claw would have pulled me into its gaping mouth and into that other world, where I would face some unspeakable punishment for daring to say one word: No.
But it wasn’t an automatic. It was a revolver. I fired five times, and four of the bullets went into the thing trying to rise from Mary Fay’s deathbed. I have reason to know exactly how many shots I fired. I heard the roar of the gun, saw repeated muzzle-flashes in the gloom, felt it jump in my hand, but all of that seemed to be happening to someone else. The thing flailed and fell back. The melted faces screamed with mouths that had merged. I remember thinking, You can’t kill Mother with bullets, Jamie. No, not her.
But it was no longer moving. The obscenity that had come out of its mouth lay limp, trailing on the pillow. The faces of Jacobs’s wife and son were fading. I covered my eyes and screamed, over and over again. I screamed until I was hoarse. When I lowered my hands, the claw was gone. Mother was gone, too.
If she was ever there in the first place, I hear you say, and I don’t blame you; I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if I hadn’t been there. But I was. They were—the dead ones. And she was.
Now, however, it was only Mary Fay, a woman whose serenity in death had been destroyed by four bullets fired into her corpse. She lay askew with her hair fanned out around her head and her mouth hanging open. I could see two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more below them, in the sheet that was now puddled around her hips. I could also see the scorch-marks left by that terrible claw, although there was no other sign of it now.
Jacobs began very slowly to slide to his left. I reached out, but the movement felt slow and dreamy. I didn’t even come close to grabbing him. He thumped to the floor on his side, knees still bent. His eyes were wide open but already glazing. An unutterable expression of horror was stamped on his features.
Charlie, you look like a man who just got a bad electrical shock, I thought, and began to laugh. Oh, how I did laugh. I bent over, grasping my knees to keep from falling. It was almost noiseless, that laughter—the screaming had blown my voice out—but it was genuine. Because it was funny; you see that, don’t you? Bad electrical shock! A shocking development! Hilarious!
But all the time I was laughing—convulsed with it, sick with it—I kept my eyes on Mary Fay, waiting for the hair-tufted black leg to slither out of her mouth again, giving birth to those screaming faces.
At last I staggered out of the death chamber, and through the living room. A few broken branches lay on the carpet, blown through the door Jenny Knowlton had left open. They crunched like bones under my feet and I wanted to scream again, but I was too tired. Oh, I was so tired.
The stacked stormclouds were moving away to the east, throwing down random forks of lightning as they went; soon the streets of Brunswick and Freeport would be flooded, the storm drains temporarily clogged with chips of hail, but between those dark clouds and the place where I stood, a rainbow bent its many-colored arc over the entire breadth of Androscoggin County. Hadn’t there been rainbows on the day Astrid and I had come here?
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, we used to sing during our Thursday-night MYF meetings, while Patsy Jacobs swayed on the piano bench and her ponytail swung from side to side. A rainbow was supposed to be a good sign, it meant the storm was over, but looking at this one filled me with fresh horror and revulsion, because it reminded me of Hugh Yates. Hugh and his prismatics. Hugh who had also seen the ant-things.
The world began to darken. I realized I was on the verge of fainting, and that was good. Perhaps when I woke up, my mind would have blotted all this out. That would be even better. Even madness would be better . . . as long as there was no Mother in it.
Death would be best of all. Robert Rivard had known it; Cathy Morse had, too. I remembered the revolver then. Surely there was a bullet left in it for me, but it seemed like no solution. Perhaps it would have,