Adam shut the door to his bedroom. The stone lay on his bed. He had taken it from Vera after they’d rushed her inside the office, his father locking the doors, a lot of good glass walls would do when the assault came, but they saw a group of the Pitch eerily keeping their distance, not storming the motel, only making silent gestures in the direction of Vera, or likely at the stone she’d hidden in her jacket.
Somehow the Pitch knew what she’d taken with her inside.
They retreated to the stairwell; the two Larkin men nailing braces across the doorway, while Vera sat on the steps behind them, breathlessly telling of her failed escape, the blocked highway, a snowmobiler shooting her Camaro full of arrows, and how they were really goddamned trapped now.
“That’s enough.”
It was his mother speaking from the top of the stairs.
“You want to live? You’d better start helping us. We need to barricade the back door.” She came right down to where Vera rested and took away her pistol.
Vera looked more afraid than angry.
Adam brought the stone into his room, deposited it on the bed, dead center of his Mossy Oak camouflage comforter, not knowing what else to do. He made a point of not looking at it. He didn’t think twice about that.
Not at first.
He still had the hammer in his hand. Nails clamped between his lips. He quickly decided his bedroom window was too high and too small to worry about intruders. They’d need a ladder to reach it. The window slid sideways, instead of up-and-down, and at its widest was about eighteen inches across. He gazed out, and saw thick fingers of ice knuckling around the edges. He made sure to check the lock anyway.
At the street level, the crazies howled for more blood. Adam thought he heard someone calling his name. He drew nearer to the window.
Smoke, clouds, and snow. Shades of gray. In the distance, a man was climbing the town’s water tank. His apelike silhouette advanced hand over hand up the curve, clinging to unseen icy rungs. Adam watched him reach the summit.
He’s cutting the cell phone tower.
A transformer exploded across the highway. Sparks gushed. The streetlights blowing out like birthday candles— whoosh. The town slipped into electrical blackness.
Everything tinged Halloween orange because of the fires.
Below him, in the parking lot, one of the Pitch twirled a steely hook attached to a long chain coiled between his legs. He was letting out a few more links with every revolution. The chain blurred. The creep doing the spinning moved from shadow to shadow in his dark coat. He was tall. A lantern passed behind him. Snow glazed his hair, turning pink with his, or somebody’s, blood.
Adam pressed his cheek to the glass. The guy’s hands looked freezer-burned. He must have noticed Adam, because he shuffled closer, wading into the turbid haze beneath the bedroom window. His head hung down, chin buried in the collar of his coat like a man hurrying through the weather to meet a train.
Adam couldn’t see a face.
The hook went flying.
The pink-haired, freezer-burned guy—he’d let go of the chain.
The metal claw slammed into the motel facade under Adam’s window.
Adam jumped back.
He listened to the hook scrabbling along.
The guy hauled on the chain and pulled loose a panel of siding with a horrible splitting screech.
The hook dropped.
Clanged.
The panel hit the ground and the wind dragged it out of sight.
Pink Freezer guy went back to twirling.
Adam looped the hammer on his jeans. He brushed his sweating palms against his legs but couldn’t seem to dry them. Looking away, avoiding the window, his eyes fell to the stone. Jagged silver-black points flickered at him. It seemed bigger than it had back in Vera’s bathroom. Trick of light? His thumb glided along a hard slippery edge. It surprised him. Oily, lubricated. He looked at his fingertip. Saw no residue. Touched the stone again ... it was warm.
He held it up. It didn’t seem as heavy as when he carried it upstairs. He set it down again on the bed.
Two pyramids glued together. If he wanted to, he could spin the thing like a top. Eight triangles, eight flat panes for gazing into—four sides tilted up and four slanted underneath.
He couldn’t say why, but he locked his bedroom door.
Adam stared down at the stone. The triangular pane facing him was clear. Why hadn’t he noticed this before? He looked in.
The stone was hollow.
He was able to see the entire inner chamber.
It was empty.
He pried his fingernail along the edge of the clear pane. Like a trapdoor, it swung open. Sticking out at him like a stiff, pointed tongue.
Shadows lay along the cracks diving to the bottom, which looked deep as an air shaft, and wider than the limits of the stone’s outer surface. A coppery light illuminated the chamber, but he could
see no bulb or flame. The stone’s inner sides swirled rich with colors, not black at all, but honeys, caramels, toffees. He could smell something now that he’d opened it—a woody forest smell, pleasant and clean. The smell changed. Sweetness followed, not the scent of wildflowers—the candied sweetness of sugar cooking, melting in a pan. He let his eyes soft-focus. He emptied his thoughts. He stared into the bottom of the stone.
