God, Margaret deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this,
sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with
God. -- and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he
was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on
to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing
backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no
longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margaret, until it was
nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to
plunge him into despondency.
Then he saw that he hadn't been visited only by this heinous surrogate
but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was
entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding
within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own
body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as
that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit
locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick,
irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a
mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as
fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and
jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes
or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or
orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it
from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was
seeing, merely the briefest glimpse.
The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the
cadaver's rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh
remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and
that the bulk of the apparition before him was the rider on the
bones.
Its tangled appendages bulged where her heart and lungs had once been,
twined like vines around clavicles and scapulae, around humerus and
radius and ulna, around femur and tibia, even filled the empty skull
and churned frenziedly just behind the rims of the hollow sockets.
This was more than he could tolerate and more than his books had
prepared him for, beyond alien, an obscenity he couldn't bear. He
heard himself screaming, heard it but was unable to stop, could not
lift the gun because all his strength was in the scream. Although it
seemed like an eternity, only five seconds elapsed from the moment he
yanked open the door until his heart was wrenched by fatal spasms. In
spite of the thing that loomed on the threshold of the kitchen, in
spite of the thoughts and terrors that exploded through his mind in
that sliver of time, Eduardo knew the number of seconds was precisely
five because a part of him continued to be aware of the ticking of the
clock, the funereal cadence, five ticks, five seconds.
Then a searing pain blazed through him, the mother of all pain, not
from an assault by the traveler but arising from within, accompanied by
white light as bright as the eye of a nuclear explosion might be, an
all-obliterating whiteness that erased the traveler from his view and
all the cares of the world from his consideration. Peace.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
