Anyway, I didn’t think Eddie yelling was important, and I went out back to the hutch where
we kept our supplies without bothering to check on him. I was more than half-convinced the Puff-Pak would be gone, but it was still on the shelf, wedged between the box of blank videotapes and a pile of Field & Stream magazines. Some tidy soul had even tucked it into a plastic evidence-bag to keep the dust off. Taking it down, I remembered how crazy Curt had looked on the day I first saw him wearing this gadget, Curt also wearing a plastic barber’s smock and a blue bathing cap and red galoshes. You’re beautiful, wave to your adoring fans, I’d told him.
I put the mask to my mouth and nose, almost sure that what came out of it would be unbreathable, but it was air, all right — stale as week-old bread but not actually moldy, if you know what I mean. Better than the stench in the shed, certainly. I grabbed the battered old Polaroid One-Shot from the nail where it was hanging by the strap. I backed out of the hutch, and — this could be nothing but hindsight, I’ll be the first to admit it — I think I saw movement. Just a flash of movement. Not from the vicinity of the shed, though, because I was looking right at that and this was more a corner-of-the-eye phenomenon. Something in our back field. In the high grass. I probably thought it was Mister Dillon, maybe rolling around and trying to get that thing’s smell off. Well, it wasn’t. Mister Dillon wasn’t up to any rolling around by then. By then poor old D was busy dying.
I went back into the shed, breathing through the mask. And although I hadn’t felt what Eddie was talking about before, this time it came through loud and clear. It was like being outside the shed for a few moments had freshened me for it, or attuned me to it. The Buick wasn’t flashing purple lightning or glowing or humming, it was only sitting there, but there was a sense of liveliness to it that was unmistakable. You could feel it hovering just over your skin, like the lightest touch of a breeze huffing at the hairs on your forearms. And I thought . .
. this is crazy, but I thought, What if the Buick’s nothing but another version of what I’m wearing on my face right now? What if it’s nothing but a Puff-Pak? What if the thing wearing it has exhaled and now its chest is lying flat but in a second or two—
Even with the Puff-Pak, the smell of the dead creature was enough to make my eyes water.
Brian Cole and Jackie O’Hara, two of the handier build-em-and-fix-em fellows on the roster back then, had installed an overhead fan the year before, and I flipped the switch as I passed it.
I took three pictures, and then the One-Shot was out of film — I’d never even checked the load. Stupid. I tucked the photos into my back pocket, put the camera down on the floor, then went to get the tarp. As I bent and grabbed it, I realized that I’d taken the camera but walked out of the hutch right past the looped length of bright yellow rope. I should have taken it and cinched the loop in the end of it around my waist. Tied the other end to the big old hook Curds had mounted to the left of Shed B’s side door for just that purpose. But I didn’t do that.
The rope was too goddam bright to miss, but I missed it anyway. Funny, huh? And there I was where I had no business to be on my own, but I was on my own. I wasn’t wearing a
security line, either. Had walked right past it, maybe because something wanted me to walk right past it. There was a dead E.T. on the floor and the air was full of a lively, chilly, gathering feeling. I think it crossed my mind that if I disappeared, my wife arid Ennis Rafferty’s sister could join up forces. I think I might have laughed out loud at that. I can’t remember for sure, but I do remember being struck humorous by something. The global absurdity of the situation, maybe.
The thing we’d killed had turned entirely white. It was steaming like dry ice. The eyes on the severed piece still seemed to be staring at me, even though by then they’d started to melt and run. I was as afraid as I’ve ever been in my life, afraid the way you are when you’re in a situation where you could really die and you know it. That sense of something about to breathe, to suck in, was so strong it made my skin crawl. But I was grinning, too. Big old grin. Not quite laughing, but almost. Feeling humorous. I tossed the tarp over Mr E.T. and started backing out of the shed. Forgot the Polaroid entirely. Left it sitting there on the concrete.
I was almost at the door when I looked at the Buick. And some force pulled me toward it.
Am I sure it was its force? Actually, I’m not. It might have just been the fascination deadly things have for us: the edge and the drop, how the muzzle of a gun looks back at us like an eye if we turn it this way and that. Even the point of a knife starts to look different if the hour’s late and everyone else in the house has gone to sleep.
All this was below the level of thinking, though. On the level of thinking I just decided I couldn’t go out and leave the Buick with its trunk open. It just looked too . . . I don’t know, too getting ready to breathe. Or to bite. Something like that. I was still smiling. Might even have laughed a little.
I took eight steps — or maybe it was a dozen, I guess it could have been as many as a dozen. I was telling myself there was nothing foolish about what I was doing, Eddie J. was nothing but an old lady mistaking feelings for facts. I reached for the trunk-lid. I meant to just slam it and scat (or so I told myself), but then I looked inside and I said one of those things you say when you’re surprised, I can’t remember which one, it might have been Well I be dog or I’ll be switched. Because there was something in there, lying on the trunk’s plain brown carpeting. It looked like a transistor radio from the late fifties or early sixties. There was even a shiny stub of what could have been an antenna sticking up from it.
I reached into the trunk and picked the gizmo up. Had a good laugh over it, too. I felt like I was in a dream, or tripping on some chemical. And all the time I knew it was closing in one me, getting ready to take me. I didn’t know if it got Ennis the same way, but probably, yeah.
And I didn’t care. I was standing in front of that open trunk, no rope on me and no one to pull me back, and something was getting ready to pull me in, to breathe me like cigarette smoke.
And I didn’t give Shit One. All I cared about was what I’d found in the trunk.
It might have been some sort of communication device — that’s what it looked like — but
it might have been something else entirely: where the monster kept its prescription drugs, some sort of musical instrument, maybe even a weapon. It was the size of a cigarette-pack but a lot heavier. Heavier than a transistor radio or a Walkman, too. There were no dials or knobs or levers on it. The stuff it was made of didn’t look or feel like either metal or plastic. It had a fine-grained texture, not exactly unpleasant but organic, like cured cowhide. I touched the rod sticking out of it and it retracted into a hole on top. I touched the hole and the rod came back out. Touched the rod again and this time nothing happened. Not then, not ever. Although ever for what we called ‘the radio’ wasn’t very long; after a week or so, the surface of it began to pit and corrode. It was in an evidence bag with a zip-lock top, but that didn’t matter. A month later the ‘radio’ looked like something that’s been left out in the wind and rain for about eighty years. And by the following spring it was nothing but a bunch of gray fragments lying at the bottom of a plastic baggie. The antenna, if that’s what it was, never moved again. Not so much as a silly millimeter.