The room got darker and darker. But Grace wasn’t sure anymore that the darkness was outside her eyes. Maybe it was inside.
A sound she had been ignoring, pretending not to hear, had been growing louder and louder. It was the static sound she had heard when she and Reece had driven across the Beaufort County line and slammed into the mirage fence put up by the Jabberwock.
There were halos around the edges of her vision now, the kind you saw around lights when you drove in the rain at night. Except the halos weren’t bright white light. They were black light. Light, but black. Impossible, but there wasn’t anything about what was happening to her and to everybody else in the county that wasn’t impossible. The light was sparkly, like someone had thrown into the air a handful of black glitter.
And it was cold. So very, very cold. Her teeth would have been chattering except she had her jaw clenched so tight in terror the muscles couldn’t budge it.
This was it. This was what had happened to Reece. To Cissy and the girls. Oh, those sweet children, how utterly terrified they must have been. This was what had happened to Abner Riley and Harry Tungate, and to all the other people out there in the county who had vanished. Nowhere County had vanished, too, and nobody out there in the wide world missed it. It could have fallen off the edge of the planet and it wouldn’t even have made the ten o’clock news.
A tiny thought squiggled out of a school of thought fish below the surface and fired up into the light.
Was that it? Was that why this was happening? Was it because nobody cared about Nower County — including, no, especially the people who lived here? Was it possible that when the world stopped caring about a place, stopped noticing it, the place somehow … came unhooked from the world?
Was that what caused the Jabberwock?
She heard laughter, only it wasn’t real laughter. Not human laughter. It was a sound like a creature that didn’t normally produce human sound was trying to laugh. Like they’d learned how by watching real people laugh at real things. It was a mimic. A parody. A mirror image of laughter. Tinny and fake and utterly repulsive.
But it was definitely somebody’s … no, something’s attempt to laugh.
At what? There wasn’t anything funny.
Oh, but it is humorous.
The words weren’t spoken, but she could hear them. In her head. As the world around her got colder and more dim, more filled with black light and glitter. She didn’t hear the words above the ever-increasing roar of the static, but through it.
Like whatever created the static spoke and laughed, too. Or tried to imitate speech and laughter.
No, that wasn’t it. No, the laughter and the words were made out of the static. The static was the natural sound, the ambient noise, and some … thing had twisted and contorted the static into sounds that approximated speech and laughter.
Approximated.
Such an ugly, hoary sound that Grace shuddered.
You don’t think it’s funny?
The words were a growl of ugly sound Grace suspected she wouldn’t have been able to understand if they’d been spoken out loud instead of in her head.
“No.” She said the word out loud and was instantly sorry she had done it. Sorry she had engaged. She didn’t want to participate in any way with what was happening to her.
Let the Jabberwock kill her and eat her or dissolve her or whatever it was the thing did to people to make them vanish. Just do it. She believed a person ought to die with as much dignity as the situation allowed. The same held true for vanishing.