Midnight (42 page)

35

Shaddack remained in Paula Parkins’s garage through most of the afternoon.

Twice he put up the big door, switched on the van’s engine, and pulled into the driveway to better monitor Moonhawk’s progress on the VDT. Both times, satisfied with the data, he rolled back into the garage and lowered the door again.

The mechanism was clicking away. He had designed it, built it, wound it up, and pushed the start button. Now it could go through its paces without him.

He passed the hours sitting behind the wheel, daydreaming about the time when the final stage of Moonhawk would be completed and all the world would be brought into the fold. When no Old People existed, he would have redefined the word “power,” for no man before him in all of history would have known such total control. Having remade the species, he could then program its destiny to his own desires. All of humankind would be one great hive, buzzing industriously, serving his vision. As he daydreamed, his erection grew so hard that it began to ache dully.

Shaddack knew many scientists who genuinely seemed to believe that the purpose of technological progress was to improve the lot of humanity, lift the species up from the mud and carry it on eventually, to the stars. He saw things differently. To his way Of thinking, the sole purpose of technology was to concentrate Power in his hands. Previous would-be remakers of the world had relied on political power, which always ultimately meant the power of the legal gun. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others had sought power through intimidation and mass murder, wading to the throne through lakes of blood, and all of them had ultimately failed to achieve what silicon circuitry was in the process of bestowing upon Shaddack. The pen was not mightier, than the sword, but the microprocessor was mightier than vast armies.

If they knew what he had undertaken and what dreams of conquest still preoccupied him, virtually all other men of science would say that he was bent, sick, deranged. He didn’t care. They were wrong, of course. Because they didn’t realize who he was. The child of the moonhawk. He had destroyed those who had posed as his parents, and he had not been discovered or punished, which was proof that the rules and laws governing other men were not meant to apply to him. His true mother and father were spirit forces, disembodied, powerful. They had protected him from punishment because the murders that he’d committed in Phoenix so long ago were a sacred offering to his real progenitors, a statement of his faith and trust in them. Other scientists would misunderstand him because they could not know that all of existence centered around him, that the universe itself existed only because
he
existed, and that if he ever died—which was unlikely—then the universe would simultaneously cease to exist. He was the center of creation. He was the only man who mattered. The great spirits had told him this. The great spirits had whispered these truths in his ear, waking and sleeping, for more than thirty years.

Child of the moonhawk …

As the afternoon waned, he became ever more excited about the approaching completion of the first stage of the project, and he could no longer endure temporary exile in the Parkins garage. Though it had seemed wise to absent himself from places in which Loman Watkins might find him, he was having increasing difficulty justifying the need to hide out. Events at Mike Peyser’s house last night no longer seemed so catastrophic to him, merely, a minor setback; he was confident that the problem of the regressives would eventually be solved. His genius resulted from the direct line between him and higher spiritual forces, and no difficulty was beyond resolution when the great spirits desired his success The threat he’d felt from Watkins steadily diminnished in his memory, too, until the police chief’s promise to find him seemed empty, even pathetic.

He was the child of the moonhawk. He was surprised that he had forgotten such an important truth and had run scared. Of course, even Jesus had spent his time in the garden, briefly frightened, and had wrestled with his demons. The Parkins garage was, Shaddack saw, his own Gethsemane, where he had taken refuge to cast out those last doubts that plagued him.

He was the child of the moonhawk.

At four-thirty he put up the garage door.

He started the van and pulled down the driveway.

He was the child of the moonhawk.

He turned onto the county road and headed toward town.

He was the child of the moonhawk, heir to the crown of light, and at midnight he would ascend the throne.

36

Pack Martin—his name was actually Packard because his mother named him after a car that had been her father’s pride—lived in a house trailer on the southeast edge of town. It was an old trailer, its enameled finish faded and crackled like the glaze on an ancient vase. It was rusted in a few spots, dented, and set on a concrete-block foundation in a lot that was mostly weeds. Pack knew that many people in Moonlight Cove thought his place was an eyesore, but he just plain did not give a damn.

