submit . . . useless to resist . .. Let it in . . . paradise,
paradise, joy forever . . . Let it in. Hammering on his soul.
Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him,
ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of
his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN,
LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ-- A brief internal sizzle and crack,
like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered
through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he
lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move. Bodies are.
Everything becomes me. Puppets. Surrogates. Jack had never before
awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a
dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking. Listening
to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a
dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but . . . an intrusion.
Communication. Contact. n attempt to subvert and overpower his will
while he slept. .. Everything becomes me. Those three words were not
so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of
superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken by the
unseen Giver in the dream and by the hate entity that communicated
through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and
sleeping Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, impedous,
hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent
without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate. A greasy nausea
made Jack gag. He felt cold and dirty inside. Corrupted by the
Giver's attempt to seize control and nest within him, even though it
had not been successful. He knew as surely as he had ever known
anything in his life that this enemy was real: not a ghost, not a
demon, not just the paranoid-schizophrenic delusion of a troubled mind,
but a creature of flesh and blood. No doubt infinitely strange
flesh.
And blood that might not be recognized as such by any physician yet
born. But flesh and blood nonetheless.
He didn't know what the thing was, where it had come from, or out of
what it had been born, he knew only that it existed. And that it was
somewhere on Quartermass Ranch.
Jack was lying on his side, but Heather was no longer pressed against
him. She had turned over during the night. Crystals of snow
tick-tick-ticked against the window, like a finely calibrated
astronomical clock counting off every hundredth of a second. The wind
that harried the snow made a low whirring sound. Jack felt as if he
was listening to the heretofore silent and secret cosmic machinery that
drove the universe through its unending cycles. Shakily, he pushed
back the covers, sat up, stood. Heather didn't wake.
Night still reigned, but a faint gray light in the east hinted at the
pending coronation of a new day. Striving to quell his nausea, Jack
stood in just his underwear until his shivering was a greater concern
than his queasiness. The bedroom was warm. The chill was internal.
Nevertheless, he went to his closet, quietly slid the door open,
slipped a pair of jeans from a hanger, pulled them on, then a shirt.
Awake, he could not sustain the explosive terror that had blown him out
