Chapter 29 #2
Neither of them has bothered to reset it.
The door lolls open a crack. A ghost-colored light flickers in the hall. At the bottom of the doorway, Jayne can see a black
shadow. As she watches, it shifts, moves, and disappears . . . as if someone had been standing there and is only now backing
away.
“Tana?” Jayne whispers. “You up?”
Ronnie sleeps on his stomach, the bedsheets kicked back. He wears white Fruit-of-the-Looms, so old they’ve assumed a certain
transparency, his ass visible through the old fabric, and his face is half-buried in his bloodstained pillow. He gets nosebleeds
after too much coke and uses the pillowcase to wipe. She wants to club him one, wake him up, but he usually hits back, and
she’s not in the mood for a punch-up tonight.
The TV is running. That’s what’s casting the spectral blue light glimmering in the hallway.
She can hear SportsCenter. Then there’s a snapping sound and a hiss of static.
A moment passes and there’s another snap and Jayne can hear MTV, Headbangers Ball, Ozzy Osbourne pouring himself a suicide solution.
Tana. Has to be Tana. She can’t sleep either.
Still, when she slips out of the bed, she reaches for the shotgun, leaning against the wall beside the end table.
It’s a single-barrel Ithaca pump and it was her daddy’s gun.
It’s older than Tana, a slam-fire model.
They literally don’t make ’em like this anymore.
Hold the trigger down and the Ithaca will fire as fast as you can pump shells into the chamber.
It’s not quite an automatic weapon, but it’s perfectly possible to squeeze off four rounds in four seconds.
She nudges the bedroom door open with the barrel of the gun and considers the short corridor to the living room. Tana’s bedroom
door is ajar on the left. The door to the bathroom stands open on the right, looking into maximum darkness.
Jayne creeps sidelong down the hall and peers through the open crack of Tana’s bedroom door. The sight sends a paralytic tingle
of alarm through her. It can’t be Tana in the living room because Tana is right there, asleep on her side, one hand cupping the swollen curve of her belly and a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting on the bed beside her. She snores delicately, her hair across her face.
In the living room the TV clunks to a new channel. The TV is ten years old, and when someone changes the channel, it sounds
like slamming a fresh magazine into a gun. A studio audience roars with unhinged laughter.
“Who’s there?” she cries. Without waiting for an answer, she shouts, “I have a gun!”
The audience laughs and laughs, as if that was the funniest thing ever. Tana makes a small muttering sound in her bedroom,
and then says Jayne’s name, but she isn’t all the way awake, Jayne can tell from her tone.
She moves, has to move, can’t be still any longer. She ducks into the living room, lifting the Ithaca, swinging the barrel to cover the couch.
As she does the TV turns itself off with another loud clunk.
Light collapses to a dot in the center of the screen. In its fading glow, Jayne can see the remote on the armrest of the couch.
It is not a large living room and there is nowhere to hide. She can see in a glance she’s alone. The empty sofa, angled to
face the TV, takes up most of the space. She wheels toward the front door. A black overcoat hanging from a peg looks like
a man slouching against the wall, and for a microsecond Jayne is thi-i-i-i-i-sss close to emptying a barrel into Ronnie’s favorite duster.
Then she realizes she’s moved too far into the living room and has her back to the open archway of the kitchen.
She pivots on her heel to cover the tiny kitchen .
. . and sees a white, gaping corpse face, staring at her through the window over the sink.
She catches herself before she can blast away, realizes she’s been tricked by her own reflection in the glass.
Jayne’s hands are shaking as she revolves to face the living room once again. And now, for the first time, she can dimly see
an image of something squirming across the television screen. Jayne hits the wall switch and lights the room up.
The TV screen has become a glass window looking into a dry aquarium, and there’s a fucking snake stuffed in there, a snake
as thick as a firehose, knotted and tangled on itself. It shifts and twists, slowly, hardly enough room inside the boxy old
TV for it. That’s an anaconda, she thinks, there is a fucking South American anaconda in the TV, and then she sees it has arms. Scaly arms, and black talons, and one of those claws draws three white scratches across the inside of the glass with a faint,
almost musical whine. Its face presses to the glass, staring out at her with one golden eye, the pupil a vertical black slit.
“Who says there’s nothin’ on the telly this hour of the night,” remarks the thing inside the television, in a voice that reminds
her of the sailor in Jaws, what was his name, Quint. “You never know when you might find a good creature feature, babe. Even better than that, Jayney.
Sometimes, in the wee hours, a creature feature finds you.” A black forked tongue flickers from the dragon’s thin-lipped mouth and that one staring eye closes in a slow wink.
Jayne screams. She has never screamed so loudly in her entire life. And even so, she can barely hear herself over the thunderous
boom of the shotgun. Her hands are shaking, but the shot is true. The curved screen of her ten-year-old TV erupts. The back
of the TV explodes outward, blowing capacitators and diodes straight through the wall.
She advances on the television, coming around the sofa.
She racks another shell into the pipe and because she’s still depressing the trigger, the Ithaca booms again, this time punching a hole in the floor in front of the television.
The sudden detonation scares her so badly, she takes a stumbling step backward.
Her calves strike the couch and she abruptly sits down.
Through the droning in her ears, she hears her sister screaming and Ronnie falling out of bed.
Jayne stares at the smoking wreck of her TV, looking for the black ruin of the snake, the thing that spoke to her, but he’s
gone, he’s gone now, which should be a relief, but she’s fighting for breath and there’s a terrible thought cycling through
her head, a paranoid chant, the worst thought of her life, he knows my name, he knows my name, he knows my NAME, he
—knows my name,” Van muttered, coughing weakly.
Arthur came back to himself, sitting on the floor, back to the wall. The haze was clearing—Gwen stood in the open back door,
one foot out on the step—but the room remained blurry with smoke. He swung his head heavily toward Van, who was on all fours
near the oven. Van looked back at him and his eyes were white and hideous, covered with a filmy, semi-transparent, nictating
membrane. He blinked and the membrane was gone.
“You were there too?” Arthur asked him.
That was how it seemed to him. He had not had a vision—it was more powerful than that. For a time he had simply left the kitchen
and gone to live in Jayne Nighswander’s head. The inside of her head was a dreadful place to find oneself, about the worst
place he had ever been. Prison would be better.
Van gazed blankly back at him and Arthur knew he hadn’t heard the question. He was still making his way back from Jayne’s
head to his own. Arthur peered across the room.
“Gwen, did you—?” Arthur began. He didn’t need to finish. The answer was in her face.
“What did we do, Arthur?” she asked. “What in God’s name did we do?”
“I don’t know,” he told her. “But whatever we did, we have to find a way to stop it.”