He was screaming at the top of his lungs now, but he couldn’t hear himself above the thunderous roar of the antigravity avalanche. The boulders exploded over the crest and rained down around him with earsplitting force. Splinters of stone broke from them and gouged him, drew more blood, but he was not crushed as he expected. Two, three, half a dozen, ten boulders slammed down around him and piled up above him, though he was not struck by anything other than the shards cast off by each jarring impact.
Then the rocks were still.
Tolbeck waited, breathless with terror.
Gradually, he became aware of the cold again. And the wind.
Feeling around, he discovered that the boulders had piled on all sides and had stacked up overhead, forming a rude tomb. They were too heavy to be shoved out of the way. There were chinks in the tomb, hundreds of them, and a few admitted the moon’s radiant gaze. The wind whistled and moaned and hissed at other openings, but no hole large enough to permit Tolbeck to escape.
In essence, though air could still reach him, he had been buried alive.
For a moment his terror swelled, but then he thought of what had happened to McCaffrey and Hoffritz and some of the others, and this death seemed almost merciful. The cold was painful again, as if some rodent with teeth of ice were chewing on his guts and nibbling on his bones. But that would pass, and quickly. In a few more minutes he would grow numb again, and this time the numbness would last. The blood had already begun to drain inward, away from his freezing skin, in a desperate effort to protect vital organs. The blood supply to his brain would be reduced as well, to a minimal maintenance level, and he would become drowsy. He would go to sleep and never wake up. Not so bad. Not as bad as what had been done to Ernie Cooper and the others.
He relaxed, resigned to death, afraid of it but willing to face it now that he knew it would not be too painful.
But for the wind, the winter night was silent.
With great weariness, Tolbeck curled up in his tomb and closed his eyes.
Something grabbed his nose, pinched and twisted it so hard that tears burst from his eyes.
He blinked, flailed out, struck empty air.
Something clawed at his ear. Something unseen.
‘No,’ he pleaded.
Something poked him hard in the right eye, and the pain was so excruciating that he knew he had been blinded. The psychogeist had slipped through the chinks and had joined him in his makeshift tomb of winter-chilled stone. His death would not be easy, after all.
* * *
During the night, Laura woke and did not know where she was. A lamp with a cocked shade cast faint amber light, created odd and menacing shadows. She saw a bed beside her own. In it, Dan Haldane was sleeping, fully clothed.
The motel. They were hiding out, holed up in a motel room.
Still fuzzy-minded and having trouble keeping her eyes open, she turned over and looked at Melanie, and then she realized what had awakened her. The air temperature was plummeting, and Melanie was squirming weakly under the covers, softly sobbing, murmuring in fear.
Within the room there was now a … presence, something either more or less than human but unquestionably alien, invisible yet undeniable. In her drowsiness, Laura was more acutely aware of the entity than she had been when it had twice intruded into her kitchen or when it had earlier visited this very room. Freshly roused from sleep, she was still largely guided by her subconscious, which was far more open to these fantastic perceptions than was the conscious mind, which, by comparison, was conservative and a vigilant doubting Thomas. Now, although she still had no idea what the thing was, she could sense it drifting across the room and hovering above Melanie.
Suddenly Laura was certain that her daughter was about to be beaten to death before her eyes. With a panic that was half like the dreamy terror in a nightmare, she started to get up, shivering, each exhalation instantly transformed to frost. Even as she pushed the covers aside, however, the air grew warm again, and her daughter quieted. Laura hesitated, watching the child, glancing around the room, but the danger — if there had been any — seemed to have passed.