Blue-eyed miracle. Was that her mother's or her father's?
"Who gives a rat's ass?" Trisha croaked. "If I get out of this, I'm going to make up some sayings of my own."
Fifty or sixty feet north of the place where she had spent that endless Sunday night and Monday morning, Trisha realized she still had her Walkman in her right hand. She stopped and went carefully and laboriously about the task of getting it clipped to her waistband. Her jeans were absolutely floating on her now, and she could see the sharp jut of her hipbones. Lose a few more pounds and I'll be able to model the latest Paris fashions, she thought. She was just won-dering what to do with the headphone attachment when a sudden rough rattle of distant explosions split the still morning air - it sounded like a puddle of soda being sucked up through a giant straw.
Trisha cried out, and she was not alone in her startle-ment; a number of crows cawed, and a pheasant exploded through the brush in a ruffled whir of indignation.
Trisha stood, wide-eyed, the forgotten earbud headphones penduluming at the end of their cord by her scabby, dirty left ankle. She knew that sound; it was the rattle of backfires through an old muffler. A truck, maybe, or some kid's bucket of rods. There was another road up there. A real road.
She wanted to run and knew she must not. If she did, she would blow out all her energy in one burst. That would be dreadful. To faint away and perhaps die of exposure within actual sound of traffic would be like blowing the save when the opposing team was down to their last strike. Such abom-inations happened, but she would not let it happen to her.
She began to walk instead, forcing herself to move slowly and deliberately, listening all the while for another series of those rattling backfires, or a distant engine, or a horn. There was nothing, nothing at all, and after an hour of walking she began to think she had hallucinated the whole thing.
This hadn't seemed like a hallucination, but...
She topped a rise and looked down. She began coughing again, and more blood flew from her lips, bright in the sun, but Trisha took no notice - did not even put her hand up.
Below her the rutted track she was on ended, T-squaring into a dirt road.
Trisha walked slowly down and stood upon it. She could see no tire tracks - it was hardpan - but there were real ruts here, and no grass growing down the middle. The new road ran at right angles to her road, roughly east and west. And here, at last, Trisha made the right decision. She did not turn west for any other reason than that her head had begun to ache again and she didn't want to be walking directly into the sunshine... but she did turn west. Four miles from where she stood, New Hampshire Route 96, a patched rib-bon of hot-top, ran through the woods. A few cars and a great many pulp-trucks used this road; it was one of the lat-ter which Trisha had heard backing off through its ancient exhaust system as the driver downshifted for Kemongus Hill. The sound had carried better than nine miles through the still morning air.
She began to move again, and with a new feeling of strength. It was perhaps forty-five minutes later that she heard something, distant but unmistakable.
Don't be stupid, you've gotten to a place where anything's mis-takable.
Perhaps so, but...
She cocked her head like the dog on Gramma McFar-land's old records, the ones Gramma kept up in the attic.
She held her breath. She heard the thump of blood in her temples, the wheeze of her breath in her infected throat, the call of birds, the rustle of the breeze. She heard the hum of mosquitoes around her ears... and another hum, as well.
CHAPTER 15
The hum of tires on pavement. Very distant, but there.
Trisha began to cry. "Please don't let me be making it up," she said in a husky voice that was now down to little more than a whisper. "Aw, God, please, don't let me be making that u - "
A louder rustling noise commenced behind her - not the breeze, not this time. Even if she might have convinced her-self (for a few cruddy seconds or so) that it was, what about the snapping sound of branches? And then the grinding, splintering sound of something falling - a small tree, prob-ably, that had been in the way. In Its way. It had let her get this close to rescue, had allowed her to come within actual hearing of the path she had so casually and carelessly lost. It had watched her painful progress, perhaps with amuse-ment, perhaps with some sort of god's compassion that was too terrible to even think about. Now it was through watching, through waiting.
Slowly, both with terror and with a strange sort of calm inevitability, Trisha turned to face the God of the Lost.
Bottom of the Ninth:Save Situation
IT EMERGED from the trees on the left side of the road, and Trisha's first thought was: Is that all? Is that all it ever was?
Grown men would have turned and run from the Ursus americanus which lumbered out of the last screen of bushes - it was a fully grown North American black bear, perhaps four hundred pounds - but Trisha had been prepared for some awful horror torn from the underside of the night.
