Midnight (50 page)

29

Beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the eaves, came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo and then chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been thrown open, letting denizens of the pit pour forth into Moonlight Cove.

Harry worried about Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie.

Below him, the unseen conversion team locked the collapsible ladder in place. One of them began to climb into the attic.

Harry wondered what they would look like. Would they be just ordinary men—old Doc Fitz with a syringe and a couple of deputies to assist him? Or would they be Boogeymen? Or some of the machine-men Sam had talked about?

The first one ascended through the open trap. It was Dr. Worthy, the town’s youngest physician.

Harry considered shooting him while he was still on the ladder. But he hadn’t fired a gun in twenty years, and he didn’t want to waste his limited ammunition. Better to wait for a closer shot.

Worthy didn’t have a flashlight. Didn’t seem to need one. He looked straight toward the darkest corner, where Harry was propped, and said, “How did you know we were coming, Harry?”

“Cripple’s intuition,” Harry said sarcastically.

Along the center of the attic, there was plenty of headroom to allow Worthy to walk upright. He rose from a crouch as he came out from under the sloping rafters near the trap, and when he had taken four steps forward, Harry fired twice at him.

The first shot missed, but the second hit low in the chest.

Worthy was flung backward, went down hard on the bare boards of the attic floor. He lay there for a moment, twitching, then sat up, coughed once, and got to his feet.

Blood glistened all over the front of his torn white shirt. He had been hit hard, yet he had recovered in seconds.

Harry remembered what Sam had said about how the Coltranes had refused to stay dead.
Go for the data processor.

He aimed for Worthy’s head and fired twice again, but at that distance—

about twenty-five feet—and at that angle, shooting up from the floor, he couldn’t hit anything. He hesitated with only four rounds left in the pistol’s clip.

Another man was climbing through the trap.

Harry shot at him, trying to drive him back down.

He came on, unperturbed.

Three rounds in the pistol.

Keeping his distance, Dr. Worthy said, “Harry, we’re not here to harm you. I don’t know what you’ve heard or
how
you’ve heard about the project, but it isn’t a bad thing. …”

His voice trailed off, and he cocked his head as if to listen to the un-human cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar look of longing, visible even in the dim wash of light from the open trap, crossed Worthy’s face.

He shook himself, blinked, and remembered that he had been trying to sell his elixir to a reluctant customer. “Not a bad thing at all, Harry. Especially for you. You’ll walk again, Harry, walk as well as anyone. You’ll be whole again. Because after the Change, you’ll be able to heal yourself. You’ll be free of paralysis.”

“No, thanks. Not at that price.”

“What price, Harry?” Worthy asked, spreading his arms, palms up. “Look at me. What price have I paid?”

“Your soul?” Harry said.

A third man was coming up the ladder.

The second man was listening to the ululant cries that came in through the attic vents. He gritted his teeth, ground them together forcefully, and blinked very fast. He raised his hands and covered his face with them, as if he were suddenly anguished.

Worthy noticed his companion’s situation. “Vanner, are you all right?”

Vanner’s hands …
changed.
His wrists swelled and grew gnarly with bone, and his fingers lengthened, all in a couple of seconds. When he took his hands from his face, his jaw was thrusting forward like that of a werewolf in midtransformation. His shirt tore at the seams as his body reconfigured itself. He snarled, and teeth flashed.

“…
need,”
Vanner said, “…
need, need, want, need
…”

“No!” Worthy shouted.

The third man, who had just come out of the trap, rolled onto the floor, changing as he did so, flowing into a vaguely insectile but thoroughly repulsive form.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, Harry emptied the .38 at the insect-thing, pitched it away, snatched the .45 revolver off the board floor beside him, also fired three rounds from that, evidently striking the thing’s brain at least once. It kicked, twitched, fell back down through the trap, and did not clamber upward again.

Vanner had undergone a complete lupine metamorphosis and seemed to have patterned himself after something that he had seen in a movie, because he looked familiar to Harry, as if Harry had seen that same movie, though he could not quite remember it. Vanner shrieked in answer to the creatures whose cries pealed through the night outside.

Tearing frantically at his clothes, as if the pressure of them against his skin was driving him mad, Worthy was changing into a beast quite different from either Vanner or the third man. Some grotesque physical incarnation of his own mad desires.

