With all his heart, Tolbeck wished that he had never met Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz, wished that he had never seen that gray room or the girl who had been taught to find the door to December.
Who would have imagined the experiments could get this far out of hand or that such a thing as this would be unleashed?
Something moved below.
Tolbeck gasped, and the sudden intake of subfreezing air hurt his throat and made his lungs ache.
Something cracked, thudded, snapped.
A deer, he thought. There are deer in these mountains. But it wasn’t a deer.
He remained on his knees, cowering against the rocks, hoping that he might still be able to hide, although he knew that he was deluding himself.
Something rattled below. The queer noise grew louder, closer. A small, hard object snapped against Tolbeck’s chest, startling him, then clattered to the frozen ground.
He saw it roll away from him and come to rest in the moonlight. A pebble.
From below, the malign, psychotic spirit-thing had thrown a pebble at him.
Silence.
It was playing with him.
More rattling. He was struck again, twice, not hard, but harder than he had been struck the first time.
He saw another stone drop to the ground in front of him: a white pebble about the size of a marble. The clattering was made by pebbles rolling and bouncing and skipping up the side of the ravine, snapping against larger stones and rebounding as they came.
The psychogeist pitched with unerring accuracy. Tolbeck wanted to run. He had no strength.
He looked wildly left and right. Even if he had possessed the strength to run, he had nowhere to go.
He looked at the night sky. The stars were sharp and cold. He had never seen a sky so forbidding.
He realized that he was praying. The Lord’s Prayer. He hadn’t prayed in twenty years.
Suddenly a lot more rattling arose, a torrent of up-rushing pebbles, dozens, scores, hundreds of little stones, a rattle-tick-snick-snap-click-clack-crack that built until it was like the sound of a hailstorm on a concrete parking lot. Abruptly a squall of stones burst over the crest of the ridge, spewing out of the darkness, waves of half-glimpsed missiles in the pale moonlight, spinning at Tolbeck, ricocheting off his skull, rapping his face and arms and hands and body. None of the projectiles was traveling at the speed of a bullet or even half fast enough to be lethal, but all of them were painful.
And now it was not as if the pebbles were being thrown at him but as if the laws of gravity had been suspended on the slope, at least in respect to small stones, for they came up in a veritable river, Jesus, hundreds of them, and he was caught in the center of those punishing currents. He drew his knees up. He tucked his head down and covered it with his arms. He tried to squeeze even farther into the granite niche where he had hoped to hide, but the pebbles found him.
Occasionally, he was pummeled by pieces of stone too large to be called pebbles. Small rocks. And some that were not so small. He cried out each time that one of those found him, for it was worse than taking a blow from a fist.
He was bleeding and bruised. He thought one of the rocks had broken his left wrist.
The hard music on the slope, a deadly song of pure percussion, changed: The hailstorm patter of upwardly cascading pebbles was now punctuated by heavier thuds and cracks. Those noises were made by the small rocks bounding along the ridge wall to take their whacks at him. He was being stoned to death by something he could not see, and he was no longer praying but was screaming instead. However, even above his screams, he could hear the distant and terrible sound of boulders rolling inexorably toward the top of the ridge.
The entire slope below seemed to be tearing loose and churning upward, cataclysmically divorcing itself from the crust of the earth, as though divine judgment had required the planet to disperse its substance, and as though the fulfillment of that harsh judgment was beginning here. The ground shook with a series of violent concussions transmitted through the rough granite beneath him, as each bounce of each oncoming boulder generated the energy equivalent to a grenade explosion.