And he waited.
Crystals.
There was a thin layer of what appeared to be raw sugar crystals at the bottom. Adam tried measuring the level against the outside of the box. Maybe not so thin. How could he even tell? Was it rising?
An optical illusion, he knew.
It had to be.
Max had said he saw things in the stone.
This wasn’t exactly what Adam expected. But when Max told his story, Adam had to admit he wanted to see something, too.
Now it was happening.
A slow lick of sugar curled around inside the stone enclosure; it traced the edges, bulging like a wave, or as if a living thing were burrowing beneath the surface.
Testing.
The sugar level rose higher. No. Something had begun to rise out of it. A bubble, perfectly round, was growing and quickly filling the space. As the bubble expanded, the crystals spilled away like sand running off a smooth oval rock.
He could see skin now.
Tan in color, but authentic human skin, taking shape.
He saw the top of a skull.
Man or woman—he did not know. But the skull floated up slowly inside the stone. Enlarging, inflating like a balloon, it spread outward in all directions at once. More than half the inner space was now occupied.
The shadows reddened around the emerging head.
It was a birth.
Like all births, great expectations preceded it. Adam angled to the left and then right, trying to glimpse more features, a nose, ears ...
The sugar disappeared, funneled to the bottom, past the chin, out of sight.
It was only this one thing now—a shaven head.
Adam leaned in. He could see pores in the taut skin, a light beading of sweat beginning to pop, and the twitch-twitch of living nerves underneath.
Still he could smell the sweetness. It seemed heavier. Cloying.
He could hear . . . yes, there was no mistake ... he could hear breathing. Slow, steady, rhythmic—like the pattern of a person asleep. He watched his own chest rise and fall. The same beat. But he wasn’t asleep. With each exhalation Adam smelled more of the sweetness that was coming, he realized, from the hidden mouth.
The head stopped rising an inch from the trapdoor.
It stayed perfectly still.
Adam stretched his hand out.
And quickly drew it back.
It was amazing how real the thing seemed. There were faint freckles and bumps and grooves where the cranial bones fused. Adam could see the tiny divot of an old scar. It was easy to believe this head was real and not...
Adam screamed.
He slammed the trapdoor closed. He pinned it with his knee. He fumbled as the head pressed against the clear pane, forcing its way out, pushing.
Pushing .
Adam hugged the stone and kept his knee against the pane. He wondered if it might crack. Shatter. And he screamed again, as frustration and a second wave of fear swept over him.
The pushing stopped.
It took real bravery to lift his knee off the trapdoor lid. He slid
backward on the seat of his jeans, never taking his eyes off the stone, until his tailbone hit the wall. The sides of the stone were opaque. Solid rock and black as a pit.
He sat there.
What had he just seen?
He was asking himself this question. He wasn’t having much luck coming up with answers. The facts were plain: The head in the stone had moved, turning slightly to the left, then back to center and off to the right, like something a person on a strange street corner might do to get their bearings. Adam felt his own head mimicking the movements as he watched.
What the ... ?
The head in the stone snapped back. Flesh hit against rock. There was just enough room for the head to look up.
That’s exactly what it did.
Liquid pupils peered at him like sacs of jellied darkness. The nose—nothing was there but a ragged hole. Thin lips parted, breathing out sweetness.
Adam’s face was inches away.
Eye to eye.
He had a good long look.
But that wasn’t what made him scream.
The face he saw was immediately recognizable as male, yet unblinking and hideously rigid, like a mask. Gradually, the features unfroze, softened. Skin crinkled around the eyes. The lips curved into a familiar human expression. Under normal circumstances Adam’s response would have been to smile back.
Instead, he shuddered.
His pulse raced. Neck hairs stood on end. Time ground to a halt. But that didn’t make him scream. Viewing didn’t push him over the edge. A thought did. He realized the thing emerging from the stone was also taking a good long look at him.
And, Adam knew, it liked what it saw.
Pounding at the door .. .
His mother and father were calling for him. The door shook in
its frame as his father rammed it with his shoulder. Wood crunched with each hollow thud.
“Adam! Unlock the door!” His mother’s shouts mingled with the voices of the Pitch and the people dying outside.
Words rebounded. Distorted, far away, calling up to him. He had the sensation of standing on a precipice over profound windy depths. Vertigo trilled through his bones. He didn’t get up to let his parents in.
Despite his terror, he wanted most of all to flip open the trapdoor again.
Yes. That was what he should do.
The stone cleared and the head bobbed inside, nodding, agreeing.
He reached for it.