window.
Jack touched the glistening with a fingertip, but he was so frigid with
fear that ice felt no colder than his own skin. Beyond the kitchen
windows, the white world was filled with cold motion, the relentless
angular descent of driven snow. Restless, Heather moved continuously
back and forth between the two windows, nervously anticipating the
pearance of a monstrously corrupted intruder in that otherwise sterile
landscape.
They were dressed in the new ski suits they'd bought the previous
morning, prepared to get out of the house quickly if they came under
attack and found their prison indefensible. The loaded Mossberg
twelve-gauge lay on the table.
Jack could drop the yellow tablet and snatch up the gun in the event
that something--don't even think about what it might be launched an
assault on the house. The Micro Uzi and the Korth .38 were on the
counter by the sink.
Toby sat at the table, sipping hot chocolate from a mug, and the dog
was lying at his feet. The boy was no longer in a trance state, was
entirely disconnected from the mysterious invader of dreams, yet he was
uncharacteristically subdued.
? Although Toby had been fine yesterday afternoon and evening,
following the apparently far more extensive assault he had suffered in
the graveyard, Heather worried about him. He had come away from that
first experience with no conscious memory of it, but the trauma of
total mental enslavement had to have left scars deep in the mind, the
effects of which might become evident only over a period of weeks or
months. And he did remember the second attempt at control, because
this time the puppetmaster hadn't succeeded in either dominating him or
repressing the memory of the telepathic invasion. The encounter she'd
had with the creature in a dream the night before last had been
frightening and so repulsive that she had been overcome with nausea.
Toby's experiences with it, much more intimate than her own, must have
been immeasurably more terrifying and affecting.
Moving restively from one window to the other, Heather stopped behind
Toby's chair, put her hands on his thin shoulders, gave him a squeeze,
smoothed his hair, kissed the top of his head. Nothing must happen to
him. Unbearable to think of him being touched by that thing, whatever
it was and whatever it might look like, or by one of its puppets.
Intolerable. She would do anything to prevent that. Anything. She
would die to prevent it.
Jack looked up from the tablet after quickly reading the first three or
four pages. His face was as white as the snowscape. 'Why didn't you
tell me about this when you found it?'
'Because of the way he'd hidden it in the freezer, I thought it must be
personal, private, none of our business. Seemed like something only
Paul Youngblood ought to see.'
'You should've showed it to me.'
'Hey, you didn't tell me about what happened in the cemetery,' she
said, 'and that's a hell of a lot bigger ..'I'm sorry.' You didn't
