CHAPTER SIX

AT NINE-THIRTY P.M. a monster norther had broken, the snow blowing thick and wild, blocking out the night sky. The wind whooped and yowled, snapping limbs and branches like toothpicks, the gale bending the pines-as if it were one mighty hairbrush combing through the landscape.

Ralph plogged through the storm, the snow heaped on his shoulders and on the gifts he carried in the duffel. He didn't seem to mind the storm at all. He pushed through the blizzard warmed by the prospect of Hallie's whiskey, his veins buzzing in anticipation. He hummed a tune when his mind suddenly blanked out on him, the melody with it, so he switched over to limericks, crooning them out loud so he could hear the rhyme above the storm.

"There was a young lady from Sydney. Who could take it right up to her kidney. But a man from Quebec, shoved it up to her neck, he had a long one now, din't he?"

He jackknifed forward in the snow, the gifts going with him.

He began to smother and pant, trying to push himself up, his hands going through the snow until it packed enough to give him leverage.

He came up breathing hard and fast through his nose and through his mouth. He brushed the snow off his face, squinting to find his walking stick. A wild, panicky thought of what would happen if he couldn't find his stick prickled his scalp. I could freeze out here, get covered over in a drift until spring thaws out and there.

But it wasn't the walking stick he came up with. It was the Commando Cody raygun. He stared down dumbly at the toy, flicking the trigger, the gun whizzing, sparking death rays in the darkness.

"Fuckin' gizmo crapola—"

In the distant, fifty, sixty yards from Ralph, something breached through the snow. It looked like a humungous white bubble that pulsated for a moment then bowled out, curving, moving with a deadly destination. The something humped under the snow, burrowing through the white sea of flakes at a sickening speed.

But Ralph didn't seem to take notice of what was heading for him. He was too busy searching for the walking stick (not even an inch from his foot if he took the time to look behind him), cursing the snow, cursing his leg and the goddamnsumabitch motor that decided to fall when he was under it, and swearing to God in general.

And something began to careen toward Ralph now like some unleashed beast. He was oblivious to it.

Oblivious to the horns that began to pierce the surface of the snow. The fleshless burrs of razor sharp bone bleached of color, whiter than the pure driven wall of flakes it cut through.

Oblivious to the unspeakable thing that began to rise out of the ground.

And with it, suffocating the fury of the storm, was the wild jingling of bells.

Ralph turned, suddenly aware.

He caught a fleeting glimpse of something. A spectre, small and familiar, behind the storm's curtain, materialized just long enough for him to know.

A glint of recognition in his eyes. A drop of sweat froze just under his nose.

Ralph's lips formed a word to describe it but no sound came out. It couldn't. There wasn't any air in his throat. He was sucking it in below his nostrils, below his mouth, through a hole in his neck. No matter how he tried he couldn't get air to his lungs. He inhaled and inhaled but no oxygen filled his lungs.

Only blood.

Pouring into his throat through the hole so when he exhaled it bubbled out of him in a frothing red wash.

Ralph threw his hands over his throat to plug the hole. The Commando Cody raygun plopped softly in a drift. A savage streak of blood splattered across it coloring the snow red as holly berries.

Ralph grounded his tongue with his teeth. He gagged as the air rushed out of him. He shook and trembled, then came to a frozen stop between spasms when he saw it coming at him again. He put out a hand to stop it, waving it in front of him as if he were polishing the air. It went hard and deep, biting into his stomach, whiskey and blood shooting up in a soured column from his throat. He opened his mouth to scream but nothing could work itself up but more blood and a horrible tune that came whistling out through the lips formed by the gash in his throat.

Even if a scream did manage to escape it wouldn't have mattered. There was no one within two square miles to hear him. And even if there was, the crazy clanking of bells would have drowned out any scream Ralph could have come up it.

The bells grew deafening, spiraling into the howling storm until they became an echo of the shrieking wind.

Ralph struggled for a long time to fill his lungs that had emptied through the wreckage of his throat.

The snow fell silently down on top of him.

The bells erupted, reverberatingggggggggggggggggggggg...

Corey's eyes snapped open. He gasped in the blackness like a drowning man.

The bell sounded again. This time it took form. The telephone. . .

Reality began to flash back on him, his eyes a collander, one image at a time sifting through. He was in his house, in his bed, in his pajamas. But something still had a hold over him, something that made sleep impossible.

