‘I’m going to kill it,’ he said, and at last something rose in his eyes, disturbing the surface serenity. It was more than anger. To me it looked like a kind of madness. He raised his hands.
In one was the gun. In the other he now held a butane match. ‘Before it sucks me through, I’m going to light its damned transporter on fire. That’ll shut the door to this side forever. That’s step one.’ Spoken with the scary, unconscious arrogance of youth, positive that this idea has occurred to no one before it has occurred to him. ‘And if I live through that experience, I’m going to kill whatever’s waiting on the other side. That’s step two.’
‘Whatever’s waiting? I realized the enormity of his assumptions and was staggered by them. ‘Oh, Ned! Oh, Christ!’
The pulse was stronger now. So was the hum. I could feel the unnatural cold that marked the Buick’s periods of activity settling against my skin. And saw purple light first blooming in the air just above the oversized steering wheel and then starting to skate across its surface.
Coming. It was coming. Ten years ago it would have been here already. Maybe even five.
Now it took a little longer.
‘Do you think there’s going to be a welcoming party, Ned? Are you expecting them to send the Exalted President of the Yellow-Skin Pink-Hair People or maybe the Emperor of the Alternate Universe to say howdy and give you the key to the city? Do you think they’d take the trouble? For what? A kid who can’t accept the fact that his father is dead and get on with his own life?’
‘Shut up!’
‘Know what I think?’
‘I don’t care what you think!’
‘I think the last thing you see is going to be a whole lot of nothing much before you choke to death on whatever they breathe over there.’
The uncertainty flickered in his eyes again. Part of him wanted to do a George Morgan and just finish it. But there was another part of him as well, one that might not care so much about Pitt anymore but still wanted to go on living. And above both, above and under and around, binding everything, was the pulse and the quietly calling voice. It wasn’t even seductive. It just pulled at you.
‘Sarge, come outta dere!’ Arky called.
I ignored him and kept my eyes on Curt’s boy. ‘Ned, use the brains that got you this far.
Please.’ Not shouting at him, but raising my voice to get it over the strengthening hum. And at the same time I touched the thing I’d put in my back pocket.
‘This res you’re sitting in may be alive, but that still doesn’t make it worth your time. It’s not much different from a Venus flytrap or a pitcher plant, don’t you see that? You can’t get revenge out of this thing, not even a nickel’s worth. It’s brainless.’
His mouth began to tremble. That was a start, but I wished to God he’d let go of the gun or at least lower it. And there was the butane match. Not as dangerous as the automatic, but bad enough; my shoes were in gasoline as I stood near the driver’s door of the Buick, and the fumes were strong enough to make my eyes water. Now the purple glow had begun to spin lazy lines of light across the bogus dashboard controls and to fill up the speedometer dial, making it look like the bubble in a carpenter’s level.
‘ It killed my daddy!’ he shouted in a child’s voice, but it wasn’t me he was shouting at. He couldn’t find whatever it was he wanted to shout at, and that was precisely what was killing him.
‘No, Ned. Listen, if this thing could laugh, it’d be laughing now. It didn’t get the father the way it wanted to — not the way it got Ennis and Brian Lippy — but now it’s got a damned fine chance at the son. If Curt knows, if he sees, he must be screaming in his grave.
Everything he feared, everything he fought to prevent. All of it happening again. To his own son.’
‘Stop it, stop it!’ Tears were spilling over his eyelids.
I bent down, bringing my face into that growing purple glow, into the welling coldness. I brought my face down to Ned’s face, where the resistance was finally crumbling. One more blow would do it. I pulled the can I’d taken from the hutch out of my back pocket and held it against my leg and said, ‘He must be hearing it laugh, Ned, he must know it’s too late — ‘
‘No!’
‘ — that there’s nothing he can do. Nothing at all.’
He raised his hands to cover his ears, the gun in the left, the butane match in the right, the gas can balanced on his thighs, his legs dimming out to lavender mist below his shins, that
glow rising like water in a well, and it wasn’t great — I hadn’t knocked him as completely off-balance as I would have liked — but it would have to be good enough. I pushed the cap off the aerosol can with my thumb, had just one fraction of a second to wonder if there was any pressure left in the damned thing after all the years it had stood unused on the shelf in the hutch, and then I maced him.
Ned howled with surprise and pain as the spray hit his eyes and nose. His finger squeezed the trigger of his dad’s Beretta. The report was deafening in the shed.
‘Gah-DAM!’ I heard Arky shout through the ringing in my ears.
I grabbed the doorhandle, and as I did the little locking post went down by itself, just like the arm of the padlock on the hutch door. I reached through the open window, made a fist, and punched the side of the gas can. It flew off the convulsing boy’s lap, tumbled into the misty lavender light rising up from the floor of the car, and disappeared. I had a momentary sense of it tumbling, the way things do when you drop them off a high place. The gun went off again and I felt the wind of the slug. It wasn’t really close — he was still firing blind into the Buick’s roof, probably unaware that he was shooting at all — but whenever you can feel the air stir with a bullet’s passage, it’s too damned close.
I fumbled down inside the door, finally found the inside handle, and pulled. If it didn’t come up I wasn’t sure what I’d do next — he was too big arid too heavy to yank through the window — but it did come up and the door opened. As it did, a brilliant purple flash rose up from where the Roadmaster’s floorboards had been, the trunk banged open, and the real pulling began. Sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner, I’d said, but I hadn’t known the half of it. That tidal beat suddenly sped up to a ferocious, arrhythmic pounding, like precursor waves before the tsunami that will destroy everything. There was a sense of an inside-out wind that seemed to pull instead of push, that wanted to suck your eyeballs from their sockets and then peel the skin right off your face, and yet not a hair on my head stirred.
Ned screamed. His hands dropped suddenly, as if invisible ropes had been tied around his wrists and now someone below him was yanking on them. He started to sink in his seat, only the seat was no longer precisely there. It was vanishing, dissolving into that stormy bubble of rising violet light. I grabbed him under the arms, yanked, stumbled backward first one step and then two. Fighting the incredible traction of the force trying to pull me into the descending purple throat that had been the Buick’s interior. I fell over backward with Ned on top of me. Gasoline soaked through the legs of my pants.
‘Pull us!’ I screamed at Arky. I paddled with my feet, trying to slide away from the Buick and the light pouring out of it. My feet could find no good purchase. They kept slipping in the gasoline.
Ned was yanked, pulled toward the open driver’s door so hard he was almost torn out of my grip. At the same time I felt the rope tighten around my waist. We were tugged sharply backward as I resettled my grip around Ned’s chest. He was still holding the gun, but as I
watched his arm shot out straight in front of him and the gun flew from his hand. The throbbing purple light in the cabin of the car swallowed it up, and I thought I heard it fire twice more, all by itself, as it disappeared. At the same time the pull around us seemed to weaken a little. Maybe enough to make our escape if we went now, just exited stage left with no hesitation.