Текст книги "The Mist"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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The two men and Ollie went inside the generator compartment. Their lights flashed uneasily back and forth, reminding me of something out of a boys' adventure story-and I illustrated a series of them while I was still in college. Pirates burying their bloody gold at midnight, or maybe the mad doctor and his assistant snatching a body. Shadows, made, twisted and monstrous by the shifting, conflicting flashlight 'beams, bobbed on the walls. The generator ticked irregularly as it cooled.

The bag-boy was walking toward the loading door, flashing his light ahead of him. “I wouldn't go over there,” I said.

“No, I know you wouldn't.” “Try it now, Ollie,” one of the men said. The generator wheezed, then roared.

“Jesus! Shut her down! Holy crow, don't that stink!” The generator died again. The bag-boy walked back from the loading door just as they came out. “Something's plugged that exhaust, all right,” one of the men said.

“I'll tell you what,” the bag-boy said. His eyes were shining in the glow of the flashlights, and there was a devil-may-care expression on his face that I had sketched too many times as part of the frontispieces for my boys' adventure series. “Get it running long enough for me to raise the loading door back there. I'll go around and clear away whatever it is.” “Norm, I don't think that's a very good idea,” Ollie said doubtfully. “Is it an electric door?” the one called Jim asked. “Sure,” Ollie said. “But I just don't think it would be wise for—”

“That's okay,” the other guy said. He tipped his baseball cap back on his head. “I'll do it.”

“No, you don't understand,” Ollie began again. “I really don't think anyone should—”

“Don't worry,” he said indulgently to Ollie, dismissing him.

Norm, the bag-boy, was indignant. “Listen, it was my idea,” he said.

All at once, by some magic, they had gotten around to arguing about who was going to do it instead of whether or not it should be done at all. But of course, none of them had heard that nasty slithering sound. “Stop it!” I said loudly.

They looked around at me.

“You don't seem to understand, or you're trying as hard as you can not to understand. This is no ordinary fog. Nobody has come into the market since it hit. If you open that loading door and something comes in—”

“Something like what?” Norm said with perfect eighteen-year-old macho contempt.

“Whatever made the noise I heard.”

“Mr. Drayton,” Jim said. “Pardon me, but I'm not convinced you heard anything. I know you're a big-shot artist with connections in New York and Hollywood and all, but that doesn't make you any different from anyone else, in my book. Way I figure, you got in here in the dark and maybe you just... got a little confused.”

“Maybe I did,” I said. “And maybe if you want to start screwing around outside, you ought to start by making sure that lady got home safe to her kids.” His attitude-and that of his buddy and of Norm the bag-boy-was making me mad and scaring me more at the same time. They had the sort of light in their eyes that some men get when they go shooting rats at the town dump.

“Hey,” Jim's buddy said. “When any of us here want your advice, we'll ask for it.”

Hesitantly, Ollie said: “The generator really isn't that important, you know. The food in the cold cases will keep for twelve hours or more with absolutely no—”

“Okay, kid, you're it,” Jim said brusquely. “I'll start the motor, you raise the door so that the place doesn't stink up too bad. Me and Myron will be standing by the exhaust outflow. Give us a Yell when it's clear.”

“'Sure,” Norm said, and bustled excitedly away.

“This is crazy,” I said. “You let that lady go by herself—”

“I didn't notice you breaking your ass to escort her,”

Jim's buddy Myron said. A dull, brick-colored flush was creeping out of his collar.

“-but you're going to let this kid risk his life over a generator that doesn't even matter?”

“Why don't you just shut the fuck up!” Norm yelled.

“Listen, Mr. Drayton,” Jim said, and smiled at me coldly. “I'll tell you what. If you've got anything else to say, I think you better count your teeth first, because I'm tired of listening to your bullshit.”

Ollie looked at me, plainly frightened. I shrugged: They were crazy, that was all. Their sense of proportion was temporarily gone. Out there they had been confused and scared. In here was a straightforward mechanical problem: a balky generator. It was possible to solve this problem. Solving the problem would help make them feel less confused and helpless. Therefore they would solve it.

Jim and his friend Myron decided I knew when I was licked and went back into the generator compartment. “Ready, Norm?” Jim asked. Norm nodded, then realized they couldn't hear a nod. “Yeah,” he said.

