But he didn't check out, didn't even pass out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.
The end of the world, he thought. Probably for the best.
For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.
Next came fire. A roaring furnace, as if someone had opened a hidden trapdoor and loosed Hell itself on Chester's Mill.
'It's our treat,' he muttered. His pipe pressed against his arm, making a burn he would see and feel later. He lay twitching in the yellow grass with his eyes turned up to glabrous whites that reflected the liirid sunset. 'Our Halloween treat. First the trick... then the treat.'
The fire was becoming a face, an orange version of the bloody ones he'd been looking at in the clouds just before the fit fell on him. It was the face of Jesus. Jestis was scowling at him.
And talking. Talking to him. Telling him that bringing the fire was his responsibility. His. The fire and the... the...
'The purity,' he muttered as he lay in the grass. 'No... the purification.'
Jesus didn't look so mad now. And He was fading. Why? Because The Chef had understood. First came the pink stars; then came the purifying fire; then the trial would end.
The Chef stilled as the seizure passed into the first real sleep he'd had in weeks, perhaps months. When he woke up, it was full dark f- every trace of red gone from the sky. He was chilled to the bonej but not damp.
Under the Dome, dew no longer fell.
12
While The Chef was observing the face of Christ in that evening's infected sunset, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell was sitting on her couch and trying to read. Her generator had quit - or had it ever run at all? She couldn't remember. But she had a gadget called a Mighty Brite light that her sister Rose had tucked into her Christmas stocking last year. She'd never had occasion to use it until now, but it worked just fine. You clamped it to your book and turned it on. Easy-peasy. So light wasn't a problem. The words, unfortunately, were. The words kept squirming around on the page, sometimes even changing places with each other, and Nora Roberts's prose, ordinarily crystal clear, made absolutely no sense.Yet Andrea kept trying, because she could think of nothing else to do.
The house stank, even with the windows open. She was suffering diarrhea and the toilet would no longer flush. She was hungry but couldn't eat. She had tried a sandwich around five p.m. - just an inoffensive cheese sandwich - and had thrown it up in the kitchen wastebasket minutes after it was down. A shame, because eating that sandwich had been hard work. She was sweating heavily - had already changed her clothes once, probably should change them again, if she could manage to do it - and her feet kept jittering and jerking.
They don't call it kicking the habit for nothing, she thought. And I'll never make the emergency meeting tonight, if Jim still means to have one.
Considering how her last conversation with Big Jim and Andy Sanders had gone, maybe that was good; if she showed up, they'd just bully her some more. Make her do things she didn't want to do. Best she stay away until she was clear of this... this...
'This shit', she said, and brushed her damp hair out of her eyes. 'This f**king shit in my system.'
Once she was herself again, she would stand up to Jim Rennie. It was long overdue. She would do it in spite of her poor aching back, which was such a misery without her OxyContin (but not the white-hot agony she had expected - that was a welcome surprise). Rusty wanted her to take methadone. Methadone, for God's sake! Heroin under an alias!
If you're thinking about going cold turkey, don't, he had told her. You're apt to have seizures.
But he'd said it could take ten days his way, and she didn't think she could wait that long. Not with this awful Dome over the town. Best to get it over with. Having come to this conclusion, she had flushed all of her pills - not just the methadone but a few last OxyContin pills she'd found in the back of her nightstand drawer - down the toilet. That had been just two flushes before the toilet gave up the ghost, and now she sat here shivering and trying to convince herself she'd done the right thing.
It was the only thing, she thought. That kind of takes the right and wrong out oj it.