After he'd told Becky the story, he said, "And then, you know the story about Melissa's death."
Becky nodded. "Hopfrog felt so much guilt about that."
Joe shook his head. "It was an accident."
"He never told you." Becky leaned back against the workbench.
"Never told me?"
"He had nightmares every night for years, and in all of them, Melissa was there, and sometimes, you, too. He told me it was right after the accident, and he was standing on the shore. Both you and Melissa came out of the river, moving towards him. He said she kept saying, 'Hopfrog—why? Why?' Eventually, he told me. He wanted to kill himself that day. He was in love with her, too. He knew she didn't love him. He wanted the car to crash. He wanted all of you to die." Becky reached over and placed her hand across Joe's. "I know he didn't mean it. He felt like he was going to hell his whole life because of it."
Joe closed his eyes, angry at the world. "I don't believe now it was Hopfrog. I don't believe it. I think the bloodsucker got Melissa. I think each one of us was picked out when we saw that this Angel of the Pit could be stopped. I think that no one is allowed to see its true face and live. I think this... evil thing... has been scared of us all along, because we have something that can hurt it."
"He tried to kill himself twice, that I know of," Becky said. She reached back over to Tad, still mumbling to himself, his fever cooling as he slept. She felt his forehead, then his cheek. "Look," she said. "Let's put some of these crosses up in the yard around here before it gets too dark. They'll be coming out soon."
Joe and Becky gathered up as many as they could and went outside. The sky was almost completely dark, with an incipient light, the last light of day, over the western ridge of the Malabar Hills. Using a mallet and hammer each, they drove the crosses into the ground until the land around the barn looked like a graveyard.
Then, they secured the barn door with a cross and lay down in some ragged blankets next to Tad.
Tad shivered. "Will they come in tonight?"
"Nope. We have enough religious symbols out there to open a revival meeting and then some. If they follow the rules like they've been doing, we're safe tonight.
"Tomorrow morning, I'm going to go down and get the bastard while it's sleeping."
"Why not tonight?" Tad asked.
"It follows too many of those vampire rules, that's why. Now, you go to sleep. You need your strength." Becky wrapped her arms around her son and fell asleep immediately. Joe sat up awhile, thinking he heard noises. Gradually, he, too, drifted off to sleep.
In the morning, he awoke suddenly. Becky was already up.
"Wish I had some coffee," she said.
"Me, too," Joe said.
"Wish my ex was still here," she said, sadly.
"Me, too."
"Tell me the rest," Becky said. "About what happened after Melissa died. Homer told me that you went down there before."
Joe nodded and resumed telling tales. "I tried to kill myself, too, back then. It would've been happy if that had happened." Joe began spinning the story of his eighteenth year. "It was after Hop and I saw Melissa again. After she was dead. We dug up her grave—there was a lot of rain, and the ground was easy to break, although it was backbreaking work. I needed to know if she really was a vampire, or if we both were just going insane. The coffin was gone, only a tunnel in the earth downward..."
From the Journals of Joe Gardner / when he was eighteen:
I left Hopfrog above the grave and slid down through the shaft beneath it, holding onto the chain with my dad's gardening gloves. Hopfrog had tied the chain to his chair, so if I started to fall and grabbed on, the chair would block his falling down, too. I tied flashlights to my hips, and kept a large one tucked uncomfortably under my armpit. I lowered myself down until I came to a kind of burrow, as if somebody had just dug under the moist earth. It reminded me a little of the stories of tunnels that people made to get under the Berlin Wall. It reminded me of a gopher hole.
I didn't start shaking until I lay down in the burrow and let go of the chain. I had to dig through some of the dirt that had already fallen across the recently dug path.
After a while, controlling myself from screaming from that feeling of being buried alive, the tunnel opened onto a chamber.
After that, I can't remember. I really can't. I know something happened down there. It's more like my body knows it than my mind does.
I think maybe I saw something, but I don't remember what. I was blind for about an hour afterwards, and I was back in that tunnel, trying to grab the chain so Hopfrog could pull me out.
When I got out, Hopfrog said he didn't know what to do when he heard me screaming. I said, screaming? I was screaming?
Three times, he said, like nothing he'd ever heard before.
Bloodcurdling, he said. Three screams.
I don't remember any of it and I don't want to.
We waited at the grave until just before dawn. When Melissa came back, bloated and grinning, I threw her onto one of the slabs and drove the screwdriver into her heart until Hopfrog told me to stop because I had plunged it all the way through her back.
