“It’s a spot,” Steve suggested.
“A spot. A spot that wasn’t there yesterday. A spot our dog has been fixating on since this morning. A spot I can’t . . .”
“All right, all right. Now
you’re
trying to scare
me
!”
They stared at each other in frazzled silence a moment, then burst into nervous laughter.
“What the hell.” Steve shook his head. “Probably that lightning hit the damn wall last night, and we’re all electric zombies now.”
Diane laughed until she was near tears, and curled in his arms. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly natural explanation. I lived with it all day, and nothing bad happened. It’s just another side of nature. A side we’re simply not qualified to comprehend. We’re just overreacting--we’ve made everything much too important.”
“You’re probably right,” he agreed then paused. “The whole thing is just so damn weird.”
Robbie lay grimly in bed, under the covers, watching the tree backlit by stark spears of lightning.
“One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .” he whispered. Ominously, the thunder mumbled in its ancient, throaty language.
Outside, the tortured branches of the oak pounded and scraped the window under the tormenting gale. The sky was a gray, black shroud.
Another streak of lightning fired the air. Somewhere, a power line must have bent under the force: the closet night light flickered, and went out.
“One . . . two . . . three . . .”
A great boom and rumble shook the house, rattled the glass. The wind keened like a mourner, and in the next ignition of lightning pulled the branches of the tree forward with terrible meaning.
“One . . . two . . .”
BADOOM! The building seemed to cringe. Carol Anne tossed fitfully in the other bed, as Robbie lay absolutely motionless under the covers—hoping the tree-monster wouldn’t see him.
The wind rose to gale force. Ozone suffused the air like after-burn. Lightning seared the night once more, accompanied simultaneously by a monumental CRASH, and a blast of wind. The giant oak appeared to become apoplectic—like a tortured creature, it twisted forward, thrusting its grotesque limbs out . . . until with a tremendous gust of rain and crashing glass, the limbs burst through the window, into the bedroom. Robbie screamed.
Carol Anne jumped awake, as another chorus of lightning turned the night into a raging cold furnace. Long, fingerlike twigs at the end of the great branches tangled the screaming boy like rotting skeleton hands—and as the tree swayed in the wind, lifted him out of bed.
Carol Anne started to scream. The rest of the family ran through the bedroom door just in time to see the engulfing tree-arms yank the boy up and out the broken window into the demented night. Diane gave an anguished shout, barely heard over the roar of the storm. After one paralyzed instant, the three of them—Dana, Steve, and Diane—ran out of the bedroom and tore downstairs, leaving Carol Anne where she was.
The kitchen door was blocked by falling debris, so they had to run around the side to the patio. Steve slid open the glass door, and they rushed out into the weather. They were immediately soaked, and buffeted by the eighty-mile-per-hour gale. As they looked up into the straining knobbly tree, they could barely see Robbie tossed and trapped in its topmost branches. In the surreal light of the electrical discharges, the boy looked as if he were being eaten alive. Steve began to climb.
Upstairs, Carol Anne huddled in terror against the headboard of her bed, held there partly by the velocity of the wind rushing through the shattered window. Dumbly, she stared at the half-open closet door. The light in the closet was growing brighter.
Horribly bright, with almost nuclear intensity, the sick-white hue of a neutron star. The color of television light.
Carol Anne screamed, but no sound came from her mouth. The terrible wind began spinning loose objects across the room, in frenzied vortices, into the glare of the closet. Then, slowly, larger objects started to move—chairs, radios, pillows moved inexorably toward the open closet, as if they were being inhaled, and swallowed. Carol Anne hugged the clown doll, but it only smiled.
The bed began to move.
Carol Anne dug her fingers into the mattress, screaming, crying, nearly unhinged with fear.
But she didn’t begin to know fear until she heard the wail of the Beast. It was a low, insane sound, a sound unlike anything she’d ever heard, the sound of bedlam. The Beast in the closet.
It covered the sound of the storm. It pulled Carol Anne’s bed toward the light.
Battered by a wall of wind, Steve finally reached Robbie. The boy was being strangled by an increasingly constricting tangle of twigs and vine. Steve felt almost as if he were drowning. Rain lashed him. Each time he extricated one of Robbie’s arms or hands, another would become enmeshed in the slippery lattice.