The trailer had an electrical hookup, an oil furnace, and plumbing, which was enough to meet his needs. He was warm, dry, and had a place to keep his beer. It was a veritable palace.

Best of all, the trailer had been paid for twenty-five years ago, with money he had inherited from his mother, so no mortgage hung over him. He had a little of the inheritance left, too, and rarely touched the principal. The interest amounted to nearly three hundred dollars a month, and he also had his disability check, earned by virtue of a fall he had taken three weeks after being inducted into the Army. The only real work in which Pack had ever engaged was all the reading and studying he had done to learn and memorize all of the subtlest and most complex symptoms of serious back injury, before reporting per the instructions on his draft notice.

He was born to be a man of leisure. He had known that much about himself from a young age. Work and him had nothing for each other. He figured he’d been scheduled to be born into a wealthy family, but something had gotten screwed up and he’d wound up as the son of a waitress who’d been just sufficiently industrious to provide him with a minimum inheritance.

But he envied no one. Every month he bought twelve or fourteen cases of cheap beer at the discount store out on the highway, and he had his TV, and with a bologna and mustard sandwich now and then, maybe some Fritos, he was happy enough.

By four o’clock that Tuesday afternoon, Pack was well into his second six-pack of the day, slumped in his tattered armchair, watching a game show on which the prize girl’s prime hooters, always revealed in low-cut dresses, were a lot more interesting than the MC, the contestants, or the questions.

The MC said, “So what’s your choice? Do you want what’s behind screen number one, screen number two, or screen number three?”

Talking back to the tube, Pack said, “I’ll take what’s in that cutie’s Maidenforrn, thank you very much,” and he swigged more beer.

Just then someone knocked on the door.

Pack did not get up or in any way acknowledge the knock. He had no friends, so visitors were of no interest to him. They were always either community do-gooders bringing him a box of food that he didn’t want, or offering to cut down his weeds and clean up his property, which he didn’t want, either, because he liked his weeds.

They knocked again.

Pack responded by turning up the volume on the TV.

They knocked harder.

“Go away,” Pack said.

They really
pounded
on the door, shaking the whole damn trailer.

“…What the hell?” Pack said. He clicked off the TV and got up.

The pounding was not repeated, but Pack heard a strange scraping noise against the side of the trailer.

And the place creaked on its foundation, which it sometimes did when the wind was blowing hard. Today, there was no wind.

“Kids,” Pack decided.

The Aikhorn family, which lived on the other side of the county road and two hundred yards to the south, had kids so ornery they ought to have been put to sleep with injections, pickled in formaldehyde, and displayed in some museum of criminal behavior. Those brats got a kick out of pushing cherry bombs through chinks in the foundation blocks, under the trailer, waking him with a bang in the middle of the night.

The scraping at the side of the trailer stopped, but now a couple of kids were walking around on the roof.

That was too much. The metal roof didn’t leak, but it had seen better days, and it was liable to bend or even separate at the seams under the weight of a couple of kids.

Pack opened the door and stepped out into the rain, shouting obscenities at them. But when he looked up he didn’t see any kids on the roof. What he saw, instead, was something out of a fifties bug movie, big as a man, with clacking mandibles and multifaceted eyes, and a mouth framed by small pincers. The weird thing was that he also saw a few features of a human face in that monstrous countenance, just enough so he thought he recognized Daryl Aikhorn, father of the brats.
“Neeeeeeeeeeed,”
it said, in a voice half Aikhorn’s and half an insectile keening. It leaped at him, and as it came, a wickedly sharp stinger telescoped from its repulsive body. Even before that yard-long serrated spear skewered his belly and thrust all the way through him, Pack knew that the days of beer and bologna sandwiches and Fritos and disability checks and game-show girls with perfect hooters were over.

