He will never understand why his father's acknowledgment of fear makes him feel braver; all he knows is that it does. He walks toward the center-post. He touches the barrel of the hypo inside his pocket one more time as he goes. He reaches the outer arc of turds and steps over it. The next step takes him over the inner ring and into what you might call the thing's den. Here the smell is intense: not the odor of shit or even hair and skin but rather of fur and pelt. The thing has a penis that is bigger than Paul's was. Paul's peach-fuzzy groin has thatched in with the thing's coarse, dense pubic hair, and the feet at the end of Paul's legs (those legs are the only things that still look the same) have a queerly turned-in look, as if the bones in his ankles are warping. Boards left out in the rain, Scott thinks; it's not quite nonsense.
Then his eyes return to the thing's face - to its eyes. The lids are still mostly fallen, and there's still no sign of irises, only bloody whites. The breathing is likewise unchanged; the dirty hands continue to lie limp, the palms up as if in surrender. Yet Scott knows he has entered the red zone. It will not do to hesitate now. The thing will scent him and come awake at any second. This will happen in spite of "the stuff" Daddy put in the hamburger, and so if he can do it, if he can take the thing that has stolen his brother -
Scott continues forward, walking on legs he can now barely feel. Part of his mind is absolutely convinced that he's going to his death. He won't even be able to boom away, not once the Paul-thing takes hold of him. Nevertheless, he steps within range of its grasp, into the most intimate concentration of its wild stench, and puts his hands on its naked, clammy sides. He thinks ( Paul come with me now) and ( Bool Boo'ya Boo'ya Moon sweet water the pool) and for just one heartbreaking heartbroken moment it almost happens. There's the familiar sense of things starting to rush away; up comes the hum of insects and the delicious daytime perfume of the trees on Sweetheart Hill. Then the thing's long-nailed hands are around Scott's neck. It opens its mouth and roars the sounds and smells of Boo'ya Moon away on a draft of carrion breath. To Scott it feels like someone has just shot a flaming boulder onto the delicate forming grid of his...his what? It's not his mind that takes him to that other place, not precisely his mind...and there's no time to think about it further because the thing has got him, it's got him. Everything Daddy was afraid of has come to pass. Its mouth has come unhinged in some nightmarish fashion that confounds sanity, seeming to drop its lower jaw all the way to its ( beastbone) breastbone, contorting the dirty face into something from which every last vestige of Paul - and humanity itself - has disappeared. This is the bad-gunky with its mask off. Scott has time to think It's going to take my whole head in a single bite, like a lollipop. That monstrous mouth yawns, the red eyes sparkle in the naked glow of the hanging lightbulbs, and Scott is going nowhere except to his death. The thing's head draws back far enough to bang the post, then lashes forward.
But Scott has once again forgotten about Daddy. Daddy's hand comes out of the dim, seizes the Paul-thing by the hair, and somehow wrenches the head backward. Then Daddy's other hand appears, thumb curled around the stock of his deer-gun where the stock is thinnest, forefinger hugging the trigger. He socks the gun's muzzle into the shelf of the thing's upslanted chin.
- Daddy, no! Scott shrieks.
Andrew Landon pays no attention, can afford to pay no attention. Although he's gotten a huge handful of the thing's hair, it's ripping free of his fist just the same. Now it's bellowing, and its bellows sound dreadfully like one word.
Like Daddy.
- Say hello to hell, you bad-gunky motherfucker, Sparky Landon says, and pulls the trigger. The .30-06's discharge is deafening in the enclosed space of the cellar; it will ring in Scott's ears for two hours or more. The thing's shaggy backhair flies up, as in a sudden gust of breeze, and a large splash of crimson paints the leaning center-post. The thing's legs give a single crazy cartoon kick and go still. The hands around Scott's neck twitch momentarily tighter and then fall palms-up, flump, onto the dirt. Daddy's arm encircles Scott and lifts him up.
- Are you all right, Scoot? Can you breathe?
- I'm okay, Daddy. Did you have to kill him?
- Are you brainless?
Scott hangs limp in the circle of his father's arm, unable to believe it's happened even though he knew it might. He wishes he could faint. Wishes - a little, anyway - that he could die himself.
Daddy gives him a shake. - He was gonna kill you, wasn't he?
- Y-Y-Yeah.
- You're f**king-A he was. Christ, Scotty, he was rippin his own sweetmother hair out by the roots to get at you. To get at your smoggin throat!
Scott knows this is true, but he knows something else as well. - Lookit 'im, Daddy -
lookit 'im now!
For a moment or two longer he hangs from the circle of his father's arm like a ragdoll or a puppet whose strings have been cut, then Landon slowly lowers him down and Scott knows his father is seeing what Scott wanted him to see: just a boy. Just an innocent boy who has been chained in the cellar by his lunatic father and dogsbody younger brother, then starved until he's rack-thin and covered with sores; a boy who has struggled so pitifully hard for his freedom that he actually moved the steel post and the cruelly heavy table to which he has been chained. A boy who has lived three nightmare weeks as a prisoner down here before finally being shot in the head.
- I see 'im, Daddy says, and the only thing grimmer than his voice is his face.