Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,196

boy. He moved along the side of the house. No one in the dining room. No one in the bedroom. And then, in the study, where Reg had morbidly expected to see him, there Jimmy was. The kid’s face was hot with excitement, and Reg surely must have believed that here was a bona fide agent of they at last.

“The boy was holding some sort of death-ray in his hand, it was pointed at the desk…and from inside his typewriter, Reg could hear Rackne screaming.

“You may think I’m attributing subjective data to a man who’s now dead—or, to be more blunt, making stuff up. But I’m not. In the kitchen, both Jane and Gertrude heard the distinctive warbling sound of Jimmy’s plastic space blaster…he’d been shooting it around the house ever since he started coming with his mother, and Jane hoped daily that its batteries would go dead. There was no mistaking the sound. No mistaking the place it was coming from, either—Reg’s study.

“The kid really was Dennis the Menace material, you know—if there was a room in the house where he wasn’t supposed to go, that was the one place he had to go, or die of curiosity. It didn’t take him long to discover that Jane kept a key to Reg’s study on the dining-room mantel, either. Had he been in there before? I think so. Jane said she remembered giving the boy an orange three or four days before, and later, when she was clearing out the house, she found orange peels under the little studio sofa in that room. Reg didn’t eat oranges—claimed he was allergic to them.

“Jane dropped the sheet she was washing back into the sink and rushed into the bedroom. She heard the loud wah-wah-wah of the space blaster, and she heard Jimmy, yelling: ‘I’ll getcha! You can’t run! I can seeya through the GLASS!’ And…she said…she said that she heard something screaming. A high, despairing sound, she said, so full of pain it was almost insupportable.

“‘When I heard that,’ she said, ‘I knew that I would have to leave Reg no matter what happened, because all the old wives’ tales were true…madness was catching. Because it was Rackne I was hearing; somehow that rotten little kid was shooting Rackne, killing it with a two-dollar space-gun from Kresge’s.

“‘The study door was standing open, the key in it. Later on that day I saw one of the dining-room chairs standing by the mantel, with Jimmy’s sneaker prints all over the seat. He was bent over Reg’s typewriter table. He—Reg—had an old office model with glass inserts in the sides. Jimmy had the muzzle of his blaster pressed against one of those and was shooting it into the typewriter. Wah-wah-wah-wah, and purple pulses of light shooting out of the typewriter, and suddenly I could understand everything Reg had ever said about electricity, because although that thing ran on nothing more than harmless old C or D cells, it really did feel as if there were waves of poison coming out of that gun and rolling through my head and frying my brains.

“‘“I seeya in there!” Jimmy was screaming, and his face was filled with a small boy’s glee—it was both beautiful and somehow gruesome. “You can’t run away from Captain Future! You’re dead, alien!” And that screaming…getting weaker…smaller…

“‘“Jimmy, you stop it!” I yelled.

“‘He jumped. I’d startled him. He turned around…looked at me…stuck out his tongue…and then pushed the blaster against the glass panel and started shooting again. Wah-wah-wah, and that rotten purple light.

“‘Gertrude was coming down the hall, yelling for him to stop, to get out of there, that he was going to get the whipping of his life…and then the front door burst open and Reg came up the hall, bellowing. I got one good look at him and understood that he was insane. The gun was in his hand.

“‘“Don’t you shoot my baby!” Gertrude screamed when she saw him, and reached out to grapple with him. Reg simply clubbed her aside.

“‘Jimmy didn’t even seem to realize any of this was going on—he just went on shooting the space blaster into the typewriter. I could see that purple light pulsing in the blackness between the keys, and it looked like one of those electrical arcs they tell you not to look at without a pair of special goggles because otherwise it might boil your retinas and make you blind.

“‘Reg came in, shoving past me, knocking me over.

“‘“RACKNE!” he screamed. “YOU’RE KILLING RACKNE!”

“‘And even as