Harry had only three rounds left, and he had to save the last one for himself.

30

Earlier, after surviving the ordeal in the culvert, Sam had promised himself that he would learn to accept failure, which had been all well and good until now, when failure was again at hand.

He could
not
fail, not with both Chrissie and Tessa depending on him. If no other opportunity presented itself, he would at least leap at Shaddack the moment before he believed the man was ready to pull the trigger.

Judging that moment might be difficult. Shaddack looked and sounded insane. The way his mind was short-circuiting, he might pull the trigger in the middle of one of those high, quick, nervous, boyish laughs, without any indication that the moment had come.

“Get off your stool,” he said to Sam.

“What?”

“You heard me, dammit, get off your stool. Lay on the floor, over there, or I’ll make you sorry, I sure will, I’ll make you very sorry.” He gestured with the muzzle of the shotgun. “Get off your stool and lay on the floor
now.”

Sam didn’t want to do it because he knew Shaddack was separating him from Chrissie and Tessa only to shoot him.

He hesitated, then slid off the stool because there was nothing else he could do. He moved between two lab benches, to the open area that Shaddack had indicated.

“Down,” Shaddack said. “I want to see you down there on the floor, groveling.”

Dropping to one knee, Sam slipped a hand into an inner pocket of his leather jack, fished out the metal loid that he had used to pop the lock at the Coltranes’ house, and flicked it away from himself, with the same snap of his wrist that he would have used to toss a playing card at a hat.

The loid sailed low across the floor, toward the windows, until it clattered through the rungs of a stool and clinked off the base of a marble lab bench.

The madman swung the Remington toward the sound.

With a shout of rage and determination, Sam came up fast and threw himself at Shaddack.

31

Tessa grabbed Chrissie and hustled her away from the struggling men, to the wall beside the hall door. They crouched there, where she hoped they would be out of the line of fire.

Sam had come up under the shotgun before Shaddack could swing back from the distraction. He grabbed the barrel with his left hand and Shaddack’s wrist with his weakened right hand, and pressed him backward, pushing him off balance, slamming him against another lab bench.

When Shaddack cried out, Sam snarled with satisfaction, as if
he
might turn into something that howled in the night.

Tessa saw him ram a knee up between Shaddack’s legs, hard into his crotch. The tall man screamed.

“All
right,
Sam!” Chrissie said approvingly.

As Shaddack gagged and spluttered and tried to double over in an involuntary reaction to the pain in his damaged privates, Sam tore the shotgun out of his hands and stepped back—

—and a man in a police uniform came into the room from the chemistry storage closet, carrying a shotgun of his own. “No! Drop your weapon. Shaddack is
mine.”

32

The thing that had been Vanner moved toward Harry, growling low in its throat, drooling yellowish saliva. Harry fired twice, struck it both times, but failed to kill it. The gaping wounds seemed to close up before his eyes.

One round left.

“…
need, need
…”

Harry put the barrel of the .45 in his mouth, pressed the muzzle against his palate, gagging on the hot steel.

The hideous, wolfish thing loomed over him. The swollen head was three times as big as it ought to have been, out of proportion to its body. Most of the head was mouth, and most of the mouth was teeth, not even the teeth of a wolf but the inward-curving teeth of a shark. Vanner had not been satisfied to model himself entirely after just one of nature’s predators, but wanted to make himself something more murderous and efficiently destructive than anything nature had contemplated.

When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to bite, Harry pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, “Hell, no,” and shot the damn thing in the head. It toppled back, landed with a crash, and stayed down.

Go for the data-processor.

Elation swept through Harry, but it was short-lived. Worthy had completed his transformation and seemed to have been thrown into a frenzy by the carnage in the room and the escalating shrieks that came through the attic vents from the world beyond. He turned his lantern eyes on Harry, and in them was a look of unhuman hunger.

No more bullets.

33

Sam was squarely under the cop’s gun, with no room to maneuver. He had to drop the Remington that he’d taken off Shaddack.

“I’m on your side,” the cop repeated.

“No one’s on our side,” Sam said.

Shaddack was gasping for breath and trying to stand up straight. He regarded the officer with abject terror.

With the coldest premeditation Sam had ever seen, with no hint of emotion whatsoever, not even anger, the cop turned his 20-gauge shotgun on Shaddack, who was no longer a threat to anyone, and fired four rounds. As if punched by a giant, Shaddack flew backward over two stools and into the wall.