The voices stopped, then. For a while.
I'm writing this because it's my confession. Tonight I'm going to kill myself. I can't live with what I did.
I don't want to live, knowing what happened to Melissa.
I want to be with her more than anything. I want...
"I wanted to die," Joe said. "I didn't want to go on. The more I thought about it, the more the idea of death seemed appealing. But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. It was like I was King Joe Dragonheart again, and he would never kill himself. Now, I know I'm going to die. But I have to stop that thing."
Becky glanced at her wristwatch. "It's ten a.m. If the sun ain't up, we're all screwed." She glanced at the barn door, with its boards across the inside, keeping the Night Children out. "Do you want to do the honors?"
Joe managed a smile, as if survival were enough. He felt this was all a grim duty, that life had lost what little savor it had ever possessed. "Crosses. God bless Old Man Feely for having them, for knowing how to keep them at bay."
He stood and went to the door. He got a whiff of himself—he stank, from his jeans to his sweater to his black denim jacket to his sneakers.
He drew the latch and board from the door, pushing it open. The door creaked on its hinges. The morning air was biting cold.
The apple orchard and the Feely house seemed empty of all life.
He turned to Becky. "They're in their beds today. All the children of the world."
"Good. Now, we have to go kill their owner."
Joe leaned against the door. "No. I am going to kill It. You are going to stay here and make sure your son lives. I am not going to let another child die in this town, so help me God. If you won't get out of town now, you certainly aren't going down in the mines with me to find the vampire."
Some of the Night Children were asleep in Old Man Feely's house, along the stairways, and four, in the bed, looking as innocent as if they were truly human children dreaming of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, rather than the puppets of some alien creature.
Joe put a spike to the first one, but Becky could still not bring herself to do it. Instead, she went and stood in the doorway, in the sunlight, with Tad, wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the porch.
"I'm sorry, Joe, I just can't."
"They aren't children anymore," he said. "They're just cast from children. The real children have been consumed. Remember. These are just re-creations of the children." He felt robotic inside, as if he, too, were merely a re-creation of the Joe Gardner who had once been.
When the work was done, he took a flashlight from Becky and a cross. In his belt he'd stuck a mallet and screwdriver to take care of whatever he was about to find down below.
His only thoughts were for those whom he had loved who had been taken from him.
He didn't say anything to Becky or Tad. He wasn't sure if they would get out of this alive. He just turned and went to the room.
The rotting body of John Feely lay in the corner. What had once been religious symbols and icons had either been defaced or destroyed and lay about in clumps beside the small doorway to the closet on which was scrawled:
He is risen.
Joe opened the doors to the closet and shined his flashlight into it.
The beam of his light hit a winding stone staircase.
He took a step down, then another, and another, until he felt as if he were descending into the farthest pit of hell.
He heard a fluttering like wings, and then someone grabbed his hand, knocking the flashlight from it. He heard the flashlight clatter to the ground. Instinctively, he reached for the screwdriver, intending to use it as a stake, but the darkness spoke to him in soothing tones.
It was Melissa's voice, her hand, too, guiding him in the dark.
"I've been waiting for you, all these years," she said, "in my prison."
Don't give in to her. It's not Melissa. It's the vampire.
"My mind is free to wander, but I am not free of this existence."
Joe asked, "Why don't you kill me?"
"I want to do more than kill you, King Joe."
"King Joe?" The stairs ended abruptly, and as he continued walking, the walls of John Feely's cellar gave way to the walls of the mine, shining with a yellow phosphorescence, as if rubbed with fireflies.
As the darkness receded, he glanced at Melissa, who, for a moment, was clearly visible, wearing the same clothes she had on the day she had died, soaked to the skin, smelling of river water. "King Joe Dragonheart, the boy who managed to lock me in my cage again when I was almost out."
Then Melissa seemed to evaporate, right before his eyes. Joe blinked twice, looking around in the darkness. The room that had been built into the rock gradually gave way to earth. He saw the shape of the mines, the chambers that led off to other routes.
The light came up, blinding, as if he were in some celestial presence too brilliant for human eyes. The golden light was sensual. Joe felt as if his skin were being brushed with thousands of feelers. A humming sound accompanied the light, until it was deafening, millions of locusts swarming around him, locusts made up of light and dark, spinning atomic particles of fire yellow and night; his arms, his whole body, in the light, seemed transformed as if by Midas's touch, until he could not separate himself out from the light—he no longer sensed his own body.
