the dream-kid whose mouth opens on nothing

Gately's fever hands him the theme's icon from the other side of the family: in the grave-dream a sad boy tries to scream something crucial — dig up the head, before it's too late — and his mouth moves and produces no sound at all, the wraith's "nothing come out" met now inside a stranger's dream. The most urgent message in the book, the one the whole endgame turns on, arrives as a mouthed silence and a face of pure panic, the boy holding up the terrible thing and mouthing "Too Late" to a digger who can't hear him and doesn't even know whose head they're after. [sweep — beyond-catalog]