The cop threw the gun aside and moved quickly to the dead man. He tore open the sweat-suit jacket that Shaddack wore under his coat and ripped lose a strange object, a largish rectangular medallion, that had hung from a gold chain around the man’s neck.

Holding up that curious artifact, he said, “Shaddack’s dead. His heartbeat isn’t being broadcast any more, so Sun is even now putting the final program into effect. In half a minute or so we’ll all know peace. Peace at last.”

At first Sam thought the cop was saying they were all going to die, that the thing in his hand was going to kill them, that it was a bomb or something. He backed quickly toward the door and saw that Tessa evidently had the same expectation. She had pulled Chrissie up from where they’d been crouching, and had opened the door.

But if there was a bomb, it was a silent one, and the radius of its small explosion remained within the police officer. Suddenly his face contorted. Between clenched teeth, he said, “God.” It was not an exclamation but a plea or perhaps an inadequate description of something he had just seen, for in that moment he fell down dead from no cause that Sam could see.

34

When they stepped out through the back door by which they had entered, the first thing Sam noticed was that the night had fallen silent. The shrill cries of the shape-changers no longer echoed across the fogbound town.

The keys were in the van’s ignition.

“You drive,” he told Tessa.

His wrist was swollen worse than ever. It was throbbing so hard that each pulse of pain reverberated through every fiber of him.

He settled in the passenger seat.

Chrissie curled in his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was uncharacteristically silent. She was exhausted, on the verge of collapse, but Sam knew the cause of her silence was more profound than weariness.

Tessa slammed her door and started the engine. She didn’t have to be told where to go.

On the drive to Harry’s place, they discovered that the streets were littered with the dead, not the corpses of ordinary men and women but—as their headlights revealed beyond a doubt—of creatures out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, twisted and phantasmagorical forms. She drove slowly, maneuvering around them, and a couple of times she had to pull up on the sidewalk to get past a pack of them that had gone down together, apparently felled by the same unseen force that had dropped the policeman back at Central.

Shaddock’s dead. His heartbeat isn’t being broadcast any more, so Sun is even now putting the final program into effect… .

After a while Chrissie lowered her head against Sam’s chest and would not look out the windshield.

Sam kept telling himself that the fallen creatures were phantoms, that no such things could have actually come into existence, either by the application of the highest of high technology or by sorcery. He expected them to vanish every time a shroud of fog briefly obscured them, but when the fog moved off again, they were still huddled on the pavement, sidewalks, and lawns.

Immersed in all that horror and ugliness, he could not believe that he had been so foolish as to pass years of precious life in gloom, unwilling to see the beauty of the world. He’d been a singular fool. When the dawn came he would never thereafter fail to look upon a flower and appreciate the wonder of it, the beauty that was beyond man’s abilities of creation.

“Tell me now?” Tessa asked as they pulled within a block of Harry’s redwood house.

“Tell you what?”

“What you saw. Your near-death experience. What did you see on the Other Side that scared you so?”

He laughed shakily. “I was an idiot.”

“Probably,” she said. “Tell me and let me judge.”

“Well, I can’t tell you exactly. It was more an
understanding
than a seeing, a spiritual rather than visual perception.”

“So what did you understand?”

“That we go on from this world,” he said. “That there’s either life for us on another plane, one life after another on an endless series of planes … or that we live again on this plane, reincarnate. I’m not sure which, but I felt it deeply,
knew
it when I reached the end of that tunnel and saw the light, that brilliant light.”

She glanced at him. “And
that’s
what terrified you?”

“Yes.”

“That we live again?”

“Yes. Because I found life so bleak, you see, just a series of tragedies, just pain. I’d lost the ability to appreciate the beauty of life, the joy, so I didn’t want to die and have to start in all over again, not any sooner than absolutely necessary. At least in
this
life I’d become hardened, inured to the pain, which gave me an advantage over starting out as a child again in some new incarnation.”

“So your fourth reason for living wasn’t technically a fear of death,” she said.

“I guess not.”

“It was a fear of having to live again.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

He thought a moment. Chrissie stirred in his lap. He stroked her damp hair. At last he said, “Now, I’m
eager
to live again.”