that what you want, to leave them alone with a thousand questions no one can answer? It's hard for me to believe that the boy who came here looking so hard for his father could be so selfish.'

Something flickered in his eyes at that. It was the way a man's eyes may flicker \vheri, deep in concentration, he hears a loud noise on the next block. Then the eyes grew serene again. 'This goddamned car killed my father,' he said. Spoken calmly. Even patiently. I certainly wasn't going to argue that. 'All right, maybe it did. Maybe in some way it was as much to blame for what happened to your dad as Bradley Roach was. Does that mean it can kill you, too? What is this, Ned? Buy one, get one free?'

'I'm going to kill
it,'
he said, and at last something rose in his eyes, disturbing the surface serenity. It was more than anger. To me it looked like a kind of madness. He raised his hands. In one was the gun. In the other he now held a butane match. 'Before it sucks me through, I'm going to light its damned transporter on fire. That'll shut the door to this side forever. That's step one.' Spoken with the scary, unconscious arrogance of youth, positive that this idea has occurred to no one before it has occurred to him. 'And if I live through
that
experience, I'm going to kill whatever's waiting on the other side. That's step two.'

'Whatever's
waiting?
I realized the enormity of his assumptions and was staggered by them. 'Oh, Ned!

Oh, Christ!'

The pulse was stronger now. So was the hum. I could feel the unnatural cold that marked the Buick's
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periods of activity settling against my skin. And saw purple light first blooming in the air just above the oversized steering wheel and then starting to skate across its surface. Coming. It was coming. Ten years ago it would have been here already. Maybe even five. Now it took a little longer.

'Do you think there's going to be a welcoming party, Ned? Are you expecting them to send the Exalted President of the Yellow-Skin Pink-Hair People or maybe the Emperor of the Alternate Universe to say howdy and give you the key to the city? Do you think they'd take the trouble? For what? A kid who can't accept the fact that his father is dead and get on with his own life?'

'Shut up!'

'Know what I think?'

'I
don't care what you think!'

'I think the last thing you see is going to be a whole lot of nothing much before you choke to death on whatever they breathe over there.'

The uncertainty flickered in his eyes again. Part of him wanted to do a George Morgan and just finish it. But there was another part of him as well, one that might not care so much about Pitt anymore but still wanted to go on living. And above both, above and under and around, binding everything, was the pulse and the quietly calling voice. It wasn't even seductive. It just
pulled
at you.

'Sarge, come outta dere!' Arky called.

I ignored him and kept my eyes on Curt's boy. 'Ned, use the brains that got you this far.
Please.'
Not shouting at him, but raising my voice to get it over the strengthening hum. And at the same time I touched the thing I'd put in my back pocket.

'This
res
you're sitting in may be alive, but that still doesn't make it worth your time. It's not much different from a Venus flytrap or a pitcher plant, don't you see that? You can't get revenge out of this thing, not even a nickel's worth. It's brainless.'

His mouth began to tremble. That was a start, but I wished to God he'd let go of the gun or at least lower it. And there was the butane match. Not as dangerous as the automatic, but bad enough; my shoes were in gasoline as I stood near the driver's door of the Buick, and the fumes were strong enough to make my eyes water. Now the purple glow had begun to spin lazy lines of light across the bogus dashboard controls and to fill up the speedometer dial, making it look like the bubble in a carpenter's level.

'
Itkilled my daddy!'
he shouted in a child's voice, but it wasn't me he was shouting at. He couldn't find whatever it was he wanted to shout at, and that was precisely what was killing him.

'No, Ned. Listen, if this thing could laugh, it'd be laughing now. It didn't get the father the way it wanted to - not the way it got Ennis and Brian Lippy - but now it's got a damned fine chance at the son. If Curt knows, if he sees, he must be screaming in his grave. Everything he feared, everything he fought to prevent. All of it happening again. To his own son.'

'Stop it, stop it!'Tears were spilling over his eyelids.

I bent down, bringing my face into that growing purple glow, into the welling coldness. I brought my
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face down to Ned's face, where the resistance was finally crumbling. One more blow would do it. I pulled the can I'd taken from the hutch out of my back pocket and held it against my leg and said, 'He must be hearing it laugh, Ned, he must know it's

too late - '

'No!'

' - that there's nothing he can do. Nothing at all.'