Diane was halfway up the tree herself by this time, trying to help free the others. They all kept slipping, though—the bark was covered with some saplike ooze that made traction impossible. It almost smelled like blood.
Dana watched from below, wringing her hands and desperately wishing them all free.
Everything in the room was being drawn into the cyclonic vortex of the closet. Carol Anne was lifted off the bed, but hung onto the bending frame, flapping like a flag in a hurricane. Unbelievably, the clown was not affected. It just sat on the floor where Carol Anne had dropped it, staring up, smiling, as the wind tore at her. Finally she could hold no more, and, with the slenderest vacuum noise, was slammed into the brilliant hole.
A moment later the bed gave way, flipped into the air, and flew across the room, smashing the closet door shut with Carol Anne inside, and barricading it against being reopened.
Steve tore violently at the myriad branches that enveloped Robbie, as the wind rose to maniac heights. Then, with a final thunderous explosion of light, all three—Steve, Robbie, and Diane—were thrown to the ground. Moments later, the entire tree was uprooted with a single loud crunch, and sucked into the demon night.
And suddenly the storm stopped.
The four Freelings lay in a pile on the muddy earth, numb, buzzing, spent.
Suddenly Dana pointed to the horizon and shouted: “Look, Mom . . . Dad!”
They followed the line of her finger to the distance. It was a receding funnel cloud, just beginning to break up in the outlying hills.
“A night twister!” Dana marveled.
“It must have just skimmed us,” Diane nodded. “There wouldn’t be a house standing here if . . .”
“Carol Anne!” shouted Steve.
“Still upstairs?” They all looked at the shattered upstairs window.
“My God!” Diane spoke softly.
They ran into the house, but when they reached the children’s bedroom, they froze. Except for the two beds blocking the closet, and a few toys and broken bits of furniture, the room was stripped clean. Barren.
Diane shrieked once, then she and Steve immediately started pulling at the junk. Robbie and Dana stood voicelessly in the doorway watching. E. Buzz whimpered at their feet.
“Carol Anne!” Diane called, but there was no answer.
They removed the last piece of debris, and pulled open the closet door.
The closet was empty.
“She’s not here!” Steve shouted. He was almost beside himself.
“Carol Anne!” Diane called out. She ran to the broken window and called again.
“I’ll check the kitchen!” said Dana.
“Don’t go in there!” Steve warned. “I’ll check it. You look in our room.”
“I’ll go.” Diane’s voice came in a rasp. “You look in the bathrooms.”
They all ran out. All but Robbie, who simply stood, staring feverishly into the empty closet . . . empty, but for the stain high on the wall it shared with his parents’ bedroom. A stain in the shape of some kind of . . . thing. And far back in the corner, doubled over and grinning outrageously at him: the clown doll.
Steve ran into the kitchen. The television was on, but the local transmitter must have been down—only static snow could be seen on the screen.
“Carol Anne!” he shouted.
Dana went into the downstairs bathroom. “Carol!” she called. No answer. The shower curtain was closed—she drew it back quickly: nothing there.
Diane went through the master bedroom, the bathroom; looked in the closet, under the bed. Every exposed corner left her a little more frantic. “Oh Jesus Christ Almighty.
Carol Anne
!” The television hissed white static on the end table.
Steve entered. “This is crazy. I’ve looked everywhere.”
Suddenly, realization dawned on Diane’s face. “Oh my God. The swimming pool.”
They broke into a run. Dana joined them in the hallway as they headed downstairs. Slowly Robbie emerged from his bedroom and walked into his parents’ room. Tensely, he stood in front of the television set.
Dana, Steve, and Diane raced to the edge of the newly dug pool. The rain had softened the perimeter, though, and Dana’s feet began to slide with the shifting mud. The next second she was standing in the deep end, waist high in mud and rainwater.
Steve ran in after her, and the two of them began plunging their hands into the quagmire, looking for the body. Diane sat down hard on the edge, just weeping and shaking her head. Her strength had reached its low tide.
