Something twitted in the woods, seemed to choke, twit-ted again, and was silent.
An owl hooted, far off.
Closer to, a branch snapped.
What was that? Trisha thought, turning toward the snap-ping sound. Her heartbeat began to ramp up from a walk to a jog to a run. In another few seconds it would be sprint-ing and then she might be sprinting as well, panicked all over again and running like a deer in front of a forest fire.
"Nothing, it was nothing," she said. Her voice was low and rapid... very much her mother's voice, although she did not know this. Nor did she know that in a motel room thirty miles from where Trisha stood by the fallen tree, her mother had sat up out of a troubled sleep, still half-dreaming with her eyes open, sure that something awful had happened to her lost daughter, or was about to happen.
It's the thing you hear, Trisha, said the cold voice. Its tone was sad on top, unspeakably gleeful underneath. It's coming for you. It's got your scent.
"There is no thing," Trisha said in a desperate, whispery voice that broke into complete silence each time it wavered upward. "Come on, give me a break, there is no thing."
The unreliable moonlight had changed the shapes of the trees, had turned them into bone faces with black eyes. The sound of two branches rubbing together became the clotted croon of a monster. Trisha turned in a clumsy circle, trying to look everywhere at once, her eyes rolling in her muddy face.
It's a special thing, Trisha - the thing that waits for the lost ones. It lets them wander until they're good and scared - because fear makes them taste better, it sweetens the flesh - and then it comes for them. You'll see it. It'll come out of the trees any minute now. A matter of seconds, really. And when you see its face you'll go insane.
If there was anyone to hear you, they'd think you were screaming.
But you'll be laughing, won't you? Because that's what insane people do when their lives are ending, they laugh... and they laugh... and they laugh.
"Stop it, there is no thing, there is no thing in the woods, you stop it!"
She whispered this very fast, and the hand holding the nub of dead branch clutched it tighter and tighter until it broke with a loud report like a starter's gun. The sound made her jump and utter a little scream, but it also steadied her. She knew what it was, after all - just a branch, and one she had broken. She could still break branches, she still had that much control over the world. Sounds were just sounds.
Shadows were just shadows. She could be afraid, she could listen to that stupid traitor of a voice if she wanted to, but there was no (thing special thing) in the woods. There was wildlife, and there was undoubt-edly a spot of the old kill-or-be-killed going on out there at this very second, but there was no crea - There is.
And there was.
Now, stopping all of her thoughts and holding her breath without realizing it, Trisha knew with a simple cold cer-tainty that there was. There was something. Inside her there were at that moment no voices, only a part of her she didn't understand, a special set of eclipsed nerves that perhaps slept in the world of houses and phones and electric lights and came fully alive only out here in the woods. That part didn't see and couldn't think, but it could feel. Now it felt something in the woods.
"Hello?" she called toward the moonlight-and-bone faces of the trees. "Hello, is someone there?"
In the Castle View motel room Quilla had asked him to share with her, Larry McFarland sat in his pajamas on the edge of one of the twin beds with his arm around his ex-wife's shoulders. Although she wore only the thinnest of cotton nightgowns and he was pretty sure she had nothing on beneath it, and further although he had not had a sexual relationship with anything but his own left hand in well over a year, he felt no lust (no immediate lust, anyway). She was trembling all over. It felt to him as though every muscle in her back were turned inside-out.
"It's nothing," he said. "Just a dream. A nightmare you woke up with and turned into this feeling."
"No," Quilla said, shaking her head so violently that her hair whipped lightly against his cheek. "She's in danger, I feel it. Terrible danger." And she began to cry.
Trisha did not cry, not then. At that moment she was too scared to cry. Something watching her. Something.
"Hello?" she tried again. No response... but it was there and it was on the move now, just beyond the trees at the back of the clearing, moving from left to right. And as her eyes shifted, following nothing but moonlight and a feeling, she heard a branch crack where she was looking. There was a soft exhalation... or was there? Was that perhaps only a stir of wind?
You know better, the cold voice whispered, and of course she did.
"Don't hurt me," Trisha said, and now the tears came.
"Whatever you are, please don't hurt me. I won't try to hurt you, please don't hurt me. I... I'm just a kid."
The strength ran out of her legs and Trisha did not so much fall down as fold up. Still crying and shivering all over with terror, she burrowed back under the fallen tree like the small and defenseless animal that she had become. She con-tinued begging not to be hurt almost without realizing it.
