The creature raised its head again, the thing turning between its ears catching winks and flashes of sunlight as it did so, then charged Eddie’s tree. It reached high with one paw and slashed forward, meaning to knock Eddie loose like a pinecone. The paw tore through the branch he was standing on just as he lunged upward to the next. That paw tore through one of his shoes as well, pulling it from his foot and sending it flying in two ragged pieces.
That’s okay, Eddie thought. You can have em both, Br’er Bear, if you want. Goddam things were worn out, anyway.
The bear roared and lashed at the tree, cutting deep wounds in its ancient bark, wounds which bled clear, resinous sap. Eddie kept on yanking himself up. The branches were thinning now, and when he risked a glance down he stared directly into the bear’s muddy eyes. Below its cocked head, the clearing had become a target with the scattered smudge of campfire as its bullseye.
“Missed me, you hairy motherf—” Eddie began, and then the bear, its head still cocked back to look at him, sneezed. Eddie was immediately drenched in hot snot that was filled with thousands of small white worms. They wriggled frantically on his shirt, his forearms, his throat and face.
Eddie screamed in mingled surprise and revulsion. He began to brush at his eyes and mouth, lost his balance, and just managed to hook an arm around the branch beside him in time. He held on and raked at his skin, wiping off as much of the wormy phlegm as he could. The bear roared and hit the tree again. The pine rocked like a mast in a gale . . . but the fresh claw-marks which appeared were at least seven feet below the branch on which Eddie’s feet were planted.
The worms were dying, he realized—must have begun dying as soon as they left the infected swamps inside the monster’s body. It made him feel a little better, and he began to climb again. He stopped twelve feet further up, daring to go no higher. The trunk of the pine, easily eight feet in diameter at its base, was now no more than eighteen inches through the middle. He had distributed his weight on two branches, but he could feel both of them bending springily beneath him. He had a crow’s nest view of the forest and foothills to the west now, spread out below him in an undulating carpet. Under other circumstances, it would have been a view to relish.
Top of the world, Ma, he thought. He looked down into the bear’s upturned face again, and for a moment all coherent thought was driven from his mind by simple amazement.
There was something growing out of the bear’s skull, and to Eddie it looked like a small radar-dish.
The gadget turned jerkily, kicking up flashes of sun as it did, and Eddie could hear it screaming thinly. He had owned a few old cars in his time—the kind that sat in the used-car lots with the words HANDYMAN’S SPECIAL soaped on the windshields—and he thought the sound coming from that gadget was the sound of bearings which will freeze up if they are not replaced soon.
The bear uttered a long, purring growl. Yellowish foam, thick with worms, squeezed between its paws in curdled gobbets. If he had never looked into the face of utter lunacy (and he supposed he had, having been eyeball to eyeball with that world-class bitch Detta Walker on more than one occasion), Eddie was looking into it now . . . but that face was, thankfully, a good thirty feet below him, and at their highest reach those killing talons were fifteen feet under the soles of his feet. And, unlike the trees upon which the bear had vented its spleen as it approached the clearing, this one was not dead.
“Mexican standoff, honey,” Eddie panted. He wiped sweat from his forehead with one sap-sticky hand and flicked the mess down into the bugbear’s face.
Then the creature the Old People had called Mir embraced the tree with its great forepaws and began to shake it. Eddie grabbed the trunk and held on for dear life, eyes squeezed into grim slits, as the pine began to sway back and forth like a pendulum.
6
ROLAND HALTED AT THE EDGE of the clearing. Susannah, perched on his shoulders, stared unbelievingly across the open space. The creature stood at the base of the tree where Eddie