“Norm,” I said. “Don't be a fool.” “It's a mistake,” Ollie added. He looked at us, and suddenly his face was much younger than eighteen. It was the face of a boy. His Adam's apple bobbed convulsively, and I saw that he was scared green. He opened his mouth to say something-I think he was going to call it off-and then the generator roared into life again, and when it was running smoothly, Norm lunged at the button to the right of the door and it began to rattle upward on its dual steel tracks. The emergency lights had come back on when the generator started. Now they dimmed down as the motor which lifted the door sucked away the juice.

The shadows ran backward and melted. The storage area began to fill with the mellow white light of an overcast late-winter day. I noticed that odd, acrid smell again.

The loading door went up two feet, then four. Beyond t could see a square cement platform outlined around the edges with a yellow stripe. The yellow faded and washed out in just three feet. The fog was incredibly thick.

“Ho up!” Norm yelled.

Tendrils of mist, as white and fine as floating lace, eddied inside. The air was cold. It had been noticeably cool all morning long, especially after the sticky heat of the last three weeks, but it had been a summery coolness. This was cold. It was like March. I shivered. And I thought of Steff.

The generator died. Jim came out just as Norm ducked under the door. He saw it. So did I. So did Ollie.

A tentacle came over the far lip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed Norm around the calf. My mouth dropped wide open. Ollie made a very short glottal sound of surprise -uk! The tentacle tapered from a thickness of a foot-the size of a grass snake-at the point where it had wrapped itself around Norm's lower leg to a thickness of maybe four or five feet where it disappeared into the mist. It was slate gray on top, shading to a fleshy pink underneath. And there were rows of suckers on the underside. They were moving and writhing like hundreds of small, puckering mouths.

Norm looked down. He saw what had him. His eyes bulged. “Get it off me! Hey, get it off me! Christ Jesus, get this frigging thing off me!” “Oh my God,” Jim whimpered. Norm grabbed the bottom edge of the loading door and yanked himself back in. The tentacle seemed to bulge, the way your arm will when you flex it. Norm was yanked back against the corrugated steel door-his head clanged against it. The tentacle bulged more, and Norm's legs and torso began to slip back out. The bottom edge of the loading door scraped the shirttail out of his pants. He yanked savagely and pulled himself back in like a man doing a chin-up.

“Help me,” he was sobbing. “Help me, you guys, please, please. “ “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Myron said. He had come out of the generator compartment to see what was going on. I was the closest, and I grabbed Norm around the waist and yanked as hard as I could, rocking back on my heels. For a moment we moved backward, but only for a moment. It was like stretching a rubber band or pulling taffy. The tentacle yielded but gave up its basic grip not at all. Then three more tentacles floated out of the mist toward us. One curled around Norm's flapping red Federal apron and tore it away. It disappeared back into the mist with the red cloth curled in its grip and I thought of something my mother used to say when my brother and I would beg for something she didn't want us to have-candy, a comic book, some toy. “You need that like a hen needs a flag,” she'd say. I thought of that, and I thought of that tentacle waving Norm's red apron around, and I got laughing. I got laughing, except my laughter and Norm's screams sounded about the same. Maybe no one even knew I was laughing except me.

The other two tentacles slithered aimlessly back and forth on the loading platform for a moment, making those low scraping sounds I had heard earlier. Then one of them slapped against Norm's left hip and slipped around it. I felt it touch my arm. It was warm and pulsing and smooth. I think now that if it had gripped me with those suckers, I would have gone out into the mist too. But it didn't. It grabbed Norm. And the third tentacle ringleted his other ankle.

Now he was being pulled away from me. “Help me!” I shouted. “Ollie! Someone! Give me a hand here!”

But they didn't come. I don't know what they were doing, but they didn't come. I looked down and saw the tentacle around Norm's waist working into his skin. The suckers were eating him where his shirt had pulled out of his pants. Blood, as red as his missing apron, began to seep out of the trench the,pulsing tentacle had made for itself.

I banged my head on the lower edge of the partly raised door.

Norm's legs were outside again. One of his loafers had fallen off. A new tentacle came out of the mist, wrapped its tip firmly around the shoe, and made off with it. Norm's fingers clutched at the door's lower edge. He had it in a death grip. His fingers were livid. He was not screaming anymore; he was beyond that. His head whipped back and forth in an endless gesture of negation, and his long black hair flew wildly.