He heard the lock on his parent's bedroom door open, heard his mother coming down the stairs, going to the kitchen to answer the phone. She picked it up in the middle of the fifth ring.

Her hello was full of sleep, barely discernable. Corey tried to decipher what she was saying but could only catch the tone of the words.

She hung up. Corey knew she was lingering by the phone, that she hadn't moved from the kitchen. Then she did and he knew she was heading toward his bedroom.

Corey slid back down into the streets, pulled the comforter up over him.

Margaret opened the door and paused there in the doorway. She whispered his name. "...Corey..."

He came up and saw her there, moonlight splintering across her back, casting her in solid shadow.

"Ma..."

She came, sat down on the edge of the mattress next to him. She put her arms around his head and Corey could feel his mother's voice touch his face when she said, "The Sheriff's office just called. Your daddy's dead." It leaped out of Corey, all his breath bursting out in a jumble of words, all at an hysterical pitch that almost blew Margaret off the bed. Because he knew. He had seen it with his own eyes.

"Chanks got him, ma!"

"What — Corey, what is it? Chanks? Chanks got who?"

And there was no holding back now, the truth had to come out. Every muscle in his body was trembling. His face was burning. "He got pa! Pa was bad and Chanks ate him'up!

"Easy, boy—who's Chanks?"

"He's a monster, ma! Pa told me about him! He got Willalee, and now he got pa!"

It's the shock, Margaret realized. She shouldn't have told him. It was much too sudden. She should have waited. "No one got, Willalee...your, baby brother died of crib death, Corey. And it was no monster that killed your daddy tonight. No fairy tale he told you that put him in his grave."

"No! Pa was hurtin you and Chanks came up outta the ground and got him!"

Corey was scaring her now. "That's a story, son. Your father must have made it up. Don't go believin' any of that. It just ain't true."

But Ralph was dead. That much was true. She didn't have to see his stiff and frozen body to know. But to hear it — that sounded as unbelievable as Corey's story.

"The sheriff is gonna send a car to come pick us up. I want you to be ready when he gets here."

Corey pulled his face away from Margaret. He watched her move away from him, float away from him, her feet hidden under her robe.

Ma doesn't believe me. Ma doesn't know. Ma didn't see. Ma thinks it's all made up.

Corey pulled the cord of the lamp on the night stand.

It was caught in the cone of light under the lamp. Corey blinked twice to make sure of what he was seeing. But he still wasn't sure.

The Commando Cody raygun sparkled there.

How? Did ma put it there when I was asleep? He reached for it.

The gun began to move.

Corey reared back spastically. The gun began to vibrate more intensely, rattling against the lamp. Then the lamp began to shake, spreading down to the nightstand, down through the four oak legs that started tapping out a warning in Morse code. DOT-DASH-DOT. . .DASH-DASH-DOT...DOT-DOT-DASH

Corey didn't know Morse but he knew what the tapping spelled out.

A low faraway rumble began to build. The lamp toppled, falling, rolling, the light hitting Corey at a crazy angle. The walls cracked, rivened. The stuff on the dresser skidded across the floor, the drawers popping open. Corey was terrified.

"MaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaI!!"

The whole bed was shaking violently now, the entire room beginning to quake. The rumble grew numbing—like the hum of a high-tension tower charged with thousands of volts of power. Then, from somewhere in the distance, over the roar of the rumble, Corey heard it. That dreaded sound that woke him, that heralded all the nightmares the world could conjure up.

The sound of jangling bells.

The window shade rattled up. And Corey saw, through the name Ralph had scrawled there, the same humping burrowing horror that had come for his old man, racing headlong towards him.

The rumble was excruciating. Corey covered his ears but only for a moment because then he was covering his eyes as the slotted pine of his bedroom floor began to split, to yawn open, and he didn't have to see what IT was, because he knew, and he also knew why IT was coming for him, and only wished he could die right now, right this very second, just stop breathing and die, before he saw those horns rise out of the floor, before he felt those ice claws whisk him off his bed, before he felt his brains sucked out through his eyes.

Before Chanks sat down and had himself a feast.

And when he finally worked his tortured mouth open to scream all that came out was the jingling and the tinkling, the clamor and the clanging, the rhyming and the chiming of the bells.