Page 198 of The End of the World As We Know It

Val opened the door and stopped dead.

The child did not notice her right away, or perhaps Val was meant to believe she was beneath notice. The girl knelt on the desk, staring out the unshuttered window, humming softly to herself, her dark hair loosed from the braid Lois had put it in.

Outside, not ten yards from the house, the animals were back—the predators, the low and crawling things, and they had not torn someone apart but were still tearing as the body thrashed and struggled, onehand rising pale in the moonlight, then going slack, falling to the snow. And it was not the creatures doing the carving, no. Only the killing. Mixed among them, low and crawling themselves, even lower, were other children—naked in the murderous cold, hair straggling over their backs like manes, knives of stone in their tiny hands.

Val backed away, unthinking, as if the terrible tableau outside would suddenly break apart like a flock of birds and attack the window—she had a clear and sickening vision of their bodies hitting the glass, tumbling inside, bouncing up to hamstring her or slice her heel—and the child turned at last, and smiled at her with tiny, even teeth.

Val screamed then, and fled, and slammed the door behind her, running back to the living room, where the lights were turning on and voices rose in response to her own.

“Why in thehelldid Willa go outside?” Ethan’s voice was weak and small, as if he were imitating someone else. He looked the same way he sounded, Val thought—deflated, like someone who had lost a hundred pounds overnight and still wore the extra skin. “I don’tunderstand. I just…”

“Well, what the hell was Dean doing outside?” Val said, trying to stamp out the quaver in her voice. “And both of them naked… You answered your own question. They didn’t go because they wanted to. They went because someone told them to. And—”

“Don’t say someone!” Lois broke in, at a pitch so high they all turned to stare at her. “Why are we sayingsomeone? We all know only one man has the power to do… things like that. Everybody knows that. That’sknown.”

“The dark man is dead,” Val said. “That’s known, too. Him and anyone he gave… any little sliver of his power. People went down there to look, Lois. Take measurements, photos, prove it all happened the way it was written. They’re all dead.” She held up a hand before the olderwoman could state the obvious. “I know, I know. Some people thought he couldn’t die. Those people were all proved wrong. It’s been twenty-one years. It’s not him. I… Something else has to be happening.”

“How is thatbetter?” Ethan burst out.

“Calm down,” Val said. She glanced at Bashir, returning from the kitchen and drying his hands on a dish towel. “Bash, did Willa say anything to you last night?”

He shook his head, then sagged at the knees and sat on the couch next to Martin. “Obviously she was upset,” he said. “What happened to her husband… But she didn’t present any indications that she intended to end her own life.”

Martin said, “Well, the next question is what are we going to do about th—”

“I don’t care about thenuclear bomb!” Lois snapped, thrashing out of her chair, stumbling over the blankets still pooled on the rug; Ethan caught her before she could fall, then let go, startled, as she flailed at his face. “I don’tcarewhat they said they found! I saw it in my dream, Valerie, and I think the rest of you are liars if you say you didn’t—you lied to yourselves last night and you lied to the rest of us, and that child is the spawn ofhim! The dark man! Did he die without leaving any part of himself in this world? Do you truly think that? Then you’re more fools than anyone who followed him to the desert, youare, you areliars and imbeciles!”

Frozen in shock, Valerie could think only of that movie with the Devil and the priests and the little girl, of thevoices—the thick, vomit-clotted sounds of hell coming from that little girl’s body. They had sounded nothing like her. Lois still sounded like Lois, but Val had never heard this harsh, braying screech from her—not even a raised voice. This wasn’t possession, it was just the sound of insanity, Lois had simply cracked in some deep and fundamental way. They could treat it, and—

Lois peeled past Ethan, the big man swiping ineffectually at her with one slow-moving paw, and vanished down the hallway towardthe office. The cabin wasn’t that big; Val caught up in moments, but it was still almost too late.

She and Bashir wrestled Lois to the floor, shocked by her strength, the snakelike power of her. Val was ashamed of herself even as she slammed Lois’s thin hand against the desk till the letter opener she had been brandishing fell to the carpet, only half-aware that the child had fled the office at a run.

“Stay here,” she gasped to Bashir. “I don’t know if you can—I don’t know, tie her up or something—I have to—”

“Go, see if she’s all right.”

“Jesus Christ, this motherfucking day,” Val muttered under her breath, returning to the living room. The little girl was all right, thank God; in retrospect, Val thought Lois’s surest sign of insanity was assuming that even with the element of surprise she could kill a kid with a letter opener. Martin and Ethan flanked her, awkwardly, both with an air of fretful self-consciousness, as if they had been invited to touch something fragile and they would really rather not.

Didn’t see it before, Val thought with light surprise.We’ve forgotten how to parent; we’ve forgotten what it looks like, what we’re supposed to do.“Everyone okay?”

“I nearly peed myself when Lois smacked me,” Ethan said. “Is she all right?”

“Don’t think so,” Val said. “We’re all under a lot of stress right now, with the murders and the… animals and the… everything. Bash has her, though. She’ll be fine.”

“Glad she didn’t hurt anyone,” Ethan said.

“Yes,” Martin said, and there it was in the single syllable, there was thethingVal had been thinking about for that single moment, looking into Lois’s eyes and hearing Lois’s voice, and now she looked into Martin’s eyes and heard a different voice. The child gazed up at him, blinking. There was another in the room, unseen, only heard.

No. Imagining it. I just said we were all under a lot of stress. Ijustsaid it.“Well,” Val said. “Let’s—”

“There is no we,” Martin said in not-Martin’s voice, and he clasped the child’s shoulder. “There is you. And there is us.”

“Mart?” said Ethan, holding his hands out as if Martin were armed. “What are you talking about?”

“Val knew it,” Martin said, unmoving. “Didn’t you, Val? Because we talked about it, just once. Years ago. You said the people who went to the desert, following the dark man… you said they wereweak. Too weak to resist. But you’re wrong. They were strong, stronger than the others, and that’s why he gathered them to himself, to add their strength to his.”

“I didn’t say weak,” Val said; her mouth felt numb. “I said I thought he chose people who would break a certain way if you dropped them. Hewantedthem to break. Other people, taking that hit, maybe they’d… dent or chip, nothing more. But he wanted his people to be broken before he used them. You get your damn hands off her, Martin.”