I looked over his shoulder and saw more tentacles coming, dozens of them, a forest of them. Most were small but a few were gigantic, as thick as the moss-corseted tree that had been lying across our driveway that morning. The big ones had candy-pink suckers that seemed the size of manhole covers. One of these big ones struck the concrete loading platform with a loud and rolling thrrrrap! sound and moved sluggishly toward us like a great blind earthworm. I gave one gigantic tug, and the tentacle holding Norm's right calf slipped a little. That was all. But before it reestablished its grip, I saw that the thing was eating him away.

One of the tentacles brushed delicately past my cheek and then wavered in the air, as if debating. I thought of Billy then. Billy was lying asleep in the market by Mr. McVey's long white meat cooler. I had come in here to find something to cover him up with. If one of those things got hold of me, there would be no one to watch out for him-except maybe Norton.

So I let go of Norm and dropped to my hands and knees.

I was half in and half out, directly under the raised door. A tentacle passed by on my left, seeming to walk on its suckers. It attached itself to one of Norm's bulging upper arms, paused for a second, and then slid around it in toils.

Now Norm looked like something out of a madman's dream of snake charming. Tentacles twisted over him uneasily almost everywhere... and they were all around me, as well. I made a clumsy leapfrog jump back inside, landed on my shoulder, and rolled. Jim, Ollie and Myron were still there. They stood like a tableau of waxworks in Madame Tussaud's, their faces pale, their eyes too bright. Jim and Myron flanked the door to the generator compartment. “Start the generator!” I yelled at them.

Neither moved. They were staring with a drugged, thanatotic avidity at the loading bay. I groped on the floor, picked up the first thing that came to hand-a box of Snowy bleach-and chucked it at Jim. It hit him in the gut, just above the belt buckle. He grunted and grabbed at himself. His eyes flickered back into some semblance of normality. “Go start that fucking generator!” I screamed so loudly it hurt my throat. He didn't move; instead he began to defend himself, apparently having decided that, with Norm being eaten alive by tome insane horror from the mist, the time had come for rebuttals.

I'm sorry,” he whiped. “I didn't know, how the hell was I supposed to know? You said you heard something but I didn't know what you meant, you should have said what you meant better. I thought, I dunno, maybe a bird, or something—” So then Ollie moved, bunting him aside with one thick shoulder and blundering into the generator room. Jim stumbled over one of the bleach cartons and fell down, just as I had done in the dark. “I'm sorry;” he said again. His red hair had tumbled over his brow. His cheeks were cheese-white. His eyes were those of a horrified little boy. Seconds later the generator coughed and rumbled into life.

I turned back to the loading door. Norm was almost gone, yet he clung grimly with one hand. His body boiled with tentacles and blood pattered serenely down on the concrete in dime-size droplets. His head whipped back and forth and his eyes bulged with tenor as they stared off into the mist.

Other tentacles now crept and crawled over the floor inside. There were too many near the button that controlled the loading door to even think of approaching it. One of them closed around a half-liter bottle of Pepsi and carried it off. Another slipped around a cardboard carton and squeezed. The carton ruptured and rolls of toilet paper, two-packs of Delsey wrapped in cellophane, geysered upward, came down, and rolled everywhere. Tentacles seized them eagerly.

One of the big ones slipped in. Its tip rose from the floor and it seemed to sniff the air. It began to advance toward Myron and he stepped mincingly away from it, his eyes rolling madly in their sockets. A high-pitched little moan escaped his slack lips. I looked around for something, anything at all long enough to reach over the questing tentacles and punch the SHUT button on the wall. I saw a janitor's push broom leaning against a stack-up of beer cases and grabbed it. Norm's good hand was ripped loose. He thudded down onto the concrete loading platform and scrabbled madly for a grip with his one free hand. His eyes met mine for a moment. They were hellishly bright and aware. He knew what was happening to him. Then he was pulled, bumping and rolling, into the mist. There was another scream, choked off. Norm was gone.

I pushed the tip of the broom handle onto the button and the motor whined. The door began to slide back down. It touched the thickest of the tentacles first, the one that had been investigating in Myron's direction. It indented its hide-skin, whatever-and then pierced it. A black goo began to spurt from it. It writhed madly, whipping across the concrete storage-area floor like an obscene bullwhip, and then it seemed to flatten out. A moment later it was gone. The others began to withdraw.

