it, and that the creature within would seize her.
Jim pulled her back with him into the adjoining bathroom. He kicked the
door shut.
Holly swung around, searching. The only window was set high and was too
small to provide a way out.
The bathroom walls were untainted by the organic transformation that had
overcome the bedroom, but they still shook with the triple bass thud of
the inhuman heartbeat.
“What the hell is that?” he demanded.
“The Enemy,” she said at once, surprised that he didn’t know. “The
Enemy, from the dream.”
Above them, starting from the partition that the bath shared with the
bedroom, the white ceiling began to discolor as if abruptly saturated
with red blood, brown bile. The sheen of semigloss paint on drywall
metamorphosed into a biological surface and began to throb in time with
the thunderous heartbeat.
Jim pulled her into a corner by the vanity, and she huddled helplessly
against him. Beyond the pregnant droop of the lowering ceiling, she saw
a repulsive movement like the frenzied squirming of a million maggots.
The thudding heartbeat increased in volume, booming around them.
She heard a wet, tearing sound. None of this could be happening, yet it
was, and that sound made it more real than the things she was seeing
with her own eyes, because it was such a filthy sound and so hideously
intimate too real for a delusion or a dream.
The door crashed open, and the ceiling burst overhead, showering then
with debris.
But with that implosion, the power of the lingering nightmare was
exhausted, and reality finally, fully reasserted itself Nothing
monstrous surged through the open door; only the sun-filled bedroom lay
beyond Although the ceiling had looked entirely organic when it had
burst in upon them, no trace of its transformed state remained; it was
only a ceiling again. The rain of debris included chunks of wallboard,
flaked and powdered drywall paste, splinters of wood, and wads of fluffy
Fiberglas insulation-but nothing alive.
The hole itself was astonishing enough to Holly.
Two nights ago, in the motel, though the wall had bulged and rippled as
if alive, it had returned to its true composition without a crack. No
evidence of the dream-creature’s intrusion had been left behind except
the scratches in her sides, which a psychologist might have said were
self inflicted. When the dust settled, everything might have been just
a fantastically detailed delusion.
But the mess in which they were now standing was no delusion. The pall
of white dust in the air was real.
In a state of shock, Jim took her hand and led her out of the bathroom.
The bedroom ceiling had not crashed down. It was as it had been last
night: smooth, white. But the furniture was piled up against the door
as if washed there by a flood.
Madness favored darkness, but light was the kingdom of reason. If the
waking world provided no sanctuary from nightmares, if daylight offered
no sanctuary from unreason, then there was no sanctuary anywhere,
anytime, for anyone.
The attic light, a single sixty-watt bulb dangling from a beam, did not
illuminate every corner of that cramped and dusty space.
Jim probed into the many recesses with a flashlight, edged around
heating ducts, peered behind each of the two fireplace chimneys,
searching for. . . whatever had torn apart the bathroom ceiling. He
had no idea what he expected to find. Besides the flashlight, he
carried a loaded revolver. The thing that destroyed the ceiling had not
descended into the bathroom, so it had to be in the attic above.
However, because he lived with a minimum of possessions, Jim had nothing
to store up there under the roof, which left few possible hiding places.
He was soon satisfied that those high reaches of his house were
untenanted except by spiders and by a small colony of wasps that had
constructed a nest in a junction of rafters.
Nothing could have escaped those confines, either. Aside from the trap
door by which he had entered, the only exits from the attic were the
ventilation cut-outs in opposing eaves. which was about two feet long
and twelve inches high, covered with tightly fitted screens that could