Things Beyond Midnight (7 page)

Angry now, she put on a nightrobe and stepped into her slippers. She hurried downstairs, out the back door, across the damp lawn, to the pool steps.

“Jaimie! If this is a game, I don’t like it! Damn it, I
mean
that!” She peered downward; the moonlit steps were empty. “
Answer
me!”

Then, muttering “Crap!” under her breath, she started down the clammy wooden steps, holding to the cold iron pipe rail. The descent seemed even more precipitous in the dark, and she forced herself to move slowly.

Reaching level ground, Lizbeth could see the pool. She moved closer for a full view. It was silent and deserted. Where was Jaimie? She suddenly was gripped by the familiar sense of dizzy nausea as she stared at the odd, weirdly angled rock shapes forming the pool’s perimeter. She tried to look away. And
couldn’t.

It wants me!

That terrible thought seized her mind. But what wanted her? The pool? No... something in the pool.

She kicked off the bedroom slippers and found herself walking toward the pool across the moon-sparkled grass, spiky and cold against the soles of her bare feet.

Stay back! Stay away from it!

But she couldn’t. Something was drawing her toward the black pool, something she could not resist.

At the rocks, facing the water, she unfastened her nightrobe, allowing it to slip free of her body.

She was alabaster under the moon, a subtle curving of leg, of thigh, of neck and breast. Despite the jarring hammer of her heart, Lizbeth knew that she had to step forward into the water.

It wants me!

The pool was black glass, and she looked down into it, at the reflection of her body, like white fire on the still surface.

Now... a ripple, a stirring, a deep-night movement from below.

Something was coming—a shape, a dark mass, gliding upward toward the surface.

Lizbeth watched, hypnotized, unable to look away, unable to obey the screaming, pleading voice inside her:
Run! Run!

And then she saw Jaimie’s hand. It broke the surface of the pool, reaching out to her.

His face bubbled free of the clinging black water, and acid bile leaped into her throat. She gagged, gasped for air, her eyes wide in sick shock.

It was
part
Jaimie, part something else!

It smiled at her with Jaimie’s wide, white-toothed open mouth, but, oh God! only
one
of its eyes belonged to Jaimie. It had three others, all horribly different. It
had part
of Jaimie’s face,
part
of his body.

Run! Don’t go to it! Get away!

But Lizbeth did not run. Gently, she folded her warm, pink-fleshed hand into the icy wet horror of that hand in the pool and allowed herself to be drawn slowly forward. Downward. As the cold, receiving waters shocked her skin, numbing her, as the black liquid rushed into her open mouth, into her lungs and stomach and body, filling her as a cup is filled, her final image, the last thing she saw before closing her eyes, was Jaimies wide-lipped, shining smile—an expanding patch of brightness fading down... deep... very deep... into the pool’s black depths.

Jan and David arrived early that Sunday morning, all giggles and shouts, breathing hard from the ride on their bikes.

A whole Sunday with Dad. A fine, warm-sky summer day with school safely off somewhere ahead and not bothering them. A big house to roam in, and yards to run in, and caramel-ripple ice cream waiting (Dad had promised to buy some!), and games to play, and...

“Hey! Look what I found!”

Jan was yelling at David. They had gone around to the back of the house when no one answered the bell, looking for their father. Now eight-year-old Jan was at the bottom of a flight of high wooden steps, yelling up at her brother. David was almost ten and tall for his age.

“What is it?”

“Come and see!”

He scrambled down the steps to join her.

“Jeez!” he said. “A pool! I never saw one
this
big before!”

“Me neither.”

David looked over his shoulder, up at the silent house.

“Dad’s probably out somewhere with his new girlfriend.”

“Probably,” Jan agreed.

“Let’s try the pool while we’re waiting. What do you say?”

“Yeah, let’s!”

They began pulling off their shirts.

Motionless in the depths of the pool, at the far end, where rock and tree shadows darkened the surface, it waited, hearing the tinkling, high child voices filtering down to it in the sound-muted waters. It was excited because it had never absorbed a child; a child was new and fresh—new pleasures, new strengths.