* * *

Randy Hapgood, fourteen, sloshed through the dirty calf-deep water in an overflowing gutter and sneered contemptuously, as if to say that nature would have to come up with an obstacle a thousand times more formidable than that if she hoped to daunt him. He refused to wear a raincoat and galoshes because such gear was not fashionably cool. You didn’t see rad blondes hanging on the arms of nerds who carried umbrellas, either. There were no rad girls hanging on Randy, as far as that went, but he figured they just hadn’t yet noticed how cool he was, how indifferent to weather and everything else that humbled other guys.

He was soaked and miserable—but whistling jauntily to conceal it—when he got home from Central at twenty minutes till five, after band practice, which had been cut short because of the bad weather. He stripped out of his wet denim Jacket and hung it on the back of the pantry door. He slipped out of his soggy tennis shoes, as well.

“I’m
heeeeerrreeeee
,” he shouted, parodying the little girl in
Poltergeist
.

No one answered him.

He knew his parents were home, because lights were on, and the door was unlocked. Lately they’d been working at home more and more. They were in some sort of product research at New Wave, and they were able to put in a full day on their dual terminals upstairs, in the back room, without actually going in to the office.

Randy got a Coke out of the refrigerator, popped the tab, took a swig, and headed upstairs to dry out while he told Pete and Marsha about his day. He didn’t call them mom and dad, and that was all right with them; they were cool. Sometimes he thought they were even too cool. They drove a Porsche, and their clothes were always six months ahead of what everyone else was wearing, and they’d talk about anything with him,
anything
, including sex, as frankly as if they were his pals. If he ever
did
find a rad blonde who wanted to hang on him, he’d be afraid to bring her home to meet his folks, for fear she’d think his dad was infinitely cooler than he was. Sometimes he wished Pete and Marsha were fat, frumpy, dressed out of date, and stuffily insisted on being called mom and dad. Competition in school for grades and popularity was fierce enough without having to feel that he was also in competition at home with his parents.

As he reached the top of the stairs, he called out again, “In the immortal words of the modern American intellectual, John Rambo: ‘Yo!’”

They still didn’t answer him.

Just as Randy reached the open door to the workroom at the end of the hall, a case of the creeps hit him. He shivered and didn’t stop, however, because his self-image of ultimate coolth did not allow him to be spooked.

He stepped across the threshold, ready with a wisecrack about failure to respond to his calls. Too late, he was flash-frozen in place by fear.

Pete and Marsha were sitting on opposite sides of the large table, where their computer terminals stood back to back. No, they were not exactly sitting there; they were wired into the chairs and the computers by scores of hideous, segmented cables that grew out of them—or out of the machine; it was hard to tell which—and not only anchored them to their computers but to their chairs and, finally, to the floor, into which the cables disappeared. Their faces were still vaguely recognizable, though wildly altered, half pale flesh and half metal, with a slightly melted look.

Randy could not breathe.

But abruptly he could move, and he scrambled backward.

The door slammed behind him.

He whirled.

Tentacles—half organic, half metallic—erupted from the wall. The entire room seemed weirdly, malevolently alive, or maybe the walls were filled with alien machinery. The tentacles were quick. They lashed around him, pinned his arms, thoroughly him, and turned him toward his parents.

They were still in their chairs but were no longer facing their computers. They stared at him with radiant green eyes that appeared to be boiling in their sockets, bubbling and churning.

Randy screamed. He thrashed, but the tentacles held him.

Pete opened his mouth, and half a dozen silvery spheres, like kill ball bearings, shot from him and struck Randy in the chest.

Pain exploded through the boy. But it didn’t last more than a couple of seconds. Instead, the hot pain became an icy-cold, crawling sensation that worked through his entire body and up his face.

He tried to scream again. No sound escaped him.

The tentacles shrank back into the wall, pulling him with them, until his back was pinned tightly against the plaster.

The coldness was in his head now. Crawling, crawling.

Again, he tried to scream. This time a sound came from him. A thin, electronic oscillation.

