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Midnight

Dean R.    Koontz

The citizens of Moonlight Cove, California, are changing. Some are
losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to
their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely
terrified - if not brutally murdered in the dead of night.

Dean Koontz, the bestselling master of suspense, invites you into the
shocking world of Moonlight Cove - where four unlikely survivors
confront the darkest realms of human nature.

Here is the ultimate masterpiece of fear by the one and only Dean Koontz

"BLOOD-CHILLING..        .   KOONTZ PLOWS NEW, EVEN MORE CHILLING GROUND."

MORE THAN 100 MILLION COPIES OF DEAN KOONTZ NOVELS IN PRINT!

DON'T MISS HIS new NOVEL DRAGON TEARS AVAILABLE FROM G P PUTNAM'S SONS

MIDNIGHT A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

G. P. Putnam's Son,; edition / January 1989 Berkley edition / November
1989 All rights reserved.

Copyright (C) 1989 by Nkui, Inc.

ISBN 0-425-11870-3

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"To Ed and Pat 'Thomas of the Book Carnival, who are such nice people
that sometimes I suspect they're not really human but aliens from
another, better world

Part One

ALONG THE NIGHT COAST Where eerie figures caper to some midnight music
that only they can hear.

-The Book of Counted Sorrows

Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.

Nearly every evening between ten and eleven o'clock, Janice put on her
gray sweats with the reflective blue stripes across the back and chest,
tucked her hair under a headband, laced up her New Balance shoes, and
ran six miles. She was thirty-five but could have passed for
twenty-five, and she attributed her glow of youth to her
twenty-year-long commitment to running.

Sunday night, September 21, she left her house at ten o'clock and ran
four blocks north to Ocean Avenue, the main street through Moonlight
Cove, where she turned left and headed downhill toward the public beach.
The shops were closed and dark. Aside from the faded-brass glow of the
sodium-vapor streetlamps, the only lights were in some apartments above
the stores, at Knight's Bridge Tavern, and at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic
Church, which was open twenty-four hours a day. No cars were on the
street, and not another person was in sight. Moonlight Cove always had
been a quiet little town, shunning the tourist trade that other coastal
communities so avidly pursued. Janice liked the slow, measured pace of


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life there, though sometimes lately the town seemed not merely sleepy
but dead.

As she ran down the sloping main street, through pools of amber light,
through layered night shadows cast by wind-sculpted cypresses and pines,
she saw no movement other than her own and the sluggish, serpentine
advance of the thin fog through the windless air. The only sounds were
the soft slap-slap of her rubber-soled running shoes on the sidewalk and
her labored breathing. From all available evidence, she might have been
the last person on earth, engaged upon a solitary post-Armageddon
marathon.

She disliked getting up at dawn to run before work, and in the summer it
was more pleasant to put in her six miles when the heat of the day had
passed, though neither an abhorrence of early hours nor the heat was the
real reason for her nocternal preference; she ran on the same schedule
in the winter. She exercised at that hour simply because she liked the
night.

Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out
in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky, listening to
frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of
the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of
twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was
bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more
possibilities.

Now she reached the Ocean Avenue loop at the foot of the hill, sprinted
across the parking area and onto the beach. Above the thin fog, the sky
held only scattered clouds, and the full moon's silver-yellow radiance
penetrated the mist, providing sufficient illumination for her to see
where she was going. Some nights the fog was too thick and the sky too
overcast to permit running on the shore. But now the white foam of the
incoming breakers surged out of the black sea in ghostly phosphorescent
ranks, and the wide crescent of sand gleamed palely between the lapping
tide and the coastal hills, and the mist itself was softly aglow with
reflections of the autumn moonlight.

As she ran across the beach to the firmer, damp sand at the water's edge
and turned south, intending to run a mile out to the point of the cove,
Janice felt wonderfully alive.

Richard-her late husband, who had succumbed to cancer three years
ago-had said that her circadian rhythms were so post-midnight focused
that she was more than just a night person.

"You'd probably love being a vampire, living between sunset and dawn,"
he'd said, and she'd said, "I vant to suck your blood." God, she had
loved him. Initially she worried that the life of a Lutheran minister's
wife would be boring, but it never was, not for a moment. Three years
after his death, she still missed him every day-and even more at night.
He had been suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot, twisted
cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the
hills and the waterline, Janice was sure that she was not alone in the
night and fog. She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound
other than her own footsteps, raspy - 5 breathing, and thudding
heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company.

She was not alarmed at first, for she thought another runner was sharing
the beach. A few local fitness fanatics occasionally ran at night, not
by choice, as was the case with her, but of necessity. Two or three
times a month she encountered them along her route.


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But when she stopped and turned and looked back the way she had come,
she saw only a deserted expanse of moonlit sand, a curved ribbon of
luminously foaming surf, and the dim but familiar shapes of rock
formations and scattered trees that thrust up here and there along the
strand. The only sound was the low rumble of the breakers.

Figuring that her instinct was unreliable and that she was alone, she
headed south again, along the beach, quickly finding her rhythm. She
went only fifty yards, however, before she saw movement from the corner
of her eye, thirty feet to her left a swift shape, cloaked by night and
mist, darting from behind a sandbound cypress to a weather-polished rock
formation, where it slipped out of sight again.

Janice halted and, squinting toward the rock, wondered what she had
glimpsed. It had seemed larger than a dog, perhaps as big as a man, but
having seen it only peripherally, she had absorbed no details. The
formation-twenty feet long, as low as four feet in some places and as
high as ten feet in others-had been shaped by wind and rain until it
resembled a mound of half-melted wax, more than large enough to conceal
whatever she had seen.

"Someone there?"        she asked.

She expected no answer and got none.

She was uneasy but not afraid. If she had seen something more than a
trick of fog and moonlight, it surely had been an animal-and not a dog
because a dog would have come straight to her and would not have been so
secretive. As there were no natural predators along the coast worthy of
her fear, she was curious rather than frightened.

Standing still, sheathed in a film of sweat, she began to feel the chill
in the air. To maintain high body heat, she ran in place, watching the
rocks, expecting to see an animal break from that cover and sprint
either north or south along the beach.


Some people in the area kept horses, and the Fosters even ran a breeding
and boarding facility near the sea about two and a half miles from
there, beyond the northern flank of the cove. Perhaps one of their
charges had gotten loose. The thing she'd seen from the corner of her
eye had not been as big as a horse, though it might have been a pony. On
the other hand, wouldn't she have heard a pony's thudding hoofbeats even
in the soft sand? Of course, if it was one of the Fosters' horses-or
someone else's-she ought to attempt to recover it or at least let them
know where it could be found.

At last, when nothing moved, she ran to the rocks and circled them.
Against the base of the formation and within the clefts in the stone
were a few velvet-smooth shadows, but for the most part all was revealed
in the milky, shimmering, lunar glow, and no animal was concealed there.

She never gave serious thought to the possibility that she had seen
someone other than another runner or an animal, that she was in real
danger. Aside from an occasional act of vandalism or burglary-which was
always the work of one of a handful of disaffected teenagers-and traffic
accidents, local police had little to occupy them. Crimes against
person-rape, assault, murder-were rare in a town as small and tightly
knit as Moonlight Cove; it was almost as if, in this pocket of the
coast, they were living in a different and more benign age from that in
which the rest of California dwelt.



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Rounding the formation and returning to the firmer sand near the roiling
surf, Janice decided that she had been snookered by moonlight and mist,
two adept deceivers. The movement had been imaginary; she was alone on
the shore.

She noted that the fog was rapidly thickening, but she continued along
the crescent beach toward the cove's southern point. She was certain
that she would get there and be able to return to the foot of Ocean
Avenue before visibility declined too drastically.

A breeze sprang up from the sea and churned the incoming fog, which
seemed to solidify from a gauzy vapor into a white sludge, as if it were
milk being transformed into butter. By the time Janice reached the
southern end of the dwindling strand, the breeze was stiffening and the
surf was more agitated as well, casting up sheets of spray as each wave
hit the piled rocks of - 7 the man-made breakwater that had been added
to the natural point of the cove.

Someone stood on that twenty-foot-high wall of boulders, looking down at
her. Janice glanced up just as a cloak of mist shifted and as moonlight
silhouetted him.

Now fear seized her.

Though the stranger was directly in front of her, she could not see his
face in the gloom. He seemed tall, well over six feet, though that
could have been a trick of perspective.

Other than his outline, only his eyes were visible, and they were what
ignited her fear. They were a softly radiant amber like the eyes of an
animal revealed in headlight beams.

For a moment, peering directly up at him, she was transfixed by his
gaze. Backlit by the moon, looming above her, standing tall and
motionless upon ramparts of rock, with sea spray exploding to the right
of him, he might have been a carved stone idol with luminous jewel eyes,
erected by some demon-worshiping cult in a dark age long passed. Janice
wanted( to turn and run, but she could not move, was rooted to the sand,
in the grip of that paralytic terror she had previously felt only in
nightmares.

She wondered if she were awake. Perhaps her late-night run was indeed
part of a nightmare, and perhaps she was actually asleep in bed, safe
beneath warm blankets.

Then the man made a queer low growl, partly a snarl of anger but also a
hiss, partly a hot and urgent cry of need but also cold, cold.

And he moved.

He dropped to all fours and began to descend the high breakwater, not as
an ordinary man would climb down those Jumbled rocks but with catlike
swiftness and grace. In seconds he would be upon her.

Janice broke her paralysis, turned back on her own tracks, and ran
toward the entrance to the public beach-a full mile away. Houses with
lighted windows stood atop the steep-walled bluff that overlooked the
cove, and some of them had steps leading down to the beach, but she was
not confident of finding those stairs in the darkness. She did not
waste any energy on a scream, for she doubted anyone would hear her.
Besides, if screaming slowed her down, even only slightly, she might be
overtaken and silenced before anyone from town could respond to her


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cries.

Her twenty-year commitment to running had never been more important than
it was now; the issue was no longer good health but, she sensed, her
very survival. She tucked her arms close to her sides, lowered her
head, and sprinted, going for speed rather than endurance, because she
felt that she only needed to get to the lower block of Ocean Avenue to
be safe. She did not believe the man-or whatever the hell he was-would
continue to pursue her into that lamplit and populated street.

High-altitude, striated clouds rushed across a portion of the lunar
face. The moonlight dimmed, brightened, dimmed, and brightened in an
irregular rhythm, pulsing through the rapidly clotting fog in such a way
as to create a host of phantoms that repeatedly startled her and
appeared to be keeping pace with her on all sides. The eerie, palpitant
light contributed to the dreamlike quality of the chase, and she was
half convinced that she was really in bed, fast asleep, but she did not
halt or look over her shoulder because, dream or not, the man with the
amber eyes was still behind her.

She had covered half the strand between the point of the cove and Ocean
Avenue, her confidence growing with each step, when she realized that
two of the phantoms in the fog were not phantoms after all. One was
about twenty feet to her right and ran erect like a man; the other was
on her left, less than fifteen feet away, splashing through the edge of
the foam-laced sea, loping on all fours, the size of a man but certainly
not a man, for no man could be so fleet and graceful in the posture of a
dog. She had only a general impression of their shape and size, and she
could not see their faces or any details of them other than their oddly
luminous eyes.

Somehow she knew that neither of these pursuers was the man whom she had
seen on the breakwater. He was behind her, either running erect or
loping on all fours. She was nearly encircled.

Janice made no attempt to imagine who or what they might be. Analysis of
this weird experience would have to wait for later; now she simply
accepted the existence of the impossible, for as the widow of a preacher
and a deeply spiritual woman, she had the flexibility to bend with the
unknown and unearthly when confronted by it.

- 9 Powered by the fear that had formerly paralyzed her, she picked up
her pace. But so did her pursuers.

She heard a peculiar whimpering and only slowly realized that she was
listening to her own tortured voice.

Evidently excited by her terror, the phantom forms around her began to
keen. Their voices rose and fell, fluctuating between a shrill,
protracted bleat and a guttural gnarl. Worst of all, punctuating those
ululant cries were bursts of words, too, spoken raspily, urgently "Get
the bitch, get the bitch, get the bitch - - - " What in God's name were
they? Not men, surely, yet they could stand like men and speak like
men, so what else could they be but men?

Janice felt her heart swelling in her breast, pounding hard.

"Get the bitch .        .   .

" The mysterious figures flanking her began to draw closer, and she
tried to put on more speed to pull ahead of them, but they could not be
shaken. They continued to narrow the gap. She could see them



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peripherally but did not dare look at them directly because she was
afraid that the sight of them would be so shocking that she would be
paralyzed again and, frozen by horror, would be brought down.

She was brought down anyway. Something leaped upon her from behind. She
fell, a great weight pinning her, and all three creatures swarmed over
her, touching her, plucking and tugging at her clothes.

Clouds slipped across most of the moon this time, and shadows fell in as
if they were swatches of a black cloth sky.

Janice's face was pressed hard into the damp sand, but her head was
turned to one side, so her mouth was free, and she screamed at last,
though it was not much of a scream because she was breathless. She
thrashed, kicked, flailed with her hands, desperately trying to strike
them, but hitting mostly air and sand She could see nothing now, for the
moon was completely lost.

She heard fabric tearing. The man astride her tore off her Nike jacket,
ripped it to pieces, gouging her flesh in the process. She felt the hot
touch of a hand, which seemed rough but human.

His weight briefly lifted from her, and she wriggled forward, trying to
get away, but they pounced and crushed her into the sand. This time she
was at the surf line, her face in the water.

alternately keening, panting like dogs, hissing and snarling, her
attackers loosed frantic bursts of words as they grabbed at herù .                         .
get her, get her, get, get, get .

ù.    .       want, want, want it, want it .

".   .    .    now, now, quick, now, quick, quick, quick .

They were pulling at her sweat pants, trying to strip her, but she
wasn't sure if they wanted to rape or devour her; perhaps neither; what
they wanted was, in fact, beyond her comprehension. She just knew they
were overcome by some tremendously powerful urge, for the chilly air was
as thick with their need as with fog and darkness.

One of them pushed her face deeper into the wet sand, and the water was
all around her now, only inches deep but enough to drown her, and they
wouldn't let her breathe. She knew she was going to die, she was pinned
now and helpless, going to die, and all because she liked to run at
night.

On Monday, October 13, twenty-two days after the death of Janice
Capshaw, Sam Booker drove his rental car from the San Francisco
International Airport to Moonlight Cove. During the trip, he played a
grim yet darkly amusing game with himself, making a mental list of
reasons to go on living. Although he was on the road for more than an
hour and a half, he could think of only four things Guinness Stout,
really good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death.

That thick, dark, Irish brew never failed to please him and to provide a
brief surcease from the sorrows of the world. Restaurants consistently
serving first-rate Mexican food were more difficult to locate than
Guinness; its solace was therefore more elusive. Sam had long been in
love with Goldie Hawn-or the screen image she projected-because she was
beautiful and cute, - 1 1 earthy and intelligent, and seemed to find
life so much damn fun. His chances of meeting Goldie Hawn were about a
million times worse than finding a great Mexican restaurant in a
northern California coastal town like Moonlight Cove, so he was glad


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that she was not the only reason he had for living.

As he drew near his destination, tall pines and cypresses crowded
Highway 1, forming a gray-green tunnel, casting long shadows in the
late-afternoon light. The day was cloudless yet strangely forbidding;
the sky was pale blue, bleak in spite of its crystalline clarity, unlike
the tropical blue to which he was accustomed in Los Angeles. Though the
temperature was in the fifties, hard sunshine, like glare bouncing off a
field of ice, seemed to freeze the colors of the landscape and dull them
with a haze of imitation frost.

Fear of death. That was the best reason on his list. Though he was
just forty-two years old-five feet eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds,
and currently healthy-Sam Booker had skated along the edge of death six
times, had peered into the waters below, and had not found the plunge
inviting.

A road sign appeared on the right side of the highway OCEAN AVENUE,
MOONLIGHT COVE, 2 MILES.

Sam was not afraid of the pain of dying, for that would pass in a
flicker. Neither was he afraid of leaving his life unfinished; for
several years he had harbored no goals or hopes or dreams, so there was
nothing to finish, no purpose or meaning. But he was afraid of what lay
beyond life.

Five years ago, more dead than alive on an operating-room table, he had
undergone a near-death experience. While surgeons worked frantically to
save him, he had risen out of his body and, from the ceiling, looked
down on his carcass and the medical team surrounding it. Then suddenly
he'd found himself rushing through a tunnel, toward dazzling light,
toward the Other Side the entire near-death cliche that was a staple of
sensationalistic supermarket tabloids. At the penultimate moment, the
skillful physicians had pulled him back into the land of the living, but
not before he had been afforded a glimpse of what lay beyond the mouth
of that tunnel. What he'd seen had scared the crap out of him. Life,
though often cruel, was preferable to confronting what he now suspected
lay beyond it.

He reached the Ocean Avenue exit. At the bottom of the ramp, as Ocean
Avenue turned west, under Pacific Coast Highway, another sign read
MOONLIGHT COVE '/2 MILE.

A few houses were tucked in the purple gloom among the trees on both
sides of the two-lane blacktop; their windows glowed with soft yellow
light even an hour before nightfall. Some were of that half-timbered,
deep-eaved, Bavarian architecture that a few builders, in the 1940s and
'50s, had mistakenly believed was in harmony with the northern
California coast. Others were Monterey-style bungalows with white
clapboard or shingle-covered walls, cedar-shingled roofs, and rich-if
fairy-tale rococo-architectural details. Since Moonlight Cove had
enjoyed much of its growth in the past ten years, a large number of
houses were sleek, modern, many-windowed structures that looked like
ships tossed up on some unimaginably high tide, stranded now on these
hillsides above the sea.

When Sam followed Ocean Avenue into the six-block-long commercial
district, a peculiar sense of wrongness immediately overcame him. Shops,
restaurants, taverns, a market, two churches, the town library, a movie
theater, and other unremarkable establishments lined the main drag,
which sloped down toward the ocean, but to Sam's eyes there was an
indefinable though powerful strangeness about the community that gave


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him a chill.

He could not identify the reasons for his instant negative reaction to
the place, though perhaps it was related to the somber interplay of
light and shadow. At this dying end of the autumn day, in the cheerless
sunlight, the gray stone Catholic church looked like an alien edifice of
steel, erected for no human purpose. A white stucco liquor store
gleamed as if built from time-bleached bones. Many shop windows were
cataracted with ice-white reflections of the sun as it sought the
horizon, as if painted to conceal the activities of those who worked
beyond them. The shadows cast by the buildings, by the pines and
cypress, were stark, spiky, razor-edged.

Sam braked at a stoplight at the third intersection, halfway through the
commercial district. With no traffic behind him, he paused to study the
people on the sidewalks. Not many were in sight, eight or ten, and they
also struck him as wrong, though his reasons for thinking ill of them
were less definable than those that fanned his impression of the town
itself. They walked - 13 briskly, purposefully, heads up, with a
peculiar air of urgency that seemed unsuited to a lazy, seaside
community of only three thousand souls.

He sighed and continued down Ocean Avenue, telling himself that his
imagination was running wild. Moonlight Cove and the people in it
probably would not have seemed the least unusual if he had just been
passing by on a long trip and turned off the coast highway only to have
dinner at a local restaurant. Instead, he had arrived with the
knowledge that something was rotten there, so of course he saw ominous
signs in a perfectly innocent scene.

At least that was what he told himself.                 But he knew better.

He had come to Moonlight Cove because people had died there, because the
official explanations for their deaths were suspicious, and he had a
hunch that the truth, once uncovered, would be unusually disturbing.
Over the years he had learned to trust his hunches; that trust had kept
him alive.

He parked the rented Ford in front of a gift shop.

To the west, at the far end of a slate-gray sea, the anemic sun sank
through a sky that was slowly turning muddy red. Serpentine tendrils of
fog began to rise off the choppy water.

In the pantry off the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back
against a shelf of canned goods, Chrissie Foster looked at her watch. In
the harsh light of the single bare bulb in the ceiling socket, she saw
that she had been locked in that small, windowless chamber for nearly
nine hours. She had received the wristwatch on her eleventh birthday,
more than four months ago, and she had been thrilled by it because it
was not a kid's watch with cartoon characters on the face; it was
delicate, ladylike, goldplated, with roman numerals instead of digits, a
real Timex like her mother wore. Studying it, Chrissie was overcome by
sadness. The watch represented a time of happiness and family
togetherness that was lost forever.

Besides feeling sad, lonely, and a little restless from hours of
captivity, she was scared. Of course, she was not as scared as she had
been that morning, when her father had carried her through the house and
thrown her into the pantry. Then, kicking and screaming, she had been
terrified because of what she had seen. Because of what her parents had
become. But that whitehot terror could not be sustained; gradually it


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subsided to a lowgrade fever of fear that made her feel flushed and
chilled at the same time, queasy, headachy, almost as if she were in the
early stages of flu.

She wondered what they were going to do to her when they finally let her
out of the pantry. Well, no, she didn't worry about what they were
going to do, for she was pretty sure she already knew the answer to that
one They were going to change her into one of them. What she wondered
about, actually, was how the change would be effected-and what, exactly,
she would become. She knew that her mother and father were no longer
ordinary people, that they were something else, but she had no words to
describe what they had become.

Her fear was sharpened by the fact that she lacked the words to explain
to herself what was happening in her own home, for she had always been
in love with words and had faith in their power. She liked to read just
about anything poetry, short stories, novels, the daily newspaper,
magazines, the backs of cereal boxes if nothing else was at hand. She
was in sixth grade at school, but her teacher, Mrs. Tokawa, said she
read at a tenthgrade level. When she was not reading, she was often
writing stories of her own. Within the past year she had decided she
was going to grow up to write novels like those of Mr. Paul Zindel or
the sublimely silly Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or, best of all, those of Ms.
Andre Norton.

But now words failed; her life was going to be far different from what
she had imagined. She was frightened as much by the loss of the
comfortable, bookish future she had foreseen as she was by the changes
that had taken place in her parents. Eight months shy of her twelfth
birthday, Chrissie had become acutely - 15 aware of life's uncertainty,
grim knowledge for which she was ill prepared.

Not that she had already given up. She intended to fight. She was not
going to let them change her without resistance. Soon after she had
been thrown into the pantry, once her tears had dried, she had looked
over the contents of the shelves, searching for a weapon. The pantry
contained mostly canned, bottled, and packaged food, but there were also
laundry and first-aid and handyman supplies. She had found the perfect
thing a small aerosol-spray can of WD-40, an oil-based lubricant. It
was a third the size of an ordinary spray can, easily concealed. If she
could surprise them, spray it in their eyes and temporarily blind them,
she could make a break for freedom.

As though reading a newspaper headline, she said, "Ingenious Young Girl
Saves Self with Ordinary Household Lubricant.

" She held the WD-40 in both hands, taking comfort from it.

Now and then a vivid and unsettling memory recurred her father's face as
it had looked when he had thrown her into the pantry-red and swollen
with anger, his eyes darkly ringed, nostrils flared, lips drawn back
from his teeth in a feral snarl, every feature contorted with rage.

"I'll be back for you," he had said, spraying spittle as he spoke.

"I'll be back."

He slammed the door and braced it shut with a straight-backed kitchen
chair that he wedged under the knob. Later, when the house fell silent
and her parents seemed to have gone away, Chrissie had tried the door,
pushing on it with all her might, but the tilted chair was an immovable
barricade.


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I 71 be back for you.          I'll be back.

His twisted face and bloodshot eyes had made her think of Mr. Robert
Louis Stevenson's description of the murderous Hyde in the story of Dr.
Jekyll, which she had read a few months ago. There was madness in her
father; he was not the same man that he once had been.

More unsettling was the memory of what she had seen in the upstairs hall
when she had returned home after missing the school bus and had
surprised her parents. No. They were not really her parents any more.
They were . . . something else.

She shuddered.

She clutched the can of WD-40.


Suddenly, for the first time in hours, she heard noise in the kitchen.
The back door of the house opened. Footsteps. At least two, maybe three
or four people.

"She's in there," her father said.

Chrissie's heart stuttered, then found a new and faster beat.

"This isn't going to be quick," said another man.                     Chrissie did not
recognize his deep, slightly raspy voice.

"You see, it's more complicated with a child. Shaddack's not sure we're
even ready for the children yet. It's risky. She's got to be
converted, Tucker." That was Chrissie's mother, Sharon, though she did
not sound like herself. It was her voice, all right, but without its
usual softness, without the natural, musical quality that had made it
such a perfect voice for reading fairy tales.

"Of course, yes, she's got to be done," said the stranger, whose name
was evidently Tucker.

"I know that. Shaddack knows it too. He sent me here, didn't he? I'm
just saying it might take more time than usual. We need a place where
we can restrain her and watch over her during the conversion."

"Right here.      Her bedroom upstairs."

Conversion ?

Trembling, Chrissie got to her feet and stood facing the door.

With a scrape and clatter, the tilted chair was removed from under the
knob.

She held the spray can in her right hand, down at her side and half
behind her, with her forefinger on top of the nozzle.

The door opened, and her father looked in at her.

Alex Foster. Chrissie tried to think of him as Alex Foster, not as her
father, just Alex Foster, but it was difficult to deny that in some ways
he was still her dad. Besides, "Alex Foster" was no more accurate than
"father" because he was someone altogether new.

His face was no longer warped with rage. He appeared more like himself
thick blond hair; a broad, pleasant face with bold features; a


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smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. Nevertheless, she
could see a terrible difference in his eyes. He seemed to be filled
with a strange urgency, an edgy tension. Hungry. Yes, that was it
Daddy seemed hungry . . . consumed by hunger, frantic with hunger,
starving . . . but for something other than food. She did not
understand his hunger but she sensed - 17 it, a fierce need that
engendered a constant tension in his muscles, a need of such tremendous
power, so hot, that waves of it seemed to rise from him like steam from
boiling water.

He said, "Come out of there, Christine."

Chrissie let her shoulders sag, blinked as if repressing tears,
exaggerated the shivers that swept through her, and tried to look small,
frightened, defeated. Reluctantly she edged forward.

" Come on, come on," he said impatiently, motioning her out of the
pantry.

Chrissie stepped through the doorway and saw her mother, who was beside
and slightly behind Alex. Sharon was pretty auburn hair, green eyes-but
there was no softness or motherliness about her any more. She was hard
looking and changed and full of the same barely contained nervous energy
that filled her husband.

By the kitchen table stood a stranger in jeans and plaid hunting jacket
he was evidently the Tucker to whom her mother had spoken tall, lean,
all sharp edges and angles. His closecropped black hair bristled. His
dark eyes were set under a deep, bony brow; his sharply ridged nose was
like a stone wedge driven into the center of his face; his mouth was a
thin slash, and his jaws were as prominent as those of a predator that
preyed on small animals and snapped them in half with one bite. He was
holding a physician's black leather bag.

Her father reached for Chrissie as she came out of the pantry' and she
whipped up the can of WD-40, spraying him in the eyes from a distance of
less than two feet. Even as her father howled in pain and surprise,
Chrissie turned and sprayed her mother too, straight in the face.
Half-blinded, they fumbled for her, but she slipped away from them and
dashed across the kitchen.

Tucker was startled but managed to grab her by the arm.

She spun toward him and kicked him in the crotch.

He did not let go of her, but the strength went out of his big hands.
She tore herself away from him and sprinted into the downstairs hallway.


From the east, twilight drifted down on Moonlight Cove, as if it were a
mist not of water but of smoky purple light. When Sam Booker got out of
his car, the air was chilly; he was glad that he was wearing a wool
sweater under his corduroy sportcoat. As a photocell activated all the
streetlamps simultaneously, he strolled along Ocean Avenue, looking in
shop windows, getting a feel for the town.

He knew that Moonlight Cove was prosperous, that unemployment was
virtually nonexistent-thanks to New Wave Microtechnology, which had
headquartered there ten years ago-yet he saw signs of a faltering
economy. Taylor's Fine Gifts and Saenger's Jewelry had vacated their
shops; through their dusty, plate-glass windows, he saw bare shelves and
empty display cases and deep, still shadows. New Attitudes, a trendy
clothing store, was having a going-out-of-business sale, and judging by


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the dearth of shoppers, their merchandise was moving sluggishly even at
fifty to seventy per,cent off the original prices.

By the time he had walked two blocks west, to the beach end of town,
crossed the street, and returned three blocks along the other side of
Ocean Avenue to Knight's Bridge tavern, twilight was swiftly waning. A
nacreous fog was moving in from the sea, and the air itself seemed
iridescent, shimmering delicately; a plum-colored haze lay over
everything, except where the streetlamps cast showers of mist-softened
yellow light, and above it all was a heavy darkness coming down.

A single moving car was in sight, three blocks away, and at the moment
Sam was the only pedestrian. The solitude combined with the queer light
of the dying day to give him the feeling that this was a ghost town,
inhabited only by the dead. As the gradually thickening fog seeped up
the hill from the Pacific - 19, it contributed to the illusion that all
of the surrounding shops were vacant, that they offered no wares other
than spider webs, silence, and dust.

You're a dour bastard, he told himself.                 Too grim by half.

Experience had made a pessimist of him. The traumatic course of his
life to date precluded grinning optimism.

Tendrils of fog slipped around his legs. At the far edge of the
darkening sea, the pallid sun was half extinguished. Sam shivered and
went into the tavern to get a drink.

of the three other customers, none was in a noticeably upbeat mood. In
one of the black vinyl booths off to the left, a middleaged man and
woman were leaning toward each other, speaking in low voices. A
gray-faced guy at the bar was hunched over his glass of draft beer,
holding it in both hands, scowling as if he had just seen a bug swimming
in the brew.

In keeping with its name, Knight's Bridge reeked ersatz British
atmosphere. A different coat of arms, each no doubt copied from some
official heraldic reference book, had been carved from wood and
hand-painted and inset in the back of every barstool. A suit of armor
stood in one corner. Fox-hunting scenes hung on the walls.

Sam slid onto a stool eight down from the gray-faced man. The bartender
hurried to him, wiping a clean cotton rag over the already immaculate,
highly polished oak counter.

"Yes, sir, what'll it be?" He was a round man from every aspect a small
round potbelly; meaty forearms with a thick thatching of black hair; a
chubby face; a mouth too small to be in harmony with his other features;
a puggish nose that ended in a round little ball; eyes round enough to
give him a perpetual look of surprise.

"You have Guinness?"         Sam asked.

"It's a fundamental of a real pub, I'd say. If we didn't have Guinness
. . . why, we might as well convert to a tea shop."

His was a mellifluous voice; every word he spoke sounded as smooth and
round as he looked. He seemed unusually eager to please.

"Would you like it cold or just slightly chilled?                     I keep it both ways."

"Very slightly chilled."



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"Good man!" When he returned with a Guinness and a glass, the bartender
said, "Name's Burt Peckham. I own the joint."


Carefully pouring the stout down the side of the glass to ensure the
smallest possible head, Sam said, "Sam Booker. Nice place, Burt. Thanks.
Maybe you could spread the word. I try to keep it cozy and well
stocked, and we used to have quite a crowd, but lately it seems like
most of the town either joined a temperance movement or started brewing
their own in their basements, one or the other."

"Well, it's a Monday night."

"These last couple months, it's not been unusual to be half empty even
on a Saturday night, which never used to happen."

Burt Peckham's round face dimpled with worry.                      He slowly polished the
bar while he talked.

"What it is-I think maybe this health kick Californians have been on for
so long has finally just gone too far. They're all staying home, doing
aerobics in front of the VCR, eating wheat germ and egg whites or
whatever the hell it is they eat, drinking nothing but bottled water and
fruit juice and titmouse milk. Listen, a tipple or two a day is good
for you.

" Sam drank some of the Guinness, sighed with satisfaction, and said,
"This sure tastes as if it ought to be good for you."

"It is. Helps your circulation. Keeps your bowels in shape. Ministers
ought to be touting its virtues each Sunday, not preaching against it.
All things in moderation-and that includes a couple of brews a day."
Perhaps realizing that he was polishing the bar a bit obsessively, he
hung the rag on a hook and stood with his arms folded across his chest.

"You just passing through, Sam? Actually," Sam lied, "I'm taking a long
trip up the coast from L.A. to the Oregon line, loafing along, looking
for a quiet place to semi-retire.

"

"Retire?        You kidding?"

"Semi-retire.          But you're only, what, forty, forty-one?

"Forty-two.         What are you-a bank robber?"

"Stockbroker. Made some good investments over the years. Now I think I
can drop out of the rat race and get by well enough just managing my own
portfolio. I want to settle down where it's quiet, no smog, no crime.
I've had it with L. A.

- 21 "People really make money in stocks?"                     Peckham asked.

"I thought it was about as good an investment as a craps table in Reno.
Wasn't everybody wiped out when the market blew up a couple years ago?"

"It's a mug's game for the little guy, but you can do all right if
you're a broker and if you don't get swept up in the euphoria of a bull
market. No market goes up forever or down forever; you just have to
guess right about when to start swimming against the current.

"



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"Retiring at forty-two," Peckham said wonderingly- "And when I got into
the bar business, I thought I was set for life. Told my wife-in good
times, people drink to celebrate, in bad times they drink to forget, so
there's no better business than a tavern. Now look." He indicated the
nearly empty room with a sweeping gesture of his right hand.

"I'd have done better selling condoms in a monastery."

"Get me another Guinness?"            Sam asked.

"Hey, maybe this place will turn around yet!"

When Peckham returned with the second bottle of stout, Sam said,
"Moonlight Cove might be what I've been looking for. I guess I'll stay
a few days, get the feel of it. Can you recommend a motel?"

"There's only one left. Never been much of a tourist town. No one here
really wanted that, I guess. Up until this summer, we had four motels.
Now three are out of business. I don't know . . . even as pretty as
it is, maybe this burg is dying. As far as I can see, we aren't losing
population but . . . dammit, we're losing something." He snatched up
the bar rag again and began to polish the oak.

"Anyway, try Cove Lodge on Cypress Lane. That's the last cross street
on ocean Avenue; it runs along the bluff, so you'll probably have a room
with an ocean view. Clean, quiet place At the end of the downstairs
hall, Chrissie Foster threw open the front door. She raced across the
wide porch and down the steps, stumbled, regained her balance, turned
right, and fled across the yard, past a blue Honda that evidently
belonged to Tucker, heading for the stables. The hard slap of her
tennis shoes seemed to boom like cannon fire through the swiftly fading
twilight. She wished that she could run silently-and faster. Even if
her parents and Tucker didn't reach the front porch until she was
swallowed by shadows, they would still be able to hear where she was
going.

Most of the sky was a burnt-out black, though a deep red glow marked the
western horizon, as if all the light of the October day had been boiled
down to that intense crimson essence, which had settled at the bottom of
the celestial cauldron. Wispy fog crept in from the nearby sea, and
Chrissie hoped it would swiftly thicken, dense as pudding, because she
was going to need more cover.

She reached the first of the two long stables and rolled aside the big
door. The familiar and not unpleasant aroma-straw, hay, feed grain,
horseflesh, liniment, saddle leather, and dry manure-wafted over her.

She snapped the night-light switch, and three low-wattage bulbs winked
on, bright enough to dimly illuminate the building without disturbing
the occupants. Ten generously proportioned stalls flanked each side of
the dirt-floored main aisle, and curious horses peered out at her above
several of the half-size doors. A few belonged to Chrissie's parents,
but most were being boarded for people who lived in and around Moonlight
Cove. The horses snuffled and snorted, and one whinnied softly, as - 23
Chrissie ran past them to the last box on the left, where a dapple-gray
mare named Godiva was in residence.

Access to the stalls also could he had from outside the building,
although in this cool season the exterior Dutch-style doors were kept
bolted both top and bottom to prevent heat escaping from the barn.
Godiva was a gentle mare and particularly amicable with Chrissie, but
she was skittish about being approached in the dark; she might rear or


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bolt if surprised by the opening of her exterior stall door at this
hour. Because Chrissie could not afford to lose even a few seconds in
calming her mount, she had to reach the mare from inside the stable.

Godiva was ready for her. The mare shook her head, tossing the thick
and lustrous white mane for which she had been named, and blew air
through her nostrils in greeting.

Glancing back toward the stable entrance, expecting to see Tucker and
her parents storm in at any moment, Chrissie unlatched the half-door.
Godiva came out into the aisle between the rows of stalls.

"Be a lady, Godiva.         Oh, please be sweet for me."

She could not take time to saddle the mare or slip a bit between her
teeth. With a hand against Godiva's flank, she guided her mount past
the tack room and feed shed that occupied the last quarter of the barn,
startling a mouse that scurried across her path into a shadowy corner.
She rolled open the door at that end, and cool air swept in.

Without a stirrup to give her a leg up, Chrissie was too small to mount
Godiva.

A blacksmith's shoeing stool stood in the corner by the tack room.
Keeping a hand against Godiva to gentle her, Chrissie hooked the stool
with one foot and pulled it to the horse's side.

Behind her, from the other end of the barn, Tucker shouted, "Here she
is! The stable!" He ran toward her.

The stool did not give her much height and was no substitute for a
stirrup.

She could hear Tucker's pounding footsteps, close, closer, but she
didn't look at him.

He cried, "I got her!"

Chrissie grabbed Godiva's magnificent white mane, threw herself against
the big horse and up, up, swinging her leg high, scrabbling desperately
against the mare's side, pulling hard on the mane. it must have hurt
Godiva, but the old girl was stoic. She didn't rear or whinny in pain,
as if some equine instinct told her that this little girl's life
depended on equanimity. Then Chrissie was on Godiva's back, tilting
precariously but aboard, holding tight with her knees, one hand full of
mane, and she slapped the horse's side.

"Go!"

Tucker reached her as she shouted that single word, grabbed at her leg,
snared her jeans. His deep-set eyes were wild with anger; his nostrils
flared, and his thin lips pulled back from his teeth. She kicked him
under the chin, and he lost his grip on her.

Simultaneously Godiva leaped forward, through the open door, into the
night.

"She's got a horse!"         Tucker shouted.

"She's on a horse!"

The dapple-gray sprinted straight toward the meadowed slope that led to
the sea a couple of hundred yards away, where the last muddy-red light



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of the sunset painted faint, speckled patterns on the black water. But
Chrissie didn't want to go down to the shore because she was not sure
how highh the tide was. At some places along the coast, the beach was
not broad even at low tide; if the tide were high now, deep water would
meet rocks and bluffs at some points, making passage impossible. She
could not risk riding into a dead end with her parents and Tucker in
pursuit.

Even without the benefit of a saddle and at a full gallop, Chrissie
managed to pull herself into a better position astride the mare, and as
soon as she was no longer leaning to one side like a stunt rider, she
buried both hands in the thick white mane, gripped fistfuls of that
coarse hair, and tried to use it as a substitute for reins. She urged
Godiva to turn left, away from the sea, away from the house as well,
back along the stables, and out toward the half-mile driveway that led
to the county road, where they were more likely to find help.

Instead of rebelling at this crude method of guidance, patient Godiva
responded immediately, turning to the left as prettily as if she had a
bit in her teeth and had felt the tug of a rein. The thunder of her
hooves echoed off the barn walls as they raced past that structure.

- 25 "You're a great old girl!"              Chrissie shouted to the horse.

"I love you, girl."

They passed safely wide of the east end of the stable, where she had
first entered to get the mare, and she spotted Tucker coming out of the
door. He was clearly surprised to see her heading that way instead of
down to the ocean. He sprinted toward her, and he was startlingly
quick, but he was no match for Godiva They came to the driveway, and
Chrissie kept Godiva on the soft verge, parallel to that hard-surfaced
lane. She leaned forward, as tight against the horse as she could get,
terrified of falling off, and every hard thud of hooves jarred through
her bones. Her head was turned to the side, so she saw the house off to
the left, the windows full of light but not welcoming. It was no longer
her home; it was hell between four walls, so the light at the windows
seemed, to her, to be demonic fires in the rooms of Hades.

Suddenly she saw something racing across the front lawn toward the
driveway, toward her. It was low and fast, the size of a man but
running on all fours-or nearly so-loping, about twenty yards away and
closing. She saw another equally bizarre figure, almost the size of the
first, running behind it. Though both creatures were backlit by the
house lights, Chrissie could discern little more than their shapes, yet
she knew what they were. No, correct that She knew who they probably
were, but she still didn't know what they were, though she had seen them
in the upstairs hall this morning; she knew what they had been people
like her-but not what they were now.