And then, something like wind, but like a jackhammer, slammed into him; he felt as if something smashed through him, through flesh and blood and bone, and he was falling to the ground.
It's going to kill me, he thought. I've just delivered myself to the monster who killed my family—the spike he'd brought to stab some vampire in the heart had dropped to the ground, the intent he had to destroy this creature was lost to the sensations, the electrical currents, running through his body.
Joe lifted his head up. He was forced to shut his eyes for a good minute or two because the light was like fire—and then it dimmed and he could see the yellow-gold fluorescence of the creature. Its multiple eyes were small and shiny, and the proboscis which jutted below them swung like an elephant's trunk out along the chalky walls of its prison. It had two pair of vestigial wings along its spine, and these fluttered slightly, but they were tattered, as if from centuries of abuse from thwarted attempts to escape. It was half melted, its thorax ending at a scarred abdomen which ended at the halfway point; he was reminded of pictures of mosquitoes and ants trapped in amber.
He wondered why he was able to see It. Why me? Why Joe Gardner from Colony? Why not any of the others?
And then, a voice. A voice far more dreadful than any he could've imagined from this creature. Upon hearing it, he felt as if his heart would stop.
"Joseph," his mother said, and she was standing there before him in one of her housecoats as if she had only woken up a half hour before and was putting on coffee. There was nothing inhuman about her. It wasn't just his mother, it was the mother he had always wanted, for she seemed warmer. She wore the kindest expression he could imagine on her face. Her arms were outstretched to him. "Joseph, thank God you're here. Oh, my baby."
"No!" he shouted, clawing at the air as if he could make her disappear.
A flash of lightning crossed Joe's vision as he was thrust into the middle of a movie of his own past: the Volkswagen going over the bridge... Joe reaching for Melissa to save her... the crash, water pouring into the car... reaching again for Melissa and touching something else... something other than Melissa.
"You believed," Anna Gardner said. "You understood. You knew about losing what you love. You had great belief, even for a child."
His vision faded to the blue again, and he saw the creature. The tentacle-like arms rubbed together, and the voice resumed, you knew what I felt. Then, it was his mother. Her skin was pale and shiny, and reminded him of a larva. She was weeping. "Oh, Joe, Joseph, I'm so frightened. Why do you hate me so much?"
"You're not my mother."
"Joe," she sobbed, her hands going to her eyes. "What did I do to make you hate me so much?"
"Don't do this to me," he said, fighting back every instinct he had to go and embrace this woman. "Don't do this to me. You're a monster."
Anna Gardner grinned. Blood tears streamed down her cheeks. "Yes, I am a bit of a monster, aren't I?" She advanced on him. "A bit of a monster, fucking other men, hating your daddy, hating you for being born. You're the destroyer, Joe, did you know that? You're the Antichrist. Look: everything you touch turns to shit. How many people have died because you came back here? How many? All those children, Joe. It was you who killed them. Just by stepping back over that bridge, you sealed their doom. And Aaron, my grandson. Oh, my Lord, you should've heard the squeals when his skin got ripped off—like a little piggie at the slaughterhouse. Hillary? We boiled her. We made a big pot of baby soup. Her skin slid right off her back after ten minutes. It was like skinning a tomato. I sucked her myself, Joe. Her blood was so pure and fresh."
"Stop it," Joe whispered, shivering. He felt as if he'd been thrust into a freezer. His skull felt like it was scraping the inside of his head raw. "You're a fucking monster!"
"Let me tell you about Jenny," his mother cackled, throwing her head back. "Oh, Lordy, Joseph—she was the difficult one. You married a cunt. She fought, she scratched, she bit. She was the trophy, I'll tell you. Do you know what a woman sounds like when you have her own child open her up down there? It's not even a scream, Joe. It's like air escaping a balloon. It's very amusing. The wonderful part was she called your name out, Joe, in the end. You should be proud. She called your name out. 'Joe—Joe,' she gasped. 'Where are you, Joe? Why aren't you there, Joe,' she cried." Anna Gardner erupted in a fit of giggles. "And all because of you, Joe. I wanted you here. We all did. You could have saved your family and friends, if only you'd just come down here in the first place. I learned all about you from your wife, before she died. She told us the most shocking things. She said you fucked some other bitch behind her back. She said you weren't a very good father. And your poor old mother's such a witch, is she? Well, look at yourself for a change."