* * *

Thursday afternoon, wearing warm wool slacks and a sweatshirt and a cardigan over the sweatshirt because she found it hard to stay warm these days, Meg Henderson sat at the kitchen table by the window, with a glass of chenin blanc, a plate of onion crackers, a wedge of Gouda, and a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout. She had read all of the Wolfe novels ages ago, but she was rereading them. Returning to old novels was comforting because the people in them never changed. Wolfe was still a genius and gourmet. Archie was still a man of action. Fritz still ran the best private kitchen in the world. None of them had aged since last she’d met them, either, which was a trick she wished she had learned.

Meg was eighty years old, and she looked eighty, every minute of it; she didn’t kid herself. Occasionally, when she saw herself in a mirror, she stared in amazement, as if she had not lived with that face for the better part of a century and wasn’t looking at a stranger. Somehow she expected to see a reflection of her youth because inside she was still that girl. Fortunately she didn’t
feel
eighty. Her bones were creaky, and her muscles had about as much tone as those of Jabba the Hut in the
Star Wars
movie she’d watched on the VCR last week, but she was free of arthritis and other major complaints, thank God. She still lived in her bungalow on Concord Circle, an odd little half-moon street that began and ended from Serra Avenue on the east end of town. She and Frank had bought the place forty years ago, when they had both been teachers at Thomas Jefferson School, in the days when it had been a combined school for all grades. Moonlight Cove had been much smaller then. For fourteen years, since Frank died, she had lived in the bungalo alone. She could get around, clean, and cook for herself, for which she was grateful.

She was even more grateful for her mental acuity. More than physical infirmity, she dreaded senility or a stroke that, while leaving her physically functional, would steal her memory an alter her personality. She tried to keep her mind flexible by reading a lot of books of all different kinds, by renting a variety of videos for her VCR, and by avoiding at all costs the mind-numbing slop that passed for entertainment on television.

By four-thirty Tuesday afternoon, she was halfway through the novel, though she paused at the end of each chapter to look out at the rain. She liked rain. She liked whatever weather God chose to throw at the world—storms, hail, wind, cold, heat—because the variety and extremes of creation were what made it so beautiful.

While looking at the rain, which earlier had declined from a fierce downpour to a drizzle but was once more falling furiously, she saw three large, dark, and utterly fantastic creatures appear out of the stand of trees at the rear of her property, fifty feet from the window at which she sat. They halted for a moment as a thin mist eddied around their feet, as if they were dream monsters that had taken shape from those scraps of fog and might melt away as suddenly as they had arisen. But then they raced toward her back porch.

As they drew swiftly nearer, Meg’s first impression of them was reinforced. They were like nothing on this earth … unless perhaps gargoyles could come alive and climb down from cathedral roofs.

She knew at once that she must be in the early stages of a truly massive stroke, because that was what she had always feared would at last claim her. But she was surprised that it would begin like this, with such a weird hallucination.

That was all it could be, of course—hallucination preceding the bursting of a cerebral blood vessel that must be already swelling and pressing on her brain. She waited for a painful exploding sensation inside her head, waited for her face and body to twist to the left or right as one side or the other was paralyzed.

Even when the first of the gargoyles crashed through the window, showering the table with glass, spilling the chenin blanc, knocking Meg off her chair, and falling to the floor atop her, all teeth and claws, she marveled that a stroke could produce such vivid, convincing illusions, though she was not surprised by the intensity of the pain. She’d always known that death would hurt.

* * *

Dora Hankins, the receptionist in the main lobby at New Wave, was accustomed to seeing people leave work as early as four-thirty. Though the official quitting time was five o’clock, a lot of workers put in hours at home, on their own PCs, so no one strictly enforced the eight-hour office day. Since they’d been converted, there had been no need for rules, anyway, because they were all working for the same goal, for the new world that was coming, and the only discipline they needed was their fear of Shaddack, of which they had plenty.