From a Buick 8(107)

I took this item, stuck it in my back pocket, and grabbed the coil of rope from the wall. Then I banged out again. A dark form loomed up in front of me and I almost screamed. For one mad moment I was sure it was the man in the dark coat and hat, the one with the malformed ear and the Boris Badinov accent. When the boogeyman spoke up, however, the accent was pure Lawrence Welk.

'Dat damn kid came back,' Arky whispered. 'I got halfway home and Yudas Pries' I jus' turned around. I knew it, somehow. I just ? '

I interrupted then, told him to stay clear, and ran back around the corner of Shed B with the rope looped over my arm.

'Don' go in dere, Sarge!' Arky said. I think he might've been trying to shout, but he was too scared to get much in the way of volume. 'He's t'rown down gas an' he got a gun, I seen it.'

I stopped beside the door, slipped the rope off my arm, started to tie one end to the stout hook mounted there, then gave the coil of rope to Arky instead.

'Sandy, can you feel it?' he asked. 'An' the radio gone all blooey again, nuttin but static, I heard Steff cussin at it t'rough d'window.'

'Never mind. Tie the end of the rope off. Use the hook.'

'Huh?'

'You heard me.'

I'd held on to the loop in the end of the rope and now I stepped into it, yanked it up to my waist, and ran it tight. It was a hangman's knot, tied by Curt himself, and it ran shut easily.

'Sarge, you can't do dis.' Arky made as if to grab my shoulder, but without any real force.

'Tie it off and then hold on,' I said. 'Don't go in, no matter what. If we . . .' I wasn't going to say if we disappear, though ? didn't want to hear those words come out of my mouth. 'If anything happens, tell Steff to put out a Code D as soon as the static clears.'

'Jesus!' Only from Arky it sounded more like Yeesus. 'What are you, crazy? Can't you feel it?'

'I feel it,' I said, and went inside. I shook the rope continually as I went to keep it from snagging. I felt like a diver starting down to some untried depth, minding his airhose not because he really thinks minding it will help, but because it's at least something to do, something to keep your mind off the things that may be swimming around in the blackness just beyond the reach of your light.

The Buick 8 sat fat and luxy on its whitewalls, our little secret, humming deep down in the hollows of itself. The pulse was stronger than the humming, and now that I was actually inside I felt it stop its halfhearted efforts to keep me out. Instead of pushing with its invisible hand, it pulled.

The boy sat behind the wheel with the gas can in his lap, his cheeks and forehead white, the skin there taut and shiny. As I came toward him, his head turned with robotic slowness on his neck and he looked at me. His gaze was wide and dark. In it was the stupidly serene look of the deeply drugged or the cataclysmically wounded. The only emotion that remained in his eyes was a terrible weary stubbornness, that adolescent insistence that there must be an answer and he must know the answer. He had a right. And that was what the Buick had used, of course. What it had used against him.

'Ned.'

'I'd get out of here if I were you, Sarge.' Speaking in slow, perfectly articulated syllables. 'There's not much time. It's coming. It sounds like footsteps.'

And he was right. I felt a sudden surge of horror. The hum was some sort of machinery, perhaps. The pulse was almost certainly a kind of telepathy. This was something else, though, a third thing.

Something was coming.

'Ned, please. You can't understand what this thing is and you certainly can't kill it. All you can do is get yourself sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner. And that'll leave your mother and your sisters on their own. Is that what you want, to leave them alone with a thousand questions no one can answer? It's hard for me to believe that the boy who came here looking so hard for his father could be so selfish.'

Something flickered in his eyes at that. It was the way a man's eyes may flicker when, deep in concentration, he hears a loud noise on the next block. Then the eyes grew serene again. 'This goddamned car killed my father,' he said. Spoken calmly. Even patiently.

I certainly wasn't going to argue that. 'All right, maybe it did. Maybe in some way it was as much to blame for what happened to your dad as Bradley Roach was. Does that mean it can kill you, too? What is this, Ned? Buy one, get one free?'

'I'm going to kill it,' he said, and at last something rose in his eyes, disturbing the surface serenity. It was more than anger. To me it looked like a kind of madness. He raised his hands. In one was the gun. In the other he now held a butane match. 'Before it sucks me through, I'm going to light its damned transporter on fire. That'll shut the door to this side forever. That's step one.' Spoken with the scary, unconscious arrogance of youth, positive that this idea has occurred to no one before it has occurred to him. 'And if I live through that experience, I'm going to kill whatever's waiting on the other side. That's step two.'

'Whatever's waiting? I realized the enormity of his assumptions and was staggered by them. 'Oh, Ned! Oh, Christ!'

The pulse was stronger now. So was the hum. I could feel the unnatural cold that marked the Buick's periods of activity settling against my skin. And saw purple light first blooming in the air just above the oversized steering wheel and then starting to skate across its surface. Coming. It was coming. Ten years ago it would have been here already. Maybe even five. Now it took a little longer.