"Go, Godiva, go!"

Even without the flap of reins to signal the need for greater speed, the
mare increased the length of her stride, as if she shared a psychic link
with Chrissie.

Then they were past the house, tearing flat-out across a grassy fields,
paralleling the macadam driveway, whizzing toward the county road less
than half a mile to the east. The nimble-footed mare worked her great
haunch muscles, and her powerful stride was so lullingly rhythmic and
exhilarating that Chrissie soon was hardly aware of the rocking-jolting
aspect of the ride; it seemed as if they were skimming across the earth,


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nearly flying.

She looked over her shoulder and did not see the two loping figures,
although they were no doubt still pursuing her through the multilayered
shadows. With the muddy-red candescence along the western horizon
fading to deep purple, with the lights of the house rapidly dwindling,
and with a crescent moon beginning to thrust one silver-bright point
above the line of hills in the east, visibility was poor.

Though she    could not see those pursuers who were on foot, she had no
difficulty    spotting the headlights of Tucker's blue Honda. In front of
the house,    a couple of hundred yards behind her now, Tucker swung the
car.around    in the driveway and joined the chase.

Chrissie was fairly confident that Godiva could outrun any man or beast
other than a better horse, but she knew that the mare was no match for a
car. Tucker would catch them in seconds. The man's face was clear in
her memory the bony brow, sharp-ridged nose, deeply set eyes like a pair
of hard, black marbles. He'd had about him that aura of unnatural
vitality that Chrissie sometimes had seen in her parents-abundant
nervous energy coupled with a queer look of hunger. She knew he would do
anything to stop her, that he might even attempt to ram Godiva with the
Honda.

He could not, of course, use the car to follow Godiva overland.
Reluctantly Chrissie employed her knees and the mane in her right hand
to turn the mare away from the driveway and the county road, where they
were most likely to reach help quickly. Godiva responded without
hesitation, and they headed toward the woods that lay at the far side of
the meadow, five hundred yards to the south.

Chrissie could see the forest only as a black, bristly mass vaguely
silhouetted against the marginally less dark sky. The details of the
terrain she must cross appeared to her more in memory than in reality.
She prayed that the horse's night vision was keener than hers.

"That's my girl, go, go, you good old girl, go!"                     she shouted
encouragingly to the mare.

They made their own wind in the crisp, still air. Chrissie was aware of
Godiva's hot breath streaming past her in crystallized plumes, and her
own breath smoked from her open mouth. Her heart pounded in time with
the frantic thumping of hooves, and - 27 she felt almost as if she and
Godiva were not rider and horse but one being, sharing the same heart
and blood and breath.

Though fleeing for her life, she was as pleasantly thrilled as she was
terrified, and that realization startled her. Facing death or in this
case something perhaps worse than death-was peculiarly exciting, darkly
attractive in a way and to an extent that she could never have imagined.
She was almost as frightened of the unexpected thrill as of the people
who were chasing her.

She clung tightly to the dapple-gray, sometimes bouncing on the horse's
bare back, lifting dangerously high, but holding fast, flexing and
contracting her own muscles in sympathy with those of the horse. With
every ground-pummeling stride, Chrissie grew more confident that they
would escape. The mare had heart and endurance. When they had
traversed three-quarters of the field, with the woods looming, Chrissie
decided to turn east again when they reached the trees, not straight
toward the county road but in that general direction, and Godiva fell.



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The mare had put a foot in some depression-a ground squirrel's burrow,
the entrance to a rabbit's warren, perhaps a natural drainage
ditch-stumbled, and lost her balance. She tried to recover, failed, and
fell, bleating in terror.

Chrissie was afraid that her mount would crash down on her, that she
would be crushed, or at least break a leg. But there were no stirrups
to ensnare her feet, no saddle horn to snag her clothes, and because she
instinctively let go of the dapple-gray's mane, she was thrown free at
once, straight over the horse's head and high into the air. Though the
ground was soft and further cushioned by a thick growth of wild grass,
she met it with numbing impact, driving the air from her lungs and
banging her teeth together so hard that her tongue would have been
bitten off if it had been between them. But she was three yards away
from the horse and safe in that regard.

Godiva was the first to rise, scrambling up an instant after crashing
down. Eyes wide with fright, she cantered past Chrissie, favoring her
right foreleg, which evidently was only sprained; if it had been broken,
the horse would not have gotten up.

Chrissie called to the mare, afraid the horse would wander off. But her
breath was coming in ragged gasps, and the name issued from her in a
whisper "Godiva!"

The horse kept going west, back toward the sea and the stables.

By the time Chrissie got up on her hands and knees, she realized that a
lame horse was of no use to her, so she made no further effort to recall
the mare. She was gasping for breath and mildly dizzy, but she knew she
had to get moving because she was no doubt still being stalked. She
could see the Honda, headlights on, parked along the lane more than
three hundred yards to the north. With all the bloody glow of sunset
having seeped out of the horizon, the meadow was black. She could not
determine if low, swift-moving figures were out there, though she knew
they must be approaching and that she would surely fall into their hands
within a minute or two.

She got to her feet, turned south toward the woods, staggered ten or
fifteen yards until her legs recovered from the shock of her fall, and
finally broke into a run.

Over the years Sam Booker had discovered that the length of the
California coast was graced by charming inns that featured
master-quality stonework, weathered wood, cove ceilings, beveled glass,
and lushly planted courtyards with used-brick walkways. In spite of the
comfortable images its name evoked and the singularly scenic setting
that it enjoyed, Cove Lodge was not one of those California jewels. It
was just an ordinary stucco, two-story, forty-room, rectangular box,
with a drab coffee shop at one end, no swimming pool. Amenities were
limited to ice and soda machines on both floors. The sign above the
motel office was neither garish nor in the artistic mode of some modern
neon, just small and simple-and cheap.

- 29 The evening desk clerk gave him a second-floor room with an ocean
view, though location didn't matter to Sam. Judging by the dearth of
cars in the lot, however, rooms with a view were not in short supply.
Each level of the motel had twenty units in banks of ten, serviced by an
interior hall carpeted in short-nap orange nylon that seared his eyes.
Rooms on the east overlooked Cypress Lane; those on the west faced the
Pacific. His quarters were at the northwest corner a queen-size bed
with a sagging mattress and worn blue-green spread, cigarette-scarred


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nightstands, a television bolted to a stand, table, two straight-back
chairs, cigarette-scarred bureau, phone, bathroom, and one big window
framing the night-blanketed sea.

When disheartened salesmen, down on their luck and teetering on the edge
of economic ruin, committed suicide on the road, they did the deed in
rooms like this.

He unpacked his two suitcases, putting his clothes in the closet and
bureau drawers. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the
telephone on the nightstand.

He should call Scott, his son, who was back home in Los Angeles, but he
couldn't do it from this phone. Later, if the local police became
interested in him, they would visit Cove Lodge, examine his
long-distance charges, investigate the numbers he had dialed, and try to
piece together his real identity from the identities of those with whom
he had spoken. To maintain his cover, he must use his room phone only
to call his contact number at the Bureau office in L.A a secure line
that would be answered with "Birchfield Securities, may I help yol-19 "
Furthermore, in phone-company records that it was registered to
Birchfield, the nonexistent firm with which Sam was supposedly a
stockbroker; it could not be traced ultimately to the FBI. He had
nothing to report yet, so he did not lift the receiver. When he went
out to dinner, he could call Scott from a pay phone.

He did not want to talk to the boy. It would be purely a duty call. Sam
dreaded it. Conversation with his son had ceased to be pleasurable at
least three years ago, when Scott had been thirteen and, at that time,
already motherless for a year. Sam wondered if the boy would have gone
wrong quite as rapidly or so completely if Karen had lived. That avenue
of thought led him, of course, to the contemplation of his own role in
Scott's decline Would the boy have turned bad regardless of the quality
of the parental guidance that he received; was his fall inevitable, the
weakness in him or in his stars? Or was Scott's descent a direct result
of his father's failure to find a way to steer him to a better, brighter
path?

If he kept brooding about it, he was going to pull a Willy Loman right
there in Cove Lodge, even though he was not a salesman.

Guinness stout.

Good Mexican food.

Goldie Hawn.

Fear of death.

As a list of reasons for living, it was damned short and too pathetic to
contemplate, but perhaps it was just long enough.

After he used the bathroom, he washed his hands and face in cold water.
He still felt tired, not the least refreshed.

He took off his corduroy jacket and put on a thin, supple leather
shoulder holster that he retrieved from a suitcase. He'd also packed a
Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's Special, which he now loaded. He tucked it
into the holster before slipping into his jacket again. His coats were
tailored to conceal the weapon; it made no bulge, and the holster fit so
far back against his side that the gun could not be seen easily even if
he left the jacket unbuttoned.



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For undercover assignments, Sam's body and face were as well tailored as
his jackets. He was five eleven, neither tall nor short. He weighed one
hundred and seventy pounds, mostly bone and muscle, little fat, yet he
was not a thick-necked weightlifter type in such superb condition that
he would draw attention. His face was nothing special neither ugly nor
handsome, neither too broad nor too narrow, marked neither by unusually
sharp nor blunt features, unblemished and unscarred. His sandy-brown
hair was barbered in a timelessly moderate length and style that would
be unremarkable in an age of brush cuts or in an era of shoulder-length
locks.

Of all the aspects of his appearance, only his eyes were truly
arresting. They were gray-blue with darker blue striations. Women had
often told him that his were the most beautiful eyes they had ever seen.
At one time he had cared what women said of him.

- 31 He shrugged, making sure the holster was hanging properly.

He did not expect to need the gun that evening. He had not begun to
nose around and draw attention to himself; and since he had not yet
pushed anyone, no one was ready to push back.

Nevertheless, from now on he would carry the revolver. He could not
leave it in the motel room or lock it in his rental car; if someone
conducted a determined search, the gun would be found, and his cover
would be blown. No middle-aged stockbroker, searching for a coastal
haven in which to take early retirement, would go armed with a
snub-nosed .38 of that make and model. It was a cop's piece.

Pocketing his room key, he went out to dinner.

After she checked in, Tessa Jane Lockland stood for a long time at the
big window in her room at the Cove Lodge, with no lights on. She stared
out at the vast, dark Pacific and down at the beach from which her
sister, Janice, supposedly had ventured forth on a grimly determined
mission of self-destruction.

The official story was that Janice had gone to the shore alone at night,
in a state of acute depression. She had taken a massive overdose of
Valium, swallowing the capsules with several swigs from a can of Diet
Coke. Then she had stripped off her clothes and had swum out toward far
Japan. Losing consciousness because of the drugs, she soon slipped into
the cold embrace of the sea, and drowned.

"Bullshit," Tessa said softly, as if speaking to her own vague
reflection in the cool glass.

Janice Lockland Capshaw had been a hopeful person, unfailingly
optimistic-a trait so common in members of the Lockland clan as to be
genetic. Not once in her life had Janice sat in a corner feeling sorry
for herself; if she had tried it, within seconds she would have begun
laughing at the foolishness of selfpity and would have gotten up and
gone to a movie, or for a psychologically therapeutic run. Even when
Richard died, Janice had not allowed grief to metastasize into
depression, though she loved him greatly.

So what would have sent her into such a steep emotional spiral?
Contemplating the story the police wanted her to believe, Tessa was
driven to sarcasm. Maybe Janice had gone out to a restaurant, been
served a bad dinner, and been so crushed by the "experience that suicide
had been her only possible response. Yeah. Or maybe her television
went on the blink, and she missed her favorite soap opera, which plunged


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her into irreversible despair. Sure. Those scenarios were about as
plausible as the nonsense that the Moonlight Cove police and coroner had
put in their reports.

Suicide.

"bullshit," Tessa repeated.

From the window of her motel room, she could see only a narrow band of
the beach below, where it met the churning surf. The sand was dimly
revealed in the wintry light of a newly risen quarter moon, a pale
ribbon curving southwest and northwest around the cove.

Tessa was overcome by the desire to stand on the beach from which her
sister had supposedly set out on that midnight swim to the graveyard,
the same beach to which the tide had returned her bloated, ravaged
corpse days later. She turned from the window and switched on a bedside
lamp. She removed a brown leatherjacket from a hanger in the closet,
pulled it on, slung her purse over her shoulder, and left the room,
locking the door behind her. She was certain-irrationally so-that
merely by going to the beach and standing where Janice supposedly had
stood, she would uncover a clue to the true story, through an amazing
insight or flicker of intuition.

As the hammered-silver moon rose above the dark eastern hills,
Chrissie raced along the tree line, looking for a way into the woods
before her strange pursuers found her. She quickly arrived at Pyramid
Rock, thus named because the formation, twice as tall as she was, had
three sides and came to a weather-rounded point; when younger, she had
fantasized that it had been constructed ages ago by a geographically
displaced tribe of inchhigh Egyptians. Having played in this meadow and
forest for years, she was as familiar with the terrain as with the rooms
of her own house, certainly more at home there than her parents or
Tucker would be, which gave her an advantage. She slipped past Pyramid
Rock, into the gloom beneath the trees, onto a narrow deer trail that
led south.

She heard no one behind her and did not waste time squinting back into
the darkness. But she suspected that, as predators, her parents and
Tucker would be silent stalkers, revealing themselves only when they
pounced.

The coastal woodlands were comprised mostly of a wide variety of pines,
although a few sweet gums flourished, too, their leaves a scarlet blaze
of autumn color in daylight but now as black as bits of funeral shrouds.
Chrissie followed the winding trail as the land began to slope into a
canyon. In more than half the forest, the trees grew far enough apart
to allow the cold glow of the partial moon to penetrate to the
underbrush and lay an icy crust of light upon the trail. The incoming
fog was still too thin to filter out much of that wan radiance, but at
other places the interlacing branches blocked the lunar light.

Even where moonlight revealed the way, Chrissie dared not run, for she
would surely be tripped by the surface roots of the trees, which spread
across the deer-beaten path. Here and there low-hanging branches
presented another danger to a runner, but she hurried along.

As if reading from a book of her own adventures, a book like one of
those she so much liked, she thought, Young Chrissie was as surefooted
as she was resourceful and quick-thinking, no more intimidated by the
darkness than by the thought of her monstrous pursuers. What a girl she
was!


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Soon she would reach the bottom of the slope, where she could turn west
toward the sea or east toward the county rout, which bridged the canyon.
Few people lived in that area, more than two miles from the outskirts of
Moonlight Cove; fewer still lived by the sea, since portions of the
coastline were protected by state law and were closed to construction.
Though she had little chance of finding help toward the Pacific, her
prospects to the east were not noticeably better, because the county
road was lightly traveled and few houses were built along it; besides,
Tucker might be patrolling that route in his Honda, expecting her to
head that way and flag down the first passing car she saw.

Frantically wondering where to go, she descended the last hundred feet.
The trees flanking the trail gave way to low, impenetrable tangles of
bristly scrub oaks called chaparral. A few immense ferns, ideally
suited to the frequent coastal fogs, overgrew the path, and Chrissie
shivered as she pushed through them, for she felt as if scores of small
hands were grabbing at her.

A broad but shallow stream cut a course through the bottom of the
canyon, and she paused by its bank to catch her breath. Most of the
stream bed was dry. At this time of year, only a couple of inches of
water moved lazily through the center of the channel, glimmering darkly
in the moonlight.

The night was windless.

Soundless.

Hugging herself, she realized how cold it was. In jeans and a
blue-plaid flannel shirt, she was adequately dressed for a crisp October
day, but not for the cold, damp air of an autumn night.

She was chilled, breathless, scared, and unsure of what her next move
ought to be, but most of all she was angry with herself for those
weaknesses of mind and body. Ms. Andre Norton's wonderful adventure
stories were filled with dauntless young heroines who could endure far
longer chases-and far greater - 35 cold and other hardships-than this,
and always with wits intact, able to make quick decisions and, usually,
right ones.

Spurred by comparing herself to a Norton girl, Chrissie stepped off the
bank of the stream. She crossed ten feet of loamy soil eroded from the
hills by last season's heavy rains and tried to jump across the shallow,
purling band of water. She splashed down a few inches short of the
other side, soaking her tennis shoes. Nevertheless she went on through
more loam, which clumped to her wet shoes, ascended the far bank, and
headed neither east nor west but south, up the other canyon wall toward
the next arm of the forest.

Though she was entering new territory now, at the extremity of the
section of the woods that had been her playground for years, she was not
afraid of getting lost. She could tell east from west by the movement
of the thin, incoming fog and by the position of the moon, and from
those signs she could stay on a reliably southward course. She believed
that within a mile she would come to a score of houses and to the
sprawling grounds of New Wave Microtechnology, which lay between Foster
Stables and the town of Moonlight Cove. There she would be able to find
help.

Then, of course, her real problems would begin. She would have to
convince someone that her parents were no longer her parents, that they


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had changed or been possessed or been somehow taken over by some spirit
or . . . force. And that they wanted to turn her into one of them.

Yeah, she thought, good luck.

She was bright, articulate, responsible, but she was also just an
eleven-year-old kid. She would have a hard time making anyone believe
her. She had no illusions about that. They would I listen and nod
their heads and smile, and then they would call her parents, and her
parents would sound more plausible than she did. . . .

But I've got to try, she told herself, as she began to ascend the sloped
southern wall of the canyon. If I don't try to convince someone, what
else can I do? Just surrender? No chance.

Behind her, a couple of hundred yards away, from high on the far canyon
wall down which she had recently descended, something shrieked. It was
not an entirely human cry-not that of any animal, either. The first
shrill call was answered by a second a third, and each shriek was
clearly that of a different creature, for each was in a noticeably
variant voice.

Chrissie halted on the steep trail, one hand against the deeply fissured
bark of a pine, under a canopy of sweet-scented boughs. She looked back
and listened as her pursuers simultaneously began to wail, an ululant
cry reminiscent of the baying of a pack of coyotes . . . but stranger,
more frightening. The sound was so cold, it penetrated her flesh and
pierced like a needle to her marrow.

Their baying was probably a sign of their confidence They were certain
they would catch her, so they no longer needed to be quiet.

"What are you?"       she whispered.

She suspected they could see as well as cats in the dark.

Could they smell her, as if they were dogs?

Her heart began to slam almost painfully within her breast.

Feeling vulnerable and alone, she turned from the pulling hunters and
scrambled up the trail toward the southern rim of the canyon.

At the foot of Ocean Avenue, Tessa Lockland walked through the empty
parking lot and onto the public beach. The night breeze off the Pacific
was just cranking up, faint but chilly enough that she was glad to be
wearing slacks, a wool sweater, and her leather jacket.

She crossed the soft sand, toward the seaside shadows that lay beyond
the radius of the glow from the last streetlamp, past a tall cypress
growing on the beach and so radically shaped by ocean winds that it
reminded her of an erte sculpture, all curved lines and molten for7n. On
the damp sand at the surf's edge, with the tide lapping at the strand
inches from her shoes, Tessa - 37 stared westward. The partial moon was
insufficient to light the vast, rolling main; all she could see were the
nearest three lines of low, foam-crested breakers surging toward her
from out of the foam She tried to picture her sister standing on this
deserted beach, washing down thirty or forty Valium capsules with a Diet
Coke, then stripping naked and plunging into the cold sea. No. Not
Janice.

With growing conviction that the authorities in Moonlight Cove were
incompetent fools or liars, Tessa walked slowly south along the curving


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shoreline. In the pearly luminescence of the immature moon, she studied
the sand, the widely separated cypresses farther back on the beach, and
the time-worn formations of rock. She was not looking for physical
clues that might tell her what had happened to Janice; those had been
erased by wind and tide during the past three weeks. instead, she was
hoping that the very landscape itself and the elements of
night-darkness, cool wind, and arabesques of pale but slowly thickening
fog-would inspire her to develop a theory about what had really happened
to Janice and an approach she might use to prove that theory.

She was a filmmaker specializing in industrials and documentaries of
various kinds. When in doubt about the meaning and purpose of a
project, she often found that immersion in a particular geographical
locale could inspire narrative and thematic approaches to making a film
about it. In the developmental stages of a new travel film, for
instance, she often spent a couple Of days casually strolling around a
city like Singapore or Hong Kong or Rio, just absorbing details, which
was more productive than thousands of hours of background reading and
brainstorming, though of course the reading and brainstorming had to be
a part of it too.

She had walked less than two hundred feet south along the beach, when
she heard a shrill, haunting cry that halted her. The sound was
distant, rising and falling, rising and falling, then fading.

Chilled more by that strange call than by the brisk October air, she
wondered what she had heard. Although it had been partly a canine howl,
she was certain it was not the voice of a dog. Though it was also
marked by a feline whine and wail, she was equally certain it had not
issued from a cat; no domestic cat could produce such volume, and to the
best of her knowledge, no cougars roamed the coastal hills, certainly
not in or near a town the size of Moonlight Cove.

Just as she was about to move on, the same uncanny cry cut the night
again, and she was fairly sure it was coming from atop the bluff that
overlooked the beach, farther south, where the lights of sea-facing
houses were fewer than along the middle of the cove. This time the howl
ended on a protracted and more guttural note, which might have been
produced by a large dog, though she still felt it had to have come from
some other creature. Someone living along the bluff must be keeping an
exotic pet in a cage a wolf, perhaps, or some big mountain cat not
indigenous to the northern coast.

That explanation did not satisfy her, either, for there was some
peculiarly familiar quality to the cry that she could not place, a
quality not related to a wolf or mountain cat. She waited for another
shriek, but it did not come.

Around her the darkness had deepened. The fog was clotting, and a
lumpish cloud slid across half of the two-pointed moon.

She decided she could better absorb the details of the scene in the
morning, and she turned back toward the mist-shrouded streetlamps it the
bottom of Ocean Avenue. She didn't realize she was walking so
fast-almost running-until she had left the shore, crossed the beach
parking lot, and climbed half the first steep block of Ocean Avenue, at
which point she became aware of her pace only because she suddenly heard
her own labored breathing.

Thomas Shaddack drifted in a perfect blackness that was neither warm
nor cool, where he seemed weightless, where he had - 39 ceased to feel
any sensation against his skin, where he seemed limbless and without


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musculature or bones, where he seemed to have no physical substance
whatsoever. A tenuous thread of thought linked him to his corporeal
self, and in the dimmest reaches of his mind, he was still aware that he
was a man-an Ichabod Crane of a man, six feet two, one hundred and
sixty-five pounds, lean and bony, with a too-narrow face, a high brow,
and brown eyes so light they were almost yellow.

He was also vaguely aware that he was nude and afloat in a
state-of-the-art sensory-deprivation chamber, which looked somewhat like
an old-fashioned iron lung but was four times larger. The single
low-wattage bulb was not lit, and no light penetrated the shell of the
tank. The pool in which Shaddack floated was a few feet deep, a
ten-percent solution of magnesium sulfate in water for maximum buoyancy.
Monitored by a computer-as was every element of that environment-the
water cycled between ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at
which a floating body was least affected by gravity, and ninety eight
degrees, at which the heat differential between human body temperature
and surrounding fluid was marginal.

t He suffered from no claustrophobia. A minute or two after he stepped
into the tank and closed the hatch behind him, his sense of confinement
entirely faded.

Deprived of sensory input-no sight, no sound, little or no taste, no
olfactory stimulation, no sense of touch or weight or place or
time-Shaddack let his mind break free of the dreary restraints of the
flesh, soaring to previously unattainable heights of insight and
exploring ideas of a complexity otherwise beyond his reach.

Even without the assistance of sensory deprivation, he was a genius.
Time magazine had said he was, so it must be true. He had built New
Wave Microtechnology from a struggling firm with initial capital of
twenty thousand dollars to a three-hundred-million-a-year operation that
conceived, researched, and developed cutting-edge microtechnology.
making no effort to At the moment, however, Shaddack was focus his mind
on current research problems. He was using the tank strictly for
recreational purposes, for the inducement of a specific vision that
never failed to enthrall and excite him.

His vision Except for that thin thread of thought that tethered him to
reality, he believed himself to be within a great, laboring machine, so
immense that its dimensions could be ascertained no more easily than
could those of the universe itself. It was the landscape of a dream but
infinitely more textured and intense than a dream. Like an airborne
mote within the eerily lit bowels of that colossal imaginary mechanism,
he drifted past massive walls and interconnected columns of whirling
drive shafts, rattling drive chains, myriad thrusting piston rods joined
by sliding blocks to connecting rods that were in turn joined by crank
wrists to well-greased cranks that turned flywheels of all dimensions.
Servomotors hummed, compressors huffed, distributors sparked as
electrical current flashed through millions of tangled wires to far
reaches of the construct.

For Shaddack, the most exciting thing about this visionary world was the
manner in which steel drive shafts and alloy pistons and hard rubber
gaskets and aluminum cowlings were joined with organic parts to form a
revolutionary entity possessed of two types of life efficient mechanical
animation and the throb of organic tissue. For pumps, the designer had
employed glistening human hearts that pulsated tirelessly in that
ancient lubdub rhythm, joined by thick arteries to rubber tubing that
snaked into the walls; some of them pumped blood to parts of the system
that required organic lubrication, while others pumped high-viscosity


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oil. Incorporated into other sections of the infinite machine were tens
of thousands of lung sacs functioning as bellows and filters; tendons
and tumor-like excrescences of flesh were employed to join lengths of
pipe and rubber hoses with more flexibility and surety of seal than
could have been attained with ordinary nonorganic couplings.

Here was the best of organic and machine systems wedded in one perfect
structure. As Thomas Shaddack imagined his way through the endless
avenues of this dream place, he was enraptured even though he did not
understand-or care-what ultimate function any of it had, what product or
service it labored to bring forth. He was excited by the entity because
it was clearly efficient at whatever it was doing, because its organic
and inorganic parts were brilliantly integrated.

All of his life, for as many of his forty-one years as he could recall,
Shaddack had struggled against the limitations of the - 41 human
condition, striving with all his will and heart to rise above the
destiny of his species. He wanted to be more than merely a man. He
wanted to have the power of a god and to shape not only his own future
but that of all mankind. In his private sensory-deprivation chamber,
transported by this vision of a cybernetic organism, he was closer to
that longed-for metamorphosis than he could be in the real world, and
that was what invigorated him.

For him the vision was not simply intellectually stimulating and
emotionally moving, but powerfully erotic too. As he floated through
that imaginary semiorganic machine, watching it throb and pulsate, he
surrendered to an orgasm that he felt not merely in his genitals but in
every fiber; indeed he was unaware of his fierce erection, unaware of
the forceful ejaculations around which his entire body contracted, for
he perceived the pleasure to be diffused throughout him rather than
focused in his penis. Milky threads of semen spread through the dark
pool of magnesium-sulfate solution.

A few minutes later the sensory-deprivation chamber's a matic timer
activated the interior light and sounded a soft alarm. Shaddack was
called back from his dream to the real world of Moonlight Cove.

Chrissie Foster's eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she was able to
find her way swiftly through even unfamiliar territory.

When she reached the rim of the canyon, she passed between a pair of
Monterey cypresses and onto another mule-deer trail leading south
through the forest. Protected from the wind by the surrounding trees,
those enormous cypresses were lush and full, neither badly twisted nor
marked by antler-like branches as they were along the windswept shore.
For a moment she considered climbing high into those leafy reaches, with
the hope that her pursuers would pass beneath, unaware of her. But she
dared not take that chance; if they smelled her or divined her presence
by some other means, they would ascend, and she would be unable to
retreat.

She hurried on and quickly reached a break in the trees. Beyond lay a
meadow that sloped from east to west, as did most of the land
thereabout. The breeze picked up and was strong enough to ruffle her
blond hair continuously. The fog was not as thin as it had been when
she'd left Foster Stables on horseback, but the moonlight was still
unfiltered enough to frost the knee-high, dry grass that rippled when
the wind blew.

As she ran across the field toward the next stand of woods, she saw a
large truck, strung with lights as if it were a Christmas tree, heading


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south on the interstate, nearly a mile east of her, along the crest of
the second tier of coastal hills. She ruled out seeking help from
anyone on the distant freeway, for they were all strangers headed to
faraway places, therefore even less likely than locals to believe her.
Besides, she read newspapers and watched TV, so she had heard all about
the serial killers that roamed the interstates, and she had no trouble
imagining tabloid headlines summing up her fate YOUNG GIRL KILLED AND
EATEN BY ROVING CANNIBALS IN DODGE VAN; SERVED WITH A SIDE OF BROCCOLI
AND PARSLEY FOR GARNISH; BONES USED FOR SOUP.

The county road lay half a mile closer, along the tops of the first
hills, but no traffic moved on it. In any case she already had rejected
the idea of seeking help there, for fear of encountering Tucker in his
Honda.

Of course she believed that she had heard three distinct voices among
the eerie pulings of those who stalked her, which had to mean that
Tucker had abandoned his car and was with her parents now. Maybe she
could safely head toward the county highway, after all.

She thought about that as she sprinted across the meadow. But before
she had made up her mind to change course, those dreadful cries rose
behind her again, still in the woods but closer than before. T\,vo or
three voices yowled simultaneously, as if a pack of baying hounds was at
her heels, though stranger and more savage than ordinary dogs.

Abruptly Chrissie stepped into thin air and found herself falling into
what, for an instant, seemed to be a terrible chasm. But it was only an
eight-foot-wide, six-foot-deep drainage channel that cleaved the meadow,
and she rolled to the bottom of it unharmed.

The angry shrieking of her pursuers grew louder, nearer, and now their
voices had a more frenetic quality . . . a note of need, of hunger.

She scrambled to her feet and started to clamber up the six-foot wall of
the channel, when she realized that to her left, upslope, the ditch
terminated in a large culvert that bored away into the earth. She froze
halfway up the arroyo and considered this new option.

The pale concrete pipe offered the lambent moonlight just enough of a
reflective surface to be visible. When she saw it, she knew immediately
that it was the main drainage line that carried rainwater off the
interstate and county road far above and east of her. Judging by the
shrill cries of the hunters, her lead was dwindling. She was
increasingly afraid that she would not make the trees at the far side of
the meadow before being brought down. Perhaps the culvert was a dead
end and would provide her with a haven no more secure than the cypress
that she had considered climbing, but she decided to risk it.

She slid to the floor of the arroyo again and scurried to the conduit.
The pipe was four feet in diameter. By stooping slightly she was able
to walk into it. She went only a few steps, however, before she was
halted by a stench so foul that she gagged.

Something was dead and rotting in that lightless passage. She could not
see what it was. But maybe she was better off not seeing; the carcass
might look worse than it smelled. A wild animal, sick and dying, must
have crawled into the pipe for shelter, where it perished from its
disease.

She backed hastily out of the drain, drawing deep breaths of the fresh
night air.


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From the north came intermingled, ululant walls that literally put the
hair up on the back of her neck.

They were closing fast, almost on top of her.

She had no choice but to hide deep in the culvert and hope they could
not catch her scent. She suddenly realized that the decaying animal
might be to her benefit, for if those stalking her were able to smell
her as though they were hounds, the stench of decomposition might mask
her own odor.

Entering the pitch-black culvert again, she followed the convex floor,
which sloped gradually upward beneath the meadow. Within ten yards she
put her foot in something soft and slippery. The horrid odor of decay
burst upon her with even greater strength, and she knew she had stepped
in the dead thing.

"Oh, yuck.

" She gagged and felt her gorge rise, but she gritted her teeth and
refused to throw up. When she was past the putrid mass, she paused to
scrape her shoes on the concrete floor of the pipe.

Then she hurried farther into the drain. Scurrying with her knees bent,
shoulders hunched, and head tucked down, she realized she must have
looked like a troll scuttling into its secret burrow.

Fifty or sixty feet past the unidentified dead thing, Chrissie stopped,
crouched, and turned to look back toward the mouth of the culvert.
Through that circular aperture she had a view of the ditch in moonlight,
and she could see more than she had expected because, by contrast with
the darkness of the drain, the night beyond seemed brighter than when
she had been out there.

All was silent.

A gentle breeze flowed down the pipe from drainage grilles in the
highways above and to the east, pushing the odor of the decomposing
animal away from her, so she could not detect even a trace of it. The
air was tainted only by a mild dankness, a whiff of mildew.

Silence gripped the night.

She held her breath for a moment and listened intently.

Nothing.

Still crouching, she shifted her weight from foot to foot.

Silence.

She wondered if she should head deeper into the culvert. Then she
wondered whether snakes were in the pipe. Wouldn't that be a perfect
place for snakes to nest when the oncoming night's cool air drove them
to shelter?

Silence.

Where were her parents? 'and Tuckerr?                  A minute ago they had been close
behind her, within striking distance.

- 45 Silence.



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Rattlesnakes were common in the coastal hills, though not active at this
time of year. If a nest of rattlers She was so unnerved by the
continuing, unnatural silence that she had the urge to scream, just to
break that eerie spell.

A shrill cry shattered the quietude outside. It echoed through the
concrete tunnel, past Chrissie, and bounced from wall to wall along the
passage behind her, as if the hunters were approaching her not only from
outside but from the depths of the earth behind her.

Shadowy figures leaped into the arroyo beyond the culvert.

Sam found a Mexican restaurant on Serra Street, two blocks from his
motel. One sniff of the air inside the place was enough to assure him
the food would be good. That melange was the odiferous equivalent of a
Jose Feliciano album chili powder, bubbling hot chorizo, the sweet
fragrance of tortillas made with masa harina, cilantro, bell peppers,
the astringent tang of jalapenio chiles, onions. . . .

The Perez Family Restaurant was as unpretentious as its name, a single
rectangular room with blue vinyl booths along the side walls, tables in
the middle, kitchen at the rear. Unlike Burt Peckham at Knight's Bridge
tavern, the Perez family had as much business as they could handle.
Except for a two-chair table at the back, to which Sam was led by the
teenage hostess, the restaurant was filled to capacity.

The waiters and waitresses were dressed casually in jeans and sweaters,
the only nod to a uniform being white half-aprons tied around their
waists. Sam didn't even ask for Guinness, which he had never found in a
Mexican restaurant, but they had Corona, which would be fine if the food
was good.


The food was very good. Not truly, unequivocably great, but better than
he had a right to expect in a northern coastal town of just three
thousand people. The corn chips were homemade, the salsa thick and
chunky, the albondigas soup rich and sufficiently peppery to break him
out in a light sweat.. By the time he received an order of crab
enchiladas in tomatillo sauce, he was half convinced that he should move
to Moonlight Cove as soon as possible, even if it meant robbing a bank
to finance early retirement.

When he got over his surprise at the food's quality, he began to pay as
much attention to his fellow diners as to the contents of his plate.
Gradually he noted several odd things about them.

The room was unusually quiet, considering that it was occupied by eighty
or ninety people. High-quality Mexican restaurants with fine food, good
beer, and potent margaritas-were festive places. At Perezs, however,
diners were talking animatedly at only about a third of the tables. The
other two-thirds of the customers ate in silence.

After he tilted his glass and poured from the fresh bottle of Corona
that had just been served to him, Sam studied some of the silent eaters.
Three middle-aged men sat in a booth on the right side of the room,
scarfing up tacos and enchiladas and chimichangas, staring at their food
or at the air in front of them, occasionally looking at each other but
exchanging not a word. On the other side of the room, in another booth,
two teenage couples industriously devoured a double platter of mixed
appetizers, never punctuating the meal with the chatter and laughter one
expected of kids their age. Their concentration was so intense that the
longer Sam watched them, the odder they seemed.


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Throughout the room, people of all ages, in groups of all kinds, were
fixated on their food. Hearty eaters, they had appetizers, soup,
salads, and side dishes as well as entrees; on finishing, some ordered
"a couple more tacos" or "another burrito, " before also asking for ice
cream or flan. Their jaw muscles bulged as they chewed, and as soon as
they swallowed, they quickly shoveled more into their mouths. A few ate
with their mouths open. Some swallowed with such force that Sam could
actually hear them. They were red-faced and perspiring, no doubt from
jalapenio-spiced sauces, but not one offered a comment - 47 like, "Boy,
this is hot," or "Pretty good grub," or even the most elementary
conversational gambit to his companions.

To the third of the customers who were happily jabbering away at one
another and progressing through their meals at an ordinary pace, the
almost fevered eating of the majority apparently went unnoticed. Bad
table manners were not rare, of course; at least a quarter of the diners
in any town would give Miss Manners a stroke if she dared to eat with
them. Nevertheless, the gluttony of many of the customers in the Perez
Family Restaurant seemed astonishing to Sam. He supposed that the
polite diners were inured to the behavior of the other patrons because
they had witnessed it so many times before.

Could the cool sea air of the northern coast be that appetite enhancing?
Did some peculiar ethnic background or fractured social history in
Moonlight Cove mitigate against the universal development of commonly
accepted Western table manners?

What he saw in the Perez Family Restaurant seemed a puzzle for which any
sociologist, desperately seeking a doctoral thesis subject, would be
eager to find a solution. After a while, however, Sam had to turn his
attention away from the more ravenous patrons because their behavior was
killing his own appetite.

Later, when he was figuring the tip and putting money on the table to
cover his bill, he surveyed the crowd again, and this time realized that
none of the heavy eaters was drinking beer, margaritas, or anything
alcoholic. They had ice water or Cokes, and some were drinking milk,
glass after glass, but every last man and woman of these gourmands
seemed to be a teetotaler. He might not have noticed their temperance
if he had not been a cop-and a good one-trained not only to observe but
to think about what he observed.

He remembered the scarcity of drinkers at Knight's Bridge tavern.

What ethnic culture or religious group inculcated a disdain for alcohol
while encouraging mannerlessness and gluttony?

He could think of none.

By the time Sam finished his beer and got up to leave, he was telling
himself that he'd overreacted to a few crude people, that this queer
fixation on food was limited to a handful of patrons and not as
widespread as it seemed. After all, from his table in the back, he had
not been able to see the entire room and every last one of the
customers. But on his way out, he passed a table where three attractive
and well-dressed young women were eating hungrily, none of them
speaking, their eyes glazed; two of them had flecks of food on their
chins, of which they seemed oblivious, and the third had so many
com-chip crumbs sprinkled across the front of her royal-blue sweater
that she appeared to be breading herself with the intention of going
into the kitchen, climbing into an oven, and becoming food.


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He was glad to get out in the clean night air.

Sweating both from the chili-spiced dishes and the heat in the
restaurant, he had wanted to take his jacket off, but he had not been
able to do so because of the gun he was packing in a shoulder holster.
Now he relished the chilling fog that was being harried eastward by a
gentle but steady breeze.

Chrissie saw them enter the drainage channel, and for a moment she
thought they were all going to clamber up the far side of it and off
across the meadow in the direction she had been heading. Then one of
them turned toward the mouth of the culvert. The figure approached the
drain on all fours, in a few stealthy and sinuous strides. Though
Chrissie could see nothing more of it than a shadowy shape, she had
trouble believing that this thing was either one of her parents or the
man called Tucker. But who else could it be?

Entering the concrete tunnel, the predator peered forward into the
gloom. Its eyes shone softly amber-green, not as bright here as in
moonlight, dimmer than glow-in-the-dark paint, but vaguely radiant.

Chrissie wondered how well it could see in absolute darkness. Surely its
gaze could not penetrate eighty or a hundred feet of - 49 lightless pipe
to the place where she crouched. Vision of that caliber would be
SUPERNATURAL.

it stared straight at her.

Then again, who was to say that what she was dealing with here was not
SUPERNATURAL? Perhaps her parents had become . . .

werewolves.

She was soaked in sour sweat.             She hoped the stench of the dead animal
would screen her body odor.

Rising from all fours into a crouch, blocking most of the silvery
moonlight at the drain entrance, the stalker slowly came forward.

Its heavy breathing was amplified by the curved concrete walls of the
culvert. Chrissie breathed shallowly through her open mouth lest she
reveal her presence.

Suddenly, only ten feet into the tunnel, the stalker spoke in a raspy,
whispery voice and with such urgency that the words were almost run
together in a single long string of syllables "Chrissie, you there, you,
you? Come me, Chrissie, come me, come, want you, want, want, need, my
Chrissie, my Chrissie.

" That bizarre, frantic voice gave rise in Chrissie's mind to a
terrifying image of a creature that was part lizard, part wolf, part
human, part something unidentifiable. Yet she suspected that its actual
appearance was even worse than anything she could imagine.

