on!”
The first thing he noticed, when he turned away from the dog, was that
the door to the back stairs stood open. It should have been locked.
They were making a fortress here. Dad had nailed shut the lower door,
but this one should also be locked. Toby ran to it, pushed it shut,
engaged the dead bolt, and felt better.
At the doorway, Falstaff had still not entered the room. He had
stopped whining.
He was growling.
Jack at the ranch entrance. Pausing only a moment to recover from the
first and most arduous leg of the journey.
Instead of soft flakes, the snow was coming down in sharp-edged
crystals, almost like grains of salt. The wind drove it hard enough to
sting his exposed forehead.
A road crew had been by at least once, because a four-foot-high wall of
plowed snow blocked the end of the driveway. He clambered over it,
onto the two-lane.
Flame flared off the match head.
For an instant Heather expected the fumes to explode, but they weren’t
sufficiently concentrated to be combustible.
The parasite and its dead host climbed another step, apparently
oblivious of the danger–or certain that there was none.
Heather stepped back, out of the flash zone, tossed the match.
Continuing to back up until she bumped into the hallway wall, watching
the flame flutter in an arc toward the stairwell, she had a seizure of
manic thoughts that elicited an almost compulsive bark of mad laughter,
a single dark bray that came dangerously close to ending in a thick
sob: Burning down my own house, welcome to Montana, beautiful scenery
and walking dead men and things from other worlds, and here we go,
flame falling, may you.burn in hell, burning down my own house,
wouldn’t have to do that in Los Angeles, other people will do it for
you there.
WHOOSH!
The gasoline-soaked carpet exploded into flames that leaped all the way
to the ceiling. The fire didn’t spread through the stairwell, it was
simply everywhere at once. Instantaneously the walls and railings were
as fully involved as the treads and risers.
A stinging wave of heat hit Heather, forcing her to squint. She should
at once have moved farther away from the blaze because the air was
nearly hot enough to blister her skin, but she had to see what happened
to the Giver.
The staircase was an inferno. No human being could have survived in it
longer than a few seconds.
In that swarming incandescence, the dead man and the living beast were
a single dark mass, rising another step. And another. No screams or
shrieks of pain accompanied its ascent, only the roar and crackle of
the fierce fire, which was now lapping out of the stairwell and into
the upstairs hallway.
As Toby locked the stairhead door and turned from it, and as Falstaff
growled from the threshold of the other door, orange-red light flashed
through the hall behind the dog. His growl spiraled into a yelp of
surprise. Following the flash were flickering figures of light that
danced on the walls out there: reflections of fire.
Toby knew that his mom had set the alien on fire– she was tough, she
was smart–and a current of hope thrilled through him.
Then he noticed the second wrong thing about the bedroom. The drapes
were closed over his recessed bed.
He had left them open, drawn back to both sides of the niche. He only
closed them at night or when he was playing a game. He had opened them
this morning, and he’d had no time for games since he’d gotten up.
The air had a bad smell. He hadn’t noticed it right away because his
heart was pounding and he was breathing through his mouth.
He moved toward the bed. One step, two.
The closer he drew to the sleeping alcove, the worse the smell
became.
It was like the odor on the back stairs the first day they’d seen the
house, but a lot worse.
He stopped a few steps from the bed. He told himself he was a hero.
It was okay for heroes to be afraid, but even when they were afraid,