Trembling from the cold, Joe said, "I know you're not my mother." He tried to block the images this creature was conjuring in his mind, but he saw them: Aaron bleeding to death while some horrible being crouched over him lapping at his wounds. Hillary screaming as children pushed her into scalding water. Jenny's face tensing and calling out to him in her last moment.
"Why the hell are you doing this! What is it? Do you need us for fuel? What the fuck is it?" Joe cried.
Anna Gardner shook her head, sadly. "I'll tell you why, Joe. You want to know? Why the children, why blood? Why vampires and demons and the whole masquerade? Because I like it. Because it's fun. Because your kind is so disgusting to me that I can't think of anything I'd rather do than fuck you over. I am your god, you stupid fuck." His mother's eyes beamed. "And you're my baby. You're my little Joey, writing his little stories about things that can't come true. All the bedtime stories are shit, Joey. Mamas never do get their babies back."
Then, it came to Joe. An insight, as if pieces of a puzzle had just come together. "You had children, too."
"What?" she said, caught off guard.
"You had children, too. We killed one of them. Maybe the last one. Maybe Old Man Feely killed some, too. Maybe his father and grandfather and great-grandfather killed one or two. Me and Hopfrog and Melissa, we killed one, too. That day at the barn. Somehow, we killed one of your children."
A piercing shriek came from the creature. Joe had to cover his ears. Even then, his head pounded from the noise.
"My own. My children!"
Through the image of his mother, as if this were her skeleton, he saw the creature rear up, its shriveled wings beating against the fetid air.
Joe said, "What, are you going to kill me now? Go ahead, damn it, just do it! You've taken everything away from me, you hear me? Everything! My wife, my son, my daughter, my little girl, how—you could do that to a little girl!" He could no longer weep. All he could do was scream and slam his fist into the rock floor.
When he quieted down, his mother said, "They are all here, for they are in my blood, they live, Joe, all of them, and Melissa, too. I will give you a taste."
From between her lips, a proboscis shot out and fell across his neck. He felt a brief, sharp pain at his throat. He wondered if this was what mainlining heroin was like, for suddenly he felt lighter, and happier, and he was sitting on a grassy knoll with Jenny, who held Hillary on her knee. Out by the river, Aaron was catching a Frisbee that Joe himself had just tossed him.
Jenny looked up at Joe and said, "It's about time you relaxed and enjoyed your surroundings a little, Joe."
But it was no longer Jenny, but Melissa, settling Hillary down on the grass, turning, standing, reaching for Joe, pressing her lips against his ear and whispering, no one dies here, Joe. No one.
Joe bit down as hard as he could on his tongue. The pain jolted him back into the golden aura of the creature. "It's all a fake," Joe spat out. "It's a show so that I'll give you what you want. Did you do this to the kids? Did you take Patty Glass and get her to see her folks? Or my son—did you let him think he was going to join Mommy in heaven? Is that why you started out with children? Because they're easy. But adults, we're harder. We aren't so happy to give up our lives, are we? We're not so easily fooled."
His mother came closer to him, kneeling beside him. "Children believe, Joe. Their belief gives them power. Their power gives me strength. You believe, too, Joe, no matter how you fight it. You believe in me, don't you?"
"No," Joe said. "I don't believe you have any real power, if that's what you mean. I believe you prey on the weak and the young. Like a jackal. You know about jackals? They go for carcasses, too, and children, and the sick, and the helpless. Maybe you're just a jackal, or worse. Maybe your own kind imprisoned you here so that they would never have to deal with you again."
His mother's breath was sweet, like apple blossoms. She stroked his scalp. "Oh, my baby. You were the only one I spoke through. I trusted you because I knew you believed. I could drink your blood now, Joe, if I so choose. I could take the life from you. My sweet baby boy."
"Then do it. Do it!" Joe shouted, wrenching his neck—the pain was white hot as a sucker tore at the flesh around his jaw. "Do it right now and when my blood is inside you, you bastard, I will make you suffer through eternity for what you've done to everything I've ever loved!"
He drew himself to the creature and when he was close enough, it was no longer a monster or his mother, but Melissa stroking his scalp as he lay, head in her lap, in the back of his truck. The sky was purple. Night was coming. Melissa had daisies pressed into her tangled hair. She smiled at him and he grinned because he had never been so in love in all his life as when he'd been a teenager, never had he felt such an incorruptible bond of love. Her smile broke apart and she said, "Just think, we're getting married soon and we'll get the hell out of here and you'll write novels and I'll do... whatever it is I'm going to do."
