unearthly shrieks, cries, and whispers that echoed down to her with the
fluctuant light. Around her the limestone walls pounded with the
tripartite bass beat, as if the mill were alive and had a massive
three-chambered heart.
Stop, turn back, you’re going to die up there Holly shouted, but the
woman could not hear her. Holly was only an observer in her own dream,
not an active participant, unable to influence events.
Step by step. Higher.
The iron-bound timber door stood open.
She crossed the threshold. Into the high room.
The first thing she saw was the boy. He was standing in the middle of
the room, terrified. His small hands, curled in fists, were at his
sides. A three-inch-diameter decorative candle stood in a blue dish at
his feet. A hardcover book lay beside the dish, and she glimpsed the
word “mill” on the colorful dustjacket.
Turning to look at her, his beautiful blue eyes darkened by terror, the
boy said, “I’m scared, help me, the walls, the walls!”
She realized that the single candle was not producing all of the
peculiar glow suffusing the room. Other light glimmered in the walls,
as if they were not made of solid limestone but of semitransparent and
magicallyù radiant quartz in shades of amber. At once she saw that
something was alive within the stone, something luminous which could
move through solid matter as easily as a swimmer could move through
water.
The wall swelled and throbbed.
“It’s coming,” the boy said with evident fear but also with what might
have been a perverse excitement, “and nobody can stop it!”
Suddenly it was born out of the air. The curve of mortared blocks split
like the spongy membrane of an insect’s egg. And taking shape from a
core of foul muck where limestone should have been “No!”
Choking on a scream, Holly woke.
She sat up in bed, something touched her, and she wrenched away from it.
Because the room was awash in morning light, she saw that it was only
Jim.
A dream. Just a dream.
As had happened two nights ago in the Laguna Hills Motor Inn, however,
the creature of the dream was trying to force its way into the waking
world. It was not coming through a wall this time. The ceiling.
Directly over the bed. The white-painted drywall was no longer white or
dry, but mottled amber and brown, semitransparent and luminous as the
stone in the dream had been, oozing a noxious mucus, bulging as some
shadowy entity struggled to be born into the bedroom.
The dream-thing’s thunderous three-part heartbeat-lub-dub DUB,
lubdub-DUB shuddered through the house.
Jim rolled off the bed and onto his feet. He had slipped into his
pajama bottoms again during the night, just as Holly had slipped into
the roomy top which hung halfway to her knees. She scrambled to his
side. They stared up in horror at the pulsing birth sac which the
ceiling had become, and at the shadowy writhing form struggling to
breach that containing membrane.
Most frightening of all-this apparition was in daylight. The plantation
shutters had not been completely closed over the windows, and slats of
morning sunshine banded the room. When something from Beyond found you
in the dead hours of the night, you half expected it.
But sunshine was supposed to banish all monsters.
Jim put a hand against Holly’s back, pushed her toward the open door to
the hallway. “Go, get out!”
She took only two steps in that direction before the door slammed shut
of its own accord. As if an exceptionally powerful poltergeist were at
work, a mahogany highboy, as old and well-used as everything in the
house, erupted away from the wall beside her, almost knocking her down.
It flew across the bedroom, slammed into the door. A dresser and a
chair followed that tall chest of drawers, effectively barricading the
only exit.
The windows in the far wall presented an avenue of escape, but they
would have to crouch to slip under the increasingly distended central
portion of the ceiling. Having accepted the illogic of the waking
nightmare, Holly was now loath to press past that greasy and obscenely
throbbing pouch, for fear that it would split open as she moved under