One of them had a five-pound bag of Gaines dog food, and it wouldn't let go. The descending door cut it in two before thumping home in its grooved slot. The severed chunk of tentacle squeezed convulsively tighter, splitting the bag open and sending brown nuggets of dog food everywhere. Then it began to flop on the floor like a fish out of water, curling and uncurling, but ever more slowly, until it lay still. I prodded it with the tip of the broom. The piece of tentacle, maybe three feet long, closed on it savagely for a moment, then loosened and lay limp again in the confused litter of toilet paper, dog food, and bleach cartons. There was no sound except the roar of the generator and Ollie, crying inside the plywood compartment. I could see him sitting on a stool in there with his face clutched in his hands. Then I became aware of another sound. The soft, slithery sound I had heard in the dark. Only now the sound was multiplied tenfold. It was the sound of tentacles squirming over the outside of the loading door, trying to find a way in.

Myron took a couple of steps toward me. “Look,” he said. “You got to understand—” I looped a fist at his face. He was too surprised to even try to block it. It landed just below his nose and mashed his upper lip into his teeth. Blood flowed into his mouth. “You got him killed!” I shouted. “Did you get a good look at it? Did you get a good look at what you did?” I started to pummel him, throwing wild rights and lefts, not punching the way I had been taught in my college boxing classes but only hitting out. He stepped back, shaking some of them off, taking others with a numbness that seemed like a kind of resignation or penance. That made me angrier. I bloodied his nose. I raised a mouse under one of his eyes that was going to black just beautifully. I clipped him a hard one on the chin. After that one, his eyes went cloudy and semi-vacant. “Look,” he kept sing, “look, look,” and then I punched him low in the stomach and the air went out of him and he didn't say “look, look” anymore. I don't know how long I would have gone on punching him, but someone grabbed my arms. I jerked free and turned around. I was hoping it was Jim. I wanted to punch Jim out, too. But it wasn't Jim. It was Ollie, his round face dead pale, except for the dark circles around his eyes-eyes that were still shiny from his tears. “Don't, David,” he said. “Don't hit him anymore. It doesn't solve anything.” Jim was standing off to one side, his face a bewildered blank. I kicked a carton of something at him. It struck one of his Dingo boots and bounced away. “You and your buddy are a couple of stupid assholes,” I said. “Come on, David,” Ollie said unhappily. “Quit it.” “You two assholes got that kid killed.” Jim looked down at his Dingo boots. Myron sat on the floor and held his beer belly. I was breathing hard. The blood was roaring in my ears and I was trembling all over. I sat down on a couple of cartons and put my head down between my knees and gripped my legs hard just above the ankles. I sat that way for a while with my hair in my face, waiting to see if I was going to black out or puke or what. After a bit the feeling began to pass and I looked up at Ollie. His pinky ring flashed subdued fire in the glow of the emergency lights.

“Okay,” I said dully. “I'm done.” “Good,” Ollie said. “We've got to think what to do next. “ The storage area was beginning to stink of exhaust again. “Shut the generator down. That's the first thing.” “Yeah, let's get out of here,” Myron said. His eyes appealed to me. “I'm sorry about the kid. But you got to understand—”

“I don't got to understand anything. You and your buddy go back into the market, but you wait right there by the beer cooler. And don't say a word to anybody. Not yet.”

They went willingly enough, huddling together as they passed through the swinging doors. Ollie killed the generator, and just as the lights started to fail, I saw a quilted rug-the sort of thing movers use to pad breakable things-flopped over a stack of returnable soda bottles. I reached up and grabbed it for Billy.

There was the shuffling, blundering sound of Ollie coming out of the generator compartment. Like a great many overweight man, his breathing had a slightly heavy wheezing sound.

“David?” His voice wavered a little. “You still here?”

“Right here, Ollie. You want to watch out for all those bleach cartons.”

“Yeah.”

I guided him with my voice and in thirty seconds or so he reached out of the dark and gripped my shoulder. He gave a long, trembling sigh.

“Christ, let's get out of here.” I could smell the Rolaids he always chewed on his breath. “This dark is... is bad.”

