Smoke churned into the room.
Toby had opened the dead bolt and the stairhead door. Tugging at her,
he said, 'Quick, Mom.'
Beyond confusion, in a state of utter baffflement, she followed her son
and the dog into the back stairwell and pulled the door shut, cutting
off the smoke before it reached them.
Toby hurried down the stairs, the dog at his heels, and Heather plunged
after him as he followed the curving wall out of sight.
'Honey, wait!'
'No time,' he called back to her.
'Toby !'
She was terrified about descending the stairs so recklessly, not
knowing what might be ahead, assuming another of those things had to be
somewhere near at hand. Three graves had been disturbed at the
cemetery.
In the vestibule at the bottom, the door to the back porch was still
nailed shut. The door in the kitchen was wide open, and Toby was
waiting for her with the dog.
She would have thought her heart couldn't have beat any faster or
slammed any harder than it did on the way down those stairs, but when
she saw Toby's face, her pulse quickened and each lub-dub was so
forceful that it sent a throb of dull pain across her breast.
If he had been pale with fear, he was now a far whiter shade of pale.
His face didn't look like that of a living boy so much as like a death
mask of a face, rendered now in cold hard plaster as colorless as
powdered lime. The whites of his eyes were gray, one pupil large and
the other just a pinpoint, and his lips were bluish. He was in the
grip of terror, but it wasn't terror alone that drove him. He seemed
strange, haunted--and then she recognized the same fey quality that
he'd exhibited when he'd been in front of the computer this morning,
not in the grip of the Giver but not entirely free. Between, he had
called it.
'We can get it,' he said.
Now that she recognized his condition, she could hear the same flatness
in his voice that she had heard this morning when he'd been in the
thrall of that storm of colors on the IBM monitor.
'Toby, what's wrong?'
'I've got it.'
'Got what?'
'It.'
'Got it where?'
'Under.'
Her heart was exploding.
'Under?'
'Under me.'
Then she remembered, blinked. Amazed.
'It's under you?'
He nodded.
So pale.
'You're controlling it?'