She grabbed her pack and pulled it in front of her face like a shield. Big shuddery spasms wracked her body, and when another branch cracked, closer, she screamed. It wasn't in the clearing, not yet, but almost. Almost.
Was it in the trees? Moving through the interlaced branches of the trees? Something with wings, like a bat?
She peered out between the top of the pack and the curve of the sheltering tree. She saw only tangled branches against the moon-bright sky. There was no creature among them - at least not that her eyes could pick out - but now the woods had fallen completely silent. No birds called, no bugs hummed in the grass.
It was very close, whatever it was, and it was deciding.
Either it would come and tear her apart, or it would move on. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't a dream. It was death and madness standing or crouching or perhaps perching just beyond the edge of the clearing. It was deciding whether to take her now... or to let her ripen a little while longer.
Trisha lay clutching the pack and holding her breath.
After an eternity, another branch cracked, this one a little further off. Whatever it was, it was moving away.
Trisha closed her eyes. Tears slipped out from beneath her mudcaked lids and ran down her equally muddy cheeks.
The corners of her mouth quivered up and down. She wished briefly that she was dead - better to be dead than have to endure such fear, better to be dead than to be lost.
Further off, another branch cracked. Leaves shook in a brief windless gust, and that was further off still. It was going, but it knew she was here now, in its woods. It would be back. Meanwhile, the night stretched out ahead of her like a thousand miles of empty road.
I'll never get to sleep. Never.
Her mother told her to pretend something when Trisha couldn't sleep. Imagine something nice. That's the best thing you can do when the sandman's late, Trisha.
Imagine that she was saved? No, that would only make her feel worse... like imagining a big glass of water when you were thirsty.
She was thirsty, she realized... dry as a bone. She guessed that was what got left over when the worst of your fear departed - that thirst. She turned her pack around with some effort and worked the buckles loose. It would have been easier if she'd been sitting up, but there was no way in the world she was coming out from under this tree again tonight, no way in the universe.
Unless it comes back, the cold voice said. Unless it comes back and drags you out.
She grabbed her bottle of water, had several big gulps, recapped it, restowed it. With that done, she looked long-ingly at the zippered pocket with her Walkman inside. She badly wanted to take it out and listen for a little while, but she should save the batteries.
Trisha rebuckled the pack's flap before she could weaken, then wrapped her arms around it again. Now that she wasn't thirsty anymore, what should she imagine? And she knew, just like that. She imagined Tom Gordon was in the clearing with her, that he was standing right over there by the stream.
Tom Gordon in his home uniform; it was so white it almost glowed in the moonlight. Not really guarding her because he was just pretend... but sort of guarding her. Why not? It was her make-believe, after all.
What was that in the woods? she asked him.
Don't know, Tom replied. He sounded indifferent. Of course he could afford to sound indifferent, couldn't he? The real Tom Gordon was two hundred miles away in Boston, and by now probably asleep behind a locked door.
"How do you do it?" she asked, sleepy again now, so sleepy she wasn't aware that she was speaking out loud.
"What's the secret?"
Secret of what?
"Of closing," Trisha said, her eyes closing.
She thought he would say believing in God - didn't he point to the sky every time he was successful, after all? - or believing in himself, or maybe trying your best (that was the motto of Trisha's soccer coach: "Try your best, forget the rest"), but Number 36 said none of those things as he stood by the little stream.
You have to try to get ahead of the first hitter, was what he said.
You have to challenge him with that first pitch, throw a strike he can't hit. He comes to the plate thinking, I'm better than this guy.
You have to take that idea away from him, and it's best not to wait.
It's best to do it right away. Establishing that it's you who's better, that's the secret of closing.
"What do you..." like to throw on the first pitch was the rest of the question she meant to ask, but before she could get all of it out, she was asleep. In Castle View her parents were also asleep, this time in the same narrow bed following a bout of sudden, satisfying, and totally unplanned sex. If you had ever told me was Quilla's last waking thought. I never in a million years would have was Larry's.
Of the entire family, it was Pete McFarland who slept the most uneasily in the small hours of that late spring morning; he was in the room adjoining his parents', groaning and pulling the bedclothes into a tangle as he turned restlessly from side to side. In his dreams he and his mother were argu-ing, walking down the trail and arguing, and at some point he turned around in disgust (or perhaps so she wouldn't have the satisfaction of seeing that he had begun to cry a little), and Trisha was gone. At this point his dream stuttered; it caught in his mind like a bone in a throat. He twisted back and forth in his bed, trying to dislodge it. The latening moon peered in at him, making the sweat on his forehead and temples gleam.