There were leaves and burdocks caught in its shiny fur, and held in one hand - yes, it had a hand, the clawed rudiment of one, at least - was a branch from which most of the bark had been stripped. It held this like a woodsy wand or scepter. It came to the middle of the road, seeming almost to paddle from side to side. It remained on all fours for a moment, and then, with a soft grunt, rose to a stand on its rear legs. When it did, Trisha saw it was not a black bear at all. She had been right the first time. It looked a little like a bear, but it was really the God of the Lost, and it had come for her.
It peered at her with black eyes that were not eyes at all 205. but only sockets. Its tan muzzle scented at the air, and then it raised the broken branch it held to its mouth. The muzzle wrinkled back, revealing a double row of huge, green-stained teeth. It sucked at the end of its branch, reminding her of a little kid with a lollipop. Then, with great delibera-tion, the teeth clenched upon it and tore it in two. The woods had fallen silent, and she heard the sound its teeth made very clearly, a sound like splintering bone. It was the sound her arm would make, if that thing bit down on it.
When it bit down on it.
It stretched its neck, its ears flicking, and Trisha saw it moved in its own small dark galaxy of minges and noseeums, just as she did. Its shadow, long in the morning light, stretched almost to Trisha's scuffed sneakers. They were no more than sixty feet apart.
It had come for her.
Run, called the God of the Lost. Run from me, race me to the road. This bear's body is slow, not yet filled with a summer's forage; pickings have been slim. Run. Perhaps I'll let you live.
Yes, run! she thought, and then, immediately came the cold voice of the tough tootsie: You can't run. You can barely stand up, sweetheart.
The thing that wasn't a bear stood looking at her, ears flicking at the bugs which surrounded its big triangular head, sides shining with healthy fur. It held the stump of its stick in one clawed paw. Its jaws moved with ruminative slowness, and little shredded splinters dribbled out between its teeth. Some fell, some stuck to its muzzle. Its eyes were sockets lined with minuscule buzzing life - maggots and wriggling baby flies, mosquito larvae and God knew what else, a living soup that made her think of the swamp she had walked through.
I killed the deer. I watched you, and drew my circle around you.
Run from me. Worship me with your feet and I may let you live.
The woods lay silent all about them, breathing their sour urgent scent of green. Her breath rasped softly in and out of her sick throat. The thing that looked like a bear gazed down on her haughtily from its seven feet of height. Its head was in the sky and its claws held the earth. Trisha looked back at it, up at it, and understood what she must do.
She must close.
It's God's nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth, Tom had told her. And what was the secret to closing? Establishing who was better. You could be beaten... but you must not beat yourself.
First, though, you had to create that stillness. The one that came from the shoulders and spun about the body until it was a cocoon of certainty. You could be beaten, but you must not beat yourself. You couldn't serve up a fat pitch and you couldn't run.
"Icewater," she said, and the thing standing in the middle of the dirt road tilted its head so it looked like an enormous listening dog. It cocked its ears forward. Trisha reached up, turned her cap the right way around, and pulled the curved visor low on her brow. Wearing it the way Tom Gordon did.
Then she pivoted her body so it was facing the right side of the road and took a step forward so her legs were apart, left leg pointed at the bear-thing. Her face remained turned toward it as she stepped; she fixed her gaze on the eyesock-ets looking through the dancing cloud of bugs. It all comes down to this, Joe Castiglione said; everybody fasten your seat-belts.
"Come on, if you're coming," Trisha called to it. She pulled the Walkman off the waistband of her jeans, yanked the cord free, and dropped the earbuds at her feet. The Walkman went behind her back and she began to turn it in her fingers, looking for the right grip. "I've got icewater in my veins and I hope you freeze on the first bite. Come on, you busher! Batter-fucking-up!"
The bear-thing let go of its stick and then dropped back onto all fours. It pawed at the hardpan surface of the road like a restless bull, digging up clods of earth with its claws, and then moved toward her, waddling with surprising, deceptive speed. As it came, it laid its ears flat against its skull. Its muzzle wrinkled back, and from within its mouth Trisha heard a droning sound which she recognized at once: not bees but wasps. It had taken the shape of a bear on its outside, but on the inside it was truer; inside it was full of wasps. Of course it was. Hadn't the blackrobe by the stream been its prophet?
