To Toby, she said sharply, 'Resist it!'
Back door. Snowflakes spiraling through the crack.
Come on, come on.
Keeping her eyes on the back door, at the far side of the lighted
kitchen, she said, 'Don't listen to it, honey, just tell it to go away,
say no to it. No, no, no to it.'
The tuneless music, alternately irritating and soothing, pushed her
with what seemed like real physical force when the volume rose, pulled
on her when the volume ebbed, pushed and pulled, until she realized
that she was swaying as Toby had swayed in the kitchen when under the
spell of the radio.
In one of the quieter passages, she heard a murmur Toby's voice. She
couldn't catch the words.
She looked at him. He had that dazed expression. Transported. He was
moving his lips. He might have been saying 'yes, yes,' but she
couldn't tell for sure.
Kitchen door. Still ajar two inches, no more, as it had been.
Something still waiting out there on the porch.
She knew it.
The boy whispered to his unseen seducer, soft urgent words that might
have been the first faltering steps of acquiescence or total
surrender.
'Shit!' she said.
She backed up two steps, turned toward the livingroom arch on her left,
and opened fire on the television. A brief burst, six or eight rounds,
tore into the TV. The picture tube exploded, thin white vapor or smoke
from the ruined electronics spurted into the air, and the darkly
beguiling siren song was hammered into silence by the clatter of the
Uzi.
A strong, cold draft swept through the hallway, and Heather spun toward
the rear of the house. The back door was no longer ajar. It stood
wide open. She could see the snow-covered porch and, beyond the porch,
the churning white day.
The Giver had first walked out of a dream. Now it had walked out of
the storm, into the house. It was somewhere in the kitchen, to the
left or right of the hall door, and she had missed the chance to cut it
down as it entered.
If it was just on the other side of the threshold between the hall and
the kitchen, it had closed to a maximum striking distance of about
twenty-five feet. Getting dangerously close again.
Toby was standing on the first step of the staircase, clear-eyed once
more but shivering and pale with terror. The dog was beside him,
alert, sniffing the air.
Behind her, another pot-pan-bowl-flatware-dish alarm went off with a
loud clanging of metal and shattering of glass. Toby screamed,
Falstaff erupted into ferocious barking again, and Heather swung
around, heart slamming so hard it shook her arms, made the gun jump up
and down. The front door was arcing inward. A forest of long
red-speckled black tentacles burst through the gap between door and
jamb, glossy and writhing. So there were two of them, one at the front