It had formed itself within the moist deep soil of the hill, and the pool had nurtured and fed it, helping it grow, first with small, squirming water bugs and other yard insects. It had absorbed them, using their eyes and their hard, metallic bodies to shape itself. Then the pool had provided a dead bird, and now it had feathers along part of its back, and the bird’s sharp beak formed part of its face. Then a plump gray rat had been drawn into the water, and the rat’s glassy eye became part of the thing’s body. A cat had drowned here, and its claws and matted fur added new elements to the thing’s expanding mass.

Finally, when it was still young, a golden-haired woman, Gail, had come here alone to swim that long-ago night, and the pool had taken her, given her as a fine new gift to the thing in its depths. And Gail’s long silk-gold hair streamed out of the thing’s mouth (one of its mouths, for it had several), and it had continued to grow, to shape itself.

Then, last night, this man, Jaimie had come to it. And his right eye now burned like blue phosphor from the thing’s face. Lizbeth had followed, and her slim-fingered hands, with their long, lacquered nails, now pulsed in wormlike convulsive motion along the lower body of the pool-thing.

Now it was excited again, trembling, ready for new bulk, new lifestuffs to shape and use. It rippled in dark anticipation, gathering itself, feeling the pleasure and the hunger.

Faintly, above it, the boy’s cry: “Last one in’s a fuzzy green monkey!” It rippled to the vibrational splash of two young bodies striking the water.

It glided swiftly toward the children.

00:03
STARBLOOD

Is the orbit stabilized
||

Yes
...

How much longer to penetration
||

Soon now.

You first. Then I’ll follow.

Do you think... I mean, is it possible, with this planet, that we’ll be able to succeed
||

Well try. That’s all we can do. I have no answers.

-1-
BOBBY

Bobby was still crying, his tiny face red, fists clenched, ignoring the roboMother who rocked and crooned to him.

Dennison walked over, switched off the machine, and picked up his son. He carried the squalling infant to the patio where his wife was playing Magneball with an android instructor.

“Bobby’s been crying all afternoon,” Dennison said. “Do something with him. See if you can’t shut him up.”

Mrs. Dennison glared at her husband. “Let Mother handle him.”

“I switched her off,” said Dennison. “She wasn’t doing any good. Take him fora ride in the copter. He likes that. It’ll shut him up.”

“You do it,” said Alice Dennison. “I’m perfecting my back thrust. I play tournament next week, you know.”

“You don’t give a damn about your son, do you?”

She nodded to the android, ignoring the question. “Ready,” she said. A magnetic disc leaped from the instructor’s hand and the woman expertly repelled it with a thrusting left glove.

“Well done, Mrs. Dennison,” said the android.

In a silent rage, Dennison advanced on the android and beheaded the machine with a chair leg.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” said the wife. “They cost fifteen thousand dollars. I’ll just have to buy another.”

“You do that,” said Dennison. “But first you take Bobby up in the copter. I can’t stand any more of his squalling.”

She scooped up the baby, who continued to howl, and took a riser to the roofpad. Activating the family flier, she placed Bobby inside and lifted off in a whir of gleaming blades.

Five miles above New Chicago, Mrs. Dennison switched the copter to autoflight, unlatched the main exit panel and held her baby son straight out into the blast of air.

She smiled at him—and released her grip.

Still crying, Bobby Dennison fell twisting and tumbling toward the cold earth below.

-2-
TRIS

In Greater New York, under warm summer sun, the walkways sang. Heat from the sky stirred delicate filaments within the moving bands and a thin silver rain of music drifted up to the walkriders, soothing them, easing away some small bit of city hive pressure.

For Tris, an ex-Saint at sixteen, the pressures were mounting and the song of the walkways did not ease her; she was close to an emotional breakpoint. When a Saint is cast out by the Gods she has nowhere to go. Society shuns the outcast. Her only chance lies in reinstating herself. If she cannot achieve this, she ceases to function as a viable entity and self-extinction is her only recourse.

Tris was beautiful and free-spirited, with a body built for Sainthood. Surely, she told herself, she would find her way back into Divine Favor.