“It is,” I said. “But hang tight a minute, Ollie. I wanted to talk to you and I didn't want those other two fuckheads listening. “

“Dave... they didn't twist Norm's arm. You ought to remember that. “

“Norm was a kid, and they weren't. But never mind, that's over. We've got to tell them, Ollie. The people in the market. “

“If they panic—” Ollie's voice was doubtful. “Maybe they will and maybe they won't. But it will make them think twice about going out; which is what most of them want to do. Why shouldn't they? Most of them will have people they left at home. I do myself. We have to make them understand what they're risking if they go out there.”

His hand was gripping my arm hard. “All right,” he said. “Yes, I just keep asking myself .., all those tentacles... like a squid or something... David, what were they hooked to? What were those tentacles hooked to?”

“I don't know. But I don't want those two telling people on their own. That would start a panic. Let's go.”

I looked around, and after a moment or two located the thin line of vertical light between the swing doors. We started to shuffle toward it, wary of scattered cartons, one of Ollie's pudgy hands clamped over my forearm. It occurred to me that all of us had lost our flashlights.

As we reached the doors, Ollie said flatly: “What we saw... it's impossible, David. You know that, don't you? Even if a van from the Boston Seaquarium drove out back and dumped out one of 'those gigantic squids like in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it would die. It would just die.”

“Yes,” I said. “That's right.”

“So what happened? Huh? What happened? What is that damned mist?”

“Ollie, I don't know.”

We went out.

V. An Argument with Norton. A Discussion Near the Beer Cooler. Verification.

Jim and his good buddy Myron were just outside the doors, each with a Budweiser in his fist. I looked at Billy, saw he was still asleep, and covered him with the ruglike mover's pad. He moved a little, muttered something, and then lay still again. I looked at my watch. It was 12:15 P. m. That seemed utterly impossible; it felt as if at least five hours had passed since I had first gone in there to look for something to cover him with. But the whole thing, from first to last, had taken only about thirty-five minutes. I went back to where Ollie stood with Jim and Myron. Ollie had taken a beer and he offered me one. I took it and gulped down half the can at once, as I had that morning cutting wood. It bucked me up a little. Jim was Jim Grondin. Myron's last name was LaFleur that had its comic side, all right. Myron the flower had drying blood on his lips, chin, and cheek. The eye with the mouse under it was already swelling up. The girl in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt walked by aimlessly and gave Myron a cautious look. I could have told her that Myron was only dangerous to teenage boys intent on proving their manhood, but saved my breath. After all, Ollie was right-they had only been doing what they thought was best, although in a blind, fearful way rather than in any real common interest. And now I needed them to do what I thought was best. I didn't think that would be a problem. They had both had the stuffing knocked out of them. Neither-especially Myron the flower-was going to be, good for anything for some time to come. Something that had been in their eyes when they were fixing to send Norm out to unplug the exhaust vent had gone now. Their peckers were no longer up.

“We're going to have to tell these people something,” I said.

Jim opened his mouth to protest.

“Ollie and I will leave out any part you and Myron had in sending Norm out there if you'll back up what he and I say about... well, about what got him.”

“Sure,” Jim said, pitifully lager. “Sure, if we don't tell, people might go out there .. like that woman... that woman who...” He wiped his hand across his mouth and then drank more beer quickly. “Christ, what a mess.”

“David,” Ollie said. “What—” He stopped, then made himself go on. “What if they get in? The tentacles?”

“How could they?” Jim asked. “You guys shut the door. “

“Sure,” Ollie said. “But the whole front wall of this place is plate glass.”

An elevator shot my stomach down about twenty floors. I had known that, but had somehow been successfully ignoring it. I looked over at where Billy lay asleep. I thought of those tentacles swarming over Norm. I thought about that happening to Billy. “Plate glass,” Myron LaFleur whispered. “Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar. “

I left the three of them standing by the cooler, each working a second can of beer, and went looking for Brent Norton. I found him in sober-sided conversation with Bud Brown at Register 2. The pair of them-Norton with his styled gray hair and his elderly-stud good looks, Brown with his dour New England phiz-looked like something out of a New Yorker cartoon. As many as two dozen people milled restlessly in the space between the end of the checkout lanes and the long show window. A lot of them were lined up at the glass, looking out into the mist. I was again reminded of the people that congregate at a building site.

Mrs. Carmody was seated on the stationary conveyor belt of one of the checkout lanes, smoking a Parliament in a One Step at a Time filter. Her eyes measured me, found me wanting, and passed on. She looked as if she might be dreaming awake.

“Brent,” I said.

“David! Where did you get off to?”

