screen, turned black, flowered into red again, then wilted, streamed, a
viscous pus yellow. The endlessly mutagenic display dazed Jack when he
watched it too long, and he could understand how it could completely
capture the immature mind of an eight-year-old boy, hypnotize him.
As Toby began to hammer the keyboard once more, the colors on the
screen faded–then abruptly brightened again, although in new shades
and in yet more varied and fluid forms.
“It’s a language,” Heather exclaimed softly. For a moment Jack stared
at her, uncomprehending. She said, “The colors, the patterns. A
language.” He checked the monitor. “How can it be a language?”
“It is,” she insisted. “There aren’t any repetitive shapes, nothing
that could be letters, words.”
“Talking,” Toby confirmed. He pounded the keyboard. As before, the
patterns and colors acquired a rhythm consistent with the pace at which
he input his side of the conversation. “A tremendously complicated and
expressive language,” Heather said, “beside which English or French or
Chinese is primitive.”
Toby stopped typing, and the response from the other conversant was
dark and churning, black and bile green, clotted with red. “No,” the
boy said to the screen. The colors became more dour, the rhythms more
vehement. “No,” Toby repeated. Churning, seething, spiraling reds.
For a third time- “No.” Jack said, “What’re you saying ‘no’ to?”
“To what it wants,” Toby replied. “What does it want?”
“It wants me to let it in, just let it in.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Heather said, and reached for the Off switch again. Jack
stopped her hand as he’d done before.
Her fingers were pale and frigid. “What’s wrong?” he asked, though he
was afraid he knew. The words “let it in” had jolted him with an
impact almost as great as one of Anson Oliver’s bullets. “Last night,”
Heather said, staring in horror at the screen. “In a dream.” Maybe
his own hand turned cold. Or maybe she felt him tremble. She
blinked.
“You’ve had it too, the dream!”
“Just tonight. Woke me.”
“The door,” she said. “It wants you to find a door in yourself, open
the door and let it in. Jack, damn it, what’s going on here, what the
hell’s going on?”
He wished he knew. Or maybe he didn’t. He was more scared of this
thing than of anyone he’d confronted as a cop. He had killed Anson
Oliver, but he didn’t know if he could touch this enemy, didn’t know if
it could even be found or seen.
“No,” Toby said to the screen. Falstaff whined and retreated to a
corner, stood there, tense and watchful. “No. No.” Jack crouched
beside his son.
“Toby, right now you can hear it and me, both of us?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not completely under its influence.”
“Only a little.”
“You’re … in between somewhere.”
“Between,” the boy confirmed. “Do you remember yesterday in the
graveyard?”
“Yes.”
“You remember this thing . . . speaking through you.”
“Yes.”
“What?” Heather asked, surprised. “What about the graveyard?” On the
screen: undulant black, bursting boils of yellow, seeping spots of
kidney red. “Jack,” Heather said, angrily, “you said nothing was wrong
when you went up to the cemetery. You said Toby was daydreaming–just
standing up there daydreaming.”
To Toby, Jack said, “But you didn’t remember anything about the
graveyard right after it happened.”
“No.”
“Remember what?” Heather demanded. “What the hell was there to
remember?”
“Toby,” Jack said, “are you able to remember now because . .
. because you’re half under its spell again but only half . . .
neither here nor there?”
“Between,” the boy acknowledged. “Tell me about this ‘it’ you’re
talking to,” Jack said. “Jack, don’t,” Heather said. She looked
haunted. He knew how she felt. But he said, “We have to learn about
it.”
“Why?”
“Maybe to survive.” He didn’t have to explain. She knew what he
meant. She had endured some degree of contact in her sleep. The
hostility of the thing. Its inhuman rage. To Toby, he said, “Tell me
about it.”
“What do you want to know?” -On the screen: blues of every shade,
spreading like Japanese fans but without the sharp folds, one blue over
the other, through the other.