'Life is,' the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged
to the creature with which he was in contact. 'No meaning. No
beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is.'
'Surely this isn't the first world it's ever found where things die,'
Heather said. Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely.
'They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it
can't know them.' can use them, but it can't know them. A few pieces
of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the
truth. A monstrous, terible portion of the truth. Jack remained
crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly,
'Use them?'
'But it can't know them.' How does it use them?'
.'Puppets.' Heather gasped. 'The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell
,the back staircase.' Though Jack wasn't entirely sure what she was
talking about, he knew that she'd realized what was out e on the
Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in beyond, this thing that
could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing
whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out e. Toby
whispered, 'But it can't know them. Not even as much as it can know
us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to
know them. Become them. And they resist.' Jack had heard enough. Far
too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master
switch to off, and the screen blanked. 'It's going to come for us,'
Toby said, and then he Ucended slowly out of his half-trance.
Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it
had been able to reach into the room, it couldn't have made Jack any
colder than he already was. Toby swiveled in the office chair to
direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father. The dog
came out of the corner. Though no one was touching it, the master
switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.
Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff. The screen gushed
with vile and squirming colors. Heather stooped, grabbed the power
cord, and tore it out of the wall socket. The monitor went dark again,
stayed dark.
'It won't stop,' Toby said, getting up from the chair. Jack turned to
the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a
landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours,
fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep
where the wind chose to pile it.
Either the first storm had stalled, instead of moving farther eastward,
or the second had blown in even sooner than expected overlapping the
first. 'It won't stop,' Toby repeated solemnly. He wasn't talking
about the snow.
Heather pulled him into her arms, lifted and held him as tightly and
protectively as she would have held an infant. Everything becomes
me.
Jack didn't know all that might be meant by those words, what horrors
they might encompass, but he knew Toby was right. The thing wouldn't
stop until it had become them and they'd become part of it.
Condensation had frozen on the inside of the lower panes in the French