She brought her hand down to his chin. She rubbed her fingers against it. "You cut yourself shaving? You've got a scar."
"Oh, probably," he said, caught up in the vision, and then, feeling the soreness on his neck, "You're not Melissa, though, are you? You are a phantom, a delusion. You're just that thing in the mine, sucking my blood out."
She giggled. "You're right. But you don't mind, do you? It's not so bad. If you needed human blood to escape from your prison and find your only child, wouldn't you make some sacrifices?"
"I guess so. But you want to know something?"
Melissa raised her eyebrows, as if she couldn't tell what was on his mind.
"I know something about you that you don't even know. I know about believing in things. If I believe in this vision of you, and being in the truck, I am at your mercy. The old guy was right—Virgil was right. But the reason why you've mainly gone after children before now is that you could use their belief. But see, I know something you don't. I have an imagination like a child, but I have the mastery of someone who can shape my imagination. I can believe what I want. And what I believe right now is that you may be drinking my blood, but I am drinking yours in return. And your blood is belief, that's why the crosses can keep you down, that's why you can be imprisoned. It's not because you are some Christian devil, it's because it's part of your makeup to believe in everything, isn't it? You can't not believe."
Melissa's flesh began running, bleeding skin against her nose, her eyes dribbling together like runny eggs.
It was his mother again. Anna Gardner brought her face close to his. Pressed her lips against his lips.
Opened his lips with her tongue.
He pushed her away.
"You can't not believe. So here is my religion, here is my belief," Joe gasped, and felt it to be true in his innermost being. "I believe that my blood is poison to your kind. I believe that it is like drinking your own child's blood, I believe you are burning your throat with my blood, fucker!"
The vision raked itself away and he was again in the sputtering light of the cavern. Above him, the creature's body pumped and had sent shoots of its own flesh into him, into his arms, legs, stomach, thighs, forehead, neck, and through the peristaltic pulsing of the fleshy shoots, Joe knew that the creature would quickly drain him of blood in minutes.
I'm going to die, die, die.
And then, something rose up in his memory, the little boy who lived within him, dormant all these years, the little boy who had somehow managed to terrify this creature before:
King Joe Dragonheart. He saw the boy, eleven, with a crown on his head, a knight's armor on, a flaming sword of valor and belief in his hands—
He was no longer face to face with the creature, It was now a dragon, breathing fire, Its long neck wriggling as It regained Its strength—
I need more belief, I need more belief—
King Joe Dragonheart felt her, suddenly, not a voice, not even a face, but her, Melissa, inside him as if she had never died, and Hopfrog, too, there with him, not grown-up, but as they were kids, brave and faithful, in the Feely barn, enveloped in the gold light. What struck Joe like lightning next, what illuminated the mystery of his existence, was the simple fact: we turned the dragon's own belief back on it... we reversed its own power...
He felt weak, but he kept the thought in his mind, the belief that became belief, not just his own, but King Joe Dragonheart's, and Melissa's, and Hopfrog's, all of their power as children—the light within him created a world in which he was more powerful than the alien, powerful light strength—
Joe imagined the children helping him, too, all the dead and lost children throughout the history of Colony, coming back with a united belief in the destruction of this fiend—I am your betrayer, I am the one who has come to end your suffering.
And then, Joe realized he was about to pass out.
He prayed that his blood sacrifice was the venom for which there would be no antidote. (I am a snake, a cobra, a rattler, and you milk your own doom, you press my teeth against your skin and draw into your veins the last of me, which is the last of you, like karma, like justice, his mind railed as he slipped into darkness, and then he barely saw his son, Aaron, shouting at the creature, I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you do bounces off me and sticks to you, until Aaron and the world and all of life, apparently, was snuffed out.)
And when the light came up for Joe Gardner, he was kind of hoping he'd be in heaven, or at least somewhere warm. Instead, he was right back with that Thing, its thousand eyes watching him, its limbs scrambling in the earth trying to move, its wings beating against the stale air.
The creature was fading, as if it had lost any power it had ever possessed.
It cried out, "My children, my children!" and then the words became some otherworldly language, a language of flickering lights and sparks and gasps.
Joe had no energy left.