"Help you, want help you, help, now, come me, come, come.                      You there,
there, you there?"

The worst thing about the voice was that, in spite of its cold hoarse
note and whispery tone, in spite of its alienness, it was familiar.
Chrissie recognized it as her mother's. Changed, yes, but her mother's
voice just the same.



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Chrissie's stomach was cramped with fear, but she was filled with
another pain, too, that for a moment she could not identify. Then she
realized that she ached with loss; she missed her mother, wanted her
mother back, her real mother. If she'd had one of those ornate silver
crucifixes like they always used in the fright films, she probably would
have revealed herself, advanced on this hateful thing, and demanded that
it surrender possession of her mother. A crucifix probably would not
work because nothing in real life was as easy as in the movies; besides,
whatever had happened to her parents was far stranger than vampires and
werewolves and demons jumped up from hell. But if she'd had a crucifix,
she would have tried it anyway.

"Death, death, smell death, stink, death .                  .   .

" The mother-thing quickly advanced into the tunnel until it came to the
place where Chrissie had stepped in a slippery, putrefying mass. The
brightness of the shining eyes was directly related to the nearness of
moonlight, for now they dimmed. Then the creature lowered its gaze to
the dead animal on the culvert floor.

From beyond the mouth of the drain came the sound of something
descending into the ditch. Footfalls and the clatter of stones were
followed by another voice, equally as fearsome as that of the others the
stalker now hunched over the dead animal. Calling into the pipe, it
said, "She there, there, she? Whatfound, what, what?"

".   .   .   raccoon .

"What, what it, what?

"Dead raccoon, rotten, maggots, maggots, " the first one said.

Chrissie was stricken by the macabre fear that she had left a
tennis-shoe imprint in the rotting muck of the dead raccoon.

"Chrissie ?

" the second asked as it ventured into the culvert Tucker's voice.
Evidently her father was searching for her across the meadow or in the
next section of the forest Both stalkers were fidgeting constantly.
Chrissie could hear them scraping-claws?-against the concrete floor of
the pipe. Both sounded panicky, too. No, not panicky, really, because
no fear was audible in their voices. Frantic. Frenzied. It was as if
an engine in each of them was racing faster, faster, almost out of
control.

"Chrissie there, she there, she?

" Tucker asked.

The mother-thing raised its gaze from the dead raccoon and peered
straight at Chrissie through the lightless tunnel.

You can't see me, Chrissie thought-prayed.                  I'm invisible.

The radiance of the stalker's eyes had faded to twin spots of finished
silver.

Chrissie held her breath.

'Tucker said, "Got to eat, eat, want eat.

The creature that had been her mother said, "Find girl, girl, find her



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first, then eat, then.

" They sounded as if they were wild animals magically gifted with crude
speech.

- 51 "Now, now, burning it up, eat now, now, burning, " Tucker said
urgently, insistently.

Chrissie was shaking so badly that she was half afraid they would hear
the shudders that rattled her.

Tucker said, "Burning it up, little animals in meadow, hear them, smell
them, track, eat, eat, now.

Chrissie held her breath.

,Nothing here, " the mother-thing said.

"Only maggots, stink, go, eat, then find her, eat, eat, then find her,
go.

" Both stalkers retreated from the culvert and vanished.

Chrissie dared to breathe.

After waiting a minute to be sure they were really gone, she turned and
troll-walked deeper into the upsloping culvert, blindly feeling the
walls as she went, hunting a side passage. She must have gone two
hundred yards before she found what she wanted a tributary drain, half
the size of the main line. She slid into it, feetfirst and on her back,
then squirmed onto her belly and faced out toward the bigger tunnel.
That was where she would spend the night. If they returned to the
culvert to see if they could detect her scent in the cleaner air beyond
the decomposing raccoon, she would be out of the downdraught that swept
the main line, and they might not smell her. into She was heartened
because their failure to probe deeper the culvert was proof that they
were not possessed of SUPERNATURAL powers, neither all-seeing nor
all-knowing. They were abnormally strong and quick, strange and
terrifying, but they could make mistakes too. She began to think that
when daylight came she had a fifty-fifty chance of getting out of the
woods and finding help before she was caught.

In the lights outside of the Perez Family Restaurant, Sam Booker checked
his watch. Only 7 10.

He went for a walk along Ocean Avenue, building up the courage to call
Scott in Los Angeles. The prospect of that conversation with his son
soon preoccupied him and drove all thoughts of the mannerless,
gluttonous diners out of his mind.

At 730, he stopped at a telephone booth near a Shell service station at
the corner of Juniper Lane and Ocean Avenue. He used his credit card to
make a long-distance call to his house in Sherman Oaks.

At sixteen Scott thought he was mature enough to be home alone when his
father was away on an assignment. Sam did not entirely agree and
preferred that the boy stay with his Aunt Edna. But Scott won his way
by making life pure hell for Edna, so Sam was reluctant to put her
through that ordeal.

He had repeatedly drilled the boy in safety procedures-keep all doors
and windows locked; know where the fire extinguishers are; know how to
get out of the house from any room in an earthquake or other


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emergency-and had taught him how to use a handgun. In Sam's judgment
Scott was still too immature to be home alone for days at a time; but at
least the boy was well prepared for every contingency.

The number rang nine times. Sam was about to hang up, guiltily relieved
that he'd failed to get through, when Scott finally answered.

"Hello.       It's me, Scott.         Dad."

"Y?"

Heavy-metal rock was playing at high volume in the background. He was
probably in his room, his stereo cranked up so loud that the windows
shook.

- 53 Sam said, "Could you turn the music down?"

"I can hear you," Scott mumbled.

"Maybe so, but I'm having trouble hearing you."

" I don't have anything to say, anyway."

"Please turn it down," Sam said, with emphasis on the "Please."

Scott dropped the receiver, which clattered on his nightstand. The sharp
sound hurt Sam's ear. The boy lowered the volume on the stereo but only
slightly. He picked up the phone and said, " Yeah?

"

" How're you doing?"

"Okay."

"Everything all right there?"

"Why shouldn't it be?"

"I just asked."

Sullenly "If you called to see if I'm having a party, don't worry.                            I'm
not."

Sam counted to three, giving himself time to keep his voice under
control. Thickening fog swirled past the glass-walled phone booth. "How
was school today?"

"You think I didn't go?"

"I know you went."

"You don't trust me."

"I trust you," Sam lied.

"You think I didn't go."

"Did you?"

,Yeah.       So how was it?"

"Ridiculous.         The same old shit."

"Scott, please, you know I've asked you not to use that kind of language


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when you're talking to me," Sam said, realizing that he was being forced
into a confrontation against his will.

"So sorry. Same old poop," Scott said in such a way that he might have
been referring either to the day at school or to Sam.

"It's pretty country up here," Sam said.

The boy did not reply.

"Wooded hillsides slope right down to the ocean."

"So?"

Following the advice of the family counselor whom he and Scott had been
seeing both together and separately, Sam clenched his teeth, counted to
three again, and tried another approach. "Did you have dinner yet?"

"Yeah.

"Do your homework?"

"Don't have any."

Sam hesitated, then decided to let it pass.                   The counselor, Dr.

Adamski, would have been proud of such tolerance and cool self-control.

Beyond the phone booth, the Shell station's lights acquired multiple
halos, and the town faded into the slowly congealing mist. At last Sam
said, "What're you doing this evening?"

"I was listening to music."

Sometimes it seemed to Sam that the music was part of what had turned
the boy sour. That pounding, frenetic, unmelodic heavy-metal rock was a
collection of monotonous chords and even more monotonous atonal rims, so
soul-less and mind-numbing that it might have been the music produced by
a civilization of intelligent machines long after man had passed from
the face of the earth. After a while Scott had lost interest in most
heavy-metal bands and switched allegiance to U2, but their simplistic
social consciousness was no match for nihilism. Soon he grew interested
in heavy-metal again, but the second time around he focused on black
metal, those bands espousing-or using dramatic trappings of-satanism; he
became increasingly selfinvolved, antisocial, and somber. On more than
one occasion, Sam had considered confiscating the kid's record
collection, smashing it to bits, and disposing of it, but that seemed an
absurd overreaction. After all, Sam himself had been sixteen when the
Beatles and Rolling Stones were coming on the scene, and his parents had
railed against that music and predicted it would lead Sam and his entire
generation into perdition. He'd turned out all right in spite of John,
Paul, George, Ringo, and the Stones. He was the product of an
unparalleled age of tolerance, and he did not want his mind to close up
as tight as his parents' minds had been.

"Well, I guess I better go," Sam said.

The boy was silent.

"If any unexpected problems come up, you call your Aunt Edna.

- 55 "There's nothing she could do for me that I couldn't do myself. She
loves you, Scott."



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"Yeah, sure."

"She's your mother's sister; she'd like to love you as if you were her
own. All you have to do is give her the chance." After more silence,
Sam took a deep breath and said, "I love you, too, Scott'' "Yeah? What's
that supposed to do-turn me all gooey inside? No."

" 'Cause it doesn't."

"I was just stating a fact."

Apparently quoting from one of his favorite songs, the boy said'.

"Nothing lasts forever; even love's a lie, a toolfor manipulation;
there's no God beyond the sky.

Click.    the dial tone.

"Per Sam stood for a moment, listening to the effect.

" He returned the receiver to its cradle His frustration was exceeded
only by his fury. He wanted to kick the shit out of something,
anything, and pretend that he was savaging whoever or whatever had
stolen his son from him.

He also had an empty, achy feeling in the pit of his stomach, because he
did love Scott. The boy's alienation was devastating.

He knew he could not go back to the motel yet. He was not ready to
sleep, and the prospect of spending a couple of hours in front of the
idiot box, watching mindless sitcoms and dramas, was intolerable.

When he opened the phone-booth door, tendrils of fog slipped inside and
seemed to pull him out into the night. For an hour he walked the
streets of Moonlight Cove, deep into the residential neighborhoods,
where there were no streetlamps and where trees and houses seemed to
float within the mist, as if they were not rooted to the earth but
tenuously tethered and in danger of breaking loose.

Four blocks north of Ocean Avenue, on Iceberry Way, as Sam walked
briskly, letting the exertion and the chilly night air leech the anger
from him, he heard hurried footsteps. Someone running. Three people,
maybe four. It was an unmistakable sound, though curiously stealthy,
not the straightforward slap-slap-slap of joggers' approach.

He turned and looked back along the gloom-enfolded street.

The footsteps ceased.

Because the partial moon had been engulfed by clouds, gu the scene was
brightened mostly by light fanning from the windows of Bavarian-,
Monterey-, English-, and Spanish-style houses nestled among pines and
junipers on both sides of the street. The neighborhood was
long-established, with great character, but the lack of big-windowed
modern homes contributed to the murkiness. Two properties in that block
had hooded, downcast Malibu landscape lighting, and a few had carriage
lamps at the ends of front walks, but the fog damped those pockets of
illumination. As far as Sam could see, he was alone on Iceberry Way.

He began to walk again but went less than half a block before he heard
the hurried footfalls. He swung around, but as before saw no one. This
time the sound faded, as though the runners had moved off a paved
surface onto soft earth, then between two of the houses.


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Perhaps they were on another street.                Cold air and fog could play tricks
with sound.

He was cautious and intrigued, however, and he quietly stepped off the
cracked and root-canted sidewalk, onto someone's front lawn, into the
smooth blackness beneath an immense cypress. He studied the
neighborhood, and within half a minute he saw furtive movement on the
west side of the street. Four shadowy figures appeared at the corner of
a house, running low, in a crouch. When they crossed a lawn that was
patchily illuminated by a pair of hurricane lamps on iron poles, their
freakishly distorted shadows leaped wildly over the front of a white
stucco house. They went to ground again in dense shrubbery before he
could ascertain their size or anything else about them.

Kids, Sam thought, and they're up to no good.

He didn't know why he was so sure they were kids, perhaps because
neither their quickness nor behavior was that of adults. They were
either engaged on some prank against a disliked neighbor-or they were
after Sam. Instinct told him that he was being stalked.

Perhaps they - 57 Were juvenile delinquents a problem in a community as
small and closely knit as Moonlight Cove?

Every town had a few bad kids. But in the semirural atmosphere of a
place like this, juvenile crime rarely included gang activities like
assault and battery, armed robbery, mugging, or thrill killing.

in the country, kids got into trouble with fast cars, booze, girls, and
a little unsophisticated theft, but they did not prowl the streets in
packs the way their counterparts did in the inner cities.

Nevertheless, Sam was suspicious of the quartet that crouched,
invisible, among shadow-draped ferns and azaleas, across the street and
three houses west of him. After all, something was wrong in Moonlight
Cove, and conceivably the trouble was related to juvenile delinquents.
The police were concealing the truth about several deaths in the past
couple of months, and perhaps they were protecting someone; as unlikely
as it seemed, maybe they were covering for a few kids from prominent
families, kids who had taken the privileges of class too far and had
gone beyond permissible, civilized behavior.

Sam was not afraid of them. He knew how to handle himself, and he was
carrying a .38. Actually he would have enjoyed teaching the brats a
lesson. But a confrontation with a group of teenage hoods would mean a
subsequent scene with the local police, and he preferred not to bring
himself to the attention of the authorities, for fear of jeopardizing
his investigation.

He thought it peculiar that they would consider assaulting him in a
residential neighborhood like this. One shout of alarm from him would
bring people to their front porches to see what was happening. Of
course, because he wanted to avoid calling even that much notice to
himself, he would not cry out.

The old adage about discretion being the better part of valor was in no
circumstance more applicable than in his. He moved back from the
cypress under which he had taken shelter, away from the street and
toward the lightless house behind him. Confident that those kids were
not sure where he had gone, he planned to slip out of the neighborhood
and lose them altogether. and entered a rear He reached the house,



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hurried alongside it, yard, where a looming swing set was so distorted
by shadows and mist that it looked like a giant spider stilting toward
him through the gloom. At the end of the yard he vaulted a rail fence,

beyond which was a narrow alley that serviced the block's detached
garages. He intended to go south, back toward Ocean Avenue and the
heart of town, but a shiver of prescience shook him toward another
route. Stepping straight across the narrow back street, past a row of
metal garbage cans, he vaulted another low fence, landing on the back
lawn of another house that faced out on the street parallel to Iceberry
Way.

No sooner had he left the alley than he heard soft, running footsteps on
that hard surface. The juvies-if that's what they were sounded as swift
but not quite as stealthy as they had been.

They were coming in Sam's direction from the end of the block. He had
the odd feeling that with some sixth sense they would be able to
determine which yard he had gone into and that they would be on him
before he could reach the next street. Instinct told him to stop
running and go to ground. He was in good shape, yes, but he was
forty-two, and they were no doubt seventeen or younger, and any
middle-aged man who believed he could outrun kids was a fool.

Instead of sprinting across the new yard, he moved swiftly to a side
door on the nearby clapboard garage, hoping it would be unlocked. It
was. He stepped into total darkness and pulled the door shut, just as
he heard four pursuers halt in the alleyway in front of the big roll-up
door at the other end of the building. They had stopped there not
because they knew where he was, but probably because they were trying to
decide which way he might have gone.

In tomblike blackness Sam fumbled for a lock button or dead-bolt latch
to secure the door by which he had entered. He found nothing.

He heard the four kids murmuring to one another, but he could not make
out what they were saying. Their voices sounded strange whispery and
urgent.

Sam remained at the smaller door. He gripped the knob with both hands
to keep it from turning, in case the kids searched around the garage and
gave it a try.

They fell silent.

He listened intently.

Nothing.

The cold air smelled of grease and dust. He could see nothing, but he
assumed a car or two occupied that space.

Although he was not afraid, he was beginning to feel foolish.

- 59 How had he gotten himself into this predicament? He was a grown
man, an FBI agent trained in a variety of self-defense techniques,
carrying a revolver with which he possessed considerable expertise, yet
he was hiding in a garage from four kids. He had gotten there because
he had acted instinctively, and he usually trusted instinct implicitly
but this was He heard furtive movement along the outer wall of the
garage. He tensed. Scraping footsteps. Approaching the small door at
which he stood. As far as Sam could tell, he was hearing only one of
the kids.


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Leaning back, holding the knob in both hands, Sam pulled the door tight
against the jamb.

The footsteps stopped in front of him.

He held his breath.

A second ticked by, two seconds, three.

Try the damn lock and move on, Sam thought irritably.

He was feeling more foolish by the second and was on the verge of
confronting the kid. He could pop out of the garage as if he were a
jack-in-the-box, probably scare the hell out of the punk, and send him
screaming into the night.

Then he heard a voice on the other side of the door, inches from him,
and although he did not know what in God's name he was hearing, he knew
at once that he had been wise to trust to instinct, wise to go to ground
and hide. The voice was thin, raspy, utterly chilling, and the urgent
cadences of the speech were those of a frenzied psychotic or a junkie
long over-due for a fix "Burning, need, need. . .

" He seemed to be talking to himself and was perhaps unconscious of
speaking, as a man in a fever might babble deliriously.

A hard object scraped down the outside of the wooden door.                      Sam tried to
imagine what it was.

"Feed the fire, fire, feed it, feed, " the kid said in a thin, frantic
voice that was partly a whisper and partly a whine and partly a low and
menacing growl. It was not much like the voice of any teenager Sam had
ever heard-or any adult, for that matter.

In spite of the cold air, his brow was covered with sweat.

The unknown object scraped down the door again.

Was the kid armed? Was it a gun barrel being drawn along the wood?                           The
blade of a knife? Just a stick?

".   .   .   burning, burning .


A claw?

That was a crazy idea. Yet he could not shake it. In his mind was the
clear image of a sharp and hornlike claw-a talon-gouging splinters from
the door as it carved a line in the wood.

Sam held tightly to the knob.             Sweat trickled down his temples.

At last the kid tried the door.              The knob twisted in Sam's grip, but he
would not let it move much.

".   .   .   oh, God, it burns, hurts, oh God .

Sam was finally afraid. The kid sounded so damned weird. Like a PCP
junkie flying out past the orbit of Mars somewhere, only worse than
that, far stranger and more dangerous than any angel-dust freak. Sam
was scared because he didn't know what the hell he was up against.

The kid tried to pull the door open.


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Sam held it tight against the jamb.

Quick, frenetic words ".           .   .   feed the fire, feed the fire .

I wonder if he can smell me in here? Sam thought, and under the
circumstances that bizarre idea seemed no crazier than the image of the
kid with claws.

Sam's heart was hammering. Stinging perspiration seeped into the
corners of his eyes. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms ached
fiercely; he was straining much harder than necessary to keep the door
shut.

After a moment, apparently deciding that his quarry was not in the
garage after all, the kid gave up. He ran along the side of the
building, back toward the alley. As he hurried away, a barely audible
keening issued from him; it was a sound of pain, need . . . and
animal excitement. He was struggling to contain that low cry, but it
escaped him anyway.

Sam heard cat-soft footsteps approaching from several directions. The
other three would-be muggers rejoined the kid in the alley, and their
whispery voices were filled with the same frenzy that had marked his,
though they were too far away now for Sam to hear what they were saying.
Abruptly, they fell silent and, a moment later, as if they were members
of a wolfpack responding instinctively to the scent of game or danger,
they ran as one along the alleyway, heading north. Soon their sly
footsteps faded, and again the night was grave-still.

For several minutes after the pack left, Sam stood in the dark garage,
holding fast to the doorknob.

The dead boy was sprawled in an open drainage ditch along the county
road on the southeast side of Moonlight Cove. His frostwhite face was
spotted with blood. In the glare of the two tripodmounted police lamps
flanking the ditch, his wide eyes stared unblinkingly at a shore
immeasurably more distant than the nearby Pacific.

Standing by one of the hooded lamps, Loman Watkins looked down at the
small corpse, forcing himself to bear witness to the death of Eddie
Valdoski because Eddie, only eight years old, was his godson. Loman had
gone to high school with Eddie's father, George, and in a strictly
platonic sense he had been in love with Eddie's mother, Nella, for
almost twenty years. Eddie had been a great kid, bright and inquisitive
and well behaved. Had been. But now . . . Hideously bruised,
savagely bitten, scratched and torn, neck broken, the boy was little
more than a pile of decomposing trash, his promising potential
destroyed, his flame snuffed, deprived of life-and life of him.

Of the innumerable terrible things Loman had encountered in twenty-one
years of police work, this was perhaps the worst. And because of his
personal relationship with the victim, he should have been deeply shaken
if not devastated. Yet he was barely affected by the sight of the
small, battered body. Sadness, regret, anger, and a flurry of other
emotions touched him, but only lightly and briefly, the way unseen fish
might brush past a swimmer in a dark sea. Of grief, which should have
pierced him like nails, he felt nothing.

Barry Sholnick, one of the new officers on the recently expanded
Moonlight Cove police force, straddled the ditch, one foot on each bank,
and took a photograph of Eddie Valdoski For an instant the boy's glazed



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eyes were silvery with a reflection of the flash.

Loman's growing inability to feel was, strangely, the one thing that
evoked strong feelings It scared the shit out of him. Lately he was
increasingly frightened by his emotional detachment, an unwanted but
apparently irreversible hardening of the heart that would soon leave him
with auricles of marble and ventricles of common stone.

He was one of the New People now, different in many ways from the man he
had once been. He still looked the same five-ten, squarely built, with
a broad and remarkably innocent face for a man in his line of work-but
he wasn't only what he appeared to be. Perhaps a greater control of
emotions, a more stable and analytical outlook, was an unanticipated
benefit of the Change. But was that really beneficial? Not to feel? Not
to grieve?

Though the night was chilly, sour sweat broke out on his face, the back
of his neck, and under his arms.

Dr. Ian Fitzgerald, the coroner, was busy elsewhere, but Victor Callan,
owner of Callan's Funeral Home and the assistant coroner, was helping
another officer, Jules Timmerman, scour the ground between the ditch and
the nearby woods. They were looking for clues that the killer might
have left behind.

Actually they were just putting on a show for the benefit of the score
of area residents who had gathered on the far side of the road. Even if
clues were found, no one would be arrested for the crime. No trial
would ever take place. If they found Eddie's killer, they would cover
for him and deal with him in their own way, in order to conceal the
existence of the New People from those who had not yet undergone the
Change. Because without doubt the killer was what Thomas Shaddack
called a "regressive," one of the New People gone bad. Very bad.

Loman turned away from the dead boy. He walked back along the county
road, toward the Valdoski house, which was a few hundred yards north and
veiled in mist.

He ignored the onlookers, although one of them called to him "Chief?
What the hell's going on, Chief'.?"

This was a semirural area barely within the town limits. The houses
were widely separated, and their scattered lights did little to hold
back the night. Before he was halfway to the Vaidoski place, though he
was within hailing distance of the men at the - 63 crime scene, he felt
isolated. Trees, tortured by ages of sea wind on nights far less calm
than this one, bent toward the two-lane road, their scraggly branches
overhanging the gravel shoulder on which he walked. He kept imagining
movement in the dark boughs above him, and in the blackness and fog
between the twisted trunks of the trees.

He put his hand on the butt of the revolver that was holstered at his
side.

Loman Watkins had been the chief of police in Moonlight Cove for nine
years, and in the past month more blood had been spilled in his
jurisdiction than in the entire preceding eight years and eleven months.
He was convinced that worse was coming. He had a hunch that the
regressives were more numerous and more of a problem that Shaddack
realized-or was willing to admit.

He feared the regressives almost as much as he feared his own new, cool,



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dispassionate perspective.

Unlike happiness and grief and joy and sorrow, stark fear was a survival
mechanism, so perhaps he would not lose touch with it as thoroughly as
he was losing touch with other emotions. That thought made him as
uneasy as did the phantom movement in the trees.

Is fear, he wondered, the only emotion that will thrive in this brave
new world we're making?

After a greasy cheeseburger,           soggy fries, and an icy bottle of Dos
Equis in the deserted coffee           shop at Cove Lodge, Tessa Lockland returned
to her room, propped herself           up in bed with pillows, and called her
mother in San Diego. Marion            answered the phone on the first ring, and
Tessa said, "Hi, Mom."

"Where are you, Teejay?

" As a kid, Tessa could never decide whether she wanted to be called by
her first name or her middle, Jane, so her mother always called her by
her initials, as if that were a name in itself.

"Cove Lodge," Tessa said.

"Is it nice?"

"It's the best I could find. This isn't a town that worries about
having first-rate tourist facilities. If it didn't have such a
spectacular view, Cove Lodge is one of those places that would be able
to survive only by showing closed-circuit porn movies on the TV and
renting rooms by the hour.

"Is it clean?"

" Reasonably.       If it wasn't clean, I'd insist you move out right now."

"Mom, when I'm on location, shooting a film, I don't always have luxury
accommodations, you know. When I did that documentary on the Miskito
Indians in Central America, I went on hunts with them and slept in the
mud."

"Teejay, dear, you must         never tell people that you slept in the mud.
Pigs sleep in the mud.          You must say you roughed it or camped out, but
never that you slept in         the mud. Even unpleasant experiences can be
worthwhile if one keeps         one's sense of dignity and style."

"Yes, Mom, I know. My point was that Cove Lodge isn't great, but it's
better than sleeping in the mud."

"Camping out."

"Better than camping out," Tessa said.

Both were silent a moment.            Then Marion said, "Dammit, I should be there
with you."

"Mom, you've got a broken leg."

"I should have gone to Moonlight Cove as soon as I heard they'd found
poor Janice. If I'd been there, they wouldn't have cremated the body.
By God, they wouldn't! I'd have stopped that, and I'd have arranged
another autopsy by trustworthy authorities, and now there'd be no need
for you to get involved. I'm so angry with myself.



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" Tessa slumped back in the pillows and sighed.

"Mom, don't do this to          yourself. You broke your leg three days before
Janice's body was even          found. You can't travel easily now, and you
couldn't travel easily          then, either. It's not your fault. There was a
time when a broken leg          couldn't have stopped me.

- 65 "You're not twenty any more, Mom."

"Yes, I know, I'm old," Marion said miserably.

"Sometimes I think about how old I am, and it's scary."

"You're only sixty-four, you look not a day past fifty, and you broke
your leg skydiving, for God's sake, so you're not going to get any pity
from me."

"Comfort and pity is what an elderly parent expects from a good
daughter. If you caught me calling you elderly or treating you with
pity, you'd kick my ass halfway to China."

"The chance to kick a daughter's ass now and then is one of the
pleasures of a mother's later life, Teejay. Damn, where did that tree
come from, anyway? I've been skydiving for thirty years, and I've never
landed in a tree before, and I swear it wasn't there when I looked down
on the final approach to pick my drop spot."

Though a certain amount of the Lockland family's unshakable optimism and
spirited approach to life came from Tessa's late father, Bernard, a
large measure of it-with a full measure of indomitability as well-flowed
from Marion's gene pool.

Tessa said, "Tonight, just after I got here, I went down to the beach
where they found her."

"This must be awful for you, Teejay.

"I can handle it."

When Janice died, Tessa had been traveling in rural regions of
Afghanistan, researching the effects of genocidal war on the Afghan
people and culture, intending to script a documentary on that subject.
Her mother had been unable to get word of Janice's death to Tessa until
two weeks after the body washed upon the shore of Moonlight Cove. Five
days ago, on October 8, she had flown out of Afghanistan with a sense of
having failed her sister somehow. Her load of guilt was at least as
heavy as her mother's, but what she said was true She could handle it.

"You were right, Mom.           The official version stinks."

"What've you learned?"

"Nothing yet. But I stood right there on the sand, where she was
supposed to have taken the Valium, where she set out on her last swim,
where they found her two days later, and I knew their whole story was
garbage. I feel it in my guts, Mom. And one way or another, I'm going
to find out what really happened."


"You've got to be careful, dear."

"I will."

"If Janice was .        .   .    murdered "I'll be okay."


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"And if, as we suspect, the police up there can't be trusted . . . Mom,
I'm five feet four, blond, blue-eyed, perky, and about as
dangerous-looking as a Disney chipmunk. All my life I've had to work
against my looks to be taken seriously. Women all want to mother me or
be my big sister, and men either want to be my father or get me in the
sack, but damned few can see immediately through the exterior and
realize I've got a brain that is, I strongly believe, bigger than that
of a gnat; usually they have to know me a while. So I'll just use my
appearance instead of struggling against it. No one here will see me as
a threat."

"You'll stay in touch?"

"Of course."

"If you feel you're in danger, just leave, get out."

"I'll be all right."

"Promise you won't stay if it's dangerous," Marion persisted.

"I promise. But you have to promise me that you won't jump out of any
more airplanes for a while."

"I'm too old for that, dear. I'm elderly now. Ancient. I'm going to
have to pursue interests suitable to my age. I've always wanted to
learn to water-ski, for instance, and that documentary you did on
dirt-bike racing made those little motorcycles look like so much fun."

"I love you to pieces, Mom."

"I love you, Teejay.         More than life itself."

"I'll make them pay for Janice."

"If there's anyone who deserves to pay. Just remember, Teejay, that our
Janice is gone, but you're still here, and your first allegiance should
never be to the dead."

George Valdoski sat at the formica-topped kitchen table. Though his
work-scarred hands were clasped tightly around a glass of whiskey, he
could not prevent them from trembling; the surface of the amber bourbon
shivered constantly.

When Loman Watkins entered and closed the door behind him, George didn't
even look up. Eddie had been his only child.

George was tall, solid in the chest and shoulders. Thanks to deeply and
closely set eyes, a thin-lipped mouth, and sharp features, he had a
hard, mean look in spite of his general handsomeness. His forbidding
appearance was deceptive, however, for he was a sensitive man,
soft-spoken and kind.

"How you doing'?"        Loman asked.

George bit his lower lip and nodded as if to say that he would get
through this nightmare, but he did not meet Loman's eyes.

"I'll look in on Nella," Loman said.

This time George didn't even nod.

As Loman crossed the too-bright kitchen, his hard-soled shoes squeaked


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on the linoleum floor. He paused at the doorway to the small dining
room and looked back at his friend.

"We'll find the bastard, George.              I swear we will."

At last George looked up from the whiskey. Tears shimmered in his eyes,
but he would not let them flow. He was a proud, hardheaded Pole,
determined to be strong. He said, "Eddie was playin' in the backyard
toward dusk, just right out there in the backyard, where you could see
him if you looked out any window, right in his own yard. When Nelia
called him for supper just after dark, when he didn't come or answer, we
thought he'd gone to one of the neighbors' to play with some other kids,
without asking like he should've." He had related all of this before,
more than once, but he seemed to need to go over it again and again, as
if repetition would wear down the ugly reality and thereby change it as
surely as ten thousand playings of a tape cassette would eventually
scrape away the music and leave a hiss of white noise.

"We started looking' for him, couldn't find him, wasn't scared at first;
in fact we were a little angry with him; but then we got worried and
then scared, and I was just about to call you for help when we found him
there in the ditch, sweet Jesus, all torn up in the ditch.

" He took a deep breath and another, and the pent-up tears glistened
brightly in his eyes.

"What kind of monster would do that to a child, take him away somewhere
and do that, and then be cruel enough to bring him back here and drop
him where we'd find him? Had to've been that way, 'cause we'd have
heard . . . heard the screaming if the bastard had done all that to
Eddie right here somewheres. Had to've taken him away, done all that,
then brought him back so we'd find him. What kind of man, Loman? For
God's sake, what kind of man?"

"Psychotic," Loman said, as he had said before, and that much was true.
The regressives were psychotic. Shaddack had coined a term for their
condition metamorphic-related psychosis.

"Probably on drugs," he added, and he was lying now. Drugs-at least the
conventional illegal pharmacopoeia-had nothing to do with Eddie's death.
Loman was still surprised at how easy it was for him to lie to a close
friend, something that he had once been unable to do. The immorality of
lying was a concept more suited to the Old People and their turbulently
emotional world. Old-fashioned concepts of what was immoral might
ultimately have no meaning to the New People, for if they changed as
Shaddack believed they would, efficiency and expediency and maximum
performance would be the only moral absolutes.

"The country's rotten with drug freaks these days. Burnt-out brains. No
morals, no goals but cheap thrills. They're our inheritance from the
recent Age of Do Your Own Thing. This guy was a drug-disoriented freak,
George, and I swear we'll get him."

George looked down at his whiskey again.                 He drank some.

Then to himself more than to Loman, he said, "Eddie was playin' in the
backyard toward dusk, just right out there in the backyard, where you
could see him if you looked out any window......... His voice trailed
away.

- 69 Reluctantly Loman went upstairs to the master bedroom to see how
Nella was coping.



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She was lying on the bed, propped up a bit with pillows, and Dr. Jim
Worthy was sitting in a chair that he had moved to her side, He was the
youngest of Moonlight Cove's three doctors, thirty-eight, an earnest man
with a neatly trimmed mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a proclivity
for bow ties.

The physician's bag was on the floor at his feet. A stethoscope hung
around his neck. He was filling an unusually large syringe from a
six-ounce bottle of golden fluid.

Worthy turned to look at Loman, and their eyes met, and they did not
need to say anything.

Either having heard Loman's soft footsteps or having sensed him by some
subtler means, Nella Valdoski opened her eyes, which were red and
swollen from crying. She was still a lovely woman with flaxen hair and
features that seemed too delicate to be the work of nature, more like
the finely honed art of a master sculptor. Her mouth softened and
trembled when she spoke his name "Oh, Loman."

He went around the bed, to the side opposite Dr. Worthy, and took hold
of the hand that Nella held out to him. It was clammy, cold, and
trembling.

"I'm giving her a tranquilizer," Worthy said.

"She needs to relax, even sleep if she can."

"I don't want to sleep," Nella said.

"I can't sleep. Not after . .              .    not after this .           .   .   not ever
again after this."

"Easy," Loman said, gently rubbing her hand.                   He sat on the edge of the
bed.

"Just let Dr.       Worthy take care of you.            This is for the best, Nella."

For half his life, Loman had loved this woman, his best friend's wife,
though he had never acted upon his feelings. He had always told himself
that it was a strictly platonic attraction. Looking at her now,
however, he knew passion had been a part of it.

The disturbing thing was . . . well, though he knew what he had felt
for her all these years, though he remembered it, he could not feel it
any longer. His love, his passion, his pleasant yet melancholy longing
had faded as had most of his other emotional responses; he was still
aware of his previous feelings for her, but they were like another
aspect of him that had split off and drifted away like a ghost departing
a corpse.

Worthy set the filled syringe on the nightstand. He unbuttoned and
pushed up the loose sleeve on Nelia's blouse, then tied a length of
rubber tubing around her arm, tight enough to make a vein more evident.

As the physician swabbed Nella's arm with an alcohol-soaked cottonball,
she said, "Loman, what are we going to do?"

"Everything will be fine," he said, stroking her hand.

"No. How can you say that? Eddie's dead. He was so sweet, so small
and sweet, and now he's gone. Nothing will be fine again."



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"Very soon you'll feel better," Loman assured her.

"Before you know it the hurt will be gone.                  It won't matter as much as
it does now. I promise it won't."

She blinked and stared at him as if he were talking nonsense, but then
she did not know what was about to happen to her. Worthy slipped the
needle into her arm.

She twitched.

The golden fluid flowed out of the syringe, into her bloodstream.

She closed her eyes and began to cry softly again, not at the pain of
the needle but at the loss of her son.

Maybe it is better not to care so much, not to love so much, Loman
thought.

The syringe was empty.

Worthy withdrew the needle from her vein.

Again Loman met the doctor's gaze.

Nella shuddered.

The Change would require two more injections, and someone would have to
stay with Nella for the next four or five hours, not only to administer
the drugs but to make sure that she did not hurt herself during the
conversion. Becoming a New Person was not a painless process.

Nella shuddered again.

Worthy tilted his head, and the lamplight struck his wirerimmed glasses
at a new angle, transforming the lenses into mirrors that for a moment
hid his eyes, giving him an uncharacteristically menacing appearance.

Shudders, more violent and protracted this time, swept through Nella.

From the doorway George Vaidoski said, "What's going on here?

' - 71 Loman had been so focused on Nella that he had not heard George
coming. He got up at once and let go of Nella's hand. "The doctor
thought she needed-" ,What's that horse needle for?" George said,
referring to the huge syringe. The needle itself was no larger than an
ordinary hypodermic.

"Tranquilizer," Dr.         Worthy said.

"She needs to-Tranquilizer?" George interrupted.

"Looks like you gave her enough to knock down a bull."

Loman said, "Now, George, the doctor knows what he's-" On the bed Nella
fell under the thrall of the injection. Her body suddenly stiffened,
her hands curled into tight fists, her teeth clenched, and her jaw
muscles bulged. In her throat and temples, the arteries swelled and
throbbed visibly as her heartbeat drastically accelerated. Her eyes
glazed over, and she passed into the peculiar twilight that was the
Change, neither conscious nor unconscious.

"What's wrong with her?"           George demanded.


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Between clenched teeth, lips peeled back in a grimace of pain, Nella let
out a strange, low groan. She arched her back until only her shoulders
and heels were in contact with the bed. She appeared to be full of
violent energy, as if she were a boiler straining with excess steam
pressure, and for a moment she seemed about to explode. Then she
collapsed back onto the mattress, shuddered more violently than ever,
and broke out in a copious sweat.

George looked at Worthy, at Loman. He clearly realized that something
was very wrong, though he could not begin to understand the nature of
that wrongness.

"Stop." Loman drew his revolver as George stepped backward toward the
second-floor hall.

"Come all the way in here, George, and lie down on the bed beside
Nella."

In the doorway George Valdoski froze, staring in disbelief and dismay at
the revolver.

"If you try to leave," Loman said, "I'll have to shoot you, and I don't
really want to do that."

"You wouldn't," George said, counting on decades of friendship to
protect him.

"Yes, I would," Loman said coldly.

"I'd kill you if I had to, and we'd cover it with a story you wouldn't
like. We'd say that we caught you in a contradiction, that we found
some evidence that you were the one who killed Eddie, killed your own
boy, some twisted sex thing, and that when we confronted you with the
proof, you grabbed my revolver out of my holster. There was a struggle.
You were shot. Case closed."

Coming from someone who was supposed to be a close and treasured friend,
Loman's threat was so monstrous that at first George was speechless.
Then, as he stepped back into the room, he said, "You'd let everyone
think . . . think I did those terrible things to Eddie? Why? What're
you doing, Loman? What the hell are you doing? Who . . . who are you
protecting?"

"Lie down on the bed," Loman said.

Dr.      Worthy was preparing another syringe for George.

On the bed Nella was shivering ceaselessly, twitching, writhing. Sweat
trickled down her face; her hair was damp and tangled. Her eyes were
open, but she seemed unaware that others were in the room. Maybe she
was not even conscious of her whereabouts. She was seeing a place
beyond this room or looking within herself; Loman didn't know which and
could remember nothing of his own conversion except that the pain had
been excruciating.

Reluctantly approaching the bed, George Valdoski said, "What's
happening, Loman? Christ, what is this? What's wrong?

"

"Everything'll be fine," Loman assured him.




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"It's for the best, George.            It's really for the best."

"What's for the best? What in God's name-Lie down, George.
Everything'll be fine."

"What's happening to Nella?"

"Lie down, George.         It's for the best," Loman said.

"It's for the best," Dr. Worthy agreed as he finished filling the
syringe from a new bottle of the golden fluid.

"It's really for the best," Loman said.

"Trust me." With the revolver he waved George toward the bed and smiled
reassuringly.

Harry Talbot's house was Bauhaus-inspired redwood, with a wealth of
big windows. It was three blocks south of the heart of Moonlight Cove,
on the east side of Conquistador Avenue, a street named for the fact
that Spanish conquerors had bivouacked in that area centuries earlier,
when accompanying the Catholic clergy along the California coast to
establish missions. On rare occasions Harry dreamed of being one of
those ancient soldiers, marching northward into unexplored territory,
and it was always a nice dream because, in that adventure fantasy, he
was never wheelchair-bound.

Most of Moonlight Cove was built on wooded hillsides facing the sea, and
Harry's lot sloped down to Conquistador, providing a perfect perch for a
man whose main activity in life was spying on his fellow townsmen. From
his third-floor bedroom at the northwest corner of the house, he could
see at least portions of all the streets between Conquistador and the
cove-Juniper Lane, Serra Street, Roshmore Way, and Cypress Lane-as well
as the intersecting streets which ran east-west. To the north, he could
glimpse pieces of Ocean Avenue and even beyond. Of course the breadth
and depth of his field of vision would have been drastically limited if
his house hadn't been one story higher than most of those around it and
if he hadn't been equipped with a 60mm f/8 refractor telescope and a
good pair of binoculars.

