But the birds and the buglike things the birds ate weren’t the only things out there. There was the tentacled thing that had taken Norm. There was the frayed clothesline to think about. There was the unseen thing that had uttered that low, guttural roar to think about. We had heard sounds like it sincesometimes quite distant-but how far was «distant» through the damping effect of the mist? And sometimes they were close enough to shake the building and make it seem as if the ventricles of your heart had suddenly been loaded up with ice water.
Billy started in my lap and moaned. I brushed his hair and he moaned more loudly. Then he seemed to find sleep’s less dangerous waters again. My own doze was broken and I was staring wide awake again. Since dark, I had only managed to sleep about ninety minutes, and that had been dream-haunted. In one of the dream fragments, it had been the night before again. Billy and Steffy were standing in front of the picture window, looking out at the black and slate-gray waters, out at the silver spinning waterspout that heralded the storm. I tried to get to them, knowing that a strong enough wind could break the window and throw deadly glass darts all the way across the living room. But no matter how I ran, I seemed, to get no closer to them. And then a bird rose out of the waterspout, a gigantic scarlet oiseau de mort whose prehistoric wingspan darkened the entire lake from west to east. Its beak opened, revealing a maw the size of the Holland Tunnel. And as the bird came to gobble up my wife and son, a low, sinister voice began to whisper over and over again: The Arrowhead Project … the Arrowhead Project … the Arrowhead Project …
Not that Billy and I were the only ones sleeping poorly. Others screamed in their sleep, and some went on screaming after they woke up. The beer was disappearing from the cooler at a great rate. Buddy Eagleton had restocked it once from out back with no comment. Mike Hatlen told me the Sominex was gone. Not depleted but totally wiped out. He guessed that some people might have taken six or eight bottles.
«There’s some Nytol left,» he said. «You want a bottle, David?» I shook my head and thanked him.
And in the last aisle down by Register 5, we had our winos. There were about seven of them, all out-of-staters, except for Lou Tattinger, who ran the Pine Tree Car Wash. Lou didn’t need any excuse to sniff the cork, as the saying was. The wino brigade was pretty well anesthetized.
Oh yes-there were also six or seven people who had gone crazy.
Crazy isn’t the best word; perhaps I just can’t think of the proper one. But there were these people who had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit of beer, wine, or pills. They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob eyes. The hard cement of reality had come apart in some unimaginable earthquake, and these poor devils had fallen through. In time, some of them might come back. If there was time.
The rest of us had made our own mental compromises, and in some cases I suppose they were fairly odd. Mrs. Reppler, for instance, was convinced the whole thing was a dream-or so she said. And she spoke with some conviction.
I looked over at Amanda. I was developing an uncomfortably — strong feeling for her-uncomfortable but not exactly unpleasant. Her eyes were an incredible, brilliant green … for a while I had kept an eye on her to see if she was going to rake out a pair of contact lenses, but apparently the color was true. I wanted to make love to her. My wife was at home, maybe alive, more probably dead, alone either way, and I loved her; I wanted to get Billy and me back to her more than anything, but I also wanted to screw this lady named Amanda Dumfries. I tried to tell myself it was just the situation we were in, and maybe it was, but that didn’t change the wanting.