The old man fell silent for a moment, and stared into space.
“Why?” Joyce asked, gently urging him to continue. “How did you know?”
It took another second or two for the old man to bring himself back to the present, and for a moment Izzie wondered if he hadn’t gotten lost in his memories. But when he turned to look back at the two of them his eyes were clear and his expression lucid.
“It was just a feeling at first,” he explained. “But as I walked around the town, it felt like there was always something hovering just at the corner of my eye. When I’d turn to try to catch a good look, I’d get just a glimpse and then it would be gone, every time.”
“What were they?” Izzie asked. “What did they look like, at least?”
“I couldn’t rightly have said at the time,” the old man said. “They were like hazy shadows, or mirages over a blacktop road on a hot summer’s day. I got the impression of things reaching out, like fingers on a hand or an octopus’s tentacles, but couldn’t quite bring it into focus. No one else ever seemed bothered by them, didn’t even seem to notice. For a while I thought it was all in my head. I’d tried acid a time or two, and had heard folks talk about lingering flashbacks. But that didn’t sit quite right with me. I could feel them, too, if I got close enough, down in the pit of my stomach. Hell, I could practically taste them.”
Izzie could not forget that sensation of wrongness she’d felt whenever she had gotten close to one of the Ridden, the nausea in her gut and the foul taint on her tongue.
“But that night, after the sun went down? That’s when I saw them clear for the first time.” The old man shook his head slowly and let out a low whistle. Then he turned his eyes to Izzie and Joyce. “You girls old enough to remember lava lamps?”
“Sure,” Joyce said while Izzie nodded.
“That was the first thing that came into my head when I saw the shadows,” Jett went on. “Those little blobs all stretching and squashing around. They trailed around behind some of the people walking on the street, like they were streaming out of their heads. At first I thought they were black as ink, but as I looked closer, I could see that it wasn’t just that they didn’t have any color, but that they were some color that we don’t have here, and my mind had just decided that black made more sense. Anyway, I tagged along behind one of the folks who had the shadows around their head like a halo, watching as it stretched and squashed. I was close enough that I could reach out and touch them. So I did.”
A pained expression flitted across his lined face for an instant, and then was gone.
“That was when I saw it for the first time. Not just the parts of it that were here, but what those shadows were a part of, someplace else. Not anywhere on Earth, or even in outer space, but in some other space. It was too large to fit in my head, with too many angles to make sense of, but I got this image of a living thing as big as worlds. A mass of writhing tendrils stretching out in more directions than I could comprehend, driven by an incredible hunger to consume. And there was a mind at the center of it all, thinking thoughts too vast and alien for me to understand, and all the sudden it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if it noticed me. . . . All the things I’d done and seen to that day, and I’d never been so scared as I was at that moment.”
Izzie noticed the way that the old man’s gnarled fingers were clawing at the blanket draped over his legs, as if he were falling off a cliff and grasping for anything to hold onto.
“I’m not too proud to say it,” he said, though Izzie could see that it did make him uncomfortable to admit, “but I turned tail and ran away. Didn’t even look back, for fear that the person I was following would turn and notice me. Because if he noticed me, I figured, then there was a good chance that it would notice me, too. And the thought of that . . . that thing knowing I was there turned my insides to ice.”
The old man’s grip on the blanket loosened as he visibly tried to relax.
“I holed up in a flophouse way out in the Kiev that night, and barely stepped outside for the next few days, leaving my room only to pick up packs of smokes at the newsstand or to hit the package store for bottles of rotgut whiskey and fortified wine by the armful. I drank because otherwise I couldn’t hardly sleep, since every time I closed my eyes I was back there in that other space, with that thing about to notice me. Only stone-cold drunk could I get any kind of rest, and even then, I’d wake up every morning in a cold sweat. Then, about three or four days after I’d hit town, I went out to the newsstand to pick up a pack of Camels, and one of the paperbacks on the rack caught my eye. The cover illustration showed a guy in a skull mask and fedora with a Colt .45 in either hand, looking up at something above him, crawling out of a crack in the night sky. And damned it if didn’t look exactly