“That's what I'd like to talk to you about.”

“There are people back at the cooler drinking beer,” Brown said grimly. He sounded like a man announcing that X-rated movies had been shown at the deacons' party. “I can see them in the security mirror. This has simply got to stop.”

“Brent?”

“Excuse me for a minute, would you, Mr. Brown?”

“Certainly.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared grimly up into the convex mirror. “It is going to stop, I can promise you that.”

Norton and I headed toward the beer cooler in the far corner of the store, walking past the housewares and notions. I glanced back over my shoulder, noticing uneasily how the wooden beams framing the tall, rectangular sections of glass had buckled and twisted and splintered. And one of the windows wasn't even whole, I remembered. A pie-shaped chunk of glass had fallen out of the upper corner at the instant of that queer thump. Perhaps we could stuff it with cloth or something-maybe a bunch of those $3. 59 ladies' tops I had noticed near the wine

My thoughts broke off abruptly, and I had to put the back of my hand over my mouth, as if stifling a burp. What I was really stifling was the rancid flood of horrified giggles that wanted to escape me at the thought of stuffing a bunch of shirts into a hole to keep out those tentacles that had carried Norm away. I had seen one of those tentacles-a small one-squeeze a bag of dog food until it simply ruptured.

“David? Are you okay?” “Huh?” “Your face-you looked like you just had a good idea or a bloody awful one.”

Something hit me then. “Brent, what happened to that man who came in raving about something in the mist getting John Lee Frovin?” “The guy with the nosebleed?” “Yes, him.” “He passed out and Mr. Brown brought him around with some smelling salts from the first-aid kit. Why?” “Did he say anything else when he woke up?”

“He started in on that hallucination. Mr. Brown conducted him up to the office. He was frightening some of the women. He seemed happy enough to go. Something about the glass. When Mr. Brown said there was only one small window in the manager's office, and that that one was reinforced with wire, he seemed happy enough to go. I presume he's still there. “

“What he was talking about is no hallucination.”

“No, of course it isn't.”

“And that thud we felt?”

“No, but, David—”

He's scared, I kept reminding myself. Don't blow up at him, you've treated yourself to one blowup this morning and that's enough. Don't blow up at him just because this is the way he was during that stupid property-line dispute... first patronizing, then sarcastic, and finally, when it became clear he was going to lose, ugly. Don't blow up at him because you're going to need him. He may not be able to start his own chainsaw, but he looks like the father figure of the Western world, and if he tells people not to panic, they won't. So don't blow up at him.

“You see those double doors up there beyond the beer cooler?”

He looked, frowning. “Isn't one of those men drinking beer the other assistant manager? Weeks? If Brown sees that, I can promise you that man will be looking for a job very soon.” “Brent, will you listen to me?”

He glanced back at me absently. “What were you saying, Dave? I'm sorry.”

Not as sorry as he was going to be. “Do you see those doors?”

Yes, of course I do. What about them?” f “They give on the storage area that runs all the way along the west face of the building. Billy fell asleep and I went back there to see if I could find something to cover him up with...”

I told him everything, only leaving out the argument about whether or not Norm should have gone out at all. I told him what had come in... and finally, what had gone out, screaming. Brent Norton refused to believe it. No-he refused to even entertain it. I took him over to Jim, Ollie, and Myron. All three of them verified the story, although Jim and Myron the flower were well on their way to getting drunk.

Again, Norton refused to believe or even to entertain it. He simply balked. “No,” he said. “No, no, no. Forgive me, gentlemen, but it's completely ridiculous. Either you're having me on”-he patronized us with his gleaming smile to show that he could take a joke as well as the next fellow-or you're suffering from some form of group hypnosis.”

My temper rose again, and I controlled, it with difficulty. I don't think that I'm ordinarily a quick-tempered man, but

these weren't ordinary circumstances. I had Billy to think about, and what was happening-or what had already

happened-to Stephanie. Those things were constantly gnaw ing at the back of my mind. “All right,” I said. “Let's go back there. There's a chunk of tentacle on the floor. The door cut it off when it came down. And you can hear them. They're rustling all over that door. It sounds like the wind in ivy.” “No,” he said calmly.

“What?” I really did believe I had misheard him. “What did you say?” 'I said no, I'm not going back there. The joke has gone far enough.” “Brent, I swear to you it's no joke.”