At 930 Monday night, October 13, Harry was in his custommade stool,
between the enormous west and north windows, bent to the eyepiece of the
telescope. The high stool had arms and a backrest like a chair, four
wide-spread sturdy legs for maximum balance, and a weighted base to
prevent it from tipping over easily when he was levering himself into it
from the wheelchair. It also had a harness, something like that in an
automobile, allowing him to lean forward to the telescope without
slipping off the stool and falling to the floor.

Because he had no use whatsoever of his left leg and left arm, because
his right leg was too weak to support him, because he could rely only on
his right arm-which, thank God, the Viet Cong had spared-even
transferring from the battery-powered wheelchair to a custom-made stool
was a torturous undertaking. But the effort was worthwhile because
every year Harry Talbot lived more through his binoculars and telescope
than he had the year before. Perched on his special stool, he sometimes
almost forgot his handicaps, for in his own way he was participating in
life.

His favorite movie was Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart.                     He had watched
it probably a hundred times.

At the moment the telescope was focused on the back of CalIan's Funeral


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Home, the only mortuary in Moonlight Cove, on the cast side of Juniper
Lane, which ran parallel to Conquistador but was one block closer to the
sea. He was able to see the place by focusing between two houses on the
opposite side of his own street, past the thick trunk of a Big Cone
pine, and across the service alley that ran between Juniper and
Conquistador. The funeral home backed up to that alley, and Harry had a
view that included a corner of the garage in which the hearse was
parked, the rear entrance to the house itself, and the entrance to the
new wing in which the corpses were embalmed and prepared for viewing, or
cremated.

During the past two months he had seen some strange things at Callan's.
Tonight, however, no unusual activity enlivened Harry's patient watch
over the place.

"Moose?"

The dog rose from his resting place in the corner and padded across the
unlighted bedroom to Harry's side. He was a fullgrown black Labrador,
virtually invisible in the darkness. He nuzzled Harry's leg the right
one, in which Harry still had some feeling.

Reaching down, Harry petted Moose.

"Get me a beer, old fella.

Moose was a service dog raised and trained by Canine Companions for
Independence, and he was always happy to be needed. He hurried to the
small refrigerator in the corner, which - 75 was designed for
under-the-counter use in restaurants and could be opened with a foot
pedal.

"None there," Harry said.

"I forgot to bring a six-pack up from the kitchen this afternoon.

" The dog had already discovered that the bedroom fridge contained no
Coors. He padded into the hallway, his claws clicking softly on the
polished wood floor. No room had carpets, for the wheelchair rolled
more efficiently on hard surfaces. In the hall the dog leaped and hit
the elevator button with one paw, and immediately the purr and whine of
the lift machinery filled the house.

Harry returned his attention to the telescope and to the rear of
Callan's Funeral Home. Fog drifted through town in waves, some thick
and blinding, some wispy. But lights brightened the rear of the
mortuary, giving him a clear view; through the telescope, he seemed to
be standing between the twin brick pilasters flanking the driveway that
served the back of the property. If the night had been fogless, he
would have been able to count the rivets in the metal door of the
embalmery-crematorium.

Behind him the elevator doors rolled open. He heard Moose enter the
lift. Then it started down to the first floor.

Bored with Callan's, Harry slowly swiveled the scope to the left, moving
the field of vision southward to the large vacant lot adjacent to the
funeral home. Adjusting the focus, he looked across that empty property
and across the street to the Gosdale house on the west side of Juniper,
drawing in on the dining room window.

With his good hand, he unscrewed the eyepiece and put it on a high metal
table beside his stool, quickly and deftly replacing it with one of


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several other eyepieces, thus allowing a clearer focus on the Gosdales.
Because the fog was at that moment in a thinning phase, he could see
into the Gosdale dining room almost as well as if he had been crouched
on their porch with his face to the window. Herman and Louise Gosdale
were playing pinochle with their neighbors, Dan and Vera Kaiser, as they
did every Monday night and on some Fridays.

The elevator reached the ground floor; the motor stopped whining, and
silence returned to the house. Moose was now two floors below, hurrying
along the hallway to the kitchen.

On an unusually clear night, when Dan Kaiser was sitting with his back
to the window and at the correct angle, Harry occasionally could see the
man's pinochle hand. A few times he had been tempted to call Herman
Gosdale and describe his adversary's cards to him, with some advice on
how to play out the trick.

But he dared not let people know he spent much of his day in his
bedroom-darkened at night to avoid being silhouetted at the
window-vicariously participating in their lives. They would not
understand. Those whole of limb were uneasy about a handicapped person
from the start, for they found it too easy to believe that the crippling
twist of legs and arms extended to the mind. They would think he was
nosy; worse, they might mark him as a Peeping Tom, a degenerate voyeur.

That was not the case. Harry Talbot had set down strict rules governing
his use of the telescope and binoculars, and he faithfully abided by
them. For one thing, he would never try to get a glimpse of a woman
undressed.

Amelia Scarlatti lived across the street from him and three doors north,
and he once discovered, by accident, that she spent some evenings in her
bedroom, listening to music or reading in the nude. She turned on only a
small bedside lamp, and gauzy sheers hung between the drapes, and she
always stayed away from the windows, so she saw no need to draw the
drapes on every occasion. In fact she could not be seen by anyone less
prepared to see her than Harry was. Amelia was lovely. Even through
the sheers and in the dim lamplight, her exquisite body had been
revealed to Harry in detail. Astonished by her nakedness, riveted by
surprise and by the sensuous concavities and convexities of her
full-breasted, long-legged body, he had stared for perhaps a minute.
Then, as hot with embarrassment as with desire, he had turned the scope
from her. Though Harry had not been with a woman in more than twenty
years, he never invaded Amella's bedroom again. On many mornings he
looked at an angle into the side window of her tidy first-floor kitchen
and watched her at breakfast, studying her perfect face as she had her
juice and muffin or toast and eggs. She was beautiful beyond his
abilities of description, and from what he knew of her life, she seemed
to be a nice person, as well. In a way he supposed he was in love with
her, as a boy could love a teacher who was forever beyond his reach, but
he never used unrequited love as an excuse to caress her unclothed body
with his gaze.

Likewise, if he caught one of his neighbors in another kind - 77 of
embarrassing situation, he looked away. He watched them fight with one
another, yes, and he watched them laugh together, eat, play cards, cheat
on their diets, wash dishes, and perform the countless other acts of
daily life, but not because he wanted to get any dirt on them or find
reason to feel superior to them. He got no cheap thrill from his
observations of them. What he wanted was to be a part of their lives,
to reach out to them-even if one-sidedly-and make of them an extended



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family; he wanted to have reason to care about them and, through that
caring, to experience a fuller emotional life.

The elevator motor hummed again. Moose evidently had gone into the
kitchen, opened one of the four doors of the under-the-counter
refrigerator, and fetched a cold can of Coors. Now he was returning
with the brew.

Harry Talbot was a gregarious man, and on coming home from the war with
only one useful limb, he was advised to move into a group home for the
disabled, where he might have a social life in a caring atmosphere. The
counselors warned him that he would not be accepted if he tried to live
in the world of the whole and healthy; they said he would encounter
unconscious yet hurtful cruelty from most people he met, especially the
cruelty of thoughtless exclusion, and would finally fall into the grip
of a deep and terrible loneliness. But Harry was as stubbornly
independent as he was gregarious, and the prospect of living in a group
home, with only the companionship of disabled people and caretakers,
seemed worse than no companionship at all. Now he lived alone, but for
Moose, with few visitors other than his once-a-week housekeeper, Mrs.
Hunsbok (from whom he hid the telescope and binoculars in a bedroom
closet). Much of what the counselors warned him about was proved true
daily; however, they had not imagined Harry's ability to find solace and
a sufficient sense of family through surreptitious but benign
observation of his neighbors.

The elevator reached the third floor. The door slid open, and Moose
padded into the bedroom, straight to Harry's high stool.

The telescope was on a wheeled platform, and Harry pushed it aside. He
reached down and patted the dog's head. He took the cold can from the
Labrador's mouth. Moose had held it by the bottom for maximum
cleanliness. Harry put the can between his limp legs, plucked a
penlight off the table on the other side of his stool, and directed the
beam on the can to be sure it was Coors and not Diet Coke.

Those were the two beverages that the dog had been taught to fetch, and
for the most part the good pooch recognized the difference between the
words "beer" and "Coke," and was able to keep the command in mind all
the way to the kitchen. On rare occasions he forgot along the way and
returned with the wrong drink. Rarer still, he brought odd items that
had nothing to do with the command he'd been given a slipper; a
newspaper; twice, an unopened bag of dog biscuits; once, a hardboiled
egg, carried so gently that the shell was not cracked between his teeth;
strangest of all, a toilet-bowl brush from the housekeeper's supplies.
When he brought the wrong item, Moose always proved successful on second
try.

Long ago Harry had decided that the pooch often was not mistaken but
only having fun with him. His close association with Moose had
convinced him that dogs were gifted with a sense of humor.

This time, neither mistaken nor joking, Moose had brought what he'd been
asked to bring. Harry grew thirstier at the sight of the can of Coors.

Switching off the penlight, he said, "Good boy.                    Good, good, gooood
dog."

Moose whined happily. He sat at attention in the darkness at the foot
of the stool, waiting to be sent on another errand.

"Go, Moose.      Lie down.      That's a good dog."


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Disappointed, the Lab moseyed into the corner and curled up on the
floor, while his roaster popped the tab on the beer and took a long
swallow.

Harry set the Coors aside and pulled the telescope in front of him.                          He
returned to his scrutiny of the night, the neighborhood, and his
extended family.

The Gosdales and Kaisers were still playing cards.

Nothing but eddying fog moved at Callan's Funeral Home.

One block south on Conquistador, at the moment illuminated by the
walkway lamps at the Stemback house, Ray Chang, the owner of the town's
only television and electronics store, was coming this way. He was
walking his dog, Jack, a golden retriever. They moved at a leisurely
pace, as Jack sniffed each tree ' - 79 along the sidewalk, searching for
just the right one on which to relieve himself.

The tranquillity and familiarity of those scenes pleased Harry, but the
mood was shattered abruptly when he shifted his attention through his
north window to the Simpson place. Ella and Denver Simpson lived in a
cream-colored, tile-roofed Spanish house on the other side of
Conquistador and two blocks north, just beyond the old Catholic cemetery
and one block this side of Ocean Avenue. Because nothing in the
graveyard-except part of one tree-obstructed Harry's view of the
Simpsons' property, he was able to get an angled but tight focus on all
the windows on two sides of the house. He drew in on the lighted
kitchen. Just as the image in the eyepiece resolved from a blur to a
sharp-lined picture, he saw Ella Simpson struggling with her husband,
who was pressing her against the refrigerator; she was twisting in his
grasp, clawing at his face, screaming.

A shiver sputtered the length of Harry's shrapnel-damaged spine.

He knew at once that what was happening at the Simpsons' house was
connected with other disturbing things he had seen lately. Denver was
Moonlight Cove's postmaster, and Ella operated a successful beauty
parlor. They were in their midthirties, one of the few local black
couples, and as far as Harry knew, they were happily married. Their
physical conflict was so out of character that it had to be related to
the recent inexplicable and ominous events that Harry had witnessed.

Ella wrenched free of Denver. She took only one twisting step away from
him before he swung a fist at her. The blow caught her on the side of
the neck. She went down. Hard.

In the corner of Harry's bedroom, Moose detected the new tension in his
master. The dog d his head and chuted once, twice.

Bent forward on his stool, riveted to the eyepiece, Harry saw two men
step forward from a part of the Simpson kitchen that was out of line
with the window. Though they were not in uniform, he recognized them as
Moonlight Cove police officers Paul Hawthorne and Reese Dorn. Their
presence confirmed Harry's intuitive sense that this incident was part
of the bizarre pattern of violence and conspiracy of which he had become
increasingly aware during the past several weeks. Not for the first
time, he wished to God he could figure out what was going on in his once
serene little town. Hawthorne and Dorn plucked Ella off the floor and
held her firmly between them. She appeared to be only half conscious,
dazed by the punch her husband had thrown.



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Denver was speaking to Hawthorne, Dorn, or his wife. Impossible to tell
which. His face was contorted with rage of such intensity that Harry
was chilled by it.

A third man stepped into sight, moving straight to the windows to close
the Levolor blinds. A thicker vein of fog flowed eastward from the sea,
clouding the view, but Harry recognized this man too Dr. Ian
Fitzgerald, the oldest of Moonlight Cove's three physicians. He had
maintained a family practice in town for almost thirty years and had
long been known affectionately as Doc Fitz. He was Harry's own doctor,
an unfailingly warm and concerned man, but at the moment he looked
colder than an ice berg. As the slats of the Levolor blind came
together, Harry stared into Doc Fitzs face and saw a hardness of
features and a fierceness in the eyes that weren't characteristic of the
man; thanks to the telescope, Harry seemed to be only a foot from the
old physician, and what he saw was a familiar face but, simultaneously,
that of a total stranger.

Unable to peer into the kitchen any longer, he pulled back for a wider
view of the house. He was pressing too hard against the eyepiece; dull
pain radiated outward from the socket, across his face. He cursed the
curdling fog but tried to relax.

Moose whined inquisitively.

After a minute, a light came on in the room at the southeast corner of
the second floor of the Simpson house. Harry immediately zoomed in on a
window. The master bedroom. In spite of the occluding fog, e saw
Hawthorne and Dorn bring Ella in from the upstairs hall. They threw her
onto the quilted blue spread on the queen-size bed.

Denver and Doc Fitz entered the room behind them. The doctor put his
black leather bag on a nightstand. Denver drew the drapes at the front
window that looked out on Conquistador Avenue, then came to the
graveyard-side window on which Harry was focused. For a moment Denver
stared out into the night, and Harry had the eerie feeling that the man
saw him, though they were two blocks away, as if Denver had the vision
of Superman, a built-in biological telescope of his own. The same - 81
sensation had gripped Harry on other occasions, when he was "eye-to-eye"
with people this way, long before odd things had begun to happen in
Moonlight Cove, so he knew that Denver was not actually aware of him. He
was spooked nonetheless. Then the postmaster pulled those curtains
shut, as well, though not as tightly as he should have done, leaving a
two-inch gap between the panels.

Trembling now, damp with cold perspiration, Harry worked with a series
of eyepieces, adjusting the power on the scope and trying to sharpen the
focus, until he had pulled in so close to the window that the lens was
filled by the narrow slot between the drapes. He seemed to be not
merely at the window but beyond it, standing in that master bedroom,
behind the drapes.

The denser scarves of fog slipped eastward, and a thinner veil floated
in from the sea, further improving Harry's view. Hawthorne and Dorn
were holding Ella Simpson on the bed. She was thrashing, but they had
her by the legs and arms, and she was no match for them.

Denver held his wife's face by the chin and stuffed a wadded
handkerchief or piece of white clothing into her mouth, gagging her.

Harry had a brief glimpse of the woman's face as she struggled with her


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assailants.      Her eyes were wide with terror.

"Oh, shit."

Moose got up and came to him.

In the Simpsons' house, Ella's valiant struggle had caused her skirt to
ride up. Her pale yellow panties were exposed. Buttons had popped open
on her green blouse. In spite of that, the scene conveyed no feeling
that rape was imminent, not even a hint of sexual tension. Whatever they
were doing to her was perhaps even more menacing and cruel-and certainly
stranger-than rape.

Doc Fitz stepped to the foot of the bed, blocking Harry's view of Ella
and her oppressors. The physician held a bottle of amber fluid, from
which he was filling a hypodermic syringe.

The were giving Ella an injection.

But of what?

And why?


After talking with her mother in San Diego, Tessa Lockland sat on her
motel bed and watched a nature documentary on PBS. Aloud, she critiqued
the camera work, the composition of shots, lighting, editing techniques,
scripted narration, and other aspects of the production, until she
abruptly realized she sounded foolish talking to herself. Then she
mocked herself by imitating various television movie critics, commenting
on the documentary in each of their styles, which turned out to be dull
because most TV critics were pompous in one way or another, with the
exception of Roger Ebert. Nevertheless, although having fun, Tessa was
talking to herself, which was too eccentric even for a nonconformist who
had reached the age of thirty-three without ever having to take a
nine-to-five job. Visiting the scene of her sister's "suicide" had made
her edgy. She was seeking comic relief from that grim pilgrimage. But
at certain times, in certain places, even the irrepressible Lockland
buoyancy was inappropriate.

She clicked off the television and retrieved the empty plastic ice
bucket from the bureau. Leaving the door to her room ajar, taking only
some coins, she headed toward the south end of the second floor to the
ice-maker and soda-vending machine.

Tessa had always prided herself on avoiding the nine-to-five grind.
Absurdly proud, actually, considering that she often put in twelve and
fourteen hours a day instead of eight, and was a tougher boss than any
she could have worked for in a routine job. Her income was nothing to
preen about, either. She had enjoyed a few flush years, when she could
not have stopped making money if she'd tried, but they were far
outnumbered by the years in which she had earned little more than a
subsistence living. Averaging her income for the twelve years since she
had - 83 finished film school, she'd recently calculated that her annual
earnings were around twenty-one thousand, though that figure would be
drastically readjusted downward if she did not have another boom year
soon.

Though she was not rich, though free-lance documentary filmmaking
offered no security to speak of, she felt like a success, and not just
because her work generally had been well received by the critics and not
only because she was blessed with the Lockland disposition toward
optimism. She felt successful because she had always been resistant to


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authority and had found, in her work, a way to be the master of her own
destiny.

At the end of the long corridor, she pushed through a heavy fire door
and stepped onto a landing, where the ice-maker and soda cooler stood to
the left of the head of the stairs. Well stocked with cola, root beer,
Orange Crush, and 7-Up, the tall vending machine was humming softly, but
the ice-maker was broken and empty. She would have to fill up her
bucket at the machine on the ground floor. She descended the stairs,
her footsteps echoing off the concrete-block walls. The sound was so
hollow and cold that she might have been in a vast pyramid or some other
ancient structure, alone but for the companionship of unseen spirits.

At the foot of the stairs, she found no soda or ice machines, but a sign
on the wall indicated that the ground-floor refreshment center was at
the north end of the motel. By the time she got her ice and Coke, she
would have walked off enough calories to deserve a regular, sugar-packed
cola instead of a diet drink.

As she reached for the handle of the fire door that led to the
ground-floor corridor, she thought she heard the upper door open at the
head of the stairs. If so, it was the first indication she'd had, since
checking in, that she was not the only guest in the motel. The place
had an abandoned air.

She went through the fire door and found that the lower corridor was
carpeted in the same hideous orange nylon as was the upper hall. The
decorator had a clown's taste for bright colors. It made her squint.

She would have preferred to be a more successful filmmaker, if only
because she could have afforded lodgings that did not assault the
senses. Of course, this was the only motel in Moonlight Cove, so even
wealth could not have saved her from that eye-blistering orange glare.
By the time she walked to the end of the hall, pushed through another
fire door, and stepped into the bottom of the north stairwell, the sight
of gray concrete block walls and concrete steps was positively restful
and appealing.

There, the ice-maker was working. She slid open the top of the chest
and dipped the plastic bucket into the deep bin, filling it with
half-moon pieces of ice. She set the full bucket atop the machine. As
she closed the chest, she heard the door at the head of the stairs open
with a faint but protracted squeak of hinges.

She stepped to the soda vendor to get her Coke, expecting someone to
descend from the second floor. Only as she dropped a third quarter into
the slot did she realize something was sneaky about the way the overhead
door opened the long, slow squeak . . . as if someone knew the hinges
were unoiled, and was trying to minimize the noise.

With one finger poised over the Diet Coke selection button, Tessa
hesitated, listening.

Nothing.

Cool concrete silence.

She felt exactly as she had felt on the beach earlier in the evening,
when she had heard that strange and distant cry. Now, as then, her
flesh prickled.

She had the crazy notion that someone was on the landing above, holding



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the fire door open now that he had come through it. He was waiting for
her to push the button, so the squeak of the upper door's hinges would
be covered by the clatter-thump of the can rolling into the dispensing
trough.

Many modern women, conscious of the need to be tough in a tough world,
would have been embarrassed by such apprehension and would have shrugged
off the intuitive chill. But Tessa knew herself well. She was not
given to hysteria or paranoia, so she did not wonder for a moment if
Janice's death had left her overly sensitive, did not doubt her mental
image of a hostile presence at the upper landing, out of sight around
the turn.

Three doors led from the bottom of that concrete shaft. The first was
in the south wall, through which she had come and through which she
could return to the ground-floor corridor. The second was in the west
wall, which opened to the back of the motel, where a narrow walk or
service passage evidently lay - 85 between the building and the edge of
the sea-facing bluff, and the third was in the east wall, through which
she probably could reach the parking lot in front of the motel. Instead
of pushing the vendor button to get her Coke, leaving her full ice
bucket as well, she stepped quickly and quietly to the south door and
pulled it open.

She glimpsed movement at the distant end of the ground-floor hall.
Someone ducked back through that other fire door into the south
stairwell. She didn't see much of him, only his shadowy form, for he
had not been on the orange carpet in the corridor itself but at the far
threshold, and therefore able to slip out of sight in a second. The
door eased shut in his wake.

At least two men-she presumed they were men, not women were stalking
her.

overhead, in her own stairwell, the unoiled hinges of that door produced
a barely audible, protracted rasp and squeal. The other man evidently
had tired of waiting for her to make a covering noise.

She could not go into the hallway.               They'd trap her between them.

Though she could scream in the hope of calling forth other guests and
frightening these men away, she hesitated because she was afraid the
motel might be as deserted as it seemed. Her scream might elicit no
help, while letting the stalkers know that she was aware of them and
that they no longer had to be cautious.

Someone was stealthily descending the stairs above her.

Tessa turned away from the corridor, stepped to the east door, and ran
out into the foggy night, along the side of the building, into the
parking lot beyond which lay Cypress Lane. Gasping, she sprinted past
the front of Cove Lodge to the motel office, which was adjacent to the
now closed coffee shop.

The office was open, the doorstep was bathed in a mist-diffused glow of
pink and yellow neon, and the man behind the counter was the same one
who had registered her hours ago. He was tall and slightly plump, in
his fifties, clean-shaven and neatly barbered if a little rumpled
looking in brown corduroy slacks and a green and red flannel shirt. He
put down a magazine, lowered the volume of the country music on the
radio, got up from his spring-backed desk chair, and stood at the
counter, frowning at her while she told him, a bit too breathlessly,


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what had happened.

"Well, this isn't the big city, ma'am," he said when she had finished.

"It's a peaceful place, Moonlight Cove.                 You don't have to worry about
that sort of thing here."

"But it happened," she insisted, nervously glancing out at the
neon-painted mist that drifted through the darkness beyond the office
door and window.

"Oh, I'm sure you saw and heard someone, but you put the wrong spin on
it. We do have a couple other guests. That's who you saw and heard,
and they were probably just getting a Coke or some ice, like you.

" He had a warm, grandfatherly demeanor when he smiled. "This place can
seem a little spooky when there aren't many guests. "Listen, mister . .
."

"Quinn.    Gordon Quinn."

"Listen, Mr. Quinn, it wasn't that way at all." She felt like a
skittish and foolish female, though she knew she was no such thing.

"I didn't mistake innocent guests for muggers and rapists. I'm not an
hysterical woman. These guys were up to no damn good. Well . . . all
right. I think you're wrong, but let's have a look." Quinn came
through the gate in the counter, to her side of the office.

"Are you just going like that?"              she asked.

"Like what?"

"Unarmed?"

He smiled again.        As before, she felt foolish.

"Ma'am," he said, "in twenty-five years of motel management, I haven't
yet met a guest I couldn't handle."

Though Quinn's smug, patronizing tone angered Tessa, she did not argue
with him but followed him out of the office and through the eddying fog
to the far end of the building. He was big, and she was petite, so she
felt somewhat like a little kid being escorted back to her room by a
father determined to show her that no monster was hiding either under
the bed or in the closet.

He opened the metal door through which she had fled the north service
stairs, and they went inside. No one waited there.

The soda-vending machine purred, and a faint clinking arose - 87 from
the ice-maker's laboring mechanism. Her plastic bucket still stood atop
the chest, filled with half-moon chips.

Quinn crossed the small space to the door that led to the ground-floor
hall, pulled it open.

"Nobody there," he said, nodding toward the silent corridor. He opened
the door in the west wall, as well, and looked outside, left and right.
He motioned her to the threshold and insisted that she look too.

She saw a narrow, railing-flanked serviceway that paralleled the back of
the lodge, between the building and the edge of the bluff, illuminated
by a yellowish night-light at each end. Deserted "You said you'd


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already put your money in the vendor but hadn't got your soda?" Quinn
asked, as he let the door swing shut.

"That's right.

"What did you want?"

"Well .    .   .    Diet Coke.

" At the vending machine, he pushed the correct button, and a can rolled
into the trough. He handed it to her, pointed at the plastic container
that she had brought from her room, and said, "Don't forget your ice."

Carrying the ice bucket and Coke, a hot blush on her cheeks and cold
anger in her heart, Tessa followed him up the north stairs. No one
lurked there. The unoiled hinges of the upper door squeaked as they
went into the second-floor hallway, which was also deserted.

The door to her room was ajar, which was how she left it.                      She was
hesitant to enter.

"Let's check it out," Quinn said.

The small room, closet, and adjoining bath were untenanted.

"Feel better?"       he asked.

"I wasn't imagining things."

"I'm sure you weren't," he said, still patronizing her.

As Quinn returned to the hallway, Tessa said, "They were there, and they
were real, but I guess they've gone now. Probably ran away when they
realized I was aware of them and that I went for help - "

"Well, all's well then," he said - "You're safe. If they're gone,
that's almost as good as if they'd never existed in the first place.

" Tessa required all of her restraint to avoid saying more than, "Thank
you," then she closed the door. On the knob was a lock button, which
she depressed. Above the knob was a dead-bolt lock, which she engaged.
A brass security chain was also provided; she used it.

She went to the window and examined it to satisfy herself that it
couldn't be opened easily by a would-be assailant. Half of it slid to
the left when she applied pressure to a latch and pulled, but it could
not be opened from outside unless someone broke it and reached through
to disengage the lock. Besides, as she was on the second floor, an
intruder would need a ladder.

For a while she sat in bed, listening to distant noises in the motel.
Now every sound seemed strange and menacing. She wondered what, if any,
connection her unsettling experience had with Janice's death more than
three weeks ago.

After a couple of hours in the storm drain under the sloping meadow,
Chrissie Foster was troubled by claustrophobia. She had been locked in
the kitchen pantry a great deal longer than she had been in the drain,
and the pantry had been smaller, yet the grave-black concrete culvert
was by far the worse of the two. Maybe she began to feel caged and
smothered because of the cumulative effect of spending all day and most
of the evening in cramped places.

From the superhighway far above, where the drainage system began, the


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heavy roar of trucks echoed down through the tunnels, giving rise in her
mind to images of growling dragons. She put her hands over her ears to
block out the noise. Sometimes the trucks were widely spaced, but on
occasion they came in trains of six or eight or a dozen, and the
continuous rumble became oppressive, maddening.

Or maybe her desire to get out of the culvert had something - 89 to do
with the fact that she was underground. Lying in the dark, listening to
the trucks, searching the intervening silences for the return of her
parents and Tucker, Chrissie began to feel she was in a concrete coffin,
a victim of premature burial.

Reading aloud from the imaginary book of her own adventures, she said,
"Little did young Chrissie know that the culvert was about to collapse
and fill with earth, squishing her as if she were a bug and trapping her
forever."

She knew she should stay where she was. They might still be prowling
the meadow and woods in search of her. She was safer in the culvert
than out of it.

But she was cursed with a vivid imagination. Although she was no doubt
the only occupant of the lightless passageway in which she sprawled, she
envisioned unwanted company in countless grisly forms slithering snakes;
spiders by the hundreds; cockroaches; rats; colonies of blood-drinking
bats. eventual she began to wonder if over the years a child might have
crawled into the tunnels to play and, getting lost in the branching
culverts, might have died there, undiscovered. His soul, of course,
would have remained restless and earthbound, for his death had been
unjustly premature and there had been no proper burial service to free
his spirit. Now perhaps that ghost, sensing her presence, was animating
those hideous skeletal remains, dragging the decomposed and age-dried
corpse toward her, scraping off pieces of leathery and half-petrified
flesh as it came. Chrissie was eleven years old and levelheaded for her
age, and she repeatedly told herself that there were no such things as
ghosts, but then she thought of her parents and Tucker, who seemed to be
some kind of werewolves, for God's sake, and when the big trucks passed
on the interstate, she was afraid to cover her ears with her hands for
fear that the dead child was using the cover of that noise to creep
closer, closer.

She had to get out.


When he left the dark garage where he had taken refuge from the pack of
drugged-out delinquents (which is what he had to believe they were; he
knew no other way to explain them), Sam Booker went straight to Ocean
Avenue and stopped in Knight's Bridge Tavern just long enough to buy a
six-pack of Guinness Stout to go.

Later, in his room at Cove Lodge, he sat at the small table and drank
beer while he pored over the facts of the case. On September 5, three
National Farmworkers Union organizers Julio Bustamante, his sister Maria
Bustamante, and Maria's fiance, Ramon Sanchez-were driving south from
the wine country, where they had been conducting discussions with
vineyard owners about the upcoming harvest. They were in a
four-year-old, tan Chevy van. They stopped for dinner in Moonlight
Cove. They'd eaten at the Perez Family Restaurant and had drunk too
many margaritas (according to witnesses among the waiters and customers
at Perezs that night), and on their way back to the interstate, they'd
taken a dangerous curve too fast; their van had rolled and caught fire.
None of the three had survived.


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That story might have held up and the FBI might never have been drawn
into the case, but for a few inconsistencies. For one thing, according
to the Moonlight Cove police department's official report, Julio
Bustamante had been driving. But Julio had never driven a car in his
life; furthermore, he was unlikely to do so after dark, for he suffered
from a form of night blindness. Furthermore, according to witnesses
quoted in the police report, Julio and Maria and Ramon were all
intoxicated, but no one who knew Julio or Ramon had ever seen them drunk
before; Maria was a lifelong teetotaler.

The Sanchez and Bustamante families, of San Francisco, also - 91 were
made suspicious by the behavior of the Moonlight Cove authorities. None
of them were told of the three deaths until September 10, five days
after the accident. Police chief Loman Watkins had explained that
Julio's, Maria's, and Ramon's paper IDs had been destroyed in the
intense fire and that their bodies had been too completely burned to
allow swift identification by fingerprints. What of the van's license
plates? Curiously, Loman had not found any on the vehicle or torn loose
and lying in the vicinity of the crash. Therefore, with three badly
mangled and burned bodies to deal with and no way to locate next of kin
on a timely basis, he had authorized the coroner, Dr. Ian Fitzgerald,
to fill out death certificates and thereafter dispose of the bodies by
cremation.

"We don't have the facilities of a big-city morgue, you understand,"
Watkins had explained.

"We just can't keep cadavers long tenn, and we had no way of knowing g
how much time we'd need to identify these people. We thought they might
be itinerants or even illegals, in which case we might never be able to
ID them."

Neat, Sam thought grimly, as he leaned back in his chair and took a long
swallow of Guinness.

Three people had died violent deaths, been certified victims of an
accident, and cremated before their relatives were notified, before any
other authorities could step in to verify, through the application of
modern forensic medicine, whether the death certificates and police
report in fact contained the whole story.

The Bustamantes and Sanchezes were suspicious of foul play, but the
National Farmworkers Union was convinced of it. On September 12, the
union's president sought the intervention of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation on the grounds that antiunion forces were responsible for
the deaths of Bustamante, Bustamante, and Sanchez. Generally, the crime
of murder fell into the FBI's jurisdiction only if the suspected killer
had crossed state borders either to commit the act, or during its
commission, or to escape retribution subsequent to the act; or, as in
this case, if federal authorities had reason to believe that murder had
been committed as a consequence of the willful violation of the victims'
civil rights.

On September 26, after the absurd if standard delays associated with
government bureaucracy and the federal judiciary, a team of six FBI
agents-including three men from the Scientific Investigation
Division-moved into picturesque Moonlight Cove for ten days. They
interviewed police officers, examined police and coroner files, took
statements from witnesses who were at the Perez Family Restaurant on the
night of September 5, sifted through the wreckage of the Chevy van at
the junkyard, and sought whatever meager clues might remain at the


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accident site itself. Because Moonlight Cove had no agricultural
industry, they could find no one interested in the farm-union issue let
alone angered by it, which left them short of people motivated to kill
union organizers.

Throughout their investigation, they received the full and cordial
cooperation of the local police and coroner. Loman Watkins and his men
went so far as to volunteer to submit to lie-detector tests, which
subsequently were administered, and all of them passed without a hint of
deception. The coroner also took the tests and proved to be a man of
unfailing honesty.

Nevertheless, something about it reeked.

The local officials were almost too eager to cooperate. And all six of
the FBI agents came to feel that they were objects of scorn and derision
when their backs were turned-though they never saw any of the police so
much as raise an eyebrow or smirk or share a knowing look with another
local. Call it Bureau Instinct, which Sam knew was at least as reliable
as that of any creature in the wild.

Then the other deat had to be considered.

While investigating the Sanchez-Bustamante case, the agents had reviewed
police and coroner records for the past couple of years to ascertain the
usual routine with which sudden deaths accidental and otherwise-were
handled in Moonlight Cove, in order to determine if local authorities
had dealt with this recent case differently from previous ones, which
would be an indication of police complicity in a cover-up. What they
discovered was puzzling and disturbing-but not like anything they had
expected to find. Except for one spectacular car crash involving a
teenage boy in an extensively souped-up Dodge, Moonlight Cove had been a
singularly safe place to live. During that time, its residents were
untroubled by violent death-until August 28, eight days before the
deaths of Sanchez and the Bustamantes, when an unusual series of
mortalities began to show up on the public records.

- 93 In the pre-dawn hours of August 28, the four members of the Mayser
family were the first victims Melinda, John, and their two children,
Carrie and Billy. They had perished in a house fire, which the
authorities later attributed to Billy playing with matches. The four
bodies were so badly burned that identification could be made only from
dental records.

Having finished his first bottle of Guinness, Sam reached for a second
but hesitated. He had work to do yet tonight. Sometimes, when he was
in a particularly dour mood and started drinking stout, he had trouble
stopping short of unconsciousness.

Holding the empty bottle for comfort, Sam wondered why a boy, having
started a fire, would not cry out for help and wake his parents when he
saw the blaze was beyond control. Why would the boy not run before
being overcome with smoke9 And just what kind of fire, except one fueled
by gasoline or another volatile fluid (of which there was no indication
in official reports), would spread so fast that none of the family could
escape and would reduce the house-and the bodies therein-to heaps of
ashes before firemen could arrive and quench it?

Neat again. The bodies were so consumed by flames that autopsies would
be of little use in determining if the blaze had been started not by
Billy but by someone who wanted to conceal the true causes of death. At
the suggestion of the funeral director-who was the owner of Callan's


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Funeral Home and also the assistant coroner, therefore a suspect in any
official cover-up the Maysers' next of kin, Melinda Mayser's mother,
authorized cremation of the remains. Potential evidence not destroyed
by the original fire was thus obliterated.

"How tidy," Sam said aloud, putting his feet up on the other
straight-backed chair.

"How splendidly clean and tidy."

Body count four.

Then the Bustamantes and Sanchez on September 5.                     Another fire. Followed
by more speedy cremations.

Body count seven.

On September 7, while trace vapors of the Bustamante and Sanchez remains
might still have lingered in the air above Moonlight Cove, a twenty-year
resident of the town, Jim Armesput to sea in his thirty-foot boat, the
Mary Leandra, for an early morning sail-and was never seen again. Though
he was an experienced seaman, though the day was clear and the ocean
calm, he'd apparently gone down in an outbound tide, for no identifiable
wreckage had washed up on local beaches.

Body count eight.

On September 9, while fish presumably were nibbling on Armes's drowned
body, Paula Parkins was torn apart by five Dobermans. She was a
twenty-nine-year-old woman living alone, raising and training guard
dogs, on a two-acre property near the edge of town. Evidently one of
her Dobermans turned against her, and the others flew into a frenzy at
the scent of her blood. Paula's savaged remains, unfit for viewing, had
been sent in a sealed casket to her family in Denver. The dogs were
shot, tested for rabies, and cremated.

Body count nine.

Six days after entering the Bustamante-Sanchez case, on October 2, the
FBI had exhumed Paula Parkins's body from a grave in Denver. An autopsy
revealed that the woman indeed had been bitten and clawed to death by
multiple animal assailants.

Sam remembered the most interesting part of that autopsy report word for
word . . . however, bite marks, lacerations, tears in the body
cavity, and specific damage to breasts and sex organs are not entirely
consistent with canine attack. The teeth pattern and size of bite do
not fit the dental profile of the average Doberman or other animals
known to be aggressive and capable of successfully attacking an adult.
And later in the same report, when referring to the specific nature of
Parkins's assailants Species unknown.

How had Paula Parkins really died?

What terror and agony had she known?

Who was trying to blame it on the Dobermans?

And in fact what evidence might the Dobermans' bodies have provided
about the nature of their own deaths and, therefore, the truthfulness of
the police story?

Sam thought of the strange, distant cry he had heard tonight-like that


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of a coyote but not a coyote, like that of a cat but not a cat. And he
thought also of the eerie, frantic voices of the kids who had pursued
him. Somehow it all fit. Bureau Instinct.

Species unknown.

Unsettled, Sam tried to soothe his nerves with Guinness. The bottle was
still empty. He clinked it thoughtfully against his teeth.

Six days after Parkins's death and Ion before the exhumation 9 of her
body in Denver, two more people met untimely ends in Moonlight Cove.
Steve Heinz and Laura Dalcoe, unmarried but living together, were found
dead in their house on Iceberry Way. Heinz left a typed, incoherent,
unsigned suicide note, then killed Laura with a shotgun while she slept,
and took his own life. Dr.

Ian Fitzgerald's report was murder-suicide, case closed. At the
coroner's suggestion, the Dalcoe and Heinz families authorized cremation
of the grisly remains.

Body count eleven.

"There's an ungodly amount of cremation going on in this town," Sam said
aloud, and turned the empty beer bottle around in his hands.

Most people still preferred to have themselves and their loved ones
embalmed and buried in a casket, regardless of the condition of the
body. In most towns cremations accounted for perhaps one in four or one
in five dispositions of cadavers.

Finally, while investigating the Bustamante-Sanchez case, the FBI team
from San Francisco found that Janice Capshaw was listed as a Valium
suicide. Her sea-ravaged body had washed up on the beach two days after
she disappeared, three days before the agents arrived to launch their
investigation into the deaths of the union organizers.

Julio Bustamante, Maria Bustamante, Ramon Sanchez, the four Maysers, Jim
Armes, Paula Parkins, Steven Heinz, Laura Dalcoe, Janice Capshaw a body
count of twelve in less than a month-exactly twelve times the number of
violent deaths that had occurred in Moonlight Cove during the previous
twenty-.three months. Out of a population of just three thousand,
twelve violent deaths in little more than three weeks was one hell of a
mortality rate.

Queried about his reaction to this astonishing chain of deadly events,
Chief Loman Watkins had said, "It's horrible, yes. And it's sort of
frightening. Things were so calm for so long that I guess,
statistically, we were just overdue."

But in a town that size, even spread over two years, twelve such violent
deaths went off the top of the statisticians' charts.

The six-man Bureau team was unable to find one shred of evidence of any
local authorities' complicity in those cases. And although a polygraph
was not an entirely dependable determiner of truth, the technology was
not so unreliable that Loman Watkins, his officers, the coroner, and the
coroner's assistant could all pass the examination without a single
indication of deception if in fact they were guilty.

Yet .   .    .

Twelve deaths. Four cremated in a house fire. Three cremated in a
demolished Chevy van. Three suicides, two by shotgun and one by Valium,


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all subsequently cremated at Callan's Funeral Home. One lost at sea-no
body at all. And the only victim available for autopsy appeared not to
have been killed by dogs, as the coroner's report claimed, though she
had been bitten and clawed by something, dammit.

