- Stand aside, son.
Scott does. His father runs the wheelbarrow to the top of the cellar stairs. Then, with another grunt, he tips it up, braking the barrow's wheel with one foot when it tries to backroll. The chain hits the stairs with a mighty unmusical clang, splintering two of the risers and then crashing most of the way down. Daddy slings the wheelbarrow to one side and starts down himself, reaching the come-to-rest chain at the halfway mark and kicking it ahead of him the rest of the way.
Scott follows and has just stepped over the first broken riser when he sees Paul lolling sideways from the post, the left side of his face now covered with blood. The corner of his mouth is twitching senselessly. One of his teeth lies on the shoulder of his shirt.
- Wha'd you do to him? Scott nearly screams.
- Whacked him with a board, I had to, his father replies, sounding oddly defensive. He was coming around and you were still out there playin fiddly-fuck in the shed. He'll be all right. You can't hurt em much when they're bad-gunky.
Scott barely hears him. Seeing Paul covered with blood that way has swept what happened in the kitchen from his mind. He tries to dart around Daddy and get to his brother, but Daddy grabs him.
- Not unless you don't want to go on living, Sparky Landon says, and what stops Scott isn't so much the hand on his shoulder as the terrible tenderness he hears in his father's voice. Because he'll smell you if you get right up close. Even unconscious. Smell you and come back.
He sees his younger son looking up at him and nods.
- Oh yeah. He's like a wild animal now. A maneater. And if we can't find a way to hold him we'll have to kill him. Do you understand? Scott nods, then voices one loud sob that sounds like the bray of a donkey. With that same terrible tenderness, Daddy reaches out, wipes snot from his nose, and flicks it on the floor.
- Then stop your whingeing and help me with these chains. We'll use that central support-pole and the table with the printingpress on it. That damn press has got to weight four, five hunnert pounds.
- What if those things aren't enough to hold 'im?
Sparky Landon shakes his head slowly.
- Then I dunno.
16
Lying in bed with his wife, listening to The Antlers creak in the wind, Scott says: "It was enough. For three weeks, at least, it was enough. That's where my brother Paul had his last Christmas, his last New Year's Day, the last three weeks of his life - that stinking cellar." He shakes his head slowly.
She feels the movement of his hair against her skin, feels how damp it is. It's sweat. It's on his face, too, so mixed with tears she can't tell which is which.
"You can't imagine what those three weeks were like, Lisey, especially when Daddy went to work and it was just him and me, it and me - "
"Your father went to work?"
"We had to eat, didn't we? And we had to pay for the Number Two, because we couldn't heat the whole house with wood, although God knows we tried. Most of all, we couldn't afford to make people suspicious. Daddy explained it all to me."
I bet he did, Lisey thinks grimly, but says nothing.
"I tole Daddy to cut him and let the poison out like he always did before and Daddy said it wouldn't do any good, cutting wouldn't help a mite because the bad-gunky had gone to his brain. And I knew it had. That thing could still think, though, at least a little. When Daddy was gone, it would call my name. It would say it had made me a bool, a good bool, and the end was a candybar and an RC. Sometimes it even sounded enough like Paul so I'd go to the cellar door and put my head to the wood and listen, even though I knew it was dangerous.