The Door to December

small. He cried out each time that one of those found him, for it was worse than taking a blow from a fist.
     He was bleeding and bruised. He thought one of the rocks had broken his left wrist.
     The hard music on the slope, a deadly song of pure percussion, changed: The hailstorm patter of upwardly cascading pebbles was now punctuated by heavier thuds and cracks. Those noises were made by the small rocks bounding along the ridge wall to take their whacks at him. He was being stoned to death by something he could not see, and he was no longer praying but was screaming instead. However, even above his screams, he could hear the distant and terrible sound of boulders rolling inexorably toward the top of the ridge.
     The entire slope below seemed to be tearing loose and churning upward, cataclysmically divorcing itself from the crust of the earth, as though divine judgment had required the planet to disperse its substance, and as though the fulfillment of that harsh judgment was beginning here. The ground shook with a series of violent concussions transmitted through the rough granite beneath him, as each bounce of each oncoming boulder generated the energy equivalent to a grenade explosion.
     He was screaming at the top of his lungs now, but he couldn't hear himself above the thunderous roar of the antigravity avalanche. The boulders exploded over the crest and rained down around him with earsplitting force. Splinters of stone broke from them and gouged him, drew more blood, but he was not crushed as he expected. Two, three, half a dozen, ten boulders slammed down around him and piled up above him, though he was not struck by anything other than the shards cast off by each jarring impact.
     Then the rocks were still.
     Tolbeck waited, breathless with terror.
     Gradually, he became aware of the cold again. And the wind.
     Feeling around, he discovered that the boulders had piled on all sides and had stacked up overhead, forming a rude tomb. They were too heavy to be shoved out of the way. There were chinks in the tomb, hundreds of them, and a few admitted the moon's radiant gaze. The wind whistled and moaned and hissed at other openings, but no hole large enough to permit Tolbeck to escape.
     In essence, though air could still reach him, he had been buried alive.
     For a moment his terror swelled, but then he thought of what had happened to McCaffrey and Hoffritz and some of the others, and this death seemed almost merciful. The cold was painful again, as if some rodent with teeth of ice were chewing on his guts and nibbling on his bones. But that would pass, and quickly. In a few more minutes he would grow numb again, and this time the numbness would last. The blood had already begun to drain inward, away from his freezing skin, in a desperate effort to protect vital organs. The blood supply to his brain would be reduced as well, to a minimal maintenance level, and he would become drowsy. He would go to sleep and never wake up. Not so bad. Not as bad as what had been done to Ernie Cooper and the others.
     He relaxed, resigned to death, afraid of it but willing to face it now that he knew it would not be too painful.
     But for the wind, the winter night was silent.
     With great weariness, Tolbeck curled up in his tomb and closed his eyes.
     Something grabbed his nose, pinched and twisted it so hard that tears burst from his eyes.
     He blinked, flailed out, struck empty air.
     Something clawed at his ear. Something unseen.
     'No,' he pleaded.
     Something poked him hard in the right eye, and the pain was so excruciating that he knew he had been blinded. The psychogeist had slipped through the chinks and had joined him in his makeshift tomb of winter-chilled stone. His death would not be easy, after all.
    * * *
    During the night, Laura woke and did not know where she was. A lamp with a cocked shade cast faint amber light, created odd and menacing shadows. She saw a bed beside her own. In it, Dan Haldane was sleeping, fully clothed.
     The motel. They were hiding out, holed up in a motel room.
     Still fuzzy-minded and having trouble keeping her eyes open, she turned over and looked at Melanie, and then she realized what had awakened her. The air temperature was plummeting, and Melanie was squirming weakly under the covers, softly sobbing, murmuring in