35

The steps crossed the room and the hand gripped Paul’s shoulder, and he could not turn.

He knew this was not happening. Something about the cabin had slipped into his soul, and he was losing reality. He twisted his mouth, struggling to laugh at the phantom hand that had him by the shoulder, and he fought to turn, but he could not.

He could not turn his head.

At last his head began to move, his entire body turning, muscles pulling themselves around, like a body cast in lead. His eyes left the fire. Shadows quaked in the room. Rain sputtered at the window.

His tongue was stone.

A disintegrated corpse stood before him, its teeth naked in a lipless grin.

Paul put out his arms, but they traveled so slowly he knew they would never reach the thing that stood before him, its nose decayed into twin holes.

With a clatter the poker glittered on the floor.

The thing stooped to pick it up.

The movement changed something in Paul, and he could breathe. “Whatever you are, you aren’t real,” he whispered. “Nothing like you could walk.”

The poker whistled through the air, and Paul staggered out of its way, slipping on the floor. The poker rose high into the air, and punched a jagged hole in the hardwood where his head cringed out of the way.

“This isn’t happening!” said Paul.

The thing swung the poker straight down with both hands, and Paul lifted a shoulder. The blow stunned him, and he reeled to his feet in agony. “This isn’t happening!” he wept. “You aren’t real!”

The corpse before him lurched back for a moment, getting a new grip on the iron. Firelight glittered off its skull-grin. The twin caverns of its nose hissed.

Out of fury with the impossibility more than anything he lifted the only arm that still had strength, and blocked the poker as it whipped through the air. His hand seemed to shatter, but he stabbed his elbow into the grinning head.

The face slipped off his arm and the poker slammed his ribs. Paul fumbled for the poker with his lifeless arms, but the thing stabbed the heavy iron into Paul’s stomach.

Paul staggered, and butted the thing with his head. The thing was shaken, and Paul groped for the poker with arms that trembled and jerked.

And then, like a sound seeking him from far away, he heard the simple noise of an iron rod colliding with skull. Three distinct white lights flashed to his right, and he sat slowly. He had no arms, and no legs. There were no sounds, and he tasted salt water.

There was an ocean. There was a wind, and choppy waves. There was only water. No sky.

He swallowed the warm sea. It made him feel quiet to drink it, and the surface of the sea stretched into a calm, perfect sheet of plastic. He blinked. There were lines in it. Parallel lines, pleasing to look at, and also tiring. He was going to have to count them.

Something sharp. Something jabbing, again and again. It was familiar, and he knew what it was. He rolled and a fire crackled around the black grenade of a pinecone. He lurched with nausea, and knew that the repeated jabbing was the sound of a scream.

A scream repeated over, and over.

“Lise!” Paul was on his feet.

The thing crouched, and Lise stood in the doorway, her lips apart like someone laughing. She screamed, and the poker rang against the hatchet in her hands, knocking it to the floor. She put out her hands, and grappled with the poker, but the dead thing was too strong. It wrestled her to her knees. It held her upright to steady her. It stepped back.

It planted its feet, and wrung the poker back.

Paul stepped slowly to the hatchet. It lay on the hardwood floor, like a thing that had been there a long time, tarnished with disuse. The handle leapt into Paul’s hand, warm from Lise’s touch.

With one fluid motion, Paul wrapped his broken hand around the handle, smiled against the pain, lifted the hatchet, and buried it in the shoulder of the standing corpse.

The thing collapsed.

Lise rose from her knees and reached for Paul. They held each other. Paul’s arms trembled and he sat down heavily. “I thought you were dead,” she said. “Paul,” she wept, “I thought he had killed you.”

Paul nodded, speechless. They both looked at the huddled thing in the doorway.

“I’m so glad you’re alive!” Lise breathed.

Paul’s tongue searched a gash in his lip where his teeth had bit into his own flesh. When he felt that he could move again, he crept to the figure in the doorway, and then froze.

The thing stirred. It moved its legs and lifted its head, and a thin hand reached back and tugged the hatchet free with a sound like a foot being pulled out of mud. The wedge-shaped hole filled with red, and a gout of crimson spilled down the back of its shirt.

The thing turned its ruined face toward them, and rose, hatchet in hand.

A large, pale hand closed around the hatchet, and a gentle voice said, “It’s all right, Len. It’s all over. These people are your friends.”

Ed Garfield embraced the terrible figure. “Christ,” he said. “Look what you’ve done to yourself.”