He listened to the rain. It whispered. It cried tears on the window.
Far away, the Bad Thing was loose. Ugly-nasty waves spread out from it
the way ripples spread across a pond when you dropped a stone in the
water. The Bad Thing was like a big stone dropped into the night, a
thing that didn’t belong in this world, and with a little effort Thomas
could sense the waves from it breaking over him.
He reached out. Felt it. A throbbing thing. Cold and full of anger.
Mean. He wanted to get closer. learn what it was.
He tried throwing questions at it. What are you? Where you? What do
you want? Why are you going to hurt Julie?”
Suddenly, like a big magnet, the Bad Thing began to pull him. He’d
never felt anything like that before. When he turned his thoughts to
Bobby or Julie, they didn’t grab him pull at him the way this Bad Thing
did.
A part of his mind seemed to unravel like a ball of string and the loose
end sailed through the window and way up the night, through the
darkness, until it found the Bad Thing.
Suddenly Thomas was very close to the Bad Thing, too close. It was all
around him, big ugly and so strange that Thomas felt like he’d dropped
into a swimming pool full of ice and razor blades. He didn’t know if it
was a man, couldn’t see shape, only feel it; it might be pretty on the
outside, but inside it was throbbing and dark and deep nasty. He could
see what the Bad Thing was eating. The food was was still alive and
squealing. Thomas was scared big, and right away he tried to back away,
but for a moment the ugly mind held him tight, an he could get away only
by picturing the mind-string rewinding itself onto the ball.
When the mind-string was all wound up again, Thomas turned away from the
window, onto his stomach. He was breathing real fast. He listened to
his heart boom.
He had a sick-making taste in his mouth. The same taste he got
sometimes when he bit his tongue, not meaning to, the same taste as when
the dentist yanked one of his teeth without meaning to. Blood.
Sick and scared, he sat up in bed and made the lamp!” on right away. He
took a tissue from the box on the night stand He spit into it and looked
to see if there was blood. There wasn’t. Just spit.
He tried again. No blood.
He knew what that meant. He’d been too close to the Thing. Maybe even
inside the bad thing, just for a blink.
ugly taste in his mouth was the same taste the Bad Thing tasted, tearing
with its teeth at some living, squirming thing. Thomas didn’t have
blood in his mouth, he just had mental blood in his mouth. But that was
bad enough; this time wasn’t at all like biting his tongue or getting a
tooth yank because this time what he tasted wasn’t his own blood.
Though enough warmth was in the room, he started shivering and couldn’t
stop.
CANDY PROWLED the canyons, in the grip of urgent need, grabbing wild
animals out of burrows and nests. He was kneeling in the mud beside a
huge oak, pummeled by rain, sucking blood from the ravished throat of a
rabbit, when he felt someone place a hand atop his head.
He threw down the rabbit and sprang to his feet, turning around as he
did so. Nobody was there. Two of his sisters’ blackest cats were
twenty feet behind him, visible only because their eyes were luminous in
the gloom; they had been following him since he’d left the house.
Otherwise he was alone.
For a second or two, he still felt the hand on his head, though no hand
was there. Then the queer sensation passed.
He studied the shadows on all sides and listened to the rain snapping
through the oak leaves.
Finally, shrugging off the episode, driven by his fierce need, he
proceeded farther east, moving upslope. A two-foot-wide stream had
formed on the canyon floor, six or eight inches deep, not large enough