Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain
when it was shot. No shrieks of rage.
, Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the
assault, mocked her hopes of triumph.
At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The
Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps
again.
Heather's spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed
the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and
Falstaff were waiting.
The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked
as if he'd sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself:
effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn't be
brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns.
Toby said, 'Do I have to do it? I don't want to.'
She didn't know what he meant, didn't have time to ask. 'We'll be
okay, honey, we'll make it.'
From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came
the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the
sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe--but a cold sound.
She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the
gasoline can.
Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned,
nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies
reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless
of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work.
'It's never afraid,' Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound
depths of his own fear.
'Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!'
The boy ran, and the dog went with him.
At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white
sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the
intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the
ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road,
he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast
down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the
Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow
rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a
mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts
into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking
on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the
whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and
blowing snow as obscuring as fog at sea.
Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got
off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error
only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a
spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway.
Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the
curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the