It was enough to keep the Bureau's file open. By the ninth of October,
four days after the San Francisco team departed Moonlight Cove, a
decision was made to send in an undercover operative to have a look at
certain aspects of the case that might be more fruitfully explored by a
man who was not being watched.

One day after that decision, on October 10, a letter arrived in the San
Francisco office at clinched the Bureau's determination to maintain
involvement. Sam had that note committed to memory as well Gentlemen I
have information pertinent to a recent series of deaths in the town of
Moonlight Cove. I have reason to believe local authorities are involved
in a conspiracy to conceal murder.

I would prefer you contact me in person, as I do not trust the privacy
of our telephone here. I must insist on absolute discretion because I
am a disabled Vietnam veteran with severe physical limitations, and I am
naturally concerned about my ability to protect myself.

It was signed, Harold G.           Talbot.

United States Army records confirmed that Talbot was indeed - 97 a
disabled Vietnam vet. He had been repeatedly cited for bravery in
combat. Tomorrow, Sam would discreetly visit him.

Meanwhile, considering the work he had to do tonight, he wondered if he
could risk a second bottle of stout on top of what he'd drunk at dinner.
The six-pack was on the table in front of him. He stared at it for a
long time. Guinness, good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death.
The Mexican food was in his belly, but the taste of it was forgotten.
Goldie Hawn was living on a ranch somewhere with Burt Russell, whom she
had the bad sense to prefer to one ordinary-looking, scarred, and
hope-deserted federal agent. He thought of twelve dead men and women,
of bodies roasting in a crematorium until they were reduced to bone
splinters and ashes, and he thought of shotgun murder and shotgun
suicide and fish-gnawed corpses and a badly bitten woman, and all those
thoughts led him to morbid philosophizing about the way of all flesh. He
thought of his wife, lost to cancer, and he thought of Scott and their
long-distance telephone conversation, too, and that was when he finally
opened a second beer.

Chased by imaginary spiders, snakes, beetles, rats, bats, and by the
possibly imaginary reanimated body of a dead child, and by the real if
dragon-like roar of distant trucks, Chrissie crawled out of the
tributary drain in which she had taken refuge, troll-walked down the
main culvert, stepped again in the slippery remains of the decomposing
raccoon, and plunged out into the silt-floored drainage channel. The
air was clean and sweet. In spite of the eight-foot-high walls of the
ditch, fog-filtered moonlight, and fog-hidden stars, Chrissie's
claustrophobia abated. She drew deep lungsful of cool, moist air, but
tried to breathe with as little noise as possible.


She listened to the night, and before long she was rewarded by those
alien cries, echoing faintly across the meadow from the woods to the
south. As before, she was sure that she heard three distinct voices. If
her mother, father, and Tucker were off to the south, looking for her in
the forest that eventually led to the edge of New Wave Microtech's


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property, she might be able to head back the way she had come, through
the northern woods, into the meadow where Godiva had thrown her, then
east toward the county road and into Moonlight Cove by that route,
leaving them searching fruitlessly in the wrong place.

For sure, she could not stay where she was.

And she could not head south, straight toward them.

She clambered out of the ditch and ran north across the meadow,
retracing the route she had taken earlier in the evening, and as she
went she counted her miseries. She was hungry because she'd had no
dinner, and she was tired. The muscles in her shoulders and back were
cramped from the time she had spent in the tight, cold concrete
tributary drain. Her legs ached.

So what's your problem? she asked herself as she reached the trees at
the edge of the meadow. Would you rather have been dragged down by
Tucker and "converted" into one of them?

Loman Watkins left the Valdoski house, where Dr. Worthy was
overseeing the conversion of Ella and George. Farther down the county
road, his officers and the coroner were loading the dead boy into the
hearse. The crowd of onlookers was entranced by the scene.

Loman got into his cruiser and switched on the engine. The compact
video-display lit at once, a soft green. The computer link was mounted
on the console between the front seats. It began to flash, indicating
that HQ had a message for him-one that they chose not to broadcast on
the more easily intercepted police-band radio.

Though he had been working with microwave-linked mobile computers for a
few years, he was still sometimes surprised upon first getting into a
cruiser and seeing the VDT light up. In major cities like Los Angeles,
for the better part of the past decade, most patrol cars had been
equipped with computer links to central police data banks, but such
electronic wonders were still rare in smaller cities and unheard of in
jurisdictions as comparatively minuscule as Moonlight Cove. His
department boasted state-of-the-art technology not because the town's
treasury was overflowing but because New Wave-a leader in mobile
microwave-linked data systems, among other things-had equipped his
office and cars with their in-development hardware and software,
updating the system constantly, using the Moonlight Cove police force as
something of a proving ground for every advancement that they hoped
ultimately to integrate into their line of products.

That was one of the many ways Thomas Shaddack had insinuated himself
into the power structure of the community even before he had reached for
total power through the Moonhawk Project. At the time Loman had been
thick headed enough to think New Wave's largesse was a blessing. Now he
knew better.

From his mobile VDT, Loman could access the central computer in the
department's headquarters on Jacobi Street, one block south of Ocean
Avenue, to obtain any information in the data banks or to "speak" with
the on-duty dispatcher who could communicate with him almost as easily
by computer as by police-band radio. Furthermore, he could sit
comfortably in his car and, through the HQ computer, reach out to the
Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Sacramento to get a make on a
license plate, or the Department of Prisons data banks in the same city
to call up information on a particular felon, or any other computer tied
in to the nationwide law-enforcement electronic network.


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He adjusted his holster because he was sitting on his revolver.

Using the keyboard under the display terminal, he entered his ID number,
accessing the system.

The days when all fact-gathering required police legwork had begun to
pass in the mid-eighties. Now only TV cops like Hunter were forced to
rush hither and yon to turn up the smallest details because that was
more dramatic than a depiction of the high-tech reality. In time,
Watkins thought, the gumshoe might be in danger of becoming the gunbutt,
with his ass parked for hours in front of either a mobile VDT or one on
a desk at HQ.

The computer accepted his number.               The VDT stopped flashing.

Of course, if all the people of the world were New People, and if the
problem of the regressives were solved, ultimately there would be no
more crime and no need of policemen. Some criminals were spawned by
social injustice, but all men would be equal in the new world that was
coming, as equal as one machine to another, with the same goals and
desires, with no competitive or conflicting needs. Most criminals were
genetic detectives, their sociopathic behavior virtually encoded in
their chromosomes; however, except for the regressive element among
them, the New People would be in perfect genetic repair. That was
Shaddack's vision, anyway.

Sometimes Loman Watkins wondered where free will fit into the plan.
Maybe it didn't. Sometimes he didn't seem to care if it fit in or not.
At other times his inability to care . . . well, it scared the hell
out of him.

Lines of words began to appear from left to right on the screen, one
line at a time, in soft green letters on the dark background FOR LOMAN
WATKINS SOURCE Shaddack JACK TUCKER HAS NOT REPORTED IN FROM THE FOSTER
place. NO ONE ANSWERS RHONE THERE. URGENT THAT SITUATION E3E
CLARIFIED. AWAIT YOUR report.

Shaddack had direct entry to the police-department computer from his own
computer in his house out on the north point of the cove. He could
leave messages for Watkins or any of the other men, and no one could
call them up except the intended recipient.

The screen went blank.

Loman Watkins popped the hand brake, put the patrol car in gear, and set
out for Foster Stables, though the place was actually 101 outside the
city limits and beyond his bailiwick. He no longer cared about such
things as jurisdictional boundaries and legal procedures. He was still
a cop only because it was the role he had to play until all of the town
had undergone the Change. None of the old rules applied to him any more
because he was a New Man. Such disregard for the law would have
appalled him only a few months ago, but now his arrogance and his
disdain for the rules of the Old People's society did not move him in
the least.

Most of the time nothing moved him any more.                   Day by day, hour by hour,
he was less emotional.

Except for fear, which his new elevated state of consciousness still
allowed fear because it was a survival mechanism, useful in a way that
love and joy and hope and affection were not. He was afraid right now,
in fact. Afraid of the regressives. Afraid that the Moonhawk Project


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would somehow be revealed to the outside world and be crushed-and him
with it. Afraid of his only master, Shaddack. Sometimes, in fleeting
bleak moments, he was afraid of himself, too, and of the new world
coming.

Moose dozed in a corner of the unlighted bedroom. He chuted in his
sleep, perhaps chasing bushy-tailed rabbits in a dream although, being
the good service dog that he was, even in his dreams he probably ran
errands for his master.

Belted in his stool at the window, Harry leaned to the eyepiece of the
telescope and studied the back of Callan's Funeral Home over on Juniper
Lane, where the hearse had just pulled into the service drive. He
watched Victor Callan and the mortician's assistant, Ned Ryedock, as
they used a wheeled gurney to transfer a body from the black Cadillac
hearse into the embalming and cremation wing. Zippered inside a
half-collapsed, black plastic body bag, the corpse was so small that it
must have been that of a child. Then they closed the door behind them,
and Harry could see no more.

Sometimes they left the blinds raised at the two high, narrow windows,
and from his elevated position Harry was able to peer down into that
room, to the tilted and guttered table on which the dead were embalmed
and prepared for viewing. On those occasions he could see much more
than he wanted to see. Tonight, however, the blinds were lowered all
the way to the windowsills.

He gradually shifted his field of vision southward along the
fog-swaddled alley that served Callan's and ran between Conquistador and
Juniper. He was not looking for anything in particular, just slowly
scanning, when he saw a pair of grotesque figures. They were swift and
dark, sprinting along the alley and into the large vacant lot adjacent
to the funeral home, running neither on all fours nor erect, though
closer to the former than the latter.

Boogeymen.

Harry's heart began to race.

He'd seen their like before, three times in the past four weeks, though
the first time he had not believed what he had seen. They had been so
shadowy and strange, so briefly glimpsed, that they seemed like phantoms
of the imagination; therefore he named them Boogeymen.

They were quicker than cats. They slipped through his field of vision
and vanished into the dark, vacant lot before he could overcome his
surprise and follow them.

Now he searched that property end to end, back to front, seeking them in
the three- to four-foot grass. Bushes offered concealment too. Wild
holly and a couple of clumps of chaparral snagged and held the fog as if
it were cotton.

He found them. Two hunched forms. Man-size. Only slightly less black
than the night. Featureless. They crouched together in the dry grass
in the middle of the lot, just to the north of the immense fir that
spread its branches (all high ones) like a canopy over half the
property.

Trembling, Harry pulled in even tighter on that section of the lot and
adjusted the focus. The Boogeymen's outlines sharpened. Their bodies
grew paler in contrast to the night around - 103 them. He still could


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not see any details of them because of the darkness and eddying mist.

Although it was quite expensive and tricky to obtain, he wished that
through his military contacts he had acquired a TeleTron, which was a
new version of the Star Tron night-vision device that had been used by
most armed services for years. A Star Tron took available
light-moonlight, starlight, meager electric light if any, the vague
natural radiance of certain minerals in soil and rocks-and amplified it
eighty-five thousand times. With that single-lens gadget, an
impenetrable nightscape was transformed into a dim twilight or even
late-afternoon grayness. The Tele-Tron employed the same technology as
the Star Tron, but it was designed to be fitted to a telescope.
Ordinarily, available light was sufficient to Harry's purposes, and most
of the time he was looking through windows into well-lighted rooms; but
to study the quick and furtive Boogeymen, he needed some high-tech
assistance.

The shadowy figures looked west toward Juniper Lane, then north toward
Callan's, then south toward the house that, with the funeral home,
flanked that open piece of land. Their heads turned with a quick, fluid
movement that made Harry think of cats, although they were definitely
not feline.

One of them glanced back to the east. Because the telescope put Harry
right in the lot with the Boogeymen, he saw the thing's eyes-soft gold,
palely radiant. He had never seen their eyes before. He shivered, but
not just because they were so uncanny. Something was familiar about
those eyes, something that reached deeper than Harry's conscious or
subconscious mind to stir dim recognition, activating primitive racial
memories carried in his genes.

He was suddenly cold to the marrow and overcome by fear more intense
than anything he had known since Nam.

Dozing, Moose was attuned nonetheless to his master's mood. The
Labrador got up, shook himself as if to cast off sleep, and came to the
stool. He made a low, mewling, inquisitive sound.

Through the telescope Harry glimpsed the nightmare face of one of the
Boogeymen. He had no more than the briefest flash of it, at most two
seconds, and the malformed visage was limned only by an ethereal spray
of moonlight, so he saw little; in fact the inadequate lunar glow did
less to reveal the thing than to deepen the mystery of it.

But he was gripped by it, stunned, frozen.

Moose issued an interrogatory "Woof?"

For an instant, unable to look up from the eyepiece if his life had
depended on it, Harry stared at an apelike countenance, though it was
leaner and uglier and more fierce and infinitely stranger than the face
of an ape. He was reminded, as well, of wolves, and in the gloom the
thing even seemed to have something of a reptilian aspect. He thought
he saw the enameled gleam of wickedly sharp teeth, gaping jaws. But the
light was poor, and he could not be certain how much of what he saw was
a trick of shadow or a distortion of fog. Part of this hideous vision
had to be attributed to his fevered imagination. A man with a pair of
useless legs and one dead arm had to have a vivid imagination if he was
to make the most of life.

As suddenly as the Boogeyman looked toward him, it looked away. At the
same time both creatures moved with an animal fluidity and quickness


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that startled Harry. They were nearly the size of big jungle cats and
as fast. He turned the scope to follow them, and they virtually flew
through the darkness, south across the vacant lot, disappearing over a
split-rail fence into the backyard of the Claymore house, up and gone
with such alacrity that he could not hold them in his field of view.

He continued to search for them, as far as the junior-senior high school
on Roshmore, but he found only night and fog and the familiar buildings
of his neighborhood. The Boogeymen had vanished as abruptly as they
always did in a small boy's bedroom the moment the lights were turned
on.

At last he lifted his head from the eyepiece and slumped back in his
stool.

Moose immediately stood up with his forepaws on the edge of the stool,
begging to be petted, as if he had seen what his master had seen and
needed to be reassured that malign spirits did not actually run loose in
the world.

With his good right hand, which at first trembled violently, Harry
stroked the Labrador's head. In a while the petting calmed him almost
as much as it calmed the dog.

If the FBI eventually responded to the letter he had sent over a week
ago, he did not know if he would tell them about the - 105 Boogeymen. He
would tell them everything else he had seen, and a lot of it might be
useful to them. But this . . . On the one hand, he was sure that the
beasts he had glimpsed so fleetingly on three occasions-four now-were
somehow related to all the other curious events of recent weeks. They
were a different magnitude of strangeness, however, and in speaking of
them he might appear addled, even crazed, causing the Bureau agents to
discount everything else he said.

Am I addled?      he wondered as he petted Moose.               Am I crazed?

After twenty years of confinement to a wheelchair, housebound, living
vicariously through his telescope and binoculars, perhaps he had become
so desperate to be more involved with the world and so starved for
excitement that he had evolved an elaborate fantasy of conspiracy and
the uncanny, putting himself at the center of it as The One Man Who
Knew, convinced that his delusions were real. But that was highly
unlikely. The war had left his body pathetically damaged and weak, but
his mind was as strong and clear as it had ever been, perhaps even
tempered and made stronger by adversity. That, not madness, was his
curse.

"Boogeymen," he said to Moose.             The dog chuted.

"What next? Will I look up at the moon some night and see the
silhouette of a witch on a broomstick?"

Chrissie came out of the woods by Pyramid Rock, which once had
inspired her fantasies of inch-high Egyptians. She looked west toward
the house and Foster Stables, where lights now wore rainbow-hued halos
in the fog. For a moment she entertained the idea of going back for
Godiva or another horse. Maybe she could even slip into the house to
grab a jacket. But she decided that she would be less conspicuous and
safer on foot. Besides, she was not as dumb as movie heroines who
repeatedly returned to the Bad House, knowing the Bad Thing was likely
to find them there. She turned east-northeast and headed up through the
meadow toward the county road.


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Exhibiting her usual cleverness (she thought, as if reading a line from
an adventure novel), Chrissie wisely turned away from the cursed house
and set off into the night, wondering if she would ever again see that
place of her youth or find solace in the arms of her now alienated
family.

Tall, autumn-dry grass lashed at her legs, as she angled out toward the
middle of the field. Instead of staying near the tree line, she wanted
to be in the open in case something leaped at her from the forest. She
didn't think she could outrun them once they spotted her, not even if
she had a minute's head start, but at least she intended to give herself
a chance to try.

The night chill had deepened during the time she'd taken refuge in the
culvert. Her flannel shirt seemed hardly more warming than a
short-sleeved summer blouse. If she were an adventurer-heroine of the
breed that Ms. Andre Norton created, she would know how to weave a coat
out of available grass and other plants, with a high insulation factor.
Or she would know how to trap, painlessly kill, and skin fur-bearing
animals, how to tan their hides and stitch them together, clothing
herself in garments as astonishingly stylish as they were practical.

She simply had to stop thinking about the heroines of those books. Her
comparative ineptitude depressed her.

She already had enough to be depressed about. She'd been driven from
her home. She was alone, hungry, cold, confused, afraid-and stalked by
weird and dangerous creatures. But more to the point . . . though her
mother and father always had been a bit distant, not given to easy
displays of affection, Chrissie had loved them, and now they were gone,
perhaps gone forever, changed in some way she did not understand, alive
but soulless and, therefore, as good as dead.

When she was less than a hundred feet from the two-lane county route,
paralleling the long driveway at about the same distance, she heard a
car engine. She saw headlights on the road, coming from the south. Then
she saw the car itself, for the fog was thinner in that direction than
toward the sea, and visibility - 107 was reasonably good. Even at that
distance she identified it as a police cruiser; though no siren wailed,
blue and red lights were revolving on its roof. The patrol car slowed
and turned in the driveway by the sign for Foster Stables.

Chrissie almost shouted, almost ran toward the car, because she always
had been taught that policemen were her friends. She actually raised
one hand and waved, but then realized that in a world where she could
not trust her own parents, she certainly could not expect all policemen
to have her best interests in mind.

Spooked by the thought that the cops might have been "converted" the way
Tucker had intended to convert her, the way her parents had been
converted, she dropped down, crouching in the tall grass. The
headlights had not come anywhere near her when the car had turned into
the driveway. The darkness on the meadow and the fog no doubt made her
invisible to the occupants of the cruiser, and she was not exactly so
tremendously tall that she stood out on the flat land. But she did not
want to take any chances.

She watched the car dwindle down the long driveway. It paused briefly
beside Tucker's car, which was abandoned halfway along the lane, then
drove on. The thicker fog in the west swallowed it.



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She rose from the grass and hurried eastward again, toward the county
route. She intended to follow that road south, all the way into
Moonlight Cove. If she remained watchful and alert, she could scramble
off the pavement into a ditch or behind a patch of weeds each time she
heard approaching traffic.

She would not reveal herself to anyone she did not know. Once she
reached town, she could go to Our Lady of Mercy and seek help from
Father Castelli. (He said he was a modern priest and preferred to be
called Father Jim, but Chrissie had never been able to address him so
casually.) Chrissie had been an indefatigable worker at the church's
summer festival and had expressed a desire to be an altar girl next
year, much to Father Castelli's delight. She was sure he liked her and
would believe her story, no matter how wild it was. If he didn't
believe her . . . well, then she would try Mrs. Tokawa, her
sixth-grade teacher.

She reached the county road, paused, and looked back toward the distant
house, which was only a collection of glowing points in the fog.
Shivering, she turned south toward Moonlight Cove.

The front door of the Foster house stood open to the night.

Loman Watkins went through the place from bottom to top and down again.
The only odd things he found were an overturned chair in the kitchen and
Jack Tucker's abandoned black bag filled with syringes and doses of the
drug with which the Change was effected-and a spray-can of WD-40 on the
floor of the downstairs hall.

Closing the front door behind him, he went out onto the porch, stood at
the steps that led down to the front yard, and listened to the
ethereally still night. A sluggish breeze had risen and fallen fitfully
during the evening, but now it had abated entirely. The air was
uncannily still. The fog seemed to dampen all sounds, leaving a world
as silent as if it had been one vast graveyard.

Looking toward the stables, Loman called out "Tucker!                      Foster! Is anyone
here?"

An echo of his voice rolled back to him.                 It was a cold and lonely
sound.

No one answered him.

"Tucker?     Foster?"

Lights were on at one of the long stables, and a door was open at the
nearest end. He supposed he should go have a look.

Loman was halfway to that building when an ululant cry, like the
wavering note of a distant horn, came from far to the south, faint but
unmistakable. It was shrill yet guttural, filled with anger, longing,
excitement, and need. The shriek of a regressive in mid-hunt.

He stopped and listened, hoping that he had misheard.

- 109 The.sound came again. This time he could discern at least two
voices, perhaps three. They were a long way off, more than a mile, so
their eerie keening could not be in reply to Loman's shouts.

Their cries chilled him.

And filled him with a strange yearning.


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No.

He made such tight fists of his hands that his fingernails dug into his
palms, and he fought back the darkness that threatened to well up within
him. He tried to concentrate on police work, the problem at hand.

If those cries came from Alex Foster, Sharon Foster, and Jack Tucker-as
was most likely the case-where was the girl, Christine?

Maybe she escaped as they were preparing her for conversion. The
overturned kitchen chair, Tucker's abandoned black bag, and the open
front door seemed to support that unsettling explanation. In pursuit of
the girl, caught up in the excitement of the chase, the Fosters and
Tucker might have surrendered to a latent urge to regress. Perhaps not
so latent. They might have regressed on other occasions, so this time
they had slipped quickly and eagerly into that altered state. And now
they were stalking her in the wildlands to the south-or had long ago run
her down, torn her to pieces, and were still regressed because they got
a dark thrill from being in that debased condition.

The night was cool, but suddenly Loman was sweating.

He wanted .      .   .   needed.      .   .   .

No!

Earlier in the day, Shaddack had told Loman that the Foster girl had
missed her school bus and, returning home from the bus stop at the
county road, had walked in on her parents as they were experimenting
with their new abilities. So the girl had to be conducted through the
Change slightly sooner than planned, the first child to be elevated. But
maybe "experimenting" was a lie that the Fosters had used to cover their
asses. Maybe they had been in deep regression when the girl had come
upon them, which they could not reveal to Shaddack without marking
themselves as degenerates among the New People.

The Change was meant to elevate mankind; it was forced evolution.


Willful regression, however, was a sick perversion of the power bestowed
by the Change. Those who regressed were outcasts. And those
regressives who killed for the primal thrill of blood sport were the
worst of all psychotics who had chosen devolution over evolution.

The distant cries came again.

A shiver crackled the length of Loman's spine. It was a pleasant
shiver. He was seized by a powerful longing to shed his clothes, drop
closer to the ground, and race nude and unrestrained through the night
in long, graceful strides, across the broad meadow and into the woods,
where all was wild and beautiful, where prey waited to be found and run
down and broken and torn . . .

No.

Control.

Self-control.

The faraway cries pierced him.

He must exhibit self-control.



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His heart pounded.

The cries.     The sweet, eager, wild cries .               .   .

Loman began to tremble, then to shake violently, as in his mind's eye he
saw himself freed from the rigid posture of Homo erectus freed from the
constraints of civilized form and behavior. If the primal man within
him could be set loose at long last and allowed to live in a natural
state No. Unthinkable.

His legs became weak, and he fell to the ground, though not onto all
fours, no, because that posture would encourage him to surrender to
these unspeakable urges; instead he curled into the fetal position, on
his side, knees drawn up to his chest, and struggled against the
swelling desire to regress. His flesh grew as hot as if he had been
lying for hours in midday summer sun, but he realized that the heat was
coming not from any external source but from deep within him; the fire
arose not merely from vital organs or the marrow of his bones, but from
the material within the walls of his cells, from the billions of nuclei
that harbored the genetic material that made him what he was. Alone in
the dark and fog in front of the Foster house, seduced by the echoey cry
of the regressives, he longed to exercise the control of his physical
being that the Change had granted him. But he ' - knew if once he
succumbed to that temptation, he would never be Loman Watkins again; he
would be a degenerate masquerading as Loman Watkins, Mr. Hyde in a body
from which he had banished Dr. Jekyll forever.

With his head tucked down, he was looking at his hands, which were
curled against his chest, and in the dim light from the windows of the
Foster house, he thought he saw several of his fingers begin to change.
Pain flashed through his right hand. He felt the bones crunching and
re-forming, knuckles swelling, digits lengthening, the pads of his
fingers growing broader, sinews and tendons thickening, nails hardening
and sharpening into talonlike points.

He screamed in stark terror and denial, and he willed himself to hold
fast to his born identity to what remained of his humanity. He resisted
the lava-like y movement of his living tissue. Through clenched teeth
he repeated his name-"Loman Watkins, Loman Watkins, Loman Watkins"-as if
that were a spell that would prevent this evil transformation.

Time passed. Perhaps a minute. Perhaps ten. An hour. He didn't know.
His struggle to retain his identity had conveyed him into a state of
consciousness beyond time.

Slowly, he returned to awareness. With relief he found himself still on
the ground in front of the house, unchanged. He was drenched in sweat.
But the white-hot fire in his flesh had subsided. His hands were as
they'd always been, with no freakish elongation of the fingers.

For a while he listened to the night. He heard no more of the distant
cries, and he was grateful for that silence.

Fear, the only emotion that had not daily lost vividness and power since
he had become one of the New People, was now as sharp as knives within
him, causing him to cry out. For some time he had been afraid that he
was one of those with the potential to become a regressive, and now that
dark speculation was proven true. But if he had surrendered to the
yearning, he would have lost both the old world he had known before he'd
been converted and the brave new world Shaddack was making; he would
belong in neither.



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Worse He was beginning to suspect that he was not unique, that in fact
all of the New People had within them the seeds of devolution. Night by
night, the regressives seemed to be increasing in number.

Shakily, he got to his feet.

The film of sweat was like a crust of ice on his skin now that his inner
fires had been banked.

Moving dazedly toward his patrol car, Loman Watkins wondered if
Shaddack's research-and the technological application of it-was so
fundamentally flawed that there was no benefit whatsoever in the Change.
Maybe it was an unaligned- curse. If the regressives were not a
statistically insignificant percentage of the New People, if instead
they were all doomed to drift toward regression sooner or later. . . .

He thought of Thomas Shaddack out there in the big house on the north
point of the cove, overlooking the town where beasts of his creation
roamed the shadows, and a terrible bleakness overcame him. Because
reading for pleasure had been his favorite pastime since he was a boy,
he thought of H. G. Wells's Dr.

Moreau, and he wondered if that was who Shaddack had become. Moreau
reincarnate. Shaddack might be a Moreau for the age of microtechnology,
obsessed with an insane vision of transcendence through the forced
melding of man and machine. Certainly he suffered from delusions of
grandeur, and had the hubris to believe that he could lift mankind to a
higher state, just as the original Moreau had believed he could make men
from savage animals and beat God at His game. If Shaddack was not the
genius of his century, if he was an overreacher like Moreau, then they
were all damned.

Loman got in the car and pulled the door shut. He started the engine
and turned on the heater to warm his sweat-chilled body.

The computer screen lit, awaiting use.

For the sake of protecting the Moonhawk Project-which, flawed or not,
represented the only future open to him-he had to assume the girl,
Christine, had escaped, and that the Fosters and Tucker hadn't caught
her. He must arrange for men to stand watch surreptitiously along the
county road and on the streets entering the north end of Moonlight Cove.
If the girl came into town seeking help, they could intercept her. More
likely than not, she would unknowingly approach one of the New People
with her tale of possessed parents, and that would be the end of - 113
her. Even if she got to people not yet converted, they weren't likely
to believe her wild story. But he could take no chances.

He had to talk to Shaddack about a number of things, and attend to
several pieces of police business.

He also had to get something to eat.

He was inhumanly hungry.

Something was wrong, something was wrong, something, something.

Mike Peyser had slipped through the dark woods to his house on the
southeast edge of town, down through the wild hills and trees, stealthy
and alert, slinking and quick, naked and quick, returning from a hunt,
blood in his mouth, still excited but tired after two hours of playing
games with his prey, cautiously bypassing the homes of his neighbors,
some of whom were his kind and some of whom were not. The houses in


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that area were widely separated, so he found it relatively easy to creep
from shadow to shadow, tree to tree, through tall grass, low to the
ground, cloaked in the night, swift and sleek, silent and swift, naked
and silent, powerful and swift, straight to the porch of the
single-story house where he lived alone, through the unlocked door, into
the kitchen, still tasting the blood in his mouth, blood, the lovely
blood, exhilarated by the hunt though also glad to be home, but then
Something was wrong.

Wrong, wrong, God, he was burning up, full of fire, hot, burning up, in
need of food, nourishment, fuel, fuel, and that was normal, that was to
be expected-the demands on his metabolism were tremendous when he was in
his altered state-but the fire was not wrong, not the inner fire, not
the frantic and consuming need for nourishment. What was wrong was that
he could not, he could not, he could not He could not change back.

Thrilled by the exquisitely fluid movement of his body, by the way his
muscles flexed and stretched, flexed and stretched, he came into the
darkened house, seeing well enough without lights, not as well as a cat
might but better than a man, because he was more than just a man now,
and he roamed for a couple of minutes through the rooms, silent and
swift, almost hoping he would find an intruder, someone to savage,
someone to savage, savage, someone to savage, bite and tear, but the
house was deserted. In his bedroom, he settled to the floor, curled on
his side, and called his body back to the form that had been his
birthright, to the familiar form of Mike Peyser, to the shape of a man
who walked erect and looked like a man, and within himself he felt a
surge toward normalcy, a shift in the tissues, but not enough of a
shift, and then a sliding away, away, like an outgoing tide pulling back
from a beach, away, away from normalcy, so he tried again, but this time
there was no shift at all, not even a partial return to what he had
been. He was stuck, trapped, locked in, locked, locked in a form that
earlier had seemed the essence of freedom and inexpressibly desirable,
but now it was not a desirable form at all because he could not forsake
it at will, was trapped in it, trapped, and he panicked.

He sprang up and hurried out of the room. Although he could see fairly
well in the darkness, he brushed a floor lamp, and it fell with a crash,
the brittle sound of shattering glass, but he kept going into the short
hall, the living room. A rag rug spun out from under him. He felt that
he was in a prison; his body, his own transformed body, had become his
prison, prison, metamorphosed bones serving as the bars of a cell, bars
holding him captive from within; he was restrained by his own
reconfigured flesh. He circled the room, scrambled this way and that,
circled, circled, frenzied, frantic. The curtains fluttered in the wind
of his passage. He weaved among the furniture. An end table toppled
over in his wake. He could run but not escape. He carried his prison
with him. No escape. No escape. Never. That realization made his
heart thump more wildly. Terrified, frustrated, he knocked over a
magazine rack, spilling its contents, swept a heavy glass ashtray and
two pieces of decorative pottery - 115 off the cocktail table, tore at
the sofa cushions until he had shredded both the fabric and the foam
padding within, whereupon a terrible pressure filled his skull, pain,
such pain, and he wanted to scream but he was afraid to scream, afraid
that he would not be able to stop.

Food.

Fuel.

Feed the fire, feed the fire.



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He suddenly realized that his inability to return to his natural form
might be related to a severe shortage of energy reserves needed to fuel
the tremendous acceleration of his metabolism associated with a
transformation. To do what he was demanding, his body must produce
enormous quantities of enzymes, hormones, and complex biologically
active chemicals; in mere minutes the body must undergo a forced
degeneration and rebuilding of tissues equal in energy requirements to
years of ordinary growth, and for that it needed fuel, material to
convert, proteins and minerals, carbohydrates in quantity.

Hungry, starving, starving, Peyser hurried into the lightless kitchen,
clutched the handle on the refrigerator door, pulled himself up, tore
the door open, hissed as the light stung his eyes, saw two-thirds of a
three-pound canned ham, solid ham, good ham, sealed in Saran Wrap on a
blue plate, so he seized it, ripped away the plastic, threw the plate
aside, where it smashed against a cabinet door, and he dropped back to
the floor, bit into the hunk of meat, bit and bit into it, bit deep,
ripped, chewed feverishly, bit deep.

He loved to strip out of his clothes and seek another form as soon after
nightfall as possible, sprinting into the woods behind his house, up
into the hills, where he chased down rabbits and raccoons, foxes and
ground squirrels, tore them apart in his hands, with his teeth, fed the
fire, the deep inner burning, and he loved it, loved it, not merely
because he felt such freedom in that incarnation but because it gave him
an overwhelming sense of power, godlike power, more intensely erotic
than sex, more satisfying than anything he had experienced before,
power, savage power, raw power, the power of a man who had tamed nature,
transcended his genetic limits, the power of the wind and the storm,
freed of all human limitations, set loose, liberated. He had fed
tonight, sweeping through the woods with the confidence of an
inescapable predator, as irresistible as the darkness itself, but
whatever he had consumed must have been insufficient to empower his
return to the form of Michael Peyser, software designer, bachelor,
Porsche-owner, ardent collector of movies on video disk, marathon
runner, Perrier-drinker.

So now he ate the ham, all two pounds of it, and he snatched other items
out of the refrigerator and ate them as well, stuffing them into his
mouth with both tine-fingered hands a bowlful of cold, leftover rigatoni
and one meatball; half of an apple pie that he'd bought yesterday at the
bakery in town; a stick of butter, an entire quarter of a pound, greasy
and cloying but good food, good fuel, just the thing to feed the fire;
four raw eggs; and more, more. This was a fire that, when fed, did not
burn brighter but cooled, subsided, for it was not a real fire at all
but a physical symptom of the desperate need for fuel to keep the
metabolic processes running smoothly. Now the fire began to lose some
of its heat, shrinking from a roaring blaze to sputtering flames to
little more than the glow of hot coals.

Sated, Mike Peyser collapsed to the floor in front of the open
refrigerator, in a litter of broken dishes and food and Saran Wrap and
eggshells and Tupperware containers. He culled up again and willed
himself toward that form in which the word would recognize him, and once
more he felt a shift taking place in his marrow and bones, in his blood
and organs, in sinews and cartilage and muscles and skin, as tides of
hormones and enzymes and other biological chemicals were produced by his
body and washed through it, but as before the change was arrested with
transformation woefully incomplete, and his body eased toward its more
savage state, inevitably regressing though he strained with all his
will, all his will, strained and struggled to seek the higher form.


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The refrigerator door had swung shut. The kitchen was in the grasp of
shadows again, and Mike Peyser felt as if that darkness was not merely
all around him but also within him.

At last he screamed.         As he had feared, once he began to scream, he
could not stop.

Shortly before midnight Sam Booker left Cove Lodge. He wore a brown
leather jacket, blue sweater, jeans, and blue running shoes-an outfit
that allowed him to blend effectively with the night but that didn't
look suspicious, though perhaps slightly too youthful for a man of his
relentlessly melancholy demeanor. Ordinary as it looked, the jacket had
several unusually deep and capacious inner pockets, in which he was
carrying a few basic burglary and auto-theft tools. He descended the
south stairs, went out the rear door at the bottom, and stood for a
moment on the walkway behind the lodge.

Thick fog poured up the face of the bluff and through the open railing,
driven by a sudden sea breeze that finally had disturbed the night's
calm. In a few hours the breeze would harry the fog inland and leave
the coast in relative clarity. By then Sam would have finished the task
ahead of him and, no longer needing the cover that the mist provided,
would be at last asleep-or more likely fighting insomnia-in his
motel-room bed.

He was uneasy. He had not forgotten the pack of kids from whom he'd run
on Iceberry Way, earlier in the evening. Because their true nature
remained a mystery, he continued to think of them as punks, but he knew
they were more than just juvenile delinquents. Strangely, he had the
feeling that he did know what they were, but the knowledge stirred in
him far below even a subconscious plain, in realms of primitive
consciousness.

He rounded the south end of the building, walked past the back of the
coffee shop, which was now closed, and ten minutes later, by a
roundabout route, he arrived at the Moonlight Cove Municipal Building on
Jacobi Street. It was exactly as the Bureau's San Francisco agents had
described it a two-story structure-weathered brick on the lower floor,
white siding on the upper-with a slate roof, forest-green storm shutters
flanking the windows, and large iron carriage lamps at the main
entrance. The municipal building and the property on which it stood
occupied half a block on the north side of the street, but its
anti-institutional architecture was in harmony with the otherwise
residential neighborhood. Exterior and interior ground-floor lights
were on even at that hour because in addition to the city-government
offices and water authority, the municipal building housed the police
department, which of course never closed.

From across the street, pretending to be out for a late-night
constitutional, Sam studied the place as he passed it. He saw no
unusual activity. The sidewalk in front of the main entrance was
deserted. Through the glass doors he saw a brightly lighted foyer.

At the next corner he went north and into the alley in the middle of the
block. That unlighted serviceway was bracketed by trees and shrubbery
and fences that marked the rear property lines of the houses on Jacobi
Street and Pacific Drive, by some garages and outbuildings, by groups of
garbage cans, and by the large unfenced parking area behind the
municipal building.

Sam stepped into a niche in an eight-foot-tall evergreen hedge at the


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corner of the yard that adjoined the public property. Though the alley
was very dark, two sodium-vapor lamps cast a jaundiced glow over the
city lot, revealing twelve vehicles four late-model Fords of the
stripped-down, puke-green variety that was produced for federal, state,
and local government purchase; a pickup and van both beefing the seal of
the city and the legend WATER Authority; a hulking street-sweeping
machine; a large truck with wooden sides and tailgate; and four police
cars, all Chevy sedans.

The quartet of black-and-whites were what interested Sam because they
were equipped with VDTs linking them to the police department's central
computer. Moonlight Cove owned eight patrol cars, a large number for a
sleepy coastal town, five more than other communities of similar size
could afford and surely in excess of need.

But everything about this police department was bigger and better than
necessary, which was one of the things that had triggered silent alarms
in the minds of the Bureau agents who'd come to investigate the deaths
of Sanchez and the Bustamantes.

- 119 Moonlight Cove had twelve full-time and three part-time officers,
plus four full-time office support personnel. A lot of manpower.
Furthermore, they were all receiving salaries competitive with
law-enforcement pay scales in major West Coast cities, therefore
excessive for a town as small as this. They had the finest uniforms,
the finest office furniture, a small armory o' handguns and riot guns
and tear gas, and-most astonishing of all-they were computerized to an
extent that would have been the envy of the boys manning the
end-of-the-world bunkers at the Strategic Air Command in Colorado.

From his bristly nook in the fragrant evergreen hedge, Sam studied the
lot for a couple of minutes to be sure no one was sitting in any of the
vehicles or standing in deep shadows along the back of the building.
Levolor blinds were closed at the lighted windows on the ground floor,
so no one inside had a view of the parking area.

He took a pair of soft, supple goatskin gloves from a jacket pocket and
pulled them on.

He was ready to move when he heard something in the alley behind him.                          A
scraping noise. Back the way he'd come.

Pressing deeper into the hedge, he turned his head to search for the
source of the sound. A pale, crumpled cardboard box, twice the size of
a shoebox, slid along the blacktop, propelled by the breeze that was
increasingly rustling the leaves of the shrubs and trees. The carton
met a garbage can, wedged against it, and fell silent.

Streaming across the alley, flowing eastward on the breeze, the fog now
looked like smoke, as if the whole town were afire. Squinting back
through that churning vapor, he satisfied himself that he was alone,
then turned and sprinted to the nearest of the four patrol cars in the
unfenced lot.

It was locked.

From an inner jacket pocket, he withdrew a Police automobile lock
Release Gun, which could instantly open any lock without damaging the
mechanism. He cracked the car, slipped in behind the steering wheel,
and closed the door as quickly and quietly as possible.

Enough light from the sodium-vapor lamps penetrated the car for him to



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see what he was doing, though he was experienced enough to work
virtually in the dark. He put the lock gun away and took an
ignition-socket wrench from another pocket. In seconds he popped the
ignition-switch cylinder from the steering column, exposing the wires.

