SEVEN

Reggie felt someone's eyes on him.

In the closet, with his comic collection spread around him, something cold settled on his neck. But when he turned, there was nothing to see. He brushed at his collar; the washing-instruction labels on his shirts sometimes dug into the back of his neck and irritated it. But the label had been ripped out.

A curl of cool air passed over him. Again he turned from the closet to find nothing there. Even the window was closed, the air conditioner off, since the day had stayed so cool.

I'm here . . . .

The thought brushed across him, as that cold breath had. Suddenly he felt dissociated from himself, as light as air. He hadn't felt this way since the day he had been hit by the truck. He was half in the world and half out of it; he felt like he was back in the tunnel with those two figures, one reaching to whisper horribly in his ear, the other watching impassively. And then, as if a cloud had passed over him, the feeling was gone.

He shrugged and turned back to the closet. It was a small cubicle, barely a couple of feet deep, but all the walls were lined with stacked comic books. These were things he didn't even let the rest of the Three Musketeers put their hands on. They were carefully arranged and cataloged, with big hand-lettered labels his mother had helped him with (after she had finished her calligraphy course and wanted to try it out), and they were stacked according to date. Knowing that the really expensive and famous comics were beyond him, and not really interested in them anyway, he had started gathering some of the more available, although weird, titles. He had all issues of Superman published in the 80s, and he also had the whole short run of Nukla, about a superhero who got his powers from a dose of lethal radiation. He had all of the Twilight Zone comics published in the 1960s.

The thing that separated him from other collectors, though, and made him a blasphemer in most eyes, was that he actually read his comics. As far as he was concerned, he wasn't collecting so that someday he could unload the whole mess and make some money—he collected comics simply because he loved them. A lot of people didn't understand this, including Pup, who couldn't see the use in doing anything unless you got something out of it. He often asked Reggie why he was always taking his books out of their protective glassine bags and reading them—"junking them up" was the way Pup put it—and Reggie couldn't make Pup understand that he did it because he loved them not for what they were as possessions, but for what they were in themselves.

"There's great artwork in these books, and some of the stories are as good as the stuff you read in regular books, and the way it all goes together makes it like nothing else," he'd say, but Pup would give him that blank look, half-put-on and half-serious, and Reggie would give up. Pup's problem was that he had too much, since his parents seemed to own half of Montvale and he got anything he whined for. "Too much," Reggie's mother always said, and no one had ever denied it.

I'm here. . . .

Reggie was lifting the last two books from his "Toss-in" box, where he threw them after he'd finished reading them and where they waited for him to re-file, when a cold hand slipped around his neck and tightened slightly before letting go. He gave a yell and jumped up, but there was no hand and no one there for it to be attached to.

The feeling that he was back in the tunnel returned, and Reggie looked up to see in the corner of the room, up near the ceiling, a pair of huge eyes staring at him. They gazed unblinking until they faded, like the Cheshire Cat, into the sharp corners of the ceiling and nothing was there. I'm here, I'll be here, he heard, and then the feeling of dissociation disappeared as if it had never been, and he was alone.

A real shadow caught his eye at the window, moving from right to left against the pull-down shade over the air conditioner. Reggie stood dead still and watched the shadow cross back from left to right. He dropped the two comics he had in his hand and walked to the window.

For some reason, he was not afraid. The other presence was entirely gone; whatever was behind the shade was something else—but the other thing, the eyes that had been with him, had left a feeling be-hind, a strength, that stayed with him now.

He lifted the shade on the window—

And screamed.

There was a face pressed up against the glass. At first he thought it was his own face, distorted and beaten and old. Now he saw, as the face pulled back from the window, that it looked only a little bit like him. It looked more like his father had, only much older; and for a moment of hope and fear, he thought it might be his father, returned after ten years to live with them again. But the face was much too old—lined with deep black crevices and with pain sunk into the eyes so deep that the eyeballs were scarcely visible. But they could be seen, and when Reggie saw how brightly and desperately they burned within their deep, hurting wells, he cried out again.

It was the face of a dead man, like something from his horror comics.

The old man had stumbled back away from the window. He seemed as terrified of Reggie as Reggie was of him. The old man stared at him, his sunken, haunted eyes lit wildly. Reggie eased open the window over the air conditioner and as he did so, his pressing arm hit the -On" button. The air conditioner roared into life. The man outside moved back-ward and started to stumble away. Reggie threw the window all the way up.

"You!" the old man croaked at him in a half voice.

"Wait!" Reggie shouted.

The old man gave a shrill, tinny scream. He held his hands in anguish to his head. "Flames!" he shouted. "The dream!" And then he suddenly turned as if pulled by an invisible magnet. He lurched away from the house, onto the sidewalk and across the street. A car, honking its horn loudly, narrowly missed him, but the old man paid no heed, pushing off the hood and running on. His legs would not carry him as fast as he wanted to go and he fell, rising and stumbling on.

Reggie ran from his room, making it out onto the front lawn in time to see the old man disappear around the corner of the house across the street. His cries faded. Reggie considered following him, but he saw that the old man had made a direct line for the amusement park.

I'm with you. . . .

Once more a coldness enveloped Reggie. He looked up, expecting to see two huge, fading eyes glaring at him. But as quickly as the sensation came, it was gone. He was left staring at the brooding, girder-like visage of the amusement park. It looked reptilian. Another feeling gripped him—one of dread and foreboding; and a deeper kind of cold, with fingers that wanted to hold and squeeze him till he choked, enveloped him. Once again he saw before him a vision of Montvale in flames, the fire of Breughel's "The Triumph of Death," a red landscape, and from the midst of the inferno a sticklike hand, covered in a black sleeve, held out to him. At the end of those fingers was the cold touch, the hurting one that sought to reach inside, and then the arm extended back to a body and a face, the face whispering, soothing him and pursing its lips, opening its mouth wide, telling him something, something secret for him alone as the flames and the cold mingled:

"K—"

He shook the vision off, ran into the house and shut the door behind him. The house was cold. He went back into his room, but the chill was just as great there. The light was too harsh. He stared down at the pile of comics he had left; now they looked like just a pile of newsprint, unimportant. They seemed trivial, a little boy's escape reading—like all the things in Pup's garage seemed trivial too.

So it’s real. Something is really happening.

Reggie felt his heart harden a little. He had suddenly grown older. All the things in his room, the horror books and models and masks hanging on the corners of the bedposts, were just toys. He hadn't imagined any of what had happened; it was all real. The only important thing in the room, the one thing that had any meaning at all, was the poster over his bed, the painting of Breughel's landscape of death; and as he looked at it once more, the red fire began to dance, and that hand, that long white hand, reached out toward him. . . .