Part 18 (1/2)

The mist had no scent. The rain had left no smell behind.

One phase of the taking of the earth had ended.

A new and surely more terrifying phase had begun.

In every end is a beginning-and perhaps in this beginning, for her and Neil, would be the end of all things mortal. The last twist of the knife.

Visibility proved inconstant. Even when she stood still, one moment she could see only five feet, the next moment ten; never more than twenty; sometimes only as far as from eye to hand.

People poured out of the tavern, though many remained behind with their lubricants and illusions. Each took only a few steps before he became a ghostly form with the m.u.f.fled voice of a mummy in its windings.

In this slowly churning, ever s.h.i.+fting purple opacity, a flashlight seemed useful. When Neil probed with his, however, the beam refracted strangely through the murk, revealing nothing and further confusing the eye.

Switching off the flash and pocketing it, he said, ”Better to have both hands for the shotgun, anyway.”

Molly had drawn her pistol as she'd come out of the tavern door. She felt no better armed than a blowgun primitive cast by some fluke of time onto a modern battlefield contested by armies with tanks and laser-guided missiles.

A ragtag group of the resistance fighters set off for the bank, on foot and closely marshaled. Their footsteps and then their voices quickly faded.

Another group, in a Chevy Suburban and a Ford pickup, drove away, into the lower reaches of town, toward Norman Ling's food market. Although they proceeded at a creep, they soon vanished into the throat of the fog; and a swallow later, their headlights dimmed, damped.

The roar of engines swiftly softened and, with distance, changed into a throaty grumble, as if beasts from the Jura.s.sic period prowled swamps in the purple dimness far below.

She worried that the dog would race ahead of them, vanish in the earthbound clouds, but she hoped that he would obey her when she called him back. The fog might complicate their search, but no more than the pounding rain would have done.

”All right, Virgil,” she said, ”let's do the work.”

The dog seemed to know what she meant, and he started forward at a pace they could match.

They walked the center of the street, their hoods thrown back, but still wearing their raincoats in case the storm returned.

They had not gone far when a forlorn voice called out of the mist: ”Help me. Someone help me.”

The dog stopped, ears p.r.i.c.ked forward.

Molly scanned the gloom, seeking the source of the cry.

”Where?” Neil asked.

”I don't know.”

Then the pleading came again, this time with a thin note of anguish: ”Please. Someone please. Oh, G.o.d, please help me.”

She recognized the voice. Ken Halleck: the postal clerk with the muttonchops and the wide smile.

With rifle and pitchfork, Ken and his seventeen-year-old son, Bobby, had been guarding the front door of the tavern.

On leaving that establishment, Molly had not realized that Ken and Bobby were missing. The end of the rain, the arrival of dawn, and the purple mist had fully commanded her attention.

”I hear someone,” Halleck said, his voice shuddering with pain, with fear. ”Please, don't leave me here alone, suffering like this. I'm so afraid.”

Virgil deduced Halleck's location and advanced a few steps in that direction before halting. His head lowered and his hackles rose. He growled softly, more to warn his companions than to challenge whatever menace he detected in the dismalness ahead.

Molly hesitated, but when Halleck cried out again, this time in a racked voice even more pitiable than before, she could not turn away from him, even if he might be-as the dog's reaction seemed to suggest-bait in a trap.

”Careful,” Neil whispered, moving with her, at her side, into the livid mist, leaving the wary dog behind them.

Foreboding, forbidding, the odorless miasma closed around them, cloyed, so thick it seemed to m.u.f.fle even the beat of her heart in her own ears. But in a few steps it began to draw away, like layer upon layer of opening curtains.

Through lifting veils, Molly saw an object in the street, dark against the darker blacktop. In another step she realized that it was the severed head of Ken Halleck.

In the bodiless head, the eyes opened, filled with impossible life, and with unspeakable misery.

The lips moved, the mouth cracked, and words came forth: ”Do you know where Bobby is, my Bobby, my son?”

32.

THE HUMAN IMAGINATION MAY BE THE MOST elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompa.s.s the millions of hopes and dreams that in centuries of relentless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.

Yet there had been discoveries and sights in these momentous hours that Molly could not have imagined and with which her reason wrestled and lost. Not the least was this severed and yet apparently living head, although it had been foreshadowed by the brainless walking corpse of Harry Corrigan and by the self-mutilating doll.

For a moment, Ken Halleck's eyes transfixed her. Pathetic. Pathoformic. Demonic.

The aliens had introduced on Earth some malevolent energy that did not differentiate between vegetable and animal, between organic and inorganic, between the animate and the inanimate. It thrived equally in the living and in the dead, and in what had never lived at all.

In Ken's voice now, a tremor of anguish, of grief: ”Where is my Bobby? What have they done to him? I want to see my boy.”

The mind not only reeled but rebelled, and not only rebelled but retreated to denial, desperate to refute this abomination no matter how vividly the senses confirmed it.

You might imagine surviving in an environment transformed to match that of a world on the far end of the galaxy, dressed with strange malignant plants, populated by a Sabbat broth of repulsive and vicious animals. You might hope for a hospitable corner in some extreme lat.i.tude, where you could live out your days in mousehole secrecy, with simple food and the pleasures of the timid.

But Molly couldn't imagine wanting wanting to survive in a madhouse world where the dead walked, severed heads conversed, dolls made threats, and every horror of the elastic human imagination might be encountered-and worse. Such a place could offer no moment of peace, no chance of happiness. to survive in a madhouse world where the dead walked, severed heads conversed, dolls made threats, and every horror of the elastic human imagination might be encountered-and worse. Such a place could offer no moment of peace, no chance of happiness.

Here, now, she might have given up the hope of survival, except that she would be left with two options: wait until some nightmare creature found her and tore her to pieces-or kill herself. Either course counted as self-destruction, however, and suicide was not permissible in her philosophy or her faith.

Besides, the children had to be found. What might happen after she had gathered them together under her inadequate protection was something she chose not to dwell upon.

”I love my boy, my Bobby,” said Halleck's head, ”where is my Bobby?”

Neil raised the shotgun, but Molly stayed him with a touch.