He hated this part. To click on the video-display mounted on the car's
console, he had to start the engine; the computer was more powerful than
a lap-top model and communicated with its base data center by
energy-intensive microwave transmissions, drawing too much power to run
off the battery. The fog would cover the exhaust fumes but not the
sound of the engine. The black-and-white was parked eighty feet from
the building, so no one inside was likely to hear it. But if someone
stepped out of the back door for some fresh air or to take one of the
off-duty cruisers out on a call, the idling engine would not escape
notice. Then Sam would be in a confrontation that-given the frequency
of violent death in this town-he might not survive.

Sighing softly, lightly depressing the accelerator with his right foot,
he separated the ignition wires with one gloved hand and twisted the
bare contact points together. The engine turned over immediately,
without any harsh grinding.

The computer screen blinked on.

The police department's elaborate computerization was provided free by
New Wave Microtechnology because they were supposedly using Moonlight
Cove as a sort of testing ground for their own systems and software. The
source of the excess friends so evident in every other aspect of the
department was not easy to pin down, but the suspicion was that it came
from New Wave or from New Wave's majority stockholder and chief
executive officer, Thomas Shaddack. Any citizen was free to support his
local police or other arms of government in excess of his taxes, of
course, but if that was what Shaddack was doing, why wasn't it a matter
of public record? No innocent man gives large sums of money to a civic
cause with complete self-effacement. If Shaddack was being secretive
about supporting the local authorities with private funds, then the
possibility of bought cops and in-the-pocket officials could not be
discounted. And if the Moonlight Cove police were virtually soldiers in
Thomas Shaddack's private army, it followed that the suspicious number
of violent deaths in recent weeks could be related to that unholy
alliance.

Now the VDT in the car displayed the New Wave logo in the ' - 121 bottom
right hand corner, just as the IBM logo would have been featured if this
had been one of their machines.

During the San Francisco office's investigation of the Sanchez
Bustamante case, one of the Bureau's better agents, Morrie Stein, had
been in a patrol car with one of Watkins's officers, Reese Dorn, when
Dorn accessed the central computer for information in departmental
files. By then Morrie had suspected that the computer was even more
sophisticated than Watkins or his men had revealed, serving them in some
way that exceeded the legal limits of police authority and that they
were not willing to discuss, so he had memorized the code number with
which Reese had tapped into the system. When he had flown to the Los
Angeles office to brief Sam, Morrie had said, "I think every cop in that
twisted little town has his own computer-access number, but Dorn's ought
to work as well as any. Sam, you've got to get into their computer and
let it throw some menus at you, see what it offers, play around with it
when Watkins and his men aren't looking over your shoulder. Yeah, I
sound paranoid, but there's too much high-tech for their size and needs,
unless they're up to something dirty. At first it seems like any town,


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even more pleasant than most, rather pretty . . . but, dammit, after
a while you get the feeling the whole burg is wired, that you're watched
everywhere you go, that Big Brother is looking over your shoulder every
damn minute. Honest to God, after a few days you're gut-sure you're in
a miniature police state, where the control is so subtle you can hardly
see it but still complete, iron-fisted. Those cops are bent, Sam;
they're deep into something-maybe drug traffic, who knows-and the
computer is part of it."

Reese Dorn,s number was 262699, and Sam tapped it out on the VDT
keyboard. The New Wave logo disappeared. The screen was blank for a
second. Then a menu appeared.

CHOOSE ONE A. DISPATCHER B. CENTRAL FILES C. BULLETIN board 0.
OUTSYSTEM MODEM To Sam, the first item on the menu indicated that a
cruising officer could communicate with the dispatcher at headquarters

not only by means of the police-band radio with which the car was
equipped but also through the computer link. But why would he want to
go to all the trouble of typing in questions to the dispatcher and
reading the transmitted replies off the VDT when the information could
be gotten so much easier and quicker on the radio? Unless . . . there
were some things that these cops did not want to talk about on radio
frequencies that could be monitored by anyone with a police-band
receiver.

He did not open the link to the dispatcher because then he would have to
begin a dialogue, posing as Reese Dorn, and that would be like shouting,
Hey, I'm out here in one of your cruisers, poking my nose in just where
you don't want, so why don't you come and chop it off.

Instead, he tapped B and entered it.                Another menu appeared.

CHOOSE ONE A. STATUS - CURRENT ARRESTEES B. STATUS - CURRENT COURT
CASES C. STATUS - RENDING COURT CASES D. PAST ARREST RECORDS - COUNTY
E. raspite ARREST RECORDS - CITY F. CONVICTED CRIMINALS LIVING IN
COUNTY G. CONVICTED CRIMINALS LIVING IN CITY Just to satisfy himself
that the offerings on the menu were what they appeared to be and not
code for other information, he punched in selection F, to obtain data on
convicted criminals living in the county. Another menu appeared,
offering him ten choices MURDER, MANSLAUGHTER, RARE, SEX OFFENSES,
ASSAULT AND BATTERY, ARMED ROBBERY, BURGLARY, BREAKING AND ENTERING,
OTHER THEFT, MISCELLANEOUS LESSER OFFENSES.

He called forth the file on murder and discovered three convicted
killers-all guilty of murder in either the first or second degree-were
now living as free men in the county after having served anywhere from
twelve to forty years for their crimes before being released on parole.
Their names, addresses, and telephone numbers appeared on the screen
with the names of their victims, economically summarized details of
their crimes, and - 123 the dates of their imprisonment; none lived in
the city limits of Moonlight Cove.

Sam looked up from the screen and scanned the parking lot. It remained
deserted. The omnipresent mist was filled with thicker veins of fog
that rippled banner-like as they flowed past the car, and he felt almost
as if he were under the sea in a bathyscaphe, peering out at long
ribbons of kelp fluttering in marine currents.

He returned to the main menu and asked for item C, BULLETIN BOARD. That
proved to be a collection of messages that Watkins and his officers had
left for one another regarding matters that seemed sometimes related to


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police work and sometimes private. Most were in such cryptic shorthand
that Sam didn't feel he could puzzle them out or that they would be
worth the effort to decipher.

He tried item 0 on the main menu, OUTSYSTEM MODEM, and was shown a list
of computers nationwide with which he could link through the telephone
modern in the nearby municipal building. The department's possible
connections were astonishing LOS ANGELES PD (for police department), SAN
FRANCISCO PD, SAN Diego PD, Denver PD, HOUSTON PD, Dallas PD, PHOENIX
PD, CHICAGO PD, MIAMI PD, NEW YORK CITY PD, and a score of other major
cities; CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES, DEPARTMENT OF PRISONS,
HIGHWAY PATROL, and many other state agencies with less obvious
connections to police work; U.S. ARMY personnel FILES, NAVY personnel
FILES, AIR FORCE; FBI CRIMINAL RECORDS, FBI FILES (Local Law-Enforcement
Assistance System, a relatively new Bureau program); even INTERPOL's New
York office, through which the international organization could access
its central files in Europe.

What in the hell would a small police force in rural California need
with all those sources of information?

And there was more data to which even fully computerized police agencies
in cities like Los Angeles would not have easy access. By law, some of
it was stuff that police could not obtain without a court order, such as
the files at TRW, the nation's premier credit-reporting firm. The
Moonlight Cove Police department's ability to access TRW's data base at
will had to be a secret kept from TRW itself, for the company would not
have cooperated in a wholesale disgorgement of its files without a
subpoena. The system also offered entrance to CIA data bases in
Virginia, which were supposedly secured against access from any computer
beyond the Agency's walls, and to certain FBI files which were likewise
believed to be inviolate.

Shaken, Sam retreated from the OUTSYSTEM MODEM options and returned to
the main menu.

He stared out at the parking lot, thinking.

When briefing Sam a few days ago, Morrie Stein had suggested that
Moonlight Cove's police might somehow be trafficking in drugs, and that
New Wave's generosity with computer systems might indicate complicity on
the part of certain unidentified officers of that firm. But the Bureau
was also interested in the possibility that New Wave was illegally
selling sensitive high technology to the Soviets and that it had bought
the Moonlight Cove police because, through these law-enforcement
contacts, the company would be alerted at the earliest possible moment
to a nascent federal probe into its activities. They had no explanation
of how either of those crimes accounted for all the recent deaths, but
they had to start with some theory.

Now Sam was ready to discount both the idea that New Wave was selling to
the Soviets and that some executives of the firm were in the drug trade.
The far-reaching web of data bases that the police had made available to
themselves through their modern-one hundred and twelve were listed on
that menu!-was greatly in excess of anything they would require for
either drug trafficking or sniffing out federal suspicions of possible
Soviet connections at New Wave.

They had created an informational network more suitable to the
operational necessities of an entire state government-or, even more
accurately, a small nation. A small, hostile nation. This data web was
designed to provide its owner with enormous power. It was as if this


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picturesque little town suffered under the governing hand of a
megaLomaniac whose central delusion was that he could create a tiny
kingdom from which he would eventually conquer vast territory.

Today, Moonlight Cove; tomorrow, the word.

"What the fuck are they doing?"              Sam wondered aloud.

Safely locked in her room at Cove Lodge-dressed for bed in pale
yellow panties and a white T-shirt emblazoned with Kermit the Frog's
smiling face-Tessa drank Diet Coke and tried to watch a repeat of the
Tonight show, but she couldn't get interested in the conversations that
Johnny Carson conducted with a witless actress, a witless singer, and a
witless comedian. Diet thought to accompany Diet Coke.

The more time that passed after her unsettling experience in the motel's
halls and stairwells, the more she wondered if indeed she had imagined
being stalked. She was distraught about Janice's death, after all,
preoccupied by the thought that it was murder rather than suicide. And
she was still dyspeptic from the cheeseburger she'd eaten for dinner,
which had been so greasy that it might have been deep-fried, bun and
all, in impure yak lard. as Scrooge had first believed of Marley's
ghost, so Tessa now began to view the phantoms that had frightened her
earlier Perhaps they'd been nothing more than an undigested bit of beef,
a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.

As Carson's current guest talked about a weekend he'd spent at an arts
festival in Havana with Fidel Castro-"a great guy, a funny guy, a
compassionate guy"-Tessa got up from the bed and went to the bathroom to
wash her face and brush her teeth. As she was squeezing Crest onto the
brush, she heard someone try the door to her room.

The small bath was off the smaller foyer. When she stepped to the
threshold, she was within a couple of feet of the door to the hall,
close enough to see the knob twisting back and forth as someone tested
the lock. They weren't even being subtle about it. The knob clicked
and rattled, and the door clattered against the frame.

She dropped her toothbrush and hurried to the telephone that stood on
the nightstand.

No dial tone.

She jiggled the cutoff buttons, pressed 0 for operator, but nothing
worked. The motel switchboard was shut down. The phone was dead.

Several times Chrissie had to scurry off the road, taking cover in
the brush along the verge, until an approaching car or truck went past.
One of them was a Moonlight Cove police car, heading toward town, and
she was pretty sure it was the one that had come out to the house. She
hunkered down in tall grass and milkweed stalks, and remained there
until the black-and-white's taillights dwindled to tiny red dots and
finally vanished around a turn.

A few houses were built along the first mile and a half of that two-lane
blacktop. Chrissie knew some of the people who lived in them the
Thomases, the Stones, the Elswicks. She was tempted to go to one of
those places, knock on the door, and ask for help. But she couldn't be
sure that those people were still the nice folks they had once been.
They might have changed, too, like her parents. Either something
SUPERNATURAL or from outer space was taking possession of people in and
around Moonlight Cove, and she had seen enough scary movies and read



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enough scary books to know that when those kind of forces were at work,
you could no longer trust anyone.

She was betting nearly everything on Father Castelli at Our Lady of
Mercy because he was a holy man, and no demons from hell would be able
to get a grip on him. Of course, if the problem 7 - 127 I was aliens
from another world, Father Castelli would not be protected just because
he was a man of God.

In that case, if the priest had been taken over, and if Chrissie managed
to get away from him after she discovered he was one of the enemy, she'd
go straight to Mrs. Irene Tokawa, her teacher. Mrs. Tokawa was the
smartest person Chrissie knew. If aliens were taking over Moonlight
Cove, Mrs. Tokawa would have realized something was wrong before it was
too late. She would have taken steps to protect herself, and she would
be one of the last that the monsters would get their hooks into. Hooks
or tentacles or claws or pincers or whatever.

So Chrissie hid from passing traffic, sneaked past the houses scattered
along the county road, and proceeded haltingly but steadily toward town.
The horned moon, sometimes revealed above the fog, had traversed most of
the sky; it would soon be gone. A stiff breeze had swept in from the
west, marked by periodic gusts strong enough to whip her hair straight
up in the air as if it were a blond flame leaping from her head.
Although the temperature had fallen to only about fifty degrees, the
night felt much colder during those turbulent moments when the breeze
temporarily became a blustering wind. The positive side was that the
more miserable the cold and wind made her, the less aware she was of
that other discomfort-hunger.

"Waif Found Wandering Hungry and Dazed After Encounter with Space
Aliens," she said, reading that imagined headline from an issue of The
National Enquirer that existed only in her mind.

She was approaching the intersection of the county route and Holliwell
Road, feeling good about the progress she was making, when she nearly
walked into the arms of those she was trying to avoid.

To the east of the county route, Holliwell was a dirt road leading up
into the hills, under the interstate, and all the way to the old,
abandoned Icarus Colony-a dilapidated twelve-room house, barn, and
collapsing outbuildings where a group of artists had tried to establish
an ideal communal society back in the 1950s. Since then it had been a
horse-breeding facility (failed), the site of a weekly flea market and
auction (failed), a natural food restaurant (failed), and had long ago
settled into ruin. Kids knew all about it because it was a spooky place
and thus the site of many tests of courage. To the west, Holliwell Road
was paved and led along the edge of the town limits, past some of the
newer homes in the area, past New Wave Microtech, and eventually out to
the north point of the cove, where Thomas Shaddack, the computer genius,
lived in a huge, weird-looking house. Chrissie didn't intend to go
either east or west on Holliwell; it was just a milestone on her trek,
and when she crossed it she would be at the northeast corner of the
Moonlight Cove city limits.

She was within a hundred feet of Holliwell when she heard the low but
swiftly swelling sound of a racing engine. She stepped away from the
road, over a narrow ditch at the verge, waded through weeds, and took
cover against the thick trunk of an ancient pine. Even as she hunkered
down by the tree, she got a fix on the direction from which the vehicle
was approaching-west-and then she saw its headlights spearing into the
intersection just south of her. A truck pulled into view on Holliwell,


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ignoring the stop sign, and braked in the middle of the intersection.
Fog whirled and plumed around it.

Chrissie could see that heavy-duty, black, extended-bed pickup fairly
well because, as the junction of Holliwell and the county road was the
site of frequent accidents, a single streetlight had been installed on
the northeast corner for better visibility and as a warning to drivers.
The truck bore the distinctive New Wave insignia on the door, which she
could recognize even at a distance because she had seen it maybe a
thousand times before a white and blue circle the size of a dinner
plate, the bottom half of which was a cresting blue wave. The truck had
a large bed, and at the moment its cargo was men; six or eight were
sitting in the back.

The instant that the pickup halted in the intersection, two men vaulted
over the tailgate. One of them went to the wooded point at the
northwest corner of the intersection and slipped into the trees, no more
than a hundred feet south of the pine from which Chrissie was watching
him. The other crossed to the southeast corner of the junction and took
up a position in weeds and chaporral.

The pickup turned south on the county road and sped away.

Chrissie suspected that the remaining men in the truck would be let off
at other points along the eastern perimeter of Moonlight Cove, where
they would take up watch positions. Further - 129 more, the truck had
been big enough to carry at least twenty men, and no doubt others had
been dropped off as it had come eastward along Holliwell from the New
Wave building in the west. They were surrounding Moonlight Cove with
sentries. She was quite sure they were looking for her. She had seen
something she had not been meant to see-her parents in the act of a
hideous transformation, shucking off their human disguise-and now she
had to be found and "converted"-as Tucker had put it-before she had a
chance to warn the world.

The sound of the black truck receded.

Silence settled in like a damp blanket.

Fog swirled and churned and eddied in countless currents, but the
overriding tidal forces in the air pushed it relentlessly toward the
dark and serried hills.

Then the breeze abruptly ratcheted up until it became a real wind again,
whispering in the tall weeds, soughing through the evergreens. It
produced a soft and strangely forlorn thrumming from a nearby road sign.

Though Chrissie knew where the two men had gone to ground, she could not
see them. They were well hidden.

Fog flew past the patrol car and eastward through the night, driven
by a breeze that was swiftly becoming a full wind, and ideas flew
through Sam's mind with the same fluidity. His thoughts were so
disturbing that he would have preferred to have sat in mindless
stupefaction.

From considerable prior computer experience, he knew that part of a
system's capabilities could be hidden if the program designer simply
deleted some choices from the task menus that appeared on the screen. He
stared at the primary menu on the car's display-A, DISPATCHER; B,
CENTRAL FILES; BULLETIN BOARD; 0. OUTSYSTEM MODEM-and he pressed E,
though no E task was offered.



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Words appeared on the terminal HELLO, OFFICER DORN.

There was an E. He'd entered either a secret data base requiring ritual
responses for access or an interactive information system that would
respond to questions he typed on the keyboard. If the former was the
case, if passwords or phrases were required, and if he typed the wrong
response, he was in trouble; the computer would shut him out and sound
an alarm in police headquarters to warn them that an impersonator was
using Dorn's number.

Proceeding with caution, he typed HELLO.

MAY I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Sam decided to proceed as if this was just what it seemed to be-a
straightforward, question-and-answer program. He tapped the keyboard
MENU.

The screen blanked for a moment, then the same words reappeared MAY I BE
OF ASSISTANCE?

He tried again PRIMARY MENU.

MAY I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

MAIN MENU.

MAY I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Using a system accessed by question and response, with which one was
unfamiliar, meant finding the proper commands more or less by trial and
error. Sam tried again FIRST MENU.

At last he was rewarded.

CHOOSE ONE A. NEW WAVE personnel B. PROJECT MOONHAWK C.Shaddack He had
found a secret connection between New Wave, its founder Thomas Shaddack,
and the Moonlight Cove police. But he didn't know yet what the
connection was or what it meant.

He suspected that choice C might link him to Shaddack's personal
computer terminal, allowing him to have a dialogue with Shaddack that
would be more private than a conversation conducted on police-band
radio. If that was the case, then Shaddack - 131 and the local cops
were indeed involved in a conspiracy so criminal that it required a very
high degree of security. He did not punch C because, if he called up
Shaddack's computer and got Mr. Big himself on the other end, there was
no way he could successfully pretend to be Reese Dorn.

Choice A probably would provide him with a roster of New Wave's
executives and department heads, and maybe with codes that would allow
him to link up with their personal terminals as well. He didn't want to
talk with any of them either.

Besides, he felt that he was on borrowed time. He surveyed the parking
lot again and peered especially hard at the deeper pools of shadow
beyond the reach of the sodium-vapor lamps. He'd been in the patrol car
for fifteen minutes, and no one had come or gone from the
municipal-building lot in that time. He doubted his luck would hold
much longer, and he wanted to learn as much as possible in whatever
minutes remained before he was interrupted.




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PROJECT MOONHAWK was the most mysterious and interesting of the three
choices, so he pushed B, and another menu appeared.

CHOOSE ONE A. CONVERTED B. PENDING CONVERSION C, SCHEDULE OF
CONVERSION - LOCAL 0. SCHEDULE OF CONVERSION - SECOND STAGE He punched
choice A, and a column of names and addresses appeared on the screen.
They were people in Moonlight Cove, and at the head of the column was
the notation 1967 NOW CONVERTED.

Converted? From what? To what? Was there something religious about
this conspiracy? Some strange cult? Or maybe "converted" was used in
some euphemistic sense or as a code.

The word gave him the creeps.

Sam discovered that he could either scroll through the list or access it
in alphabetized chunks. He looked up the names of residents whom he
either knew of or had met. Loman Watkins was on the converted list. So
was Reese Dorn. Burt Peckham, the owner of Knight's Bridge Tavern, was
not among the converted, but the entire Perez family, surely the same
that operated the restaurant, was on that roster.

He checked Harold Talbot, the disabled vet with whom he intended to make
contact in the morning. Talbot was not on the converted list.

Puzzled as to the meaning of it all, Sam closed out that file, returned
to the main menu, and punched B, PENDING CONVERSION. This brought
another list of names and addresses to the VDT, and the column was
headed by the words "04 PENDING CONVERSION. On this roster he found
Burt Peckham and Harold Talbot.

He tried C, SCHEDULE OF CONVERSION-LOCAL, and a submenu of three
headings appeared A. MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 600 P.M.

THROUGH TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 600 A.M.

B.   TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 600 A.M.

THROUGH TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 600 P.M.

C.   TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 600 P.M.

THROUGH It was now 1239 A.M Wednesday, about halfway times noted in
choice A, so he punched that one another list of names headed by the
notation 380 CONVERSIONS SCHEDULED.

The fine hairs were bristling on the back of Sam's neck, and he didn't
know why except that the word "conversions" unsettled him. It made him
think of that old movie with Kevin McCarthy, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers.

He also thought of the pack that had pursued him earlier in the night.
Had they been . . . converted?

When he looked up Burt Peckham, he found the tavern owner on the
schedule for conversion before 600 A.M. However, Harry Talbot was not
listed.

The car shook.

between the first. It was - 133 Sam snapped his head up and reached for
the revolver holstered under his jacket.

Wind.   It was only wind.          A series of hard gusts shredded holes in the


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fog and lightly rocked the car. After a moment the wind died to a
strong breeze again, and the torn fabric of fog mended itself, but Sam's
heart was still thudding painfully.

As Tessa put down the useless telephone, the doorknob stopped
rattling. She stood by the bed for a while, listening, then ventured
warily into the foyer to press her ear against the door.

She heard voices but not immediately beyond that portal. They were
farther down the hallway, peculiar voices that spoke in urgent, raspy
whispers. She could not make out anything they said.

She was sure they were the same ones who had stalked her, unseen, when
she had gone for ice and a Diet Coke. Now they were back. And somehow
they had knocked out the phones, so she couldn't call for help. It was
crazy, but it was happening that they Such persistence on their part
indicated to Tessa were not ordinary rapists or muggers, that they had
focused on her because she was Janice's sister, because she was there to
look into Janice's death. However, she wondered how they had become
aware of her arrival in town and why they had chosen to move against her
so precipitously, without even waiting to see if she was just going to
settle Janice's affairs and leave. Only she and her mother knew that
she intended to attempt a murder investigation of her own.

Gooseflesh prickled her bare legs, and she felt vulnerable in just a
T-shirt and panties. She went quickly to the closet, pulled on jeans
and a sweater.

She wasn't alone in the motel.             There were other guests.           Mr.


Quinn had said so. Maybe not many, perhaps only another two or three.
But if worse came to worst, she could scream, and the other guests would
hear her, and her would-be assailants would have to flee.

She picked up her Rockports, in which she had stuffed the white athletic
socks she'd been wearing, and returned to the door.

Low, hoarse voices hissed and muttered at the far end of the hall-then a
bone-jarring crash slammed through the lodge, making her cry out and
twitch in surprise. Another crash followed at once. She heard a door
give way at another room.

A woman screamed, and a man shouted, but the oilier voices were what
brought a chill of horror to Tessa. There were several of them, three
or even four, and they were eerie and shockingly savage. The public
corridor beyond her door was filled with harsh wolflike growls,
murderous snarls, shrill and excited squeals, an icy keening that was
the essence of blood hunger, and other less describable sounds, but
worst of all was that those same inhuman voices, clearly belonging to
beasts not men, nevertheless also spat out a few recognizable words ". .
. need, need . . . get her, get . . . get, get . . . blood,
bitch, blood. . .

" Leaning against the door, holding on to it for support, Tessa tried to
tell herself that the words she heard were from the man and woman whose
room had been broken into, but she knew that was not true, because she
also heard both a man and woman screaming. Their screams were horrible,
almost unbearable, full of terror and agony, as if they were being
beaten to death or worse, much worse, being torn apart, ripped limb from
limb and gutted.




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A couple of years ago Tessa had been in Northern Ireland, making a
documentary about the pointlessness of the needless violence there, and
she'd been unfortunate enough to be at a cemetery, at the funeral of one
of the endless series of "martyrs"-Catholic or Protestant, it didn't
matter any more, both had a surfeit of them-when the crowd of mourners
had metamorphosed into a pack of savages. They had streamed from the
churchyard into nearby streets, looking for those of a different faith,
and soon they'd come across two British plain clothes army officers
patrolling the area in an unmarked car. By its sheer size, the mob
blocked the car's advance, encircled it, smashed in the windows, and
dragged the would-be peacekeepers out onto the pavement. Tessa's two
technical assistants had fled, but she had T - 135 waded into the melee
with her shoulder-mounted videotape camera, and through the lens she had
seemed to be looking beyond the reality of this world into hell itself.
Eyes wild, faces distorted with hatred and rage, grief forgotten and
bloodlust embraced, the mourners had tirelessly kicked the fallen
Britons, then pulled them to their feet only to pummel and stab them,
slammed them repeatedly against the car until their spines broke and
their skulls cracked, then dropped them and stomped them and tore at
them and stabbed them again, though by that time- they were both dead.
Howling and shrieking, cursing, chanting slogans that degenerated into
meaningless chains of sounds, mindless rhythms, like a flock of
carrion-eating birds, they plucked at the shattered bodies, though they
weren't like earthly birds, neither buzzards nor vultures, but like
demons that had flown up from the pit, tearing at the dead men not only
with the intention of consuming their flesh but with the hot desire to
rip out and steal their souls. Two of those frenzied men had noticed
Tessa, had seized her camera and smashed it, and had thrown her to the
ground. For one terrible moment she was sure that they would dismember
her in their frenzy. Two of them leaned down, grabbing at her clothes.
Their faces were so wrenched with hatred that they no longer looked
human, but like gargoyles that had come to life and had climbed down
from the roofs of cathedrals. They had surrendered all that was human
in themselves and let loose the gene-encoded ghosts of the primitives
from whom they were descended. "For God's sake, no!" she had cried.

"For God's sake, please!" Perhaps it was the mention of God or just the
sound of a human voice that had not devolved into the hoarse gnarl of a
beast, but for some reason they let go and hesitated. She seized that
reprieve to scramble away from them, through the churning, blood-crazed
mob to safety.

What she heard now, at the other end of the motel corridor, was just
like that. Or worse.


Beginning to sweat even though the patrol car's heater was not on, still
spooked by every sudden gust of wind, Sam called up submenu item B,
which showed the conversions scheduled from 600 this coming morning
until 600 P.m. that evening. Those names were preceded by the heading
450 CONVERSIONS SCHEDULED. Harry Talbot's name was not on that list
either.

Choice C, six o'clock Thursday evening through midnight the same day,
indicated that 274 conversions were scheduled. Harry Talbot's name and
address were on that third and final list.

Sam mentally added the numbers mentioned in each of the three conversion
periods-380, 450, and 274-and realized they totaled 1104, which was the
same number that headed the list of pending conversions. Add that number
to 1967, the total listed as already converted, and the grand total,
3071, was probably the population of Moonlight Cove. By the next time


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he clock struck midnight, a little less than twenty-three hours from
now, the entire town would be converted-whatever the hell that meant.

He keyed out of the submenu and was about to switch off the car's engine
and get out of there when the word ALERT appeared on the VDT and began
to flash. Fear thrilled through him because he was sure they had
discovered an intruder poking around in their system; he must have
tripped some subtle alarm in the program.

Instead of opening the door and making a run for it, however, he watched
the screen for a few more seconds, held by curiosity.

TELEPHONE sweep INDICATES FBI AGENT IN MOONLIGHT COVE.

- 137 POINT OF CALL PAY PHONE.             SHELL STATION, OCEAN AVENUE.

The alert was related to him, though not because they knew he was
currently sitting in one of their patrol cars and probing the New
Wave/Moonhawk conspiracy. Evidently the bastards were tied into the
phone company's data banks and periodically swept those records to see
who had made calls from what numbers to what numbers-even from all of
the town's pay telephones, which in ordinary circumstances could have
been counted on to provide secure communications for a field agent. They
were paranoid and security conscious and electronically connected to an
extent and degree that proved increasingly astounding with each
revelation.

TIME OF CALL 731 P.M Monday, OCTOBER13.

At least they didn't keep a minute-by-minute or even hour-by-hour link
with the telephone company. Their computer obviously swept those
records on a programmed schedule, perhaps every four or six or eight
hours. Otherwise they would have been on the lookout for him shortly
after he had made the call to Scott earlier in the evening.

After the legend CALL PLACED TO, his home phone number appeared, then
his name and his address in Sherman Oaks. Followed by CALL placed BY
SAMUEL H. BOOKER.

MEANS OF PAYMENT telephone CREDIT CARD.

TYPE OF CARD EMPLOYER-billed.


BILLING ADDRESS FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

They would start checking motels in the entire county, but as he was
staying in Moonlight Cove's only lodgings, the search would be a short
one. He wondered if he had time to sprint back to Cove Lodge, get his
car, and drive to the next town, Aberdeen Wells, where he could call the
Bureau office in San Francisco from an unmonitored phone. He had
learned enough to know that something damned strange was going on in
this town, enough to justify an imposition of federal authority and a
far-reaching investigation.

But the very next words that appeared on the VDT convinced him that if
he went back to Cove Lodge to get his car, he would be caught before he
could get out of town. And if they got their hands on him, he might be
just one more nasty accidental-death statistic.

They knew his home address, so Scott might be in danger too-not right
now, not down there in Los Angeles, but maybe by tomorrow.



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DIALOGUE INVOKED WATKINS SHOLNICK, ARE YOU LINKED lii SHOLNICK HERE.

WATKINS TRY COVE LODGE.           SHOLNICK ON MY WAY.

Already an officer, Shoinick, was on his way to see if Sam was a
registered guest at Cove Lodge. And the cover story that Sam had
established with the desk clerk-that he was a successful stockbroker
from Los Angeles, contemplating early retirement in one coastal town or
another-was blown.

WATKINS Peterson?

Peterson HERE.

They probably didn't have to type in their names. Each man's link would
identify him to the main computer, and his name would be automatically
printed in front of the brief input that he typed. Clean, swift, easy to
use.

- 139 WATKINS BACK UR SHOLNICK.

PETERSON DONE.

WATKINS DON'T KILL HIM UNTIL WE CAN QUESTION.

All over Moonlight Cove, cops in patrol cars were talking to one another
by computer, off the public airwaves, where they could not be easily
overheard. Even though Sam was eavesdropping on them without their
knowledge, he felt that he was up against a formidable enemy nearly as
omniscient as God.

WATKINS DANBERRY?

DANBERRY HERE.       HQ.

WATKINS BLOCK OCEAN AVENUE TO IN interstate.

DANBERRY DONE.

SHADDACK WHAT ABOUT THE FOSTER GIRL?

Sam was startled to see Shaddack's name appear on the screen. The alert
apparently had flashed on his computer at home, perhaps also sounding an
audible alarm and waking him.

WATKINS STILL LOOSE.

SHADDACK CAN'T RISK BOOKER stumbling ACROSS HER.

WATKINS TOWN'S ringed WITH SENTRIES.                THEY'LL CATCH HER COMING IN.

Shaddack SHE'S SEEN TOO MUCH.

Sam had read about Thomas Shaddack in magazines, newspapers. The guy
was a celebrity of sorts, the computer genius of the age, and somewhat
geeky looking besides.

Fascinated by this revealing dialogue, which incriminated the famous man
and his bought police force, Sam had not immediately picked up on the
meaning of the exchanges between Chief Watkins and Danberry Danberry ...
Here. HQ ... Block Ocean Avenue to interstate ... Done. He realized
that Officer Danberry was at headquarters, HQ, which was the municipal
building, and that any moment he was going to come out the back door and
rush to one of the four patrol cars in the parking lot.


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"Oh, shit." Sam grabbed the ignition wires, tearing them apart. The
engine coughed and died, and the video-display went dark. A fraction of
a second later, Danberry threw open the rear door of the municipal
building and ran into the parking lot.

When the screaming stopped, Tessa broke out of a trance of terror and
went straight to the phone again. The line was still dead.

Where was Quinn? The motel office was closed at this hour, but didn't
the manager have an adjacent apartment? He would respond to the ruckus.
Or was he one of the savage pack in the corridor?

They had broken down one door.             They could break down hers too.

She grabbed one of the straight-backed chairs from the table by the
window, hurried to the door with it, tilted it back, and wedged it under
the knob.

She no longer thought they were after her just because she was Janice's
sister and bent on uncovering the truth. That explanation didn't
account for their attack on the other guests, who had nothing to do with
Janice. It was nuts. She didn't understand what was happening, but she
clearly understood the implications of what she had heard a psychotic
killer-no, several psychotics, judging by the noise they had made, some
bizarre cult like the Manson family maybe, or worse-were loose in the
motel. They had already killed two people, and they could kill her,
too, evidently for the sheer pleasure of it. She felt as if she were in
a bad dream.

She expected the walls to bulge and flow in that amorphous - 141 fashion
of nightmare places, but they remained solid, fixed, and the colors of
things were too sharp and clear for this to be a dreamscape.

Frantically she pulled on her socks and shoes, unnerved being barefoot,
as earlier her near nakedness had made her feel vulnerable-as if death
could be foiled by an adequate wardrobe.

She heard those voices again. Not at the end of the hallway any more.
Near her own door. Approaching. She wished the door featured one of
those one-way, fisheye lenses that allowed a wide-angled view, but there
was none.

At the sill was a half-inch crack, however, so Tessa dropped to the
floor, pressed one side of her face against the carpet, and squinted out
at the corridor. From that limited perspective, she saw something move
past her room so quickly that her eyes could not quite track it, though
she caught a glimpse of its feet, which was enough to alter dramatically
her perception of what was happening. This was not an incidence of
human savagery akin to the bloodbath she had witnessed-and to which she
nearly had succumbed-in Northern Ireland. This was, instead, an
encounter with the unknown, a breach of reality, a sudden sideslip out
of the normal world into the uncanny. They were leathery, hairy,
dark-skinned feet, broad and flat and surprisingly long, with toes so
extrusile and multiple jointed that they almost seemed to have the
function of fingers.

Something hit the door.           Hard.

Tessa scrambled to her feet and out of the foyer.

Crazed voices filled the hall that same weird mix of harsh animal sounds
punctuated by bursts of breathlessly spoken but for the most part


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disconnected words.

She went around the bed to the window, disengaged the pressure latch,
and slid the movable pane aside.

Again the door shook. The boom was so loud that Tessa felt as if she
were inside a drum. It would not collapse as easily as the other
guests' door, thanks to the chair, but it would not hold for more than a
few additional blows.

She sat on the sill, swung her legs out, looked down. The fog-dampened
walk glistened in the dim yellow glow of the serviceway lamps about
twelve feet below the window. An easy jump.

They hit the door again, harder.              Wood splintered.


Tessa pushed off the windowsill. She landed on the wet walkway and,
because of her rubber-soled shoes, skidded but did not fall.

Overhead, in the room she had left, wood splintered more noisily than
before, and tortured metal screeched as the lock on the door began to
disintigrate.

She was near the north end of the building. She thought she saw
something moving in the darkness in that direction. It might have been
nothing more than a clotting of fog churning eastward on the wind, but
she didn't want to take a chance, so she ran south, with the vast black
sea beyond the railing at her right side. By the time she reached the
end of the building, a crash echoed through the night-the sound of the
door to her room going down-which was followed by the howling of the
pack as it entered that place in search of her.

Sam could not have slipped out of the patrol car without drawing
Danberry's attention. Four cruisers awaited the cop's use, so there was
a seventy-five-percent chance that Sam would be undetected if he stayed
in the car. He slid down in the driver's seat as far as he could and
leaned to his right, across the computer keyboard on the console.

Danberry went to the next car in line.

With his head on the console, his neck twisted so he could look up
through the window on the passenger's side, Sam watched as Danberry
unlocked the door of that other cruiser. He prayed that the cop would
keep his back turned, because the interior of the car in which Sam
slouched was revealed by the sulfurous glow of the parking-lot lights.
If Danberry even glanced his way, Sam would be seen.

The cop got into the other black-and-white and slammed the door, and Sam
sighed with relief. The engine turned over. - 143 Danberry pulled out
of the municipal lot. When he hit the alley he gunned the engine, and
his tires spun and squealed for a moment before they bit in, and then he
was gone.

Though Sam wanted to hot-wire the car and switch on the computer again
to find out whether Watkins and Shaddack were still conversing, he knew
he dared not stay any longer. As the manhunt escalated, the police
department's offices in the municipal building were sure to become busy.

Because he didn't want them to know that he had been probing in their
computer or that he had eavesdropped on their VDT conversation-the
greater they assumed his ignorance to be, the less effective they would
be in their search for him-Sam used his tools to replace the ignition


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core in the steering column.             He got out, pushed the lock button down,
and closed the door.

He didn't want to leave the area by the alleyway because a patrol car
might turn in from one end or the other, capturing him in its
headlights. Instead he dashed straight across that narrow back street
from the parking lot and opened a gate in a simple wrought-iron fence.
He entered the rear yard of a slightly decrepit Victorian-style house
whose owners had let the shrubbery run so wild that it looked as if a
macabre cartoon family from the pen of Gahan Wilson might live in the
place. He walked quietly past the side of the house, across the front
lawn, to Pacific Drive, one block south of Ocean Avenue.

The night calm was not split by sirens. He heard no shouts, no running
footsteps, no cries of alarm. But he knew he had awakened a many-headed
beast and that this singularly dangerous Hydra was looking for him all
over town.

Mike Peyser didn't know what to do, didn't know, he was scared,
confused and scared, so he could not think clearly, though he needed

to think sharp and clear like a man, except the wild part of him kept
intruding; his mind worked quickly, and it was sharp, but he could not
hold to a single train of thought for more than a couple of minutes.
Quick thinking, rapid-fire thinking, was not good enough to solve a
problem like this; he had to think quick and deep. But his attention
span was not what it should have been.

When he finally was able to stop screaming and get up from the kitchen
floor, he hurried into the dark dining room, through the unlighted
living room, down the short hall to the bedroom, then into the master
bath, going on all fours part of the way, rising onto his hind feet as
he crossed the bedroom threshold, unable to rise all the way up and
stand entirely straight, but flexible enough to get more than halfway
erect. In the bathroom, which was lit only by the vague and somewhat
scintillant moonglow that penetrated the small window above the shower
stall, he gripped the edge of the sink and stared into the mirrored
front of the medicine cabinet, where he could see only a shadowy
reflection of himself, without detail.

He wanted to believe that in fact he had returned to his natural form,
that his feeling of being trapped in the altered state was pure
hallucination, yes, yes, he wanted to believe that, badly needed to
believe, believe, even though he could not stand fully erect, even
though he could feel the difference in his impossibly long-fingered
hands and in the queer set of his head on his shoulders and in the way
his back joined his hips. He needed to believe.

Turn on the light, he told himself.               He could not do it.

Turn on the light.

He was afraid.

He had to turn on the light and look at himself.

But he gripped the sink and could not move.

Turn on the light.

Instead he leaned toward the tenebrous mirror, peering intently at the
indistinct reflection, seeing little more than the pale amber radiance
of strange eyes.


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turn on the light.

He let out a thin mewl of anguish and terror.

Shaddack, he thought suddenly. Shaddack, he must tell Shaddack, Tom
Shaddack would know what to do, Shaddack was his best hope, maybe his
only hope, Shaddack.

- 145 He let go of the sink, dropped to the floor, hurried out of the
t)bathroom, into the bedroom, toward the telephone on the nightstand. As
he went, in a voice alternately shrill and guttural, piercing and
whispery, he repeated the name as if it were a word with magic power
"Shaddack, Shaddack, Shaddack, Shaddack .

Tessa Lockland took refuge in a twenty-four-hour coin-operated
laundry four blocks east of Cove Lodge and half a block off Ocean
Avenue. She wanted to be someplace bright, and the banks of overhead
fluorescents allowed no shadows. Alone in the laundry, she sat in a
badly scarred, yellow plastic chair, staring at rows of clothes-dryer
portals, as if understanding would be visited upon her from some cosmic
source communicating on those circles of glass.

