I've thought about that a lot, Lisey, and I've come to two conclusions. First, that whatever got Paul was real, and that it was a kind of possessing being that might have had some perfectly mundane basis, maybe even viral or bacteriological. Second, it was not the long boy. Because that thing isn't like anything we can understand. It's its own thing, and better not thought of at all. Ever. In any case, our hero, little Scott Landon, finally goes back to sleep, and in that farmhouse out in the Pennsylvania countryside, things go on as they had been for yet a few days longer, with Daddy lying on the couch like a ripe and smelly cheese and Scott cooking the meals and washing the dishes (only he says "warshing the dishees") and the sleet ticking off the windows and the country sounds of WWVA filling the house - Donna Fargo, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty,
"Country" Charlie Pride, and - of course - Ole Hank. Then one afternoon around three o'clock a brown Chevrolet sedan with U.S. GYPSUM printed on the sides comes up the long driveway, sending out fans of slush on either side. Andrew Landon spends most of his time on the living room couch now, sleeps on it at night and has been lying on it all day, and Scott would never have guessed the old man could still move as fast as he does when he hears that car, which is clearly not the postman's old Ford truck or the meter-reader's van. Daddy is up in a flash and at the window that looks out on the left side of the front porch. He's bending over with the dirty white curtain twitched a little to one side. His hair is standing up in the back and Scott, who is standing in the kitchen doorway with a plate in one hand and a dishtowel over his shoulder, can see the big puffy purple place on the side of Daddy's face where he fell down the stairs that time, and he can see how one leg of Daddy's Dickies is hoicked up almost to the knee. He can hear Dick Curless on the radio singing "Tombstone Every Mile" and he can see the murder in Daddy's eyes and in the way his lips are pulled down so his lower teeth show. Daddy whirls from the window and the leg of his pants falls back down into place and he strides across to the closet like a crazy scissors and opens it just as the engine of the Chevrolet stops and Scott hears the car door open out there, somebody coming to death's door and not knowing it, not having the slightest sweetmother idea, and Daddy takes the. 30-06 out of the closet, the very one he used to end Paul's life. Or the life of the thing inside of him. Shoes clomp up the porch steps. There are three steps, and the middle one squeaks as it has forever, world without end, amen.
"Daddy, no," I say in a low, pleading voice as Andrew "Sparky" Landon goes toward the closed door in his new and oddly graceful scissors walk, the rifle held up to high port in front of him. I'm still holding the plate but now my fingers feel numb and I think, I'm going to drop it. Mothersmuck'll fall to the floor and break, and that man out there, the last sounds he's ever going to hear in his life are a breaking plate and Dick Curless on the radio singing about the Hainesville Woods in this stinking forgotten farmhouse. "Daddy, no," I say again, pleading with all my heart and trying to put that plea into my eyes.
Sparky Landon hesitates, then stands against the wall so that if the door opens (when the door opens), it will hide him. And a series of knuckle-raps comes on that door even as he does so. I have no trouble reading the words that form silently on my father's whisker-framed lips: Then get rid of him, Scoot.
I go to the door. I switch the plate I meant to dry from my right hand to my left one and open the door. I see the man standing there with terrible clarity. The U.S. Gypsum man isn't very tall - at five-foot-seven or -eight, he isn't really that much taller than I am - but he looks like the very apotheosis of authority in his black billed cap, his khaki pants with their razor-sharp creases and his khaki shirt showing beneath his heavy black car-coat, which is half-unzipped. He's wearing a black tie and carrying some sort of little case, not quite a briefcase (it will be another few years before I learn the word portfolio). He's kind of fat and clean- shaven, with pink and shining cheeks. There are galoshes on his feet, the kind that have zippers rather than buckles. I look at the whole picture and think that if ever there was a man who looked meant to be shot on a porch in the country, it's this man. Even the single hair curling from one of his nostrils proclaims that yes, this is the guy, all right, the very one sent to take a bullet from the scissors-man's gun. Even his name, I think, is the kind you read in the paper under a headline screaming MURDERED.
"Hello, son," he says, "you must be one of Sparky's boys. I'm Frank Halsey, from the plant. Head of Personnel." And he holds out his hand.
I think I won't be able to take it, but I do. And I think I won't be able to talk, but I can do that, too. And my voice sounds normal. I'm all that stands between this man and a bullet in the heart or the head, so it better. "Yes, sir, I am. I'm Scott."
"Good to know you, Scott," he says, looking past me into the living room, and I try to see what he's seeing. I tried to pick it up the day before, but God knows what kind of job I did; I'm just a smucking kid, after all. "We've kind of been missing your father."
Well, I think, you're awful close to missing everything, Mr. Halsey. Your job, your wife; your kids, if you got em.