He raised his hands to cover his ears, the gun in the left, the butane match in the right, the gas can balanced on his thighs, his legs dimming out to lavender mist below his shins, that glow rising like water in a well, and it wasn't great - I hadn't knocked him as completely off-balance as I would have liked - but it would have to be good enough. I pushed the cap off the aerosol can with my thumb, had just one fraction of a second to wonder if there was any pressure left in the damned thing after all the years it had stood unused on the shelf in the hutch, and then I maced him.

Ned howled with surprise and pain as the spray hit his eyes and nose. His finger squeezed the trigger of his dad's Beretta. The report was deafening in the shed.

'Gah-DAM!'I heard Arky shout through the ringing in my ears. I grabbed the doorhandle, and as I did the little locking post went down by itself, just like the arm of the padlock on the hutch door. I reached through the open window, made a fist, and punched the side of the gas can. It flew off the convulsing boy's lap, tumbled into the misty lavender light rising up from the floor of the car, and disappeared. I had a momentary sense of it
tumbling,
the way things do when you drop them off a high place. The gun went off again and I felt the wind of the slug. It wasn't really close he was still firing blind into the Buick's roof, probably unaware that he was shooting at all - but whenever you can feel the air stir with a bullet's passage, it's too damned close. I fumbled down inside the door, finally found the inside handle, and pulled. If it didn't come up I wasn't sure what I'd do next - he was too big arid too heavy to yank through the window - but it did come up and the door opened. As it did, a brilliant purple flash rose up from where the Roadmaster's floorboards had been, the trunk banged open, and the real pulling began.
Sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner,
I'd said, but I hadn't known the half of it. That tidal beat suddenly sped up to a ferocious, arrhythmic pounding, like precursor waves before the
tsunami
that will destroy everything. There was a sense of an inside-out wind that seemed to pull instead of push, that wanted to suck your eyeballs from their sockets and then peel the skin right off your face, and yet not a hair on my head stirred. Ned screamed. His hands dropped suddenly, as if invisible ropes had been tied around his wrists and now someone below him was yanking on them. He started to sink in his seat, only the seat was no longer precisely there. It was vanishing, dissolving into that stormy bubble of rising violet light. I grabbed him under the arms, yanked, stumbled backward first one step and then two. Fighting the incredible traction of the force trying to pull me into the descending purple throat that had been the Buick's interior. I fell over backward with Ned on top of me. Gasoline soaked through the legs of my pants.

'Pull us!'I screamed at Arky. I paddled with my feet, trying to slide away from the Buick and the light pouring out of it. My feet could find no good purchase. They kept slipping in the gasoline. Ned was
yanked,
pulled toward the open driver's door so hard he was almost torn out of my grip. At the same time I felt the rope tighten around my waist. We were tugged sharply backward as I resettled
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my grip around Ned's chest. He was still holding the gun, but as I watched his arm shot out straight in front of him and the gun flew from his hand. The throbbing purple light in the cabin of the car swallowed it up, and I thought I heard it fire twice more, all by itself, as it disappeared. At the same time the pull around
us
seemed to weaken a little. Maybe enough to make our escape if we went now, just exited stage left with no hesitation.

'Pull!'I screamed at Arky.

'Boss, I'm pullin as hard as I - '

'Pull
harder
!'

There was another furious yank, one that cut my breath off as Curtis's hangman's noose pulled tight around my mid-section. Then I was scrambling to my feet and stumbling backward at the same time with the boy still clasped in front of me. He was gasping, his eyes puffed shut like the eyes of a fighter who's had the worst of it for twelve rounds. I don't think he saw what happened next. The inside of the Buick was gone, cored out by purple light. Some unspeakable, unknowable conduit had opened. I was looking down an infected gullet and into another world. I might have frozen in place long enough for the suction to renew its hold on me and pull me in - to pull both of us in - but then Arky was screaming, high and shrill: 'Help me, Steff! God's sake! Muckle on here and help me!' She must have done it, too, because a second or so later, Ned and I were yanked backward like a couple of well-hooked fish.

I went down again and banged my head, aware that the pulse and the hum had merged, had turned into a howl that seemed to be drilling a hole in my brains. The Buick had begun flashing like a neon sign, and a flood of green-backed beetles came tumbling out of the blazing trunk. They struck the floor, scuttered, died. The suction took hold yet again, and we started moving back toward the Buick. It was like being caught in a hideously strong undertow. Back and forth, back and forth.