As a documentarist, she had to have a keen eye for the patterns in life
that would give coherence to a film narratively and visually, so she had
no trouble seeing patterns of darkness, death, and unknown forces in
this deeply troubled town. The fantastic creatures in the motel surely
had been the source of the cries she'd heard on the beach earlier that
night, and her sister had no doubt been killed by those same beings,
whatever the hell they were. Which sort of explained why the
authorities had been so insistent that Marion okay the cremation of
Janice's body-not because the remains were corroded by seawater and
half-devoured by fish, but because cremation would cover wounds that
would raise unanswerable questions in an unbiased autopsy. She also saw
reflections of the corruption of local authorities in the physical
appearance of Ocean Avenue, where too many storefronts were empty and
too many businesses were suffering, which was inexplicable for a town in
which unemployment was virtually nil. She had noted an air of solemnity
about the people she had seen on the streets, as well as a briskness and
purposefulness that seemed odd in a laid-back northern coastal town
where the hurly-burly of modern life hardly intruded.

However, her awareness of the patterns included no explanation of why
the police would want to conceal the true nature of Janice's killing. Or
why the town seemed in an economic depression in spite of its
prosperity. Or what in the name of God those nightmare things in the
motel had been. patterns were clues to underlying truths, but her
ability to recognize them did not mean she could find the answers and
reveal the truths at which the patterns hinted.

She sat, shivering, in the fluorescent glare and breathed trace fumes of
detergents, bleaches, fabric softeners, and the lingering staleness of
the cigarette butts in the two free-standing sandfilled ashtrays, while
she tried to figure what to do next. She had not lost her determination
to probe into Janice's death. But she no longer had the audacity to
think she could play detective all by herself. She was going to need
help and would probably have to obtain it from county or state
authorities.

The first thing she had to do was get out of Moonlight Cove in one
piece.



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Her car was at Cove Lodge, but she did not want to go back there for it.
Those . . . creatures might still be in the motel or watching it from
the dense shrubs and trees and omnipresent shadows that were an integral
part of the town. Like Cannel, California, elsewhere along the coast,
Moonlight Cove was a town virtually built in a seaside forest. Tessa
loved Cannel for its splendid integration of the works of man and
nature, where geography and architecture often appeared to be the
product of the same sculptor's hand. Right now, however, Moonlight Cove
did not draw style and grace from its verdant lushness and artful night
shadows, as did Carmel; rather, this town seemed to be dressed in the
thinnest veneer of civilization, beneath which something savage-even
primal-watched and waited. Every grove of trees and every dark street
was not the home of beauty but of the uncanny and of death. She would
have found Moonlight Cove far more attractive if every street and alley
and lawn and park had been lit with the same plenitude of fluorescent
bulbs as the Laundromat in which she had taken refuge - 147 Maybe the
police had shown up at Cove Lodge by now in response to the screams and
commotion. But she would not feel any safer returning there just
because cops were around. Cops were part of the problem. They would
want to question her about the murders of the other guests. They would
find out that Janice had been her sister, and though she might not tell
them she was in town to poke into the circumstances of Janice's death,
they would suspect as much. If they had participated in a conspiracy to
conceal the true nature of Janice's death, they E)probably wouldn't
hesitate to deal with Tessa in a firm and final way.

She had to abandon the car.

But damned if she was going to walk out of town at night. She might be
able to hitch a ride on the interstate-perhaps even from an honest
trucker instead of a mobile psychopath-but between Moonlight Cove and
the freeway, she would have to walk through a dark and semirural
landscape, where surely she would be at even greater risk of
encountering more of those mysterious beasts that had broken down her
motel-room door.

Of course, they had come after her in a relatively public and
well-lighted place. She had no real reason to assume that she was safer
in this coin-operated laundry than in the middle of the woods. When the
membrane of civilization ruptured and the primordial terror burst
through, you weren't safe anywhere, not even on the steps of a church,
as she had learned in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, she would cling to the light and shun the darkness. She
had stepped through an invisible wall between the reality she had always
known and a different, more hostile world. As long as she remained in
that Twilight Zone, it seemed wise to assume that shadows offered even
less comfort and security than did bright places.

Which left her with no plan of action. Except to sit in the Laundromat
and wait for morning. In daylight she might risk a long walk to the
freeway.

The blank glass of the dryer windows returned her stare.

An autumn moth thumped softly against the frosted plastic panels that
were suspended under the fluorescent bulbs.


Unable to walk boldly into Moonlight Cove as she had planned, Chrissie
retreated from Holliwell Road, heading back the way she had come. She
stayed in the woods, moving ,-, slowly and cautiously from tree to tree,


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trying to avoid making a sound that might carry to the nearer of the
sentries who had been posted at the intersection.

In a couple of hundred yards, when she was beyond those men's sight and
hearing, she moved more aggressively. Eventually she came to one of the
houses that lay along the county route. The single-story ranch home was
set behind a large front lawn and sheltered by several pines and firs,
barely visible now that the moon was waning. No lights were on inside
or out, and all was silent.

She needed time to think, and she wanted to get out of the cold, dampish
night. Hoping there were no dogs at the house, she hurried to the
garage, staying off the gravel driveway to keep from making a lot of
noise. As she expected, in addition to the large front door through
which the cars entered and exited, there was a smaller side entrance. It
was unlocked. She stepped into the garage and closed the door behind
her.

"Chrissie Foster, secret agent, penetrated the enemy facility by the
bold and clever use of a side door," she said softly.

The secondhand radiance of the sinking moon penetrated the panes in the
door and two high, narrow windows on the west wall, but it was
insufficient to reveal anything. She could see only a few darkly
gleaming curves of chrome and windshield glass, just enough to suggest
the presence of two cars.

She edged toward the first of those vehicles with the caution of a blind
girl, hands out in front of her, afraid of knocking something over. The
car was unlocked. She slipped inside be - 149 hind the wheel, leaving
the door open for the welcome glow of the interior lamp. She supposed a
trace of that light might be visible at the garage windows if anyone in
the house woke up and looked out, but she had to risk it.

She searched the glove compartment, the map-storage panels on the doors,
and under the seats, hoping to find food, because most people kept candy
bars or bags of nuts or crackers or something to snack on in their cars.
Though she had eaten midafternoon, while locked in the pantry, she'd had
nothing for ten hours. Her stomach growled. She wasn't expecting to
find a hot fudge sundae or the fixings for a jelly sandwich, but she
certainly hoped to do better than a single stick of chewing gum and one
green Lifesaver that, retrieved from beneath the seat, was furry with
dirt, lint, and carpet fuzz.

As if reading tabloid headlines, she said, "Starvation in the Land of
Plenty, A Modern Tragedy, Young Girl Found Dead in Garage, 'I Only
Wanted a Few Peanuts' Written in Her Own Blood."

In the other car she found two Hershey's bars with almonds.

"Thank you, God.        Your friend, Chrissie."

She hogged down the first bar but savored the second one in small bites,
letting it melt on her tongue.

While she ate, she thought about ways to get into Moonlight Cove. By the
time she finished the chocolate CHOCOHOLIC YOUNG GIRL FOUND DEAD IN
GARAGE FROM terminal CASE OF GIANT ZITS -she had devised a plan.

Her usual bedtime had passed hours ago, and she was exhausted from all
the physical activity with which the night had been filled, so she just
wanted to stay there in the car, her belly full of milk chocolate and
almonds, and sleep for a couple of hours before putting her plan into


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effect. She yawned and slumped down in the seat. She ached all over,
and her eyes were as heavy as if some overanxious mortician had weighted
them with coins.

That image of herself as a corpse was so unsettling that she immediately
got out of the car and closed the door. If she dozed off in the car,
she most likely wouldn't wake until someone found her in the morning.
Maybe the people who kept their cars in this garage were converted, like
her own parents, in which case she'd be doomed.


Outside, shivering as the wind nipped at her, She headed back to the
county road and turned north. She passed two more dark and silent
houses, another stretch of woods, and came to a fourth house, another
single-story ranch-style place with shake-shingle roof and redwood
siding.

She knew the people who lived there, Mr. and Mrs. Eulane. Mrs. Eulane
managed the cafeteria at school. Mr. Eulane was a gardener with many
accounts in Moonlight Cove. Early every morning, Mr. Eulane drove into
town in his white truck, the back of which was loaded with lawnmowers
and hedge clippers and rakes and shovels and bags of mulch and
fertilizer and everything else a gardener might need; only a few
students had arrived by the time he dropped Mrs. Eulane off at school,
then went about his own work. Chrissie figured she could find a place
to hide in the back of the truck-which had board sides-among Mr.
Eulane's gardening supplies and equipment.

The truck was in the Eulanes' garage, which was unlocked, just as the
other one had been. But this was the country, after all, where people
still trusted one another-which was good except that it gave invading
aliens an extra edge.

The only window was small and in the wall that could not be seen from
the house, so Chrissie risked turning on the overhead light when she
stepped inside. She quietly scaled the side of the truck and made her
way in among the gardening equipment, which was stored in the rear
two-thirds of the cargo bed, nearest the tailgate. Toward the front,
against the back wall of the truck cab, flanked by fifty-pound bags of
fertilizer, snail bait, and potting soil, was a three-foot-high stack of
folded burlap tarps in which Mr. Eulane bundled grass clippings that
had to be hauled to the dump. She could use some tarps as a mattress,
others as blankets, and bed down until morning, remaining hidden in the
burlap and between the piles of fifty-pound bags all the way to
Moonlight Cove.

She climbed out of the truck, switched off the garage lights, then
returned in the dark and carefully climbed aboard once more. She made a
nest for herself in the tarps. The burlap was a little scratchy. After
years of use it was permeated with the scent of new-mown grass, which
was nice at first but quickly palled. At least a few layers of tarps
trapped her body heat, and in minutes she was warm for the first time
all night.

- 151 And as the night deepened (she thought), young Chrissie, masking
her telltale human odors in the scent of grass that saturated the
burlap, cleverly concealed herself from the pursuing aliens-or maybe
werewolves-whose sense of smell was almost as good as that of hounds.

Sam took temporary refuge on the unlighted playground of Thomas
Jefferson Elementary School on Palomino Street on the south side of
town. He sat on one of the swings, holding the suspension chains with


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both hands, actually swinging a bit, while he considered his options.

He could not leave Moonlight Cove by car. His rental was back at the
motel, where he'd be apprehended if he showed his face. He could steal
a car, but he remembered the exchange on the computer when Loman Watkins
had ordered Danberry to establish a blockade on Ocean Avenue, between
town and the interstate. They'd have sealed off every exit.

He could go overland, sneaking from street to street, to the edge of the
town limits, then through the woods and fields to the freeway. But
Watkins had also said something about having ringed the entire community
with sentries, to intercept the "Foster girl." Although Sam was
confident of his instincts and survival abilities, he had not had
experience in taking evasive action over open territory since his
service in the war more than twenty years ago. If men were stationed
around the town, waiting to intercept the girl, Sam was likely to walk
straight into one or more of them.

Though he was willing to risk getting caught, he must not fall into
their hands until he had placed a call to the Bureau to report and to
ask for emergency backup. If he became a statistic in this
accidental-death capital of the world, the Bureau would send new men in
his place, and ultimately the truth could come out-but perhaps too late.

As he swung gently back and forth through the rapidly thinning fog,
pushed mostly by the wind, he thought about those schedules he had seen
on the VDT. Everyone in town would be "converted" in the next
twenty-three hours. Although he had no idea what the hell people were
being converted to, he didn't like the sound of it. And he sensed that
once those schedules had been met, once everyone in town was converted,
getting to the truth in Moonlight Cove would be no easier than cracking
open an infinite series of laser-welded, titanium boxes nested in
Chinese-puzzle fashion.

Okay, so the first thing he had to do was get to a phone and call the
Bureau. The phones in Moonlight Cove were compromised, but he did not
care if the call was noted in a computer sweep or even recorded word for
word. He just needed thirty seconds or a minute on the line with the
office, and massive reinforcements would be on the way. Then he'd have
to keep moving around, dodging cops for a couple of hours, until other
agents arrived.

He couldn't just walk up to a house and ask to use their phone because
he didn't know whom he could trust. Morrie Stein had said that after
being in town a day or two, you were overcome with the paranoid feeling
that eyes were on you wherever you went and that Big Brother was always
just an arm's reach away. Sam had attained that stage of paranoia in
only a few hours and was rapidly moving beyond it to a state of constant
tension and suspicion unlike anything he'd known since those jungle
battlegrounds two decades ago.

A pay phone. But not the one at the Shell station that he had used
earlier. A wanted man was foolish to return to a place he was known to
have frequented before.

From his walks around town, he remembered one or maybe two other pay
phones. He got up from the swing, slipped his hands in his jacket
pockets, hunched his shoulders against the chilling wind, and started
across the schoolyard toward the street beyond.

He wondered about the Foster girl to whom Shaddack and Watkins referred
on the computer link. Who was she? What had she seen? He suspected


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she was a key to understanding this - 153 conspiracy. Whatever she had
witnessed might explain what they meant by "conversion."

The walls appeared to be bleeding. Red ooze, as if seeping from the
Sheetrock, tracked down the pale yellow paint in many rivulets.

Standing in that second-floor room at Cove Lodge, Loman Watkins was
repelled by the carnage . . . but also strangely excited.

The male guest's body was sprawled near the disarranged bed, hideously
bitten and torn. In worse condition, the dead woman lay outside the
room, in the second-floor hall, a scarlet heap on the orange carpet.

The air reeked of blood, bile, feces, urine-a melange of odors with
which Loman was becoming increasingly familiar, as the victims of the
regressives turned up more frequently week by week and day by day. This
time, however, as never before, an alluring sweetness lay under the
acrid surface of the stench. He drew deep breaths, unsure why that
terrible redolence should have any appeal whatsoever. But he was unable
to deny-or resist-its attraction any more than a hound could resist the
fox's scent. Though he could not withstand the tempting fragrance, he
was frightened by his response to it, and the blood in his veins seemed
to grow colder as his pleasure in the biological stirring grew more
intense.

Barry Sholnick, the officer Loman had dispatched to Cove Lodge via
computer link to apprehend Samuel Booker, and who had found this death
and destruction instead of the Bureau agent, now stood in the corner by
the window, staring intently at the dead man. He had been at the motel
longer than anyone, almost half an hour, long enough to have begun to
regard the victims with the detachment that police had to cultivate, as
if dead and ravaged bodies were no more remarkable a part of the scene
than the furniture. Yet Sholnick could not shift his gaze from the
eviscerated corpse, the gore-spattered wreckage, and the blood-streaked
walls. He was clearly electrified by that horrendous detritus and the
violence of which it was a remembrance.

We hate what the regressives have become and what they do, Loman
thought, but in some sick way we're also envious of them, of their
ultimate freedom.

Something within him-and, he suspected, in all of the New People-cried
out to join the regressives. As at the Foster place, Loman felt the
urge to employ his newfound bodily control not to elevate himself, as
Shaddack had intended, but to devolve into a wild state. He yearned to
descend to a level of consciousness in which thoughts of the purpose and
meaning of life would not trouble him, in which intellectual challenge
would be nonexistent, in which he would be a creature whose existence
was defined almost entirely by sensation, in which every decision was
made solely on the basis of what would give him pleasure, a condition
untroubled by complex thought. Oh, God, to be freed from the burdens of
civilization and higher intelligence!

Sholnick made a low sound in the back of his throat.

Loman looked up from the dead man.

In Shoinick's brown eyes a wild light burned.

Am I as pale as he?         Loman wondered.         As sunken-eyed and strange?

For a moment Sholnick met the chiefs gaze, then looked away as if he had
been caught in a shameful act.


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Loman's heart was pounding.

Sholnick went to the window. He stared out at the lightless sea. His
hands were fisted at his sides.

Loman was trembling.

The smell, darkly sweet.           The smell of the hunt, the kill.

He turned away from the corpse and walked out of the room, into the
hallway, where the sight of the dead woman-half naked, gouged,
lacerated-was no relief. Bob Trott, one of several recent additions to
the force when it expanded to twelve men last week, stood over the
battered body. He was a big man, four inches taller and thirty pounds
heavier than Loman, with a face - 155 of hard planes and chiseled edges.
He looked down at the cadaver with a faint, unholy smile.

Flushed, his vision beginning to blur, his eyes smarting in the harsh
fluorescent glare, Loman spoke sharply "Trott, come with me." He set off
along the hall to the other room that had been broken into. With evident
reluctance, Trott finally followed him.

By the time Loman reached the shattered door of that unit, Paul
Amberlay, another of his officers, appeared at the head of the north
stairs, returning from the motel office where Loman had sent him to
check the register.

"The couple in room twenty-four were named Jenks, Sarah and Charles,"
Amberlay reported. He was twenty-five, lean and sinewy, intelligent.
Perhaps because the young officer's face was slightly pointed, with
deep-set eyes, he had always reminded Loman of a fox.

"They're from Portland."

"And in thirty-six here?"

"Tessa Lockland from San Diego."

Loman blinked.

"Lockland?"

Amberlay spelled it.

"When did she check in?"

"Just tonight."

"The minister's widow, Janice Capshaw," Loman said.

"Her maiden name was Lockland. I had to deal with her mother by phone,
and she was in San Diego. Persistent old broad. A million questions.
Had some trouble getting her to consent to cremation. She said her
other daughter was out of the country, somewhere really remote, couldn't
be reached quickly, but would come around within a month to empty the
house and settle Mrs.

Capshaw's affairs.         So this is her, I guess."

Loman led them into Tessa Lockland's room, two doors down from unit
forty, in which Booker was registered. Wind huffed at the open window.
The place was littered with broken furniture, torn bedding, and the
glass from a shattered TV set, but unmarked by blood. Earlier they had


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checked the room for a body and found none; the open window indicated
that the occupant fled before the regressives had managed to smash
through the door.

"So Booker's out there," Loman said, "and we've got to assume he saw the
regressives or heard the killing. He knows something's wrong here. He
doesn't understand it, but he knows enough . . . too much."

"You can bet he's busting his ass to get a call out to the damn Bureau,"
Trott said.

Loman agreed.

"And now we've also got this Lockland bitch, and she's got to be
thinking her sister never committed suicide, that she was killed by the
same things that killed the couple from Portland-"

"Most logical thing for her to do," Amberlay said, "is come straight to
us-to the police. She'll walk right into our arms. Maybe," Loman said,
unconvinced. He began to pick through the rubble.

"Help me find her purse. With them bashing down the door, she'd have
gone out the window without pausing to grab her purse."

Trott found it wedged between the bed and one of the nightstands.

Loman emptied the contents onto the mattress. He snatched up the
wallet, flipped through the plastic windows full of credit cards and
photographs, until he found her driver's license. According to the
license data, she was five-four, one hundred and four pounds, blond,
blue-eyed. Loman held up the ID so Trott and Amberlay could see the
photograph.

"She's a looker," Amberlay said.

"I'd like to get a bite of that," Trott said.

His officer's choice of words gave Loman a chill. He couldn't help
wondering whether Trott meant "bite" as a euphemism for sex or whether
he was expressing a very real subconscious desire to savage the woman as
the regressives had torn apart the couple from Portland.

"We know what she looks like," Loman said.

"That helps."

Trott's hard, sharp features were inadequate for the expression of
gentler emotions like affection and delight, but they perfectly conveyed
the animal hunger and urge to violence that seethed deep within him.

"You want us to bring her in?"

"Yes. She doesn't know anything, really, but on the other hand she
knows too much. She knows the couple down the hall were killed, and she
probably saw a regressive."

"Maybe the regressives followed her through the window and got her,"
Amberlay suggested.

"We might find her body somewhere outside, on the grounds of the lodge."

- 157 "Could be," Loman said.

"But if not, we have to find her and bring her in.                     You called Callan?"


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"Yeah," Amberlay said.

"We've got to get this place cleaned up," Loman said.

"We've got to keep a lid on until midnight, until everyone in town's
been put through the Change. Then, when Moonlight Cove's secure, we can
concentrate on finding the regressives and eliminating them."

Trott and Amberlay met Loman's eyes, then looked at each other. In the
glances they exchanged, Loman saw the dark knowledge that they all were
potential regressives, that they, too, felt the call toward that
unburdened, primitive state. It was an awareness of which none of them
dared speak, for to give it voice was to admit that Moonhawk was a
deeply flawed project and that they might all be damned.

Mike Peyser heard the dial tone and fumbled with the buttons, which
were too small and closely set for his long, tine-like fingers. Abruptly
he realized that he could not call Shaddack, dared not call Shaddack,
though they had known each other for more than twenty years, since their
days together at Stanford, could not call Shaddack even though it was
Shaddack who had made him what he was, because Shaddack would consider
him an outlaw now, a regressive, and Shaddack would have him restrained
in a laboratory and either treat him with all the tenderness that a
vivisectionist bestowed upon a white rat or destroy him because of the
threat he posed to the ongoing conversion of Moonlight Cove. Peyser
shrieked in frustration. He tore the telephone out of the wall and
threw it across the bedroom, where it hit the dresser mirror, shattering
the glass.

His sudden perception of Shaddack as a powerful enemy rather than a
friend and mentor was the last entirely clear-land rational thought that
Peyser had for a while. His fear was a trapdoor that opened under him,
casting him down into the darkness of the primeval mind that he had
unleashed for the pleasure of a night hunt. He moved back and forth
through the house, sometimes in a frenzy, sometimes in a sullen slouch,
not sure why he was alternately excited, depressed, or smoldering with
savage needs, driven more by feelings than intellect.

He relieved himself in a corner of the living room, sniffed his own
urine, then went into the kitchen in search of more food. Now and then
his mind cleared, and he tried to call his body back to its more
civilized form, but when his tissues would not respond to his will, he
cycled down into the darkness of animal thought again. Several times he
was clearheaded enough to appreciate the irony of having been reduced to
savagery by a process-the Change-meant to elevate him to superhuman
status, but that line of thought was too bleak to be endured, and a new
descent into the savage mind was almost welcome.

Repeatedly, both when in the grip of a primitive consciousness and when
the clouds lifted from his mind, he thought of the boy, Eddie Valdoski,
the boy, the tender boy, and he thrilled to the memory of blood, sweet
blood, fresh blood steaming in the cold night air.

Physically and mentally exhausted, Chrissie nevertheless was not able
to sleep. In the burlap tarps in the back of Mr. Eulane's truck, she
hung from the thin line of wakefulness, wanting nothing more than to let
go and fall into unconsciousness.

She felt incomplete, as though something had been left undone-and
suddenly she was crying. Burying her face in the fragrant and slightly
scratchy burlap, she bawled as she'd not done in years, with the abandon


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of a baby. She wept for her mother and father, perhaps lost forever,
not taken cleanly by death but by something foul, dirty, inhuman,
satanic. She wept for the adolescence that would have been hers-horses
and seaside pastures and books read on the beach-but that had been
shattered beyond repair. She wept, as well, over some loss she felt but
could not quite identify, though she suspected it was innocence or maybe
faith in the triumph of good over evil.

None of the fictional heroines she admired would have indulged in
uncontrolled weeping, and Chrissie was embarrassed by her torrent of
tears. But to weep was as human as to err, and perhaps she needed to
cry, in part, to prove to herself that no monstrous seed had been
planted in her of the sort that had germinated and spread tendrils
through her parents. Crying, she was still Chrissie. Crying was proof
that no one had stolen her soul.

She slept.

Sam had seen another pay phone at a Union 76 service station one
block north of Ocean. The station was out of business. The windows
were filmed with gray dust, and a hastily lettered FOR SALE sign hung in
one of them, as if the owner actually didn't care whether the place was
sold or not and had made the sign only because it was expected of him.
Crisp, dead leaves and dry pine needles from surrounding trees had blown
against the gasoline pumps and lay in snow-like drifts.

The phone booth was against the south wall of the building and visible
from the street. Sam stepped through the open door but did not pull it
shut, for fear of completing a circuit that would turn on the overhead
bulb and draw him to the attention of any cops who happened by.


The line was dead. He deposited a coin, hoping that would activate the
dial tone. The line was still dead.

He jiggled the hook from which the handset hung.                     His coin was returned.

He tried again but to no avail.

He believed that pay phones in or adjacent to a service station or
privately owned store were sometimes joint operations, the income shared
between the telephone company and the businessman who allowed the phone
to be installed. Perhaps they had turned off the phone when the Union
76 had closed up.

However, he suspected the police had used their access to the
telephone-company's computer to disable all coin-operated phones in
Moonlight Cove. The moment they had learned an undercover federal agent
was in town, they could have taken extreme measures to prevent him from
contacting the world outside.

Of course he might be overestimating their capabilities. He had to try
another phone before giving up hope of contacting the Bureau.

On his walk after dinner, he had passed a coin laundry half a block
north of Ocean Avenue and two blocks west of this Union 76. He was
pretty sure that when glancing through the plate glass window, he had
seen a telephone on the rear wall, at the end of a row of
industrial-size dryers with stainless-steel fronts.

He left the Union 76. As much as possible staying away from the
streetlamps-which illuminated side streets only in the first block north
and south of Ocean-using alleyways where he could, he slipped through


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the silent town, toward where he remembered having seen the laundry. He
wished the wind would die and leave some of the rapidly dissipating fog.

At an intersection one block north of Ocean and half a block from the
laundry, he almost walked into plain sight of a cop driving south toward
the center of town. The patrolman was half a block from the
intersection, coming slowly, surveying both sides of the street.
Fortunately he was looking the other way when Sam hurried into the
unavoidable fall of lamplight at the corner.

Sam scrambled backward and pressed into a deep entrance way on the side
of a three-story brick building that housed some of the town's
professionals A plaque in the recess, to the left of - 161 the door,
listed a dentist, two lawyers, a doctor, and a chiropractor. If the
patrol turned left at the corner and came past him, he'd probably be
spotted. But if it either went straight on toward Ocean or turned right
and headed west, he would not be seen.

Leaning against the locked door and as far back in the shadows as he
could go, waiting for the infuriatingly slow car to reach the
intersection, Sam had a moment for reflection and realized that even for
one-thirty in the morning, Moonlight Cove was peculiarly quiet and the
streets unusually deserted. Small towns had night owls as surely as did
cities; there should have been a pedestrian or two, a car now and then,
some signs of life other than police patrols.

The black-and-white turned right at the corner, heading west and away
from him.

Although the danger had passed, Sam remained in the unlighted entrance
way, mentally retracing his journey from Cove Lodge to the municipal
building, from there to the Union 76, and finally to his current
position. He could not recall passing a house where music was playing,
where a television blared, or where the laughter of late revelers
indicated a party in progress. He had seen no young couples sharing a
last kiss in parked cars. The few restaurants and taverns were
apparently closed, and the movie theater was out of business, and except
for his movements and those of the police, Moonlight Cove might have
been a ghost town. Its living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens might have
been peopled only by moldering corpses-or by robots that posed as people
during the day and were turned off at night to save energy when it was
not as essential to maintain the illusion of life.

Increasingly worried by the word "conversion" and its mysterious meaning
in the context of this thing they called the Moonhawk Project, he left
the entrance way, turned the corner, and ran along the brightly lighted
street to the laundry. He saw the phone as he was pushing open the
glass door.

He hurried halfway through the long room-dryers on the right, a double
row of washers back-to-back in the middle, some chairs at the end of the
washers, more chairs along the left wall with the candy and detergent
machines and the laundry-foldin2 counter-before he realized the place
was not deserted. A petite blonde in faded jeans and a blue pullover
sweater sat on one of the yellow plastic chairs. None of the washers or
dryers was running, and the woman did not seem to have a basket of
clothes with her.

He was so startled by her-a live person, a live civilian, in this
sepulchral night-that he stopped and blinked.

She was perched on the edge of the chair, visibly tense.                     Her eyes were


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wide. Her hands were clenched in her lap.                   She seemed to be holding her
breath.

Realizing that he had frightened her, Sam said, "Sorry."

She stared at him as if she were a rabbit facing down a fox. Aware that
he must look wild-eyed, even frantic, he added, "I'm not dangerous."

"They all say that."

"They do?"

"But I am."

Confused, he said, "You are what?"

"Dangerous."

"Really?"

She stood up.

"I'm a black belt."

For the first time in days, a genuine smile pulled at Sam's face. "Can
you kill with your hands?"

She stared at him for a moment, pale and shaking.                     When she spoke, her
defensive anger was excessive.

"Hey, don't laugh at me, asshole, or I'll bust you up so bad that when
you walk, you'll clink like a bag of broken glass."

At last, astonished by her vehemency, Sam began to assimilate the
observations he'd made on entering. No washers or dryers in operation.
No clothes basket. No box of detergent or bottle of fabric softener.

"What's wrong?"       he asked, suddenly suspicious.

"Nothing, if you keep your distance."

He wondered if she knew somehow that the local cops were eager to get
hold of him. But that seemed nuts. How could she know?

"What're you doing here if you don't have clothes to wash?                      What's it
your business? You own this dump?" she demanded.

"No.   And don't tell me you own it, either."

She glared at him.

He studied her, gradually absorbing how attractive she was.

She had eyes as piercingly blue as a June sky and skin as clear - 163 as
summer air, and she seemed radically out of place along this dark,
October coast, let alone in a grungy Laundromat at one-thirty in the
morning. When her beauty finally, fully registered with him, so did
other things about her, including the intensity of her fear, which was
revealed in her eyes and in the lines around them and in the set of her
mouth. it was fear far out of proportion to any threat he could pose.
If he had been a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound, tattooed biker with
a revolver in one hand and a ten-inch knife in the other, and if he had
burst into the laundry chanting paeans to Satan, the utterly bloodless
paleness of her face and the hard edge of terror in her eyes would have


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been understandable. But he was only Sam Booker, whose greatest
attribute as an agent was his guy-next-door ordinariness and an aura of
harmlessness.

Unsettled by her unsettledness, he said, "The phone."

"What?"

He pointed at the pay phone.

"Yes," she said, as if confirming it was indeed a phone.

"Just came in to make a call."

"Oh.

" Keeping one eye on her, he went to the phone, fed it his quarter, but
got no dial tone. He retrieved his coin, tried again. No luck.

"Damn!"    he said.

The blonde had edged toward the door. She halted, as though she thought
he might rush at her and drag her down if she attempted to leave the
Laundromat.

The Cove engendered in Sam a powerful paranoia. Increasingly over the
past few hours he had come to think of everyone in town as a potential
enemy. And suddenly he perceived that this woman's peculiar behavior
resulted from a state of mind precisely like his.

"Yes, of course-you're not from here, are you, from Moonlight Cove?"

"So?"

"Neither am I "So?"

"And you've seen something."

She stared at him.

He said, "Something's happened, you've seen something, and you're
scared, and I'll bet you've got damned good reason to be.

" She looked as if she'd sprint for the door.

"Wait," he said quickly.

"I'm with the FBI."         His voice cracked slightly.

"I really am."

Because he was a night person who had always preferred to sleep
during the day, Thomas Shaddack was in his teak-paneled study, dressed
in a gray sweat suit, working on an aspect of Moonhawk at a computer
terminal, when Evan, his night servant, rang through to tell him that
Loman Watkins was at the front door.

"Send him to the tower," Shaddack said.

"I'll join him shortly. " He seldom wore anything but sweat suits these
days. He had more than twenty in the closet-ten black, ten gray, and a
couple navy blue. They were more comfortable than other clothes, and by
limiting his choices, he saved time that otherwise would be wasted
coordinating each day's wardrobe, a task at which he was not skilled.



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Fashion was of no interest to him. Besides, he was gawky-big feet,
lanky legs, knobby knees, long arms, bony shoulders-and too thin to look
good even in finely tailored suits. Clothes either hung strangely on
him or emphasized his thinness to such a degree that he appeared to be
Death personified, an unfortunate image reinforced by his flour-white
skin, nearly black hair, sharp features, and yellowish eyes.

He even wore sweat suits to New Wave board meetings. If you were a
genius in your field, people expected you to be eccentric. And if your
personal fortune was in the hundreds of millions, they accepted all
eccentricities without comment.

His ultramodern, reinforced-concrete house at cliff's edge near the
north point of the cove was another expression of his - 165 calculated
nonconformity. The three stories were like three layers of a cake,
though each layer was of a different size than the others-the largest on
top, the smallest in the middle-and they were not concentric but
misaligned, creating a profile that in daylight tent the house the
appearance of an enormous piece of avant-garde sculpture. At night, its
myriad windows aglow, it looked less like sculpture than like the
star-traveling mothership of an invading alien force.

The tower was eccentricity piled on eccentricity, rising offcenter from
the third level, soaring an additional forty feet into the air. It was
not round but oval, not anything like a tower in which a princess might
pine for a crusade-bound prince or in which a king might have his
enemies imprisoned and tortured, but reminiscent of the conning tower of
a submarine. The large, glass-walled room at the top could be reached
by elevator or by stairs that spiraled around the inside of the tower
wall, circling the metal core in which the elevator was housed.

Shaddack kept Watkins waiting for ten minutes, just for the hell of it,
then chose to take the lift to meet him. The interior of the cab was
paneled with burnished brass, so although the mechanism was slow, he
seemed to be ascending inside a rifle cartridge.

He had added the tower to the architect's designs almost as an
afterthought, but it had become his favorite part of the huge house.
That high place offered endless vistas of calm (or wind-chopped),
sun-spangled (or night-shrouded) sea to the west. To the east and
south, he looked out and down on the whole town of Moonlight Cove; his
sense of superiority was comfortably reinforced by that lofty
perspective on the only other visible works of man. From that room,
only four months ago, he had seen the moonhawk for the third time in his
life, a sight that few men were privileged to see even once-which he
took to be a sign that he was destined to become the most influential
man ever to walk the earth.

The elevator stopped.          The doors opened.

When Shaddack entered the dimly lighted room that encircled the
elevator, Loman Watkins rose quickly from an armchair and respectfully
said, "Good evening, sir."

"Please be seated, chief," he said graciously, even affably, but with a
subtle note in his voice that reinforced their mutual understanding that
it was Shaddack, not Watkins, who decided how formal or casual the
meeting would be.

Shaddack was the only child of James Randolph Shaddack, a former
circuit-court judge in Phoenix, now deceased. The family had not been
wealthy, though solidly upper middle-class, and that position on the


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economic ladder, combined with the prestige of a judgeship, gave James
considerable stature in his community. And power. Throughout his
childhood and adolescence, Tom had been fascinated by how his father, a
political activist as well as a judge, had used that power not only to
acquire material benefits but to control others. The control-the
exercise of power for power's sake-was what had most appealed to James,
and that was what had deeply excited his son, too, from an early age.

Now Tom Shaddack held power over Loman Watkins and Moonlight Cove by
reason of his wealth, because he was the primary employer in town,
because he gripped the reins of the political system, and because of the
Moonhawk Project, named after the thrice-received vision. But his
ability to manipulate them was more extensive than anything old James
had enjoyed as a judge and canny politico. He possessed the power of
life and death over them-literally. If an hour from now he decided they
all must die, they would be dead before midnight. Furthermore he could
condemn them to the grave with no more chance of being punished than a
god risked when raining fire on his creations.

The only lights in the tower room were concealed in a recess under the
immense windows, which extended from the ceiling to within ten inches of
the floor. The hidden lamps ringed the chamber, subtly illuminating the
plush carpet but casting no glare on the huge panes. Nevertheless, if
the night had been clear, Shaddack would have flicked the switch next to
the elevator button, plunging the room into near darkness, so his
ghostly reflection and those of the starkly modern furnishings would not
fall on the glass between him and his view of the world over which he
held dominion. He left the lights on, however, because some milky fog
still churned past glass walls, and little could be seen now that the
horned moon had found the horizon.

Barefoot, Shaddack crossed the charcoal-gray carpet. He set 7 - 167
settled into a second armchair, facing Loman Watkins across a low,
white-marble cocktail table.

The policeman was forty-four, less than three years older than Shaddack,
but he was Shaddack's complete physical opposite five-ten, a hundred and
eighty pounds, large-boned, broad in the shoulders and chest,
thick-necked. His face was broad, too, as open and guileless as
Shaddack's was closed and cunning. His blue eyes met Shaddack's
yellow-brown gaze, held it only for a moment, then lowered to stare at
his strong hands, which were clasped so rigidly in his lap that the
sharp knuckles seemed in danger of piercing the taut skin. His darkly
tanned scalp showed through brush-cut brown hair.

Watkins's obvious subservience pleased Shaddack, but he was even more
gratified by the chief's fear, which was evident in the tremors that the
man was struggling-with some success-to repress and in the haunted
expression that deepened the color of his eyes. Because of the Moonhawk
Project, because of what had been done to him, Loman Watkins was in many
ways superior to most men, but he was also now and forever in Shaddack's
thrall as surely as a laboratory mouse, clamped down and attached to
electrodes, was at the mercy of the scientist who conducted experiments
on him. In a manner of speaking, Shaddack was Watkins's maker, and he
possessed, in Watkins's eyes, the position and power of a god.

Leaning back in his chair, folding his pale, long-fingered hands on his
chest, Shaddack felt his manhood swelling, hardening. He was not
aroused by Loman Watkins, because he had no tendency whatsoever toward
homosexuality; he was aroused not by anything in Watkins's physical
appearance but by the awareness of the tremendous authority he wielded
over the man. Power aroused Shaddack more fully and easily than sexual


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stimuli. Even as an adolescent, when he saw pictures of naked women in
erotic magazines, he was turned on not by the sight of bared breasts,
not by the curve of a female bottom or the elegant line of long legs,
but by the thought of dominating such women, totally controlling them,
holding their very lives in his hands. If a woman looked at him with
undisguised fear, he found her infinitely more appealing than if she
regarded him with desire. And since he reacted more strongly to terror
than to lust, his arousal was not dependent upon the sex or age or
physical attractiveness of the person who trembled in his presence.

Enjoying the policeman's submissiveness, Shaddack said, "You've got
Booker?"

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

"He wasn't at Cove Lodge when Sholnick got there."

"He's got to be found."

"We'll find him."

"And converted. Not just to prevent him from telling anyone what he's
seen . . . but to give us one of our own inside the Bureau. That'd be
a coup. His being here could turn out to be an incredible plus for the
project."

"Well, whether Booker's a plus or not, there's worse than him.
Regressives attacked some of the guests at the lodge. Quinn himself was
either carried off, killed, and left where we haven't found him yet . .
. or he was one of the regressives himself and is off now . . . doing
whatever they do after a kill, maybe baying at the goddamn moon."

With growing dismay and agitation, Shaddack listened to the report.

Perched on the edge of his chair, Watkins finished, blinked, and said,
"These regressives scare the hell out of me."

"They're disturbing," Shaddack agreed.

On the night of September fourth, they had cornered a regressive, Jordan
Coombs, in the movie theater on main street. Coombs had been a
maintenance man at New Wave. That night, however, he had been more ape
than man, although actually neither, but something so strange and savage
that no single word could describe him. The term "regressive" was only
adequate, Shaddack had discovered, if you never came face to face with
one of the beasts. Because once you'd seen one close up, "regressive"
insufficiently conveyed the horror of the thing, and in fact all words
failed. Their attempt to take Coombs alive had failed, too, for he had
proved too aggressive and powerful to be subdued; to save themselves,
they'd had to blow his head off.

Now Watkins said, "They're more than disturbing.                     Much more than just
that. They're .. . . psychotic."

"I know they're psychotic," Shaddack said impatiently.

"I've named their condition myself metamorphic-related psychosis."

- 169 "They enjoy killing."

Thomas Shaddack frowned.           He had not foreseen the problem of the


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regressives, and he refused to believe that they constituted more than a
minor anomaly in the otherwise beneficial conversion of the people of
Moonlight Cove.

"Yes, all right, they enjoy killing, and in their regressed state
they're designed for it, but we've only a few of them to identify and
eliminate. Statistically, they're an insignificant percentage of those
we've put through the Change."

"Maybe not so insignificant," Watkins said hesitantly, unable to meet
Shaddack's eyes, a reluctant bearer of bad tidings.

"Judging by all the bloody wreckage lately, I'd guess that among those
nineteen hundred converted as of this morning, there were fifty or sixty
of these regressives out there."

"Ridiculous!"

To admit regressives existed in large numbers, Shaddack would have to
consider the possibility that his research was flawed, that he had
rushed his discoveries out of the laboratory and into the field with too
little consideration of the potential for disaster, and that his
enthusiastic application of the Moonhawk Project's revolutionary
discoveries to the people of Moonlight Cove was a tragic mistake. He
could admit nothing of the sort.