He turned and she was gone. Turned and she was gone.
Turned and she was gone. There was only the empty path.
"No," Pete muttered in his sleep, shaking his head from side to side, trying to unstick the dream, to cough it loose before it choked him. He could not. He turned and she was gone. Behind him there was only the empty path.
It was as if he had never had a sister at all.
Fifth Inning
WHEN TRISHA woke the next morning her neck hurt so badly she could hardly turn her head, but she didn't care.
The sun was up, filling the crescent-shaped clearing with early daylight. That was what she cared about. She felt reborn. She remembered waking in the night, being itchy and needing to urinate; she remembered going to the stream and putting mud on her stings and bites by moon-light; she remembered going to sleep while Tom Gordon was standing watch and explaining some of the secrets of his closer's role to her. She also remembered being terribly frightened of something in the woods, but of course nothing had been there watching; it was being alone in the dark that had frightened her, that was all.
Something deep in her mind tried to protest this, but Trisha wouldn't let it. The night was over. She wanted to look back on it no more than she wanted to go back to that rocky slope and repeat her roll down to the tree with the wasps' nest in it. It was daytime now. There would be search-parties galore and she would be saved. She knew it.
CHAPTER 7
93. She deserved to be saved, after spending all night alone in the woods.
She crawled out from under the tree, pushing her pack before her, got to her feet, put on her hat, and hobbled back to the stream. She washed the mud from her face and hands, looked at the cloud of minges and noseeums already re-forming around her head, and reluctantly smeared on a fresh coat of goo. As she did it she remembered one of the times she and Pepsi had played Beauty Parlor when they were little girls. They'd made such a mess of Mrs. Robichaud's makeup that Pepsi's Mom had actually screamed at them to get out of the house, not to bother washing up or trying to clean up but just to get out before she totally lost it and swatted them crosseyed. So out they had gone, all powder and rouge and eyeliner and green eyeshadow and Passion Plum lipstick, probably looking like the world's youngest stripteasers.
They had gone to Trisha's house, where Quilla had first gaped, then laughed until tears rolled down her face. She had taken each little girl by the hand and led them into the bath-room, where she had given them cold cream for cleaning up.
"Spread upward gently, girls," Trisha murmured now.
When her face was done she rinsed her hands in the stream, ate the rest of her tuna sandwich, then half of the celery sticks. She rolled the lunchbag up with a distinct feeling of unease. Now the egg was gone, the tuna fish sandwich was gone, the chips were gone, and the Twinkies were gone. Her supplies were down to half a bottle of Surge (less, really), half a bottle of water, and a few celery sticks.
"Doesn't matter," she said, tucking the empty lunchbag and the remaining celery sticks back in her pack. To this she added the tattered, dirty poncho. "Doesn't matter because there's going to be search-parties galore through-94 out the store. One'll find me. I'll be having lunch in some diner by noon. Hamburger, fries, chocolate milk, apple pie a la mode." Her stomach rumbled at the thought.
Once Trisha had her things packed away, she coated her hands with mud, as well. The sun had found its way into the clearing now - the day was bright, with the promise of heat - and she was moving a little more easily. She stretched, jogged in place a little to get the old blood moving, and rolled her head from side to side until the worst of the stiffness in her neck was gone. She paused a moment longer, listening for voices, for dogs, possibly for the irregular whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades. There was nothing except for the wood-pecker, already hammering for his daily bread.
S'all right, there's plenty of time. It's June, you know. These are the longest days of the year. Follow the stream. Even if the search-parties don't find you right away, the stream will take you to people.
But as the morning wore on toward noon, the stream took her only to woods and more woods. The temperature rose. Little trickles of sweat began to cut lines through her mudpack. Bigger patches formed dark circles around the armpits of her 36 GORDON shirt; another, this one in a tree-shape, began to grow between her shoulderblades. Her hair, now so muddy it looked dirty brunette instead of blonde, hung around her face. Trisha's feelings of hope began to dis-sipate, and the energy with which she had set out from the clearing at seven o'clock was gone by ten. Around eleven, something happened to darken her spirits even further.
