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 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 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.'
