that had switched on the radio and the TV at long distance, had opened
the dead-bolt locks without a key, and had caused the windows to
implode. Call it telekinesis, mind over matter. Alien mind over
earthly matter. In this case, it was decomposing organic matter in the
rough shape of a human being.
At the bottom of the steps, the corpse stopped and gazed up at her.
Its face was only slightly swollen, though darkly empurpled, mottled
with yellow here and there, a crust of evil green under its clogged
nostrils. One eye was missing. The other was covered with a yellow
film, it bulged against a half-concealing lid that, though sewn shut by
a mortician, had partially opened when the rotting threads had
loosened.
Heather heard herself muttering rapidly, rhythmically. After a moment
she realized that she was feverishly reciting a long prayer she had
learned as a child but had not repeated in eighteen or twenty years.
Under other circumstances, if she had made a conscious effort to recall
the words, she couldn't have come up with half of them, but now they
flowed out of her as they had when she'd been a young girl kneeling in
church.
The walking corpse was less than half the reason for her fear, however,
and far less than half the reason for the acute disgust that knotted
her stomach, made breathing difficult, and triggered her gag reflex.
It was gruesome, but the discolored flesh was not yet dissolving from
the bones. The dead man still reeked more of embalming fluid than of
putrescence, a pungent odor that blew up the staircase on a cold draft
and instantly reminded Heather of long-ago high-school biology classes
and slippery specimen frogs fished from jars of formaldehyde for
dissection.
What sickened and repelled her most of all was the Giver that rode the
corpse as it might have ridden a beast of burden. Though the light in
the hallway was bright enough to reveal the alien clearly, and though
she might have wanted to see less of it rather than more, she was
nevertheless unable to precisely define its physical form. The bulk of
the thing appeared to hang along the dead man's back, secured by
whiplike tentacles-- some as thin as pencils, some as thick as her own
forearm--that were firmly lashed around the mount's thighs, waist,
chest, and neck. The Giver was mostly black, and such a deep black
that it hurt her eyes to stare at it, though in places the inky sheen
was relieved by blood-red speckles.
Without Toby to protect, she might not have been able to face this
thing, for it was too strange, incomprehensible, just too damned
much.
The sight of it dizzied like a whiff of nitrous oxide, brought her to
the edge of desperate giddy laughter, a humorless mirth that was
perilously close to madness.
Not daring to take her eyes off the corpse or its hideous rider, for
fear she would look up to find it one step below her, Heather slowly
lowered the five-gallon can of gasoline to the floor of the landing.
Along the dead man's back, at the heart of the churning mass of
tentacles, there might have been a central body akin to the sac of a