He watched as the light around the creature faded, and when he was sure it was dead, when the wings had stilled beside its body, he opened his mouth to cry out for help, but his voice failed him.
What had been the creature, the Beast, became as insubstantial as light itself.
Joe watched as a flash of light burst, small and feeble from the place where the creature had been trapped.
He too, waited to die, happy, at least, that he had saved Tad and Becky.
When he awoke again, it was Becky, with a spike in her hand, leaning over him.
She said, "Joe? Joe?"
"Becky," he gasped. "I'm alive. I'm Joe. I'm not a vampire. Don't kill me, please."
When he awoke a third time, he was above ground, and a light powdery snow was falling from a morning sky.
Becky was looking down at him, as was Tad, who said, "I knew you'd do it. Dad always said you could do anything, if you put your mind to it. He was right about you."
Joe whispered, his voice like a scrape of pain. "It's snowing. Look."
Becky, her eyes circled with dark, her hair greasy and stringy from having come through a nightmare, shushed him. "You're all scarred up, Joe. You've lost some blood. You crawled all that way up the stairs, bleeding the whole time. I thought you were a goner. You need to rest."
"Did it die—that monster?"
"I saw a light, a funnel of light, like a cyclone, and it swept from the house outside," she said, as if she had just undergone a religious conversion and now believed in something larger than life itself.
Several hours later, late in the day, he sat up in some sort of rough bed—it seemed to be all straw sticking in his back. He glanced up—it was Old Man Feely's barn.
When he felt a bit stronger, he stood up on unsteady legs and went to find the survivors.
When he found Becky, sitting on the Feely front porch, rocking Tad in her arms, he hugged her and wept. She wept, too.
"Is it over?" she asked.
"I don't know. Its body is destroyed. I think so, anyway. Why take chances?"
"I'm so tired," she said. "I am so damn tired."
"You and Tad sleep for now. It'll be night in a couple of hours. There may be some of the children left. I'll burn them. If others come, I'll be ready for them," Joe said.
But he was exhausted, too, and not even feeling as if he were alive. Inside him, it felt as if something brilliant, some fire, had been sucked from his soul, and now he was just an animal living on instinct. He trusted no one. He walked the mother and child back to the barn, checking to make sure all the crosses were in place.
Tad, who had been feverish, lay down beside his mother in the barn. Joe wrapped them in a blanket and two coats from the trunk of the Buick. One of the coats had been Jenny's. He brought it to his face, pressing into it for brief comfort before laying it across Tad's sleeping body.
Becky whispered, "I almost just want to die. I just don't think I can go on. Not one more night."
Joe wanted to tell her that there was still hope, but he felt that there was none. It was as if the light of the universe had been doused.
He knew that he had to stand watch during this night, in case It was still there.
In case the dragon was not through with them.
He knew that if he were smart, if he were sane anymore, he would get Becky and Tad and get the hell out of that place. But there was something inside him, something he could not name or describe, something which he could only think of as a vague hope, a wish, a prayer for a miracle.
He glanced up at John Feely's workbench, in the shadows. The tools John, and perhaps his father and grandfather, had used for over a century to keep Its creations from multiplying: screwdrivers and mallets and spikes and hacksaws, alongside crucifixes and ankhs fashioned from horseshoes.
The power of belief. Not the creature's belief, but the belief of those who held the instruments. It was not the cross or the ancient symbols which held power, it was John Feely, believing completely in them, having a faith like a child's imagination. Joe remembered a biblical quote: Whosever shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as a child shall never enter therein. That's what it took to stop the monster, a belief so strong as to be nearly incomprehensible.
That's why it took over children. They were fountains of belief, towers of faith. They believed in God and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Bogeyman and Vampires and even the World—they believed so strongly that the World was the right place to be.
It had been the foulest of creatures, to use children, not because of their blood or their flesh, but because of their souls—their souls had been the fuel It used to move through Time, to find Its own children, lost millennia ago, destroyed, no doubt by some early ancestor of man who had been given the gift of belief in order to protect himself from such intruders.
Exhausted, Joe sat down beside the sleepers and wept for all the children who had been lost to It, not the least of them, his own.
Without realizing it, he fell asleep again, and something warned him, a voice buzzing around in his head, that they were still out there, the children, the ones who were left, the ones who were still servants to the devil which he had destroyed.
He dreamed that his son came for him and was drinking the first blood from the tip of his finger.