3

When sleep finally came to Ricky Hawthorne, it was as if he were not merely dreaming, but had in fact been lifted bodily and still awake into another room in another building. He was lying in bed in a strange room, waiting for something to happen. The room seemed deserted, part of an abandoned house. Its walls and floor were bare planks; the window was only an empty frame, sunlight leaked in through a dozen cracks. Dust particles swirled in these stark rays of light. He did not know how he knew it, but he knew that something was going to happen, and that he was afraid of it. He was unable to leave the bed; but even if his muscles were working, he knew with the same knowledge that he would not be able to escape whatever was coming. The room was on an upper floor of the building: through the window he saw only gray clouds and a pale blue sky. But whatever was coming was going to come from inside, not out there.

His body was covered with an old quilt so faded that some of its squares were white. Beneath it, his legs lay paralyzed, two raised lines of fabric. When Ricky looked up, he realized that he could see every detail of the wooden planks on the wall with a more than usual clarity: he saw how the grain flowed down each board, how the knotholes were formed, the way the nailheads stood out at the tops of certain, boards. Breezes filled the room flicking the dust here and there.

From down at the bottom of the house, he heard a crash-it was the noise of a door being thrown open, a heavy cellar door banging against a wall. Even his upstairs room shook with it. As he listened, he heard some complex form dragging itself out of the cellar: it was a heavy form, animal-like, and it had to squeeze through the doorframe. Wood splintered, and Ricky heard the creature thud against a wall. Whatever it was began to investigate the ground floor, moving slowly and heavily. Ricky could picture what it saw-a series of bare rooms exactly like his. On the ground floor, tall grass and weeds would be growing up through the cracks in the floorboards. The sunlight would be touching the sides and back of whatever was moving heavily, purposefully through these deserted rooms. The thing downstairs made a sucking noise, then a high-pitched squeal. It was looking for him. It was snuffling through the house, knowing he was there.

Ricky tried again to force his legs to move, but the two lumps of fabric did not even twitch. The thing downstairs was brushing against walls as it passed through the rooms, making a scratchy noise; the wood creaked. He thought he heard it break through a rotten floorboard.

Then he heard the noise he had been dreading: it shouldered through another doorway. The noises from downstairs were suddenly louder-he could hear the thing breathing. It was at the bottom of the staircase.

He heard it hurl itself at the stairs.

It thumped up what sounded like a half dozen stairs, and then slipped back down. Then it went more slowly, whining with impatience, taking the stairs two or three at a time.

Ricky's face was wet with perspiration. What most frightened him was that he couldn't be sure if he were dreaming or not: if he could be certain that this was only a dream, then he had only to suffer through it, to wait until whatever it was down there got up to the top of the stairs and burst into the room-the scare would wake him up. But it did not feel at all like a dream. His senses were alert, his mind was clear, the entire experience lacked the rather disembodied, disconnected atmosphere of a dream. In no dream had he ever sweated. And if he was wide awake, then the thing banging and thundering on the stairs was going to get him, because he couldn't move.

The noises changed, and then Ricky realized that he was indeed on the third floor of the abandoned building, because the thing looking for him was on the second. Its noises were much louder: the whining, the slithery sound as its body rubbed through doors and against walls. It was moving faster, as if it smelled him.

The dust still circled in the random beams of sun; the few clouds still drifted through a sky that looked like early spring. The floor rattled as the creature thrust impatiently back onto the landing.

Now he could hear its breathing very clearly. It threw itself at the last staircase, making a noise like a wrecking ball hitting the side of a building. Ricky's stomach seemed packed with ice; he was afraid he would vomit-vomit ice cubes. His throat tightened. He would have screamed, but he thought, even while knowing it was not true, that if he did not make any noise maybe the thing would not find him. It squealed and whined, banging its way up the staircase. A stair rod snapped.

When it reached the landing outside his bedroom door, he knew what it was. A spider: it was a giant spider. It thudded against the door of his room. He heard it begin to whine again. If spiders could whine, that was how they would do it. A multitude of legs scrabbled at the door as the whining grew louder. Ricky felt pure terror, a white elemental fear worse than he'd ever experienced.

But the door did not splinter. It quietly opened. A tall black form stood just beyond the doorframe. It was no spider, whatever it was, and Ricky's terror decreased by an unconscious fraction. The black thing in the doorway did not move for a moment, but stood as if looking at him. Ricky tried to swallow; he managed to use his arms to push himself upright. The rough planks rubbed against his back and he thought again: this isn't a dream.

The black form came through the door.

Ricky saw that it was not an animal at all, but a man. Then another plane of blackness separated off, then another, and he saw that it was three men. Beneath the cowls draped over their lifeless faces, he saw the familiar features. Sears James and John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt stood before him, and he knew that they were dead.

He woke up screaming. His eyes opened to the normal sights of morning on Melrose Avenue, the cream colored bedroom with the graphics Stella had bought on their last trip to London, the window looking out on the big back yard, a shirt draped over a chair. Stella's firm hand gripped his shoulder. The room seemed mysteriously absent of light. On a strong impulse he could not name, Ricky jumped out of bed-came as close to jumping out of bed as his seventy-year-old knees would permit-and went across to the window. Stella, behind him, said, "What?" He didn't know what he was looking for, but what he saw was unexpected: the entire back yard, all the roofs of the neighboring houses, were dusted with snow. The sky too was oddly without light. He didn't know what he was going to say, but when he opened his mouth he uttered: "It snowed all night, Stella. John Jaffrey should never have had that dadblasted party."