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.
'It killed 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 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 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.
'Help me!' I shouted in Ned's ear. 'You have to help me or we're going in!' What I was thinking by that time