Robbie faced the picture tube, inches away, the bluish video glow flattening his features and his affect. For many minutes he lingered like that, then recognition flickered behind his eyes.
Something registered. He squinted, first with half-awareness, then with growing terror, into the screen. Shadows. Whispers.
An inarticulate moan passed his lips. Then he screamed. “Mommmmmmy!! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
The sound of her child’s shout jerked Diane’s head up like a marionette on a string. In an instant she was on her feet, slipping over the ground, running into the house and up the stairs.
When she reached the landing at the top of the staircase, she heard Carol Anne’s voice call out faintly from her bedroom. Diane’s heart jumped with relief, momentarily—her baby was here. Hurt, maybe, but essentially safe. She redoubled her speed into the bedroom.
In the bedroom, Robbie stared into the television static. He was hysterical, holding his hair in his fists. Diane grabbed him and pulled his face up to hers.
“What is it?” she strained. “Oh my Christ, what is it?”
The static hiss on the television grew louder. Insubstantial images played across its face. Somewhere in the distance, a small voice filtered through: “Mommy . . .”
Diane turned white as snow. “Carol Anne! Where are you?!” Frantically, she searched the room once more.
“Mommy . . . Mommy . . .” The voice was faint, waxed; barely audible over the hiss of the television. E. Buzz crept into the room and growled at the set.
“Mommy . . .” repeated the voice. There was no doubt about it. The voice was Carol Anne’s. But where, in God’s name, was she hiding?
“I’m here, baby! Oh God, baby, I’m here!” Diane wept hysterically, stumbling around the room in circles.
Almost catatonic, Robbie walked back to the television. “Mommy. Over here.”
Diane looked at her son and froze. Her face contorted with foreknowledge. Gray shapes moved fleetingly across the television screen, indistinct blurs; and then the voice came again, Carol Anne’s voice, distorted uncannily through the noise of the blue-white static: “I can’t see you, Mommy. Mommy. Where are you?”
Staring at the television with greater comprehension than she could tolerate, Diane was overcome by a choking nausea; a falling, as if into madness. Her eyes rolled back, and she lost consciousness.
Tangina Barrons was fifty-two, on the plump side, bespectacled; tended to dress in floral chiffons, and ordinarily wore her thin hair up in a tight bun. For most of her life, she’d had dreams. Special dreams.
As a child they had taken the form of nightmares.
Pavor nocturnis
, the doctor called it—night terror. She would be pulled from sleep each night with a moan of horror on her lips, moaning until her mother or her sister shook her awake. When they asked her what the dream had been about, she never remembered—there was only a black amnesia, deathly, opaque.
Around the age of ten, she stopped having the dreams. That development was met with great relief by Tangina and her family. She went through a quiescent period for a couple years—a happy time for her. Then, when she was twelve, her parents died in a train wreck—and Tangina dreamed about the wreck the night it happened. From then on, she found she was prescient.
She dreamed things before they happened—or at least, as they happened. Frequently, the dreams concerned people she knew, though not always. She became extremely close to her sister during the following years, as they were shuttled from orphanage to foster home, and much of Tangina’s second sight revolved around that beloved sibling. The second sight was alternately a gift and a curse, at first—these glimpses of the future, or of the displaced Now—but gradually Tangina simply learned to take it for granted. Some people could hear in higher registers than other people. Tangina took her second sight for what it was: that she could see in higher registers.
It was only during the last ten years or so, however, that she began having knowledge of other worlds. Not actually other planets in the universe, she thought—though for all she knew, they might be—but more like other dimensions, other planes of existence, other levels of spirit, somehow disjunct from this mortal coil. And just like those of her early childhood, these dreams scared her.
Not always, but usually. They involved running, more often than not. Either she herself was running, or her sister was, or some unknown unfortunate. What was chasing was less clear still: forms without shape, usually; gloating presences, shades of meaning.
The dreams were unsettling, at best, and Tangina would just as soon have seen them disappear. But they didn’t. In fact, they lingered in the corners of her consciousness even during waking, at times. These were states of special perception visions, nothing less. They allowed her, among other things, to “read” people in ways that were invisible to most—read their souls, their multiplicities of spirit.