He had yearned all his life for the nth degree of power that was now
nearly within his reach, and he was psychologically incapable of
retreating from the course he had set. Since puberty he had denied
himself certain pleasures because, had he acted upon those needs, he
would have been hunted down by the law and made to pay a heavy price.
All those years of denial had created a tremendous internal pressure
that he desperately needed to relieve. He had sublimated his antisocial
desires in his work, focused his energies into socially acceptable
endeavors-which had, ironically, resulted in discoveries that would make
him immune to authority and therefore free to indulge his longsuppressed
urges without fear of censure or punishment.

Besides, not just psychologically but also in practical terms, he had
gone too far to turn back. He had brought something revolutionary into
the world. Because of him, nineteen hundred New People walked the
earth, as different from other men and women as Cro-Magnons had been
different from their more primitive Neanderthal ancestors. He did not
have the ability to undo what he had done any more than other scientists
and technicians could uninvent the wheel or atomic bomb.

Watkins shook his head.

"I'm sorry . . . but I don't think it's ridiculous ;, at all.                           Fifty
or sixty regressives. Or more. Maybe a lot more.

"You'll need proof to convince me of that. You'll have to name them for
me. Are you any closer to identifying even one of them-other than
Quinn?"

"Alex and Sharon Foster, I think.               And maybe even your own man, Tucker."

"Impossible."

Watkins described what he had found at the Foster place-and the cries he
had heard in the distant woods.

Reluctantly Shaddack considered the possibility that Tucker was one of


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those degenerates. He was disturbed by the likelihood that his control
among his inner circle was not as absolute as he had thought. If he
could not be sure of those men closest to him, how could he be certain
of his ability to control the masses?

"Maybe the Fosters are regressives, though I doubt it's true of Tucker.
But even if Tucker's one of them, that means you've found four. Not
fifty or sixty. Just four. Whore all these others you imagine are out
there?"

Loman Watkins stared at the fog, which pressed in ever-changing patterns
against the glass walls of the tower room.

"Sir, I'm afraid it isn't easy. I mean . . . think about it...If the
state or federal authorities learned what you've done, if they could
understand what you've done and really believe it, and if then they
wanted to prevent us from bringing the Change to everyone beyond
Moonlight Cove, they'd have one hell of a time stopping us, wouldn't
they? After all, those of us who've been converted . . . we walk
undetected among ordinary people. We seem like them, no different,
unchanged."

"So?"

"Well . . . that's the same problem we have with the regressives.
They're New People like us, but the thing that makes them different from
us, the rottenness in them, is impossible to see; they're as
indistinguishable from us as we are from the unchanged population of Old
People."

Shaddack's iron erection had softened. Impatient with Watkins's
negativism, he rose from his armchair and moved to the - 171 nearest of
the big windows. Standing with his hands fisted in the pockets of his
sweat-suit jacket, he stared at the vague reflection of his own long,
lupine face, which was ghostlike in its transparency. He met his own
gaze, as well, then quickly looked through the reflection of his eye
sockets and past the glass into the darkness beyond, where vagrant sea
breezes worked the loom of night to bring forth a fragile fabric of fog.
He kept his back to Watkins, for he did not want the man to see that he
was concerned, and he avoided the glass-caught image of his own eyes
because he did not want to admit to himself that his concern might be
marbled with veins of fear.

He insisted on moving to the chairs, so they could not be seen as
easily from the street. Tessa was leery about sitting beside him. He
said that he was operating undercover and therefore carried no Bureau
ID, but he showed her everything else in his wallet driver's license,
credit cards, library card, video rental card, photos of his son and his
late wife, a coupon for a free chocolate-chip cookie at any Mrs. Fields
store, a picture of Goldie Hawn torn from a magazine. Would a homicidal
maniac carry a cookie coupon? In a while, as he took her back through
her story of the massacre at Cove Lodge and picked relentlessly at the
details, making sure that she told him everything and that he understood
all of it, she began to trust him. If he was only pretending to be an
agent, his pretense would not have been so elaborate or sustained.

"You didn't actually see anybody murdered?"

"They were killed," she insisted.

"You wouldn't have any doubt if you'd heard their screams. I've stood
in a mob of human monsters in Northern Ireland and seen them beat men to


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death. I was filming an industrial in a steel mill once, when there was
a spill of molten metal that splattered all over workers' bodies, their
faces. I've been with Miskito Indians in the Central American jungles
when they were hit with antipersonnel bombs-millions of little bits of
sharp steel, bodies pierced by a thousand needles-and I've heard their
screams. I know what death sounds like. And this was the worst I've
ever heard."

He stared at her for a long time.               Then he said, "You look deceptively
"Cute?"

"Yes.

"Therefore innocent?         Therefore naive?"

"Yes.My curse.

"And an advantage sometimes?"

"Sometimes," she acknowledged.

"Listen, you know something, so tell me What's going on in this town?"

"Something's happening to the people here."

"What?

"I don't know. They're not interested in movies, for one thing. The
theater closed. And they're not interested in luxury goods, fine gifts,
that sort of thing, because those stores have all closed too. They no
longer get a kick from champagne . . .

" He smiled thinly. "The barrooms are all going out of business.                        The
only thing they seem to be interested in is food. And killing."

Still standing at a tower-room window, Tom Shaddack said, "All right,
Loman, here's what we'll do. Everyone at New Wave has been converted,
so I'll assign a hundred of them to you, to augment the police force.
You can use them to help in your investigation in any way you see
fit-starting now. With that many at your command, you'll catch one of
the regressives in - 173 the act, surely . . . and you'll be more
likely to find this man Booker too - " The New People did not require
sleep. The additional deputies could be brought into the field
immediately.

Shaddack said, "They can patrol the streets on foot and in their
cars-quietly, without drawing attention. And with that assistance,
you'll grab at least one of the regressives, maybe all of them. If we
can catch one in a devolved state, if I've a chance to examine one of
them, I might be able to develop a test-physical or psychological-with
which we can screen the New People for degenerates."

"I don't feel adequate to deal with this."

"It's a police matter."

"No, it isn't, really."

"It's no different than if you were tracking down an ordinary killer,"
Shaddack said irritably.

"You'll apply the same techniques.

"But "What is it?"


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"Regressives could be among the men you assign me."

"There won't be any.            .

"But .       .   .   how can you be sure?"

"I told you there won't be," Shaddack said sharply, still facing the
window, the fog, the night.

They were both silent a moment.

Then Shaddack said, "You've got to put everything into finding these
damned deviants. Everything, you hear me? I want at least one of them
to examine by the time we've taken all of Moonlight Cove through the
Change."

" I thought "Yes?           Well, I thought "Come on, come on.                You thought
what?"

"Well . . . just that maybe you'd suspend the conversions until we
understand what's happening here. Hell, no!" Shaddack turned from the
window and glared at the police chief, who flinched satisfactorily.

"These regressives are a minor problem, very minor. What the shit do you
know about it? You're not the one who designed a new race, a new world.
I am. The dream was mine, the vision mine. I had the brains and nerve
to make the dream real. And I know this is an anomaly indicative of
nothing. So the Change will take place according to schedule."

Watkins looked down at his white-knuckled hands.

As he spoke, Shaddack paced barefoot along the curved glass wall, then
back again.

"We now have more than enough doses to deal with the remaining
townspeople. In fact, we've initiated a new round of conversions this
evening. Hundreds will be brought into the fold by dawn, the rest by
midnight. Until everyone in town is with us, there's a chance we'll be
found out, a risk of someone carrying a warning to the outside world.
Now that we've overcome the problems with the production of the
biochips, we've got to take Moonlight Cove quickly, so we can proceed
with the confidence that comes from having a secure home base.
Understand?"

Watkins nodded.

"Understand?"          Shaddack repeated.

"Yes.      Yes, sir."

Shaddack returned to his chair and sat down.

"Now what's this other thing you called me about earlier, this Vaidoski
business?

"

"Eddie Valdoski, eight years old," Watkins said, looking at his hands,
which he was now virtually wringing, as if trying to squeeze something
from them in the way he might have squeezed water from a rag.

"He was found dead a few minutes past eight.



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in a ditch along the country road.               He'd been .       .   .    tortured .    ..

bitten, gutted.         "You think one of the regressives did it?"

"Definitely.      Who found the body?"

"Eddie's folks. His dad. The boy had been playing in the backyard, and
then he . . . disappeared near sunset. They started searching,
couldn't find him, got scared, called us, continued to search while we
were on our way . . . and found the body just before my men got
there."

"Evidently the Valdoskis aren't converted?"

"They weren't.       But they are now."

Shaddack sighed.

"There won't be any trouble about the boy if they've been brought into
the fold.

" The police chief raised his head and found the courage to look
directly at Shaddack again.

"But the boy's still dead."            His voice was rough.

Shaddack said, "That's a tragedy, of course. This regressive element
among the New People could not have been foreseen. But no great
advancement in human history has been without its victims."

"He was a fine boy," the policeman said.

"You knew him?"

Watkins blinked.

"I went to high school with his father, George Valdoski.                       I was Eddie's
godfather."

Considering his words carefully, Shaddack said, "It's a terrible thing.
And we'll find the regressive who did it. We'll find all of them and
eliminate them. Meanwhile, we can take some comfort in the fact that
Eddie died in a great cause."

Watkins regarded Shaddack with unconcealed astonishment.

"Great cause?       What did Eddie know of a great cause?                  He was eight years
old."

"Nevertheless," Shaddack said, hardening his voice, "Eddie was caught up
in an unexpected side effect of the conversion of Moonlight Cove, which
makes him part of this wonderful, historical event." He knew that
Watkins had been a patriot, absurdly proud of his flag and country, and
he supposed that some of that sentiment still reposed in the man, even
subsequent to conversion, so he said "Listen to me, Loman. During the
Revolutionary War, when the colonists were fighting for independence,
some innocent bystanders died, women and children, not just combatants,
and those people did not die in vain. They were martyrs every bit as
much as the soldiers who perished in the field. It's the same in any
revolution. The important thing is that justice prevail and that those
who die can be said to have given their lives for a noble purpose."

Watkins looked away from him.



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Rising from his armchair again, Shaddack rounded the low cocktail table
to stand beside the policeman. Looking down at Watkins's bowed head, he
put one hand on the man's shoulder.

Watkins cringed from the touch.

Shaddack did not move his hand, and he spoke with the fervor of an
evangelist. He was a cool evangelist, however, whose message did not
involve the hot passion of religious conviction but the icy power of
logic, reason.

"You're one of the New People now, and that does not just mean that
you're stronger and quicker than ordinary men, and it doesn't just mean
you're virtually invulnerable to disease and have a greater power to
mend your injuries than anything any faith healer ever dreamed of. It
also means you're clearer of mind, more rational than the Old People-so
if you consider Eddie's death carefully and in the context of the
miracle we're working here, you'll see that the price he paid was not
too great. Don't deal with this situation emotionally, Loman; that's
definitely not the way of New People. We're making a world that'll be
more efficient, more ordered, and infinitely more stable precisely
because men and women will have the power to control their emotions, to
view every problem and event with the analytical coolness of a computer.
Look at Eddie Vaidoski's death as but another datum in the great flow of
data that is the birth of the New People. You've got the power in you
now to transcend human emotional limitations, and when you do transcend
them, you'll know true peace and happiness for the first time in your
life."

After a while Loman Watkins raised his head.                   He turned to look up at
Shaddack.

"Will this really lead to peace?"

"Yes.When there's no one left unconverted, will there be brotherhood at
last?"

"Yes.Tranquillity?

"Eternal."

The Talbot house on Conquistador was a three-story redwood with lots
of big windows. The property was sloped, and steep stone steps led up
from the sidewalk to a shallow porch. No - 177 streetlamps lit that
block, and there were no walkway or landscape lights at Talbot's, for
which Sam was grateful.

Tessa Lockland stood close to him on the porch as he pressed the buzzer,
just as she had stayed close all the way from the laundry. Above the
noisy rustle of the wind in the trees, he could hear the doorbell ring
inside.

Looking back toward Conquistador, Tessa said, "Sometimes it seems more
like a morgue than a town, peopled by the dead, but then . . . Then?"

". . . in spite of the silence and the stillness, you can feel the
energy of the place, tremendous pent-up energy, as if there's a huge
hidden machine just beneath the streets, beneath the ground . . . and
as if the houses are filled with machinery, too, all of it powered up
and straining at cogs and gears, just waiting for someone to engage a
clutch and set it all in motion."

That was exactly Moonlight Cove, but Sam had not been able to put the


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feeling of the place into words. He rang the bell again and said, "I
thought filmmakers were required to be borderline illiterates.

"

"Most Hollywood filmmakers are, but I'm an outcast documentarian, so I'm
permitted to think-as long as I don't do too much of it."

"Who's there?" said a tinny voice, startling Sam.                         It came from an
intercom speaker that he'd not noticed.

"Who's there, please?

" Sam leaned close to the intercom.

"Mr.      Talbot?      Harold Talbot?

"

"Yes.      Whore you?"

"Sam Booker," he said quietly, so his voice would not carry past the
perimeter of Talbot's porch.

"Sorry to wake you, but I've come in response to your letter of October
eighth.

Talbot was silent. Then the intercom clicked, and he said, "I'm on the
third floor. I'll need time to get down there. Meanwhile I'll send
Moose. Please give him your ID so he can bring it to me. I have no
Bureau ID," Sam whispered.

"I'm undercover here.             Driver's license?"          Talbot asked.

"Yes.


"That's enough."           He clicked off.

"Moose?"        Tessa asked.

"Damned if I know," Sam said.

They waited almost a minute, feeling vulnerable on the exposed porch,
and they were both startled again when a dog pushed out through a pet
door they had not seen, brushing between their legs. For an instant Sam
didn't realize what it was, and he stumbled backward in surprise, nearly
losing his balance.

Stooping to pet the dog, Tessa whispered, "Moose?"

A flicker of light had come through the small swinging door with the
dog; but that was gone now that the door was closed. The dog was black
and hardly visible in the night.

Squatting beside it, letting it lick his hand, Sam said, "I'm supposed
to give my ID to you?"

The dog wuffed softly, as if answering in the affirmative.

"You'll eat it," Sam said.

Tessa said, "He won't."

"How do you know?"


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"He's a good dog."

"I don't trust him."

"I guess that's your job."

"Huh?"

"Not to trust anyone."

"And my nature."

"Trust him," she insisted.

He offered his wallet. The dog plucked it from Sam's hand, held it in
his teeth, and went back into the house through the pet door.

They stood on the dark porch for another few minutes, while Sam tried to
stifle his yawns. It was after two in the morning, and he was
considering adding a fifth item to his list of reasons for living good
Mexican food, Guinness Stout, Goldie Haw n, fear of death, and sleep.
Blissful sleep. Then he heard the clack and rattle of locks being
laboriously disengaged, and the door finally opened inward on a dimly
lighted hallway.

Harry Talbot waited in his motorized wheelchair, dressed in blue pajamas
and a green robe. His head was tilted slightly to the left in a
permanently quizzical angle that was part of his Vietnam legacy. He was
a handsome man, though his face was prematurely aged, too deeply lined
for that of a forty-year-old.

- 179 His thick hair was half white, and his eyes were ancient. Sam
could see that Talbot had once been a strapping young man, though he was
now soft from years of paralysis. One hand lay in his lap, the palm up,
fingers half curled, useless. He was a living monument to what might
have been, to hopes destroyed, to dreams incinerated, a grim remembrance
of war pressed between the pages of time.

As Tessa and Sam entered and closed the door behind them, Harry Talbot
extended his good hand and said, "God, am I glad to see you!" His smile
transformed him astonishingly. It was the bright, broad, warm, and
genuine smile of a man who believed he was perched in the lap of the
gods, with too many blessings to count.

Moose returned Sam's wallet, uneaten.

After leaving Shaddack's house on the north point, but before
returning to headquarters to coordinate the assignments of the hundred
men who were being sent to him from New Wave, Loman Watkins stopped at
his home on Iceberry Way, on the north side of town. It was a modest,
two-story, three-bedroom, Monterey-style house, white with pale-blue
trim, nestled among conifers.

He stood for a moment in the driveway beside his patrol car, studying
the place. He had loved it as if it were a castle, but he could not
find that love in himself now. He remembered much happiness related to
the house, to his family, but he could not feel the memory of that
happiness. A lot of laughter had graced life in that dwelling, but now
the laughter had faded until recollection of it was too faint even to
induce a smile in remembrance. Besides, these days, his smiles were all
counterfeit, with no humor behind them.



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The odd thing was that laughter and joy had been a part of his life as
late as this past August. It had all seeped away only within the past
couple of months, after the Change. Yet it seemed an ancient memory.

Funny.

Actually, not so funny at all.

When he went inside he found the first floor dark and silent.                       A vague,
stale odor lingered in the deserted rooms.

He climbed the stairs. In the unlighted, second-floor hallway he saw a
soft glow along the bottom of the closed door to Denny's bedroom. He
went in and found the boy sitting at his desk, in front of the computer.
The PC had an oversize screen, and currently that was the only light in
the room.

Denny did not look up from the terminal.

The boy was eighteen years old, no longer a child; therefore, he had
been converted with his mother, shortly after Loman himself had been put
through the Change. He was two inches taller than his dad and better
looking. He'd always done well in school, and on IQ tests he'd scored
so high it spooked Loman a bit to think his kid was that smart. He had
always been proud of Denny. Now, at his son's side, staring down at
him, Loman tried to resurrect that pride but could not find it. Denny
had not fallen from favor; he had done nothing to earn his father's
disapproval. But pride, like so many other emotions, seemed an
encumbrance to the higher consciousness of the New People and interfered
with their more efficient thought patterns.

Even before the Change, Denny had been a computer fanatic, one of those
kids who called themselves hackers, to whom computers were not only
tools, not only fun and games, but a way of life. After the conversion,
his intelligence and high-tech experience were put to use by New Wave.
He was provided with a more powerful home terminal and a modern link to
the supercomputer at New Wave headquarters-a behemoth that, according to
Denny's description, incorporated four thousand miles of wiring and
thirty-three thousand high-speed processing units which, for reasons
Loman didn't understand, they called Sun, though perhaps that was its
name because all research at New Wave made heavy use of the machine and
therefore revolved around it. As Loman stood beside his son, voluminous
data flickered - 181 across the terminal screen. Words, numbers,
graphs, and charts appeared and disappeared at such speed that only one
of the New People, with somewhat heightened senses and powerfully
heightened concentration, could extract meaning from them.

in fact Loman could not read them because he had not undergone the
training that Denny had received from New Wave. Besides, he'd had
neither the time nor the need to learn to fully focus his new powers of
concentration.

But Denny absorbed the rushing waves of data, staring blankly at the
screen, no frown lines in his brow, his face completely relaxed. Since
being converted, the boy was as much a solidstate electronic entity as
he was flesh and blood, and that new part of him related to the computer
with an intimacy that exceeded any man-machine relationship any of the
Old People had ever known.

Loman knew that his son was learning about the Moonhawk Project.
Ultimately he would join the task group at New Wave that was endlessly



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refining the software and hardware related to the project, working to
make each generation of New People superior to-and more efficient
than-the one before it.

An endless river of data washed across the screen.

Denny stared unblinkingly for so long that tears would have formed in
his eyes if he had been one of the Old People.

The light of the ever-moving data danced on the walls and sent a
continuous blur of shadows chasing around the room.

Loman put one hand on the boy's shoulder.

Denny did not look up or in any way respond. His lips began to move, as
if he were talking, but he made no sound. He was speaking to himself,
oblivious of his father.

In a garrulous, evangelistic moment, Thomas Shaddack had spoken of one
day developing a link that would connect a computer directly to a
surgically implanted socket in the base of the human spine, thereby
merging real and artificial intelligence. Loman had not understood why
such a thing was either wise or desirable, and Shaddack had said, "The
New People are a bridge between man and machine, Loman. But one day our
species will entirely cross that bridge, become one with the machines,
because only then will mankind be completely efficient, completely in
control."

"Denny," Loman said softly.


The boy did not respond.

At last Loman left the room.

Across the hall and at the end of it was the master bedroom. Grace was
lying on the bed, in the dark.

Of course, since the Change, she could never be entirely blinded by a
mere insufficiency of light, for her eyesight had improved. Even in
this lightless room, she could see-as Loman could-the shapes of the
furniture and some textures, though few details. For them, the night
world was no longer black but darkish gray.

He sat on the edge of the mattress.

"Hello."

She said nothing.

He put one hand on her head and stroked her long auburn hair. He
touched her face and found her cheeks wet with tears, a detail that even
his improved eyes could not discern.

Crying. She was crying, and that jolted him because he had never seen
one of the New People cry.

His heartbeat accelerated, and a brief but wonderful thrill of hope
throbbed through him. Perhaps the deadening of emotions was a transient
condition.

"What is it?"       he asked.

"What're you crying about?"


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"I'm afraid."

The pulse of hope swiftly faded. Fear had brought her to tears, fear
and the desolation associated with it, and he already knew those
feelings were a part of this brave new world, those and no other.

"Afraid of what?"

"I can't sleep," Grace said.

"But you don't need to sleep."

"Don't I?

"None of us needs to sleep any more."

Prior to the Change, men and women had needed to sleep because the human
body, being strictly a biological mechanism, was terribly inefficient.
Downtime was required to rest and repair the damage of the day, to deal
with the toxic substances absorbed from the external world and the
toxics created internally. But in the New People, every bodily process
and function was superbly regulated. Nature's work had been highly
refined. Every organ, every system, every cell operated at a far higher
efficiency, producing less waste, casting off waste faster than - 183
before, cleansing and rejuvenating itself every hour of the day. Cirace
knew that as well as he did.

"I long for sleep," she said.

"All you're feeling is the pull of habit."

'Too many hours in the day now."

"We'll fill up the time.           The new world will be a busy one."

"What're we going to do in this new world when it comes?"

"Shaddack will tell us."

"Meanwhile .      .   ."

"Patience," he said.

"I'm afraid."

"Patience.     I yearn for sleep, hunger for it."

"We don't need to sleep," he said, exhibiting the patience that he had
encouraged in her.

"We don't need sleep," she said cryptically, "but we need to sleep."

They were both silent a while.

Then she took his hand in hers, and moved it to her breasts.                       She was
nude.

He tried to pull away from her, for he was afraid of what might happen,
of what had happened before, since the Change, when they had made love.
No. Not love. They didn't make love any more. They had sex. There
was no feeling beyond physical sensation, no tenderness or affection.
They thrust hard and fast at each other, pushed and pulled, flexed and
writhed against each other, striving to maximize the excitation of nerve



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endings. Neither of them cared for or about the other, only about
himself, his own satisfaction. Now that their emotional life was no
longer rich, they tried to compensate for that loss with pleasures of
the senses, primarily food and sex. However, without the emotional
factor, every experience was . . . hollow, and they tried to fill
that emptiness by overindulgence A simple meal became a feast;
indulgence in gluttony. And sex a feast became an unrestrained ind
degenerated into a frenzied, bestial coupling.

Grace pulled him onto the bed.

He did not want to go.          He could not refuse.           Literally could not
refuse.

Breathing hard, shuddering with excitement, she tore at his clothes and
mounted him. She was making strange wordless sounds.

Loman's excitement matched hers and swelled, and he thrust at her, into
her, into, losing all sense of time and place, existing only to stoke
the fire in his loins, stoke it relentlessly until it was an unbearable
heat, heat, friction and heat, wet and hot, heat, stoking the heat to a
flashpoint at which his entire body would be consumed in the flames. He
shifted positions, pinning her down, hammering himself into her, into
her, into, into, pulling her against him so roughly that he must be
bruising her, but he didn't care. She reached back and clawed at him,
her fingernails digging into his arm, drawing blood, and he tore at her,
too, because the blood was exciting, the smell of the blood, the sweet
smell, so exciting, blood, and it didn't matter that they wounded each
other, for these were superficial wounds and would heal within seconds,
because they were New People; their bodies were efficient; blood flowed
briefly, and then the wounds closed, and they clawed again, again. What
he really wanted-what they both wanted-was to let go, indulge the wild
spirit within, cast off all the inhibitions of civilization, including
the inhibition of higher human form, go wild, go savage, regress,
surrender, because then sex would have an even greater thrill, a purer
thrill; surrender, and the emptiness would be filled; they would be
fulfilled, and when the sex was done the could hunt y together, hunt and
kill, swift and silent, sleek and swift, bite and tear, bite deep and
hard, hunt and kill, sperm and then blood, sweet fragrant blood. . . .

For a while Loman was disoriented.

When a sense of time and place returned to him, he first glanced at the
door, realizing that it was ajar. Denny could have seen them if he'd
come down the hall-surely had heard them but Loman couldn't make himself
care whether they had been seen or heard. Shame and modesty were two
more casualties of the Change.

As he became fully oriented to the world around him, fear slipped into
his heart, and he quickly touched himself-his face, arms, chest, legs-to
be sure that he was in no way less than he ought to be. In the midst of
sex, the wildness in him grew, and sometimes he thought that approaching
orgasm he did change, - 185 regress, if only slightly. But upon
regaining awareness, he never found evidence of backsliding.

He was, however, sticky with blood.

He switched on the bedside lamp.

"Turn it off," Grace said at once.

But he was not satisfied with even his enhanced night vision.                       He wanted



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to look at her closely to determine if she was in any way .                       .   .
different.

She had not regressed. Or, if she had regressed, she had already
returned to the higher form. Her body was smeared with blood, and a few
welts showed on her flesh, where he had gouged her and where she had not
finished healing.

He turned the light off and sat on the edge of the bed.

Because the recuperative powers of their bodies had been vastly improved
by the Change, superficial cuts and scrapes healed in only minutes; you
could actually watch your flesh knit its wounds. They were impervious
to disease now, their immune systems too aggressive for the most
infectious virus or bacterium to survive long enough to replicate.
Shaddack believed that their life spans would prove to be of great
duration, as well, perhaps hundreds of years.

They could be killed, of course, but only by a wound that tore and
stopped the heart or shattered the brain or destroyed their lungs and
prevented a flow of oxygen to the blood. If a vein or artery was
severed, the blood supply was drastically reduced to that vessel for the
few minutes required to heal it. If a vital organ other than the heart
or lungs or brain was damaged, the body could limp along for hours while
accelerated repairs were under way. They were not yet as fully reliable
as machines, for machines could not die; with the right spare parts, a
machine could be rebuilt even from rubble and could work again; but they
were closer to that degree of corporeal endurance than anyone outside
Moonlight Cove would have believed.

To live for hundreds of years .              .   .

Sometimes Loman brooded about that.

To live for hundreds of years, knowing only fear and physical sensation
...

He rose from the bed, went into the adjacent bathroom, and took a quick
shower to sluice off the blood.

He could not meet his eyes in the bathroom mirror.


In the bedroom again, without turning on a light, he pulled on a fresh
uniform that he took from his closet.

Grace was still lying on the bed.

She said, "I wish I could sleep."

He sensed that she was still crying silently.

When he left the room, he closed the door behind him.

They gathered in the kitchen, which Tessa liked because some of her
happiest memories of childhood and adolescence involved family
conferences and impromptu chats in the kitchen of their house in San
Diego. The kitchen was the heart of a home and in a way the heart of a
family. Somehow the worst problems became insignificant when you
discussed them in a warm kitchen redolent of coffee and hot cocoa,
nibbling on home-baked cake or pastry. In a kitchen she felt secure.

Harry Talbot's kitchen was large, for it had been remodeled to suit a



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man in a wheelchair, with lots of clearance around the central cooking
island, which was built low-as were the counters along the walls-to be
accessible from a sitting position. Otherwise it was a kitchen like
many others cabinets painted a pleasant creamy shade; pale yellow
ceramic tile; a quietly purring refrigerator. The Levolor blinds at the
windows were electrically operated by a button on one of the counters,
and Harry put them down.

After trying the phone and discovering that the                   line was dead, that not
just the pay phones but the town's entire phone                   system had been
interdicted, Sam and Tessa sat at a round table                   in one corner, at
Harry's insistence, while he made a pot of good                   Colombian in a Mr.
Coffee machine.

"You look cold," he said.           "This'll do you good."

Chilled and tired, in need of the caffeine, Tessa did not - 187 decline
the offer. Indeed, she was fascinated that Harry, with such severe
disabilities, could function well enough to play the gracious host to
unexpected visitors.

With his one good hand and some tricky moves, he got a package of
apple-cinnamon muffins from the bread box, part of a chocolate cake from
the refrigerator, plates and forks, and paper napkins. When Sam and
Tessa offered to help, he gently declined their assistance with a smile.

She sensed that he was not trying to prove anything either to them or to
himself. He was simply enjoying having company, even at this hour and
under these bizarre circumstances. Perhaps it was a rare pleasure.

"No cream," he said.

"Just a carton of milk."

"That's fine," Sam said.

"And no elegant porcelain cream pitcher, I'm afraid," said Harry,
putting the milk carton on the table.

Tessa began to consider shooting a documentary about Harry, about the
courage required to remain independent in his circumstances She was
drawn by the siren call of her art in spite of what had transpired in
the past few hours. Long ago, however, she had learned that an artist's
creativity could not be turned off; the eye of a filmmaker could not be
capped as easily as the lens of her camera. In the midst of grief over
her sister's death, ideas for projects had continued to come to her,
narrative concepts, interesting shots, angles. Even in the terror of
war, running with Afghan rebels as Soviet planes strafed the ground at
their heels, she'd been excited by what she was getting on film and by
what she would be able to make of it when she got into an editing
room-and her three-man crew had reacted much the same. So she no longer
felt awkward or guilty about being an artist on the make, even in times
of tragedy; for her, that was just natural, a part of being creative and
alive.

Customized to his needs, Harry's wheelchair included a hydraulic lift
that raised the seat a few inches, bringing him nearly to normal chair
height, so he could sit at an ordinary table or writing desk. He took a
place beside Tessa and across from Sam.

Moose was lying in the corner, watching, occasionally raising his head
as if interested in their conversation-though more likely drawn by the
smell of chocolate cake. The Labrador did not come sniffing and pawing


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around, whining for handouts, and Tessa was impressed by his discipline.

As they passed the coffee pot and carved up the cake and muffins, Harry
said, "You've told me what brings you here, Sam-not just my letter but
all these so-called accidents.

" He looked at Tessa, and because she was on his right                     side, the
permanent cock of his head to the left made it seem as                     if he were
leaning back from her, regarding her with suspicion or                     at least
skepticism, though his true attitude was belied by his                     warm smile.

"But just where do you fit in, Miss Lockland? Call me Tessa, please.
Well . . . my sister was Janice Capshaw-Richard Capshaw's wife, the
Lutheran minister's wife?" he said, surprised.

"That's right.

"Why, they used to come to visit me. I wasn't a member of their
congregation, but that's how they were. We became friends. And after
he died, she still stopped by now and then. Your sister was a dear and
wonderful person, Tessa.

" He put down his coffee cup and reached out to her with his good hand.

"She was my friend."

Tessa held his hand. It was leathery and calloused from use, and very
strong, as if all the frustrated power of his paralyzed body found
expression through that single extremity.

"I watched them take her into the crematorium at Callan's Funeral Home,"
Harry said.

"Through my telescope. I'm a watcher. That's what I do with my life,
for the most part. I watch." He blushed slightly. He held Tessa's hand
a bit tighter.

"It's not just snooping.           In fact it isn't snooping at all.              It's .    ..

participating. Oh, I like to read, too, and I've got a lot of books,
and I do a heavy load of thinking, for sure, but it's watching, mainly,
that gets me through. We'll go upstairs later. I'll show you the
telescope, the whole setup. I think maybe you'll understand. I hope
you will. Anyway, I saw them take Janice into Callan's that night . .
. though I didn't know who it was until two days later, when the story
of her death was in the county paper. I couldn't believe she died the
way they said she did. Still don't believe it."

"Neither do I," Tessa said.

"And that's why I'm here."

Reluctantly, with a final squeeze, Harry let go of Tessa's hand.

T - 189 "So many bodies lately, most of them hauled into Callan's at
night, and more than a few times with cops hanging around, overseeing
things-it's strange as hell for a quiet little town like this.

" From across the table, Sam said, "Twelve accidental deaths or suicides
in less than two months."

"Twelve?"     Harry said.

"Didn't you realize it was that many?"                 Sam asked.


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"Oh, it's more than that."

Sam blinked.

Harry said, "T\, Twenty, by my count."

After Watkins left, Shaddack returned to the computer terminal in his
study, reopened his link to Sun, the supercomputer at New Wave, and set
to work again on a problematic aspect of the current project. Though it
was two-thirty in the morning, he would put in a few more hours, for the
earliest he went to bed was dawn.

He had been at the terminal a few minutes when his most private phone
line rang.

Until Booker was apprehended, the telephone company computer was
allowing service only among those who had been converted, from one of
their numbers to one of their numbers. Other lines were cut off, and
calls to the outside world were interrupted before being completed.
Incoming calls to Moonlight Cove were answered by a recording that
pleaded equipment failure, promised a return to full service within
twenty-four hours, and expressed regret at the inconvenience.

Therefore, Shaddack knew the caller must be among the converted and,
because it was his most private line, must also be one of his closest
associates at New Wave. A LED readout on the base of the phone
displayed the number from which the call was being placed, which he
recognized as that of Mike Peyser. He picked up the receiver and said,
" Shaddack here."

The caller breathed heavily, raggedly into the phone but said nothing.

Frowning, Shaddack said, "Hello?"

Just the breathing.

Shaddack said, "Mike, is that you?"

The voice that finally responded to him was hoarse, guttural, but with a
shrill edge, whispery yet forceful, Peyser's voice yet not his, strange
". . . something wrong, wrong, something Shaddack was reluctant to
admit that he recognized Mike Peyser's voice in those queer inflections
and eerie cadences. He said, "Who is this?"

".   .   .   need, need .       .   .    need, want, I need.

"Who is this?" Shaddack demanded angrily, but in his mind was another
question What is this?

The caller issued a sound that was a groan of pain, a mewl of deepest
anguish, a thin cry of frustration, and a snarl, all twisted into one
rolling bleat. The receiver dropped from his hand with a hard clatter.

Shaddack put his own phone down, turned back to the VDT, tapped into the
police data system, and sent an urgent message to Loman Watkins.

wrong, can't change, can't . . . wrong .                      .   .   wrong .   .   .   the
night of August twenty-eighth," Harry said.

"TWenty min 51 Sitting on the stool in the dark third-floor bedroom,
bent to the eyepiece, Sam Booker studied the rear of Callan's Funeral
Home. All but scattered scrims of fog had blown away on the wind, which



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still blustered at the window and shook the trees all along the
hillsides on which most of Moonlight Cove was built. The 191 serviceway
lamps were extinguished now, and the rear of Callan's lay in darkness
but for the thin light radiating from the blind-covered windows of the
crematorium wing. No doubt they were busily feeding the flames with the
bodies of the couple who had been murdered at Cove Lodge.

Tessa sat on the edge of the bed behind Sam, petting Moose, who was
lying with his head in her lap.

Harry was in his wheelchair nearby. He used a penlight to study a
spiral-bound notebook in which he had kept a record of the unusual
activities at the mortuary.

"First one-at least the first unusual one I noticed-was on minutes to
midnight. They brought four bodies at once, using the hearse and the
city ambulance. Police accompanied them. The corpses were in body
bags, so I couldn't see anything about them, but the cops and the
ambulance attendants and the people at Callan's were visibly . . .
well . . . upset. I saw it in their faces. Fear. They kept looking
around at the neighboring houses and the alleyway, as if they were
afraid someone was going to see what they were up to, which seemed
peculiar because they were only doing their jobs. Right? Anyway,
later, in the county paper, I read about the Mayser family dying in a
fire, and I knew that was who'd been brought to Callan's that night. I
supposed they didn't die in a fire any more than your sister killed
herself.

"Probably not," Tessa said.

Still watching the back of the funeral home, Sam said, "I have the
Maysers on my list. They were turned up in the investigation of the
Sanchez-Bustamante case."

Harry cleared his throat and said, "Six days later, September third, two
bodies were brought to Callan's shortly after midnight. And this was
even weirder because they didn't come in a hearse or an ambulance. Two
police cars pulled in at the back of Callan's, and they unloaded a body
from the rear seat of each of them, wrapped in blood-streaked sheets."

"September third?"         Sam said.

"There's no one on my list for that date. Sanchez and the Bustamantes
were on the fifth. No death certificates were issued on the third. They
kept those two off the official records."

"Nothing in the county paper about anyone dying then, either," Harry
said.


Tessa said, "So who were those two people?"

"Maybe they were out-of-towners who were unlucky enough to stop in
Moonlight Cove and stumble into something dangerous," Sam said. "People
whose deaths could be completely covered up, so no one would know where
they'd died. As far as anyone knows, they just vanished on the road
somewhere."

"Sanchez and the Bustamantes were on the night of the fifth," Harry
said, "and then Jim Armes on the night of the seventh."

"Armes disappeared at sea," Sam said, looking up from the telescope and
frowning at the man in the wheelchair.


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"They brought the body to Callan's at eleven o'clock at night," Harry
said, consulting his notebook for details.

"The blinds weren't drawn at the crematorium windows, so I could see
straight in there, almost as good as if I'd been right there in that
room. I saw the body . the mess it was in. And the face. Couple of
days later, when the paper ran a story about Armes's disappearance, I
recognized him as the guy they'd fed to the furnace.

" The large bedroom was dressed in cloaks of shadow except for the
narrow beam of the penlight, which was half shielded by Harry's hand and
confined to the open notebook. Those white pages seemed to glow with
light of their own, as if they were the leaves of a magic or holy-or
unholy-book.

Harry Talbot's careworn countenance was more dimly illumined by the
backwash from those pages, and the peculiar light emphasized the lines
in his face, making him appear older than he was. Each line, Sam knew,
had its provenance in tragic experience and pain. Profound sympathy
stirred in him. Not pity. He could never pity anyone as determined as
Talbot. But Sam appreciated the sorrow and loneliness of Harry's
restricted life. Watching the wheelchair-bound man, Sam grew angry with
the neighbors. Why hadn't they done more to bring Harry into their
lives? Why hadn't they invited him to dinner more often, drawn him into
their holiday celebrations? Why had they left him so much on his own
that his primary means of participating in the life of his community was
through a telescope and binoculars?

Sam was cut by a pang of despair at people's reluctance to reach out to
one another, at the way they isolated themselves and one another. With
a jolt, he thought of his inability to communicate with his own son,
which only left him feeling bleaker still.

- 193 To Harry, he said, "What do you mean when you say Armes's body was
a mess?"

"Cut.   Slashed."

"He didn't drown?"

"Didn't look it."

"Slashed .     .    .   Exactly what do you mean?"             Tessa asked.

Sam knew that she was thinking about the people whose screams she had
heard at the motel-and about her own sister.

Harry hesitated, then said "Well, I saw him on the table in the
crematorium, just before they slipped him into the furnace. He'd been .
. . disemboweled. Nearly decapitated. Horribly . . .

torn. He looked as bad as if he'd been standing on an antipersonnel
mine when it went off and been riddled by shrapnel."

They sat in mutual silence, considering that description.

Only Moose seemed unperturbed. He made a soft, contented sound as Tessa
gently scratched behind his ears.

Sam thought it might not be so bad to be one of the lower beasts, a
creature mostly of feelings, untroubled by a complex intellect. Or at
the other extreme . . . a genuinely intelligent computer, all


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intellect and no feelings whatsoever. The great dual burden of emotion
and high intelligence was singular to humankind, and it was what made
life so hard; you were always thinking about what you were feeling
instead of just going with the moment, or you were always trying to feel
what you thought you should feel in a given situation. Thoughts and
judgment were inevitably colored by emotions-some of them on a
subconscious level, so you didn't even entirely understand why you made
certain decisions, acted in certain ways. Emotions clouded your
thinking; but thinking too hard about your feelings took the edge off
them. Trying to feel deeply and think perfectly clearly at the same
time was like simultaneously juggling six Indian clubs while riding a
unicycle backward along a high wire.

"After the story in the paper about Artnes disappearing," Harry said, "I
kept waiting for a correction, but none was printed, and that's when I
began to realize that the odd goingson at Callan's weren't just odd but
probably criminal, as well and that the cops were part of it."

"Paula Parkins was torn apart too," Sam said.

Harry nodded.

"Supposedly by her Dobermans."

"Dobermans?"      Tessa asked.


At the laundry Sam had told her that her sister was one of many