already begun to make mistakes with my own biology too? Nothing major.
Nothing visible. Hundreds or thousands of tiny mistakes on a cellular
level. That would explain why I feel so lousy, so tired and sore. And
if my brain tissue isn’t coming back together right… that would
explain why I’m confused, fuzzy-headed, unable to read or do math.”
Julie looked at Hal, at Bobby, and knew that both men wanted to allay
Frank’s fear but were unable to do so because the scenario that he had
outlined was not only possible but likely.
Frank said, “The brass buckle looked perfectly normal until Bobby
touched it… then it turned to dust.”
ALL NIGHT long, when sleep made Thomas’s head empty, ugly dreams filled
it up. Dreams of eating small little things. Dreams of drinking blood.
Dreams of being the Bad Thing.
He finished sleeping all of a sudden, sitting up in bed, trying to
scream but unable to find any sounds in himself. For a while he sat
there, shaking, being afraid, breathing so hard that his chest ached.
The sun was back, and the night was gone away, and that made him feel
better. Getting out of bed, he stepped into slippers. His pajamas were
cold with sweat. He shivered.
He pulled on a robe. He went to the window, looked out and liking the
blue sky very much. Leftover rain made the grey lawn look soggy, the
sidewalks darker than usual, and the dirt in the flowerbeds almost
black, and in the puddles you could see the blue sky again like a face
in a mirror. He liked all that, too, because the whole world looked
clean and new all the rain had emptied out of the sky.
He wondered if the Bad Thing was still far away, or close but he didn’t
reach out to it. Because last night it tried to hurt him. Because it
was so strong he almost couldn’t get away from it. And because even
when he did get away, it tried to follow him. He’d felt it hanging on,
coming back across the night with him, and he’d shaken it off real quick
like, but maybe next time he wouldn’t be so lucky, and maybe it would
come all the way right into his room with him, not just its mind but the
Bad Thing itself. He didn’t understand how that could happen, somehow
he knew it might. And if the Bad Thing came to his Home, being awake
would be like being asleep with a nightmare filling up your head.
Terrible things would happen, and there would be no hope.
Turning away from the window, starting toward the closed door to the
bathroom, Thomas glanced at Derek’s bed and saw Derek dead. He was on
his back. His face was bashed, bruised, swollen. His eyes were open
big, you could see them shine in the light from the window and the low
light from the lamp beside the bed. His mouth was open, too, like he
was shouting, but all the sound was out of him like air out of a popped
balloon, and he would not have any more sound in him ever again, you
could tell. Blood was let out of him, too, lots of it, and a pair of
scissors were stuck in his belly, deep in, with not much more than the
handles showing, the same scissors Thomas used to clip pictures from
magazines for his poems.
He felt a big twist of pain in his heart, like maybe somebody was
sticking scissors in him too. But it wasn’t hurt-pain so much as what
he called “feel-pain,” because it was losing Derek that he was feeling,
not real hurt. It was as bad as real hurt, though, because Derek was
his friend, he liked Derek. He was scared, too, because he somehow knew
the Bad thing had let the life out of Derek, the Bad Thing was here at
The Home. Then he realized this could happen just the way things
sometimes happened in TV stories, with the cops coming and believing
that Thomas killed Derek, blaming Thomas, and everyone hating Thomas for
what he’d done, but he hadn’t done it, and all the while the Bad Thing