‘All right,’ he challenged the shadows. ‘Come out.’ He raised his rifle. ‘You hear me you bastard? Out I said, or I’ll blow you to Kingdom Come.’
He meant it too.
At the far end of the barn something stirred amongst the bales.
Now I’ve got the son of a bitch, thought Denny. The trespasser got up, all nine feet of him, and stared at Denny.
‘Jee-sus.’
And without warning it was coming at him, coming like a locomotive smooth and efficient. He fired into it, and the bullet struck its upper chest, but the wound hardly slowed it.
Nicholson turned and ran. The stones of the yard were slippery beneath his shoes, and he had no turn of speed to outrun it. It was at his back in two beats, and on him in another.
Gwen dropped the phone when she heard the shot. She raced
to the window in time to see her sweet Denny eclipsed by a gargantuan form. It howled as it took him, and threw him up into the air like a sack of feathers. She watched helplessly as his body twisted at the apex of its journey before plummeting back down to earth again. It hit the yard with a thud she felt in her every bone, and the giant was at his body like a shot, treading his loving face to muck.
She screamed; trying to silence herself with her hand. Too late. The sound was out and the giant was looking at her, straight at her, its malice piercing the window. Oh God, it had seen her, and now it was coming for her, loping across the yard, a naked engine, and grinning a promise at her as it came.
Gwen snatched Amelia off the floor and hugged her close, pressing the girl’s face against her neck. Maybe she wouldn’t see: she mustn’t see. The sound of its feet slapping on the wet yard got louder. Its shadow filled the kitchen.
‘Jesus help me.’
It was pressing at the window, its body so wide that it cancelled out the light, its lewd, revolting face smeared on the watery pane. Then it was smashing through, ignoring the glass that bit into its flesh. It smelled child-meat. It wanted child-meat. It would have child-meat.
Its teeth were spilling into view, widening that smile into an obscene laugh. Ropes of saliva hung from its jaw as it clawed the air, like a cat after a mouse in a cage, pressing further and further in, each swipe closer to the morsel.
Gwen flung open the door into the hall as the thing lost patience with snatching and began to demolish the window-frame and clamber through. She locked the door after her while crockery smashed and wood splintered on the other side, then she began to load all the hall furniture against it. Tables, chairs, coat-stand, knowing even as she did it, that it would be matchwood in two seconds flat. Amelia was kneeling on the hall floor where Gwen had set her down. Her face was a thankful blank.
All right, that was all she could do. Now, upstairs. She picked up her daughter, who was suddenly air-light, and took the stairs two at a time. Halfway up, the noise in the kitchen below stopped utterly.
She suddenly had a reality crisis. On the landing where she stood all was peace and calm. Dust gathered minutely on the
window-sills, flowers wilted; all the infinitesimal domestic procedures went on as though nothing had happened.
‘Dreaming it,’ she said. God, yes: dreaming it.
She sat down on the bed Denny and she had slept in together for eight years, and tried to think straight.
Some vile menstrual nightmare, that’s what it was, some rape-fantasy out of all control. She lay Amelia on the pink eiderdown (Denny hated pink, but suffered it for her sake) and stroked the girl’s clammy forehead.
‘Dreaming it.’
Then the room darkened, and she looked up knowing what she’d see.
It was there, the nightmare, all over the upper windows, its spidery arms spanning the width of the glass, clinging like an acrobat to the frame, its repellent teeth sheathing and unsheathing as it gawped at her terror.