Her dreams were vivid but fragmentary: a kind of mental meteor shower. The only one she remembered with any clarity was the one she had been having just before she woke up in the middle of the night, coughing and cold, lying on her side with her knees drawn all the way up to her chin and shivering all over.
In this dream she and Tom Gordon were in an old meadow which was now running to bushes and young trees, mostly birches. Tom was standing by a splintery post that came up to about the height of his hip. On top of it was an old ringbolt, rusty red. Tom was flicking this back and forth between his fingers. He was wearing his warmup jacket over his uniform. The gray road uniform. He would be in Oakland tonight. She had asked Tom about "that pointin thing." She knew, of course, but asked anyway. Possibly because Walt from Framingham had wanted to know, and a cellular El Dopo like Walt wouldn't believe any little girl lost in the woods; Walt would want it straight from the closer's mouth.
"I point because it's God's nature to come on in the bot-tom of the ninth," Tom said. He spun the ringbolt on top of the post back and forth between his fingers. Back and forth, back and forth. Who do you call when your ringbolt's busted? Dial 1-800-54-RINGBOLT, of course. "Especially when the bases are loaded and there's only one out." Some-thing in the woods chattered at that, perhaps in derision.
The chattering grew louder and louder until Trisha opened her eyes in the dark and realized it was the sound of her own teeth.
She got slowly to her feet, wincing as every part of her body protested. Her legs were the worst, closely followed by her back. A gust of wind struck her - not a puff this time but a gust - and almost knocked her over. She wondered how much weight she had lost. A week of this and you'll be able to put a string around me and fly me like a kite, she thought. She started to laugh at that, and the laugh turned into another coughing fit. She stood with her hands planted on her legs just above her knees, her head down, coughing. The cough started deep in her chest and came out of her mouth in a series of harsh barks. Great. Just great. She put the inside of her wrist to her forehead and couldn't tell if she had a fever or not.
Walking slowly with her legs spread far apart - her butt chafed less when she did that - Trisha went back to the pines and broke off more branches, this time meaning to pile them on top of her like blankets. She took one armload back to her bed, got a second, and stopped halfway between the trees and the needle-floored dip she'd chosen to sleep in.
Slowly, she turned in a complete circle under the blazing four o'clock stars.
"Leave me alone, can't you?" she cried, and that started her coughing again. When she got the cough under control, she said it again, but in a lower voice: "Can't you quit it?
Can't you just cut me a break, let me be?"
Nothing. No sound but the soughing of the wind through the pines... and then a grunt. Low and soft and not even remotely human. Trisha stood where she was with her arms around her fragrant, sappy load of branches. Her skin broke out in hard little bumps. Where had that grunt come from?
This side of the stream? The other side? From the stand of pines? She had a horrible idea, almost a certainty, that it was the pines. The thing which had been watching her was in the pines. As she harvested branches to cover herself with, its face had been perhaps less than three feet from her own; its claws, the ones which had torn into the trees and ripped both deer apart, had perhaps hovered within inches of her own hands as she bent the branches back and forth, first splin-tering them and then breaking them.
Trisha started coughing again, and that got her moving.
She dropped the branches in a helter-skelter pile and crawled among them without any attempt to create order out of their jumbled chaos. She winced and moaned a little when one of them poked the place on her hip where she had been stung, then lay still. She sensed it coming now, slipping out of the pines and finally coming for her. The tough tootsie's special thing, the wasp-priest's God of the Lost. You could call it whatever you wanted - the lord of dark places, the emperor of understairs, every kid's worst nightmare. Whatever it was, it had finished teasing her; it was all done playing games. It would simply tear away the branches beneath which she was cowering and eat her alive.
Coughing and shivering, all sense of reality and rational-ity gone - temporarily insane, in fact - Trisha put her arms over the back of her head and waited to be torn open by the thing's claws and stuffed into its fangy mouth. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke in the early light of Tuesday morning, both of her arms were asleep from the elbows down and at first she couldn't bend her neck at all; she had to walk with her head cocked slightly to one side.