Run, it said as it came toward her, its big hindquarters swaying from side to side. It was weirdly graceful, leaving clawed prints behind and a scatter of droppings on the sur-face of the packed earth. Run, it's your last chance.
Except it was stillness that was her last chance.
Stillness and maybe a good hard curveball.
Trisha put her hands together, coming to the set. The Walkman no longer felt like a Walkman; it felt like a base-ball.
There were no Fenway Faithful here, rising to their feet in the Boston Church of Baseball; no rhythmic clapping; no umpires and no batboy. There was only her and the green stillness and the hot morning sunshine and a thing that looked like a bear on the outside and was full of wasps on the inside. Only stillness and now she understood how someone like Tom Gordon must feel, standing in the set position in the silence of the cyclone's core, where all pressure falls to zero and all sounds are shut out and it all comes down to this: fasten your seatbelts.
She stood in the set position and let the stillness spin out around her. Yes, it came from the shoulders. Let it eat her; let it beat her. It could do both. But she would not beat herself.
And I won't run.
It stopped before her and stretched its neck up so its face approached her face as if to kiss. There were no eyes, only two squirming circles, wormhole universes filled with breeding bugs. They hummed and squirmed and jostled each other for position in the tunnels that bored toward the god's unimaginable brain. Its mouth opened and she saw that its throat was lined with wasps, plump ungainly poison factories crawling over the remains of a chewed stick and the pinkish lump of deergut that served as its tongue. Its breath was the muddy stink of the bog.
She saw these things, noted them briefly, then looked beyond. Veritek flashed the sign. Soon she would make her pitch, but for now she was still. She was still. Let the batter wait, anticipate, lose his timing; let him wonder, begin to think his guess about the curve was wrong.
The bear-creature sniffed delicately all around her face.
Bugs crawled in and out of its nostrils. Noseeums fluttered between the two locked faces, one furry and the other smooth. Minges flicked against the damp surfaces of Trisha's open, unblinking eyes. The thing's rudiment of a face was shifting and changing, always shifting and changing - it was the face of teachers and friends; it was the face of parents and brothers; it was the face of the man who might come and offer you a ride when you were walking home from school. Stranger-danger was what they had been taught in the first grade: stranger-danger. It stank of death and disease and everything random; the hum of its poisoned works was, she thought, the real Subaudible.
It rose up on its back legs again, swaying a little as if to beast-music only it could hear, and then it swatted at her .. . yet it was playful, only playful as yet, missing her face by several inches. The passage of its earth-darkened claws breezed the hair off her forehead. The hair settled back light as milkweed puffs but Trisha did not move. She stood in the set position, looking through the bear's underbelly, where a bluish-white blaze of fur grew in a shape like a lightning bolt.
Look at me.
No.
Look at me!
It was as if unseen hands had grasped her beneath the angles of her jaw. Slowly, not wanting to but helpless to resist, Trisha raised her head. She looked up. She looked into the bear-thing's empty eyes and understood it meant to kill her no matter what. Courage was not enough. But so what?
If a little courage was all you had, so what? It was time to close.
Without thinking about it, Trisha brought her left foot back against her right one and went into her motion - not the one her Dad had taught her in the back yard but the one she'd learned on TV, watching Gordon. When she stepped forward again and raised her right hand to her right ear and then beyond - really rearing back because this would be no lazy offspeed pitch, no eephus; this was going to be the heartbreaker, the serious bent cheese - the bear-thing took a clumsy, overbalanced step backward. Did the squirming things which lent it its dim vision register the baseball in her hand as a weapon? Or was it the threatening, aggressive motion which startled it - the raised hand, the stepping for-ward when she should have been stepping back and turning to run? It didn't matter. The thing grunted in what might have been perplexity. A little cloud of wasps puffed out of its mouth like living vapor. It waved one furry foreleg in an effort to keep its balance. As it struggled to stay on its feet, a shot rang out.
The man in the woods that morning, the first human being to see Trisha McFarland in nine days, was too shaken to even try lying to the police about why he had been in the woods with a high-powered autoload rifle; he'd been in the market for an out-of-season deer. His name was Travis Her-rick, and he didn't believe in spending money on food if he didn't have to. There were too many other important things to spend money on - lottery tickets and beer, for instance.
In any case, he was never tried for anything, or even fined, and he did not kill the creature he saw standing in front of the little girl, who faced it so still and so brave-like.
