The Dead Town

On the stairs, leaning against the railing, making not a sound, Frost warily watched the thing in the foyer, seething swarm or Blob like in the movies, machine or animal, terrestrial or alien from a far world, he didn’t know which, didn’t care which, at least not now, not until he got out of this house and away and was somewhere safe, where he could think.

After the table and the three vases were dissolved, the thing became less active. The arches, loops, and whorls formed by apparent currents in its substance were fewer and churning slower than before.

Frost’s initial impression was that the beast must be resting, but after a couple of minutes, he decided that it might be thinking. Something about its attitude — if the Blob was capable of having an attitude — suggested deliberation, a pondering of the situation and a consideration of its options.

Options? Based on what he had seen of the thing’s capabilities, its options were virtually unlimited. It was a shape-changer, it could fly, bullets had no effect on it, it was fearless and aggressive to an extent that suggested it was invulnerable, and instantaneously it could incorporate into itself people and objects of all kinds. Why would such a creature have any need to brood about its options? It could do anything it wanted, with no mortal consequence to itself but with plenty of mortal consequences for everyone who got in its way.

The idea of this thing meditating, musing, reflecting somberly upon its destiny almost teased a laugh from Frost, but he didn’t give in to the impulse because the laugh would have been a dark, despairing giggle.

Besides, he remained convinced that if he made a sound, the creature would be reminded of its pursuit of him and in an instant would be upon him in one hideous form or another. The wisest thing he could do for the time being was remain still, silent, and wait for some development that he might be able to use to his advantage.

He didn’t have to wait long before something happened. The thing began to act once more like a pool of thick liquid, washing back and forth in the foyer, its whorling currents returning to their previous level of activity.

Frost tensed. He put a hand under his open jacket, on the grip of the pistol in his shoulder rig, but then withdrew his hand without the weapon. Going for a gun was a reflex action. An agent’s reflexes were usually reliable, the result of experience, but in this case reflexive responses would get him killed.

The living pool, whether its life was that of an animal or an intelligent machine, or both, or neither, slopped against the bottom step, lapped at the front door and the walls. The patterns of the currents within it were for the most part as liquid and sinuous as before — but here and there the currents twitched, stuttered briefly, before spiraling smoothly once more.

Suddenly a woman’s hand rose out of the pool, a hand in various shades of gray with veins of black, as if carved from stone and yet animated, clutching at the air in search of something to which it could secure itself. After a moment, other hands reached through the surface of the pool, or rather formed from the substance of it. A second female hand, slender and beautifully shaped, had skin like brass, like the shiny brass of the fallen chandelier that had been incorporated into the swarm. A man’s hand, then a second, one with skin the color of the glazed vases that had stood upon the foyer table, the other with normal flesh.

All the hands receded, melted into the pool, but then the gray surface glistened like water, and an immense face appeared in it, as if just below the surface, perhaps five feet from the point of the chin to the top of the brow. This countenance was at first as blank as that of a stone-temple god, with pale limestone eyes. But then it swelled from the surface, taking dimension and acquiring the color of skin, and Frost saw that it was becoming Dagget’s face. The eyes opened, but they weren’t eyes, were instead ovals of what seemed to be amber glass like the cups that contained the flame-shaped bulbs on the chandelier.

Frost waited for the glass eyes to shift toward him, but they did not. The Dagget face dissolved to be at once replaced by another immense countenance, that of the beautiful woman who had emerged from the cocoon in the bathroom. Her eyes looked real but had a fixed gaze like that of a blind person. The enormous face formed more completely than Dagget’s had done, and the woman seemed to be struggling against invisible bonds, trying to free herself from the pool. Her mouth went wide, as if in a scream, but no sound escaped her.

Frost remembered what she had said upstairs, after the teeth had fallen out of her mouth and she had grown new ones, as she gazed at herself in the mirror above the bathroom sinks: I think my builder built this builder wrong. As he watched the huge face strain to scream and form further out of the pool, he began to suspect that everything this creature had done since taking down the chandelier had been evidence of malfunction.

Abruptly the face disintegrated back into the pool or the swarm, whichever or whatever it was, and the whole of the abomination became highly agitated, roiling as though a school of eels thrashed in it, serpentine forms slithering across the surface, wriggling, twisting. From it issued both the grumbling bumblebee drone and the zeeeeee of angry wasps that Frost had heard before.

The sounds swelled in volume and seemed to promise violence greater than any thus far committed, so that Frost dared to take a step backward and then another, even if movement might still make a target of him. He retreated cautiously to the landing, ready to run but also mesmerized by the spectacle in the foyer below.

Simultaneously, the pool stopped thrashing and the two insect voices fell silent. The creature became very still, exhibiting none of its previous spiraling currents. Its color began to change. Instead of many shades of gray from charcoal to mouse-skin with patches of glittering silver, it grew dull, with no sheen anywhere, and swiftly paled to a uniform concrete-gray.

It looked as dead as any dead thing Frost had ever seen.

Minutes earlier, he had thought that it must be invulnerable and therefore immortal. Now he imagined that if he descended the stairs and stepped on that gray mass, it would prove to have petrified, to have turned to hardest stone underfoot, a strange slab there in the foyer. Perhaps if sliced with a high-powered mason’s saw, it would appear to have the grain of granite, allowing no clue that it had ever been anything else, certainly not anything more.

But he did not descend to test the accuracy of his perceptions. He backed quietly off the landing and onto the upper flight of the open staircase, all the while watching the stone-but-not-stone through the railing.

He found a bedroom with a window that opened onto the front-porch roof. He climbed out of the house, crept toward the edge of the snow-covered roof. The slope was gradual, and he did not slip. He jumped to the yard below, tucked and rolled as he landed, and sprang to his feet, covered in snow, turning fearfully in a circle, certain that something must be coming at him.

Nothing pursued him. He was alone. No neighbors seemed to have heard Dagget’s ten shots. Maybe no one remained alive to hear them. No traffic passed in the street.

The silence could have been no deeper if he had been sealed in the vacuum of a snow globe.

Behind the wheel of the Land Rover, he realized that Dagget, who had been driving, had the key. The key was not a key anymore. It was whatever Dagget had become, part of the granite-like mass in the foyer.

If it had been an older vehicle, he might have tried to hot-wire it. But it was too new for that, with an electronic ignition.

He got out of the Land Rover and stood in snow that fell so thickly it seemed to be something other than snow. It seemed to be the whole world coming apart around him.

Chapter 33

In the offices of the Rainbow Falls Gazette on Beartooth Avenue, Addison Hawk, the editor-in-chief and publisher, worked late. He was alone, and aside from the noises he made at his cluttered desk, the only sound was the tick-tock of the silver-plated pendulum in the grandfather clock.

Among the original furnishings of these premises, the handsome clock dated back to the late 1800s, when Elsworth Hawk, Addison’s great-grandfather, founded the Gazette. It had stood in the reception lounge for decades until he moved it into his private office upon ascending to the editorship. Many people these days had no patience for the monotonous counting of such a clock, but to Addison it was lovely background music. He would no more have disposed of it than he would have ripped out the stained-oak beadboard wainscoting and the ornate decorative tin ceiling. He was an advocate for tradition in a world that had gone mad for change, that valued destructive and constructive change equally, and in fact seemed unable to tell the difference between the two.