them are afraid.'
'Then it's okay if I'm scared?' Toby said. rmore than okay,' Jack
said. 'If you were never afraid of anything, then you'd be either very
stupid or me. Now, I know you can't be stupid because you're Insanity,
on the other hand . . . well, I can't be )sure about that, since it
runs in your mom's family.' he smiled. Then maybe I can do it,' Toby
said. 'We'll get through this,' Jack assured him. Heather met Jack's
eyes and smiled as if to say, You did that so well, you ought to be
Father of the Year. He winked at her. God, she loved him.
'Then it's insane,' the boy said. Frowning, Heather said, 'What?'
'The alien.
Can't be stupid. It's smarter than we are, can do things we can't. So
it must be insane. It's never afraid.' Heather and Jack glanced at
each other. No smiles this time. 'Never,' Toby repeated, both hands
clasped tightly around the mug of hot chocolate.
Heather returned to the windows, first one, then the other. Jack
skimmed the tablet pages he hadn't yet read, found a passage about the
doorway, and quoted from it aloud. Standing on edge, a giant coin of
darkness. As thin as a sheet of paper. Big enough to drive a train
through. A blackness of exceptional purity.
Eduardo daring to put his hand in it. His sense that something was
coming out of that fearful gloom.
Pushing the tablet aside, getting up from his chair, Jack said, 'That's
enough for now. We can read the rest of it later. Eduardo's account
supports our own experiences. That's what's important. They might've
thought he was a crazy old geezer, or that we're flaky city people
who've come down with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies in all this open
space, but it isn't as easy to dismiss all of us.'
Heather said, 'So who're we going to call, the county sheriff?' 'Paul
Youngblood, then Travis Potter. They already suspect something's wrong
out here--though, God knows, neither of them could have a clue that
it's any-thing this wrong. With a couple of locals on our side,
there's a chance the sheriff's deputies might take us more
seriously.'
Carrying the shotgun with him, Jack went to the wall phone. He plucked
the handset off the cradle, listened, rattled the disconnect lever,
punched a couple of numbers, and hung up. 'The line's dead.' He had
suspected as much even as he started toward the phone.
After the incident with the computer, she knew that getting help wasn't
going to be easy, she hadn't wanted to think about the possibility
they were trapped.
'Maybe the storm brought down the lines,' Jack said. 'Aren't the phone
lines on the same poles as the power and we have power, so it wasn't
the storm.' the pegboard, he snatched the keys to the Explorer and to
Eduardo's Cherokee.
'Okay, let's get the out of here. We'll drive over to Paul and
Carolyn's, call Travis from there.'
Heather tucked the yellow tablet into the waistband of her pants,
against her stomach, and zipped her ski-jacket over it. She took the
