Alan pulled free of its grasp and immediately rolled away from the door. Leaving his wheelchair behind, he rose to his hands and knees and scrambled across the foyer floor toward the living room.

He almost made it.

Two strong, healthy legs would have got him to safety. He cursed his legs as they slumped beneath him, slowing him down. His right arm was letting him down too. He had to depend on his arms for a good part of his speed, but the right one was wounded. His left hand was just inches from the living room carpet when he felt something coil about his ankle. Even then, a good strong kick might have freed him, but his legs didn't have a good strong kick in them. He realized then that he should have tried for the stairs. If he'd have been able to reach the newel post of the bannister he'd have had something to hold on to.

As the tentacle dragged him back, Alan clawed at the marble floor, looking for a crack, a seam, anything to hold on to, but there was nothing. It had been too expertly installed. He kicked feebly with his free leg but then felt another tentacle wrap around that ankle and worm its way up to his thigh.

And now he was being dragged back at a faster rate.

He spotted his hatchet where he'd dropped it. He tried to reach it. He stretched his good arm and fingers to the limit, until he thought his shoulder would dislocate, but could not get near it. Like a departing sailor gazing at his home port from the stern of a ship, he watched the hatchet slip further and further out of reach.

Next came his wheelchair. He grabbed at that, caught hold of a foot rest but it simply rolled with him. He clutched it because it was all he had to hold on to.

And then other tentacles, Alan couldn't count how many, looped and coiled around his legs, and he couldn't kick free now, even if he'd had two good legs. He was helpless. Utterly helpless.

I am going to die.

Although he never stopped struggling against the inexorable tug of the tentacles, the realization was a sudden cold weight in his heart. Fear and dread shot through him, but not panic. Mostly there was sadness. Tears sprang into his eyes. Tears for all the things he'd never do, like walking again, or watching Jeffy grow up, or growing old with Sylvia, but most of all, for the way he'd be dying. He'd never feared the moment, but then he'd always imagined the moment arriving when he was gray and withered and bedfast and that he'd welcome it with open arms.

The tentacles dragged his legs through the opening at the bottom of the door. The jagged wood raked the backs of his thighs and then dug into the flesh of his hips and buttocks as he became wedged into the opening.

He wasn't going to fit through. At least not in one piece.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, I don't want to die like this!

And suddenly amid the fear and the grief and the pain he realized that he had to die a certain way. He'd been given no choice in how death was coming to him but he had something to say about how he met it.

Silently.

He groaned as the traction on his legs increased and the ligaments and tendons and skin and muscles began to stretch past their tolerances.

Quiet!

He reached up and grabbed the thin cotton blanket from the wheelchair and stuffed it deep into his mouth, gagging as the fabric brushed the back of his throat.

Good. Gag. Then he couldn't scream. And he mustn't scream.

Oh God, the pain!

He had to be quiet because if he let the pain and fear out in a scream, Sylvia would wake and come for him…he knew her, knew if she thought he was in danger, she wouldn't hesitate, she'd charge, she'd wade through a storm of bugs and tentacles to get to him…

Alan screeched silently into his blanket-stuffed mouth as the ball at the head of his right femur twisted free and dislocated from the hip socket with a grinding explosion of agony, and screamed again as the left one followed.

Quiet, quiet, QUIET!

…because it was too late for him and if she came upstairs they'd have her too, and after they got Sylvia, they'd get Jeffy and then Glaeken wouldn't be able to assemble whatever it was he had to assemble and the Enemy would win it all and the bugs would feast on everybody…he just prayed he'd bought Sylvia and Jeffy enough time…prayed his body would stay wedged in the opening and block the bugs out for a while because soon Toad Hall would be swarming with them and if they had enough time they'd gnaw through the cellar door and all this agony would be for nothing…so he had to hold on and keep quiet for just a few more seconds because in just a few more seconds it would be over and…

Alan's blanket drank the howl that burst from his throat as his right leg ripped free of his body and slid away into the night and yet he smiled within as he felt his consciousness draining away in the warm red stream pumping from his ruptured femoral artery, smiled because there's nothing quieter than a dead man.

WINS-AM

dead air

"Alan?"

Sylvia awoke with a start and stared wildly around her, momentarily disoriented in the darkness. Then she saw the candle flickering on the ping-pong table and remembered she was in the basement. She reached out a hand and found Jeffy's slumbering form curled next to her on the old Castro convertible.

She squinted at the luminous dial on her watch. 7:30. Had she been asleep that long? She must have been more tired than she'd thought. At least the night had gone quickly. Sunrise was due at 9:10. Another long, long night was drawing to a close. She stretched. Soon Alan would be knocking on the upstairs door, telling them all to rise and—

Then she heard it.

On the upstairs door—scratching. She leapt out of bed and hurried to the foot of the steps to listen again.

No—not scratching. Gnawing.

Trembling, chewing her upper lip, Sylvia crept up the stairs, telling herself with each tread that she was wrong, that it couldn't be, that her ears had to be playing dirty tricks on her. Half-way up she caught the smell and abruptly ran out of denials. She rushed the rest of the way to the door where she pressed the flats of her hands against the solid oak panels and felt the vibrations as countless teeth scored the outer surface.

Alan! Dear God, where's Alan?

She turned the knob and gripped it with both hands as she leaned her shoulder against the door. Bugs in Toad Hall. She had to see. She could hear them and smell them but she had to see them to believe there were that many of the horrors in her house. She edged the door open a crack and saw a sliver of the hallway. The creatures immediately attacked the opening and she slammed the door shut. But she'd seen enough.

Bugs. The hall was choked with them—floating, drifting, darting, bumping, hanging on the walls.

Sylvia began to tremble. If the halls had been taken over by the bugs, where was Alan? To invade Toad Hall they had to get past Alan.

"Alan?" she cried, her face against the vibrating door.

Maybe he got to the movie room and locked himself in there. Maybe he was safe.

But those were only words. She could find no place in her heart and mind that truly believed them. A sob built in her throat and ripped free as a scream.

"ALAN!"