hit him, and he stumbled back from the window and fell on his butt
beside the bed, and then he couldn’t feel the Bad Thing at all, it was
gone, but what he had felt was so big and so ugly that his heart was
pounding and he could hardly breathe, and right away he thought to
Bobby: Run, go, get away, save Julie, the Bad Thing’s coming, the Bad
Thing, run, run.
THE DREAM was filled with the music of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight
Serenade,” though like everything in dreams, the song was indefinably
different from the real tune. Bobby was in a house that was at once
familiar yet total strange, and somehow he knew it was the seaside
bungalow to which he and Julie were going to retire young. He drifted
into the living room, over a dark Persian carpet, comfortable-looking
upholstered chairs, a huge old chesterfield with rounded back and thick
cushions, a rusty looking carpet with bronze panels, an Art Deco lamp,
and overflowing bookshelves. The music was coming from outside, so he
was out there. He enjoyed the easy transitions of the dream, moving
through a door without opening it, crossing a wide porch a descending
wooden stairs without ever quite lifting a foot. The sea rumbled to one
side, and the phosphorescent foam of breakers glowed faintly in the
night. Under a palm tree, in the sand, with a scattering of shells
around it, stood a Wurlitzer 950, ablaze with gold and red light, bubble
tubes percolating gazelles perpetually leaping, figures of Pan
perpetually pipin record-changing mechanism gleaming like real silver,
and large black platter spinning on the turntable. Bobby felt as
“Moonlight Serenade” would go on forever, which would have been fine
with him, because he had never been more mellow more at peace, and he
sensed that Julie had come out of the house behind him, that she was
waiting on the damp sand near the water’s edge, and that she wanted to
dance with him, as he turned, and there she was, exotically illuminated
by the Wurlitzer, and he took a step toward her “Run, go, get away, save
Julie, the Bad Thing’s coming, Bad Thing, run, run!
The indigo ocean suddenly leapt as if under the lash of a storm, and
spume exploded into the night air.
Hurricane winds shook the palms.
The Bad Thing! Run! Run!
The world tilted. Bobby stumbled toward Julie. The sea surged up
around her. It wanted her; it was going to seize her; it was water with
a will, a thinking sea with a malevolent consciousness gleaming darkly
in its depths.
The Bad Thing!
The Glenn Miller tune speeded up, whirling at double time.
The Bad Thing!
The soft, romantic light from the Wurlitzer flamed brighter, stung his
eyes, yet did not drive back the night. It was radiating light as if
the door to Hell had opened, but the darkness around them only
intensified, yielding nothing to that supernatural blaze.
THE BAD THING! THE BAD THING!
The world tilted again. Heaved and rolled.
Bobby staggered across the carnival-ride beach, toward Julie, who seemed
unable to move. She was being swallowed by the churning oil-black sea.
THE BAD THING THE BAD THING THE BAD THING!
With the hard crack of riven stone, the sky split above them, but no
lightning stabbed out of that crumbling vault.
Geysers of sand erupted around Bobby. Inky water exploded out of sudden
gaping holes in the beach.
He looked back. The bungalow was gone. The sea rose on all sides. The
beach was dissolving under his feet.
Screaming, Julie disappeared under the water.
BADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHING
A twenty-foot wave loomed over Bobby. It broke. He was swept away. He
tried to swim. The flesh on his arms and hands bubbled and blistered
and began to peel off, revealing glints of ice-white bone. The midnight
seawater was an acid. His head went under. He gasped, broke the
surface, but the corrosive sea had already kissed away his lips, and he
felt his gums receding from his teeth, and his tongue turned to rancid
mush in the salty rush of caustic brine that he had swallowed. Even the
spray-filled air was erosive, eating away his lungs in an instant, so