another cardinal rule of Wink: he’s outside his property at night.
And he has committed worse crimes than what he was about to do in the linen closet, hasn’t he? Isn’t it possible that what they really wanted to do was flush him out of his house, to the dark, where he’d be vulnerable?
As he realizes this, a soft, twinkling light creeps across the fence and around him. Its source is behind him, and he knows he should not look at it, yet he turns.
Down the hill is the start of the forest, and there are lights in the trees, lights like will-o’-wisps, slowly orbiting a few of the trunks. Some lights are a pale blue, others a soft pink. They are so beautiful and enchanting that Norris cannot help himself: he walks down the hill to them, wishing to touch them and hold them.
Yet somehow they elude him. They always seem a few more feet away, circling the next few trees over rather than the ones he’d thought, and soon he’s deep within the forest, wandering under the dark, whispering pines.
He enters a wide, grassy glade. The will-o’-wisp lights go out, and Norris stands there, confused.
Then someone enters on the opposite side of the glade.
It is difficult to see in this faint light, but he thinks he can see a small, elderly figure in white shirtsleeves and a red bow tie, yet the face is dark. Just as he begins to think the person is familiar, the image flickers like the flame of a candle, and as it does the moon seems to dim too, and the glade grows deeply dark, so dark Norris cannot even see what is in front of him.
“Hello?” he calls, and he walks forward, arms outstretched, trying to find the man on the other side of the glade.
He thinks he is close when he hears breathing. Relieved, he turns toward it, but as he grows near he finds it no longer sounds like normal breathing. The air is passing through too many passageways, he thinks, and some of them seem to rattle, as if they are filled with mucus…
He stops. Something is standing just beside him underneath the tree, and it is not a little old man. He can just see it out of the corner of his eye, and he glimpses something low and broad and chitinous, and what tops it is not a head but a mass that appears somehow nasal to him, a sphenoidal lump riddled with gaping conchae and sinuses, yet clutched under the upper shelf of two of these cavities are two pieces of anatomy he recognizes:
Eyes. Very human, very clear eyes, with pupils and corneas, watching him.
He opens his mouth to scream, but it never gets out. The thing falls on him and he feels hard and rigid limbs grasp his back and pull him to it, and something fleshy and many-headed (like a sea anemone, he thinks, even as he struggles against it) wraps itself around his mouth, pries his lips open, and begins to worm its way into his throat…
Then things go dark.
Norris awakes with the dawn. He groans and rolls over and cracks an eye. He’s lying on his gravel driveway with what feels like most of its pebbles digging into his back. But that isn’t the most painful thing: the worst of it is his skin, for it feels like a million mosquitoes have been feasting on him while he slept. He sits up, scratching and expecting to see many frog-belly-white lumps lining his arms and hands.
He stops. For what is on his skin—or, rather, underneath it—is not mosquito bites at all.
Norris is covered with what looks like some horrific fungal infection, bands of virulent black stretching across his arms and hands and belly. It’s not on his skin but below it, and the skin itself is pebbled and moist.
But this is not the worst thing, nor is it the thing that will send him running down the street, screaming. For though the infection is horrendous, the most unnerving thing is that its many splintered webs and rings are not distributed randomly about his body. Quite the contrary: their arrangement obviously resembles letters. And what those letters spell is the same thing, written over and over again:
GET OUT
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wink is not perfect. Its residents are well aware of that. But then, they say, no place is perfect. There’s always a few mild irritants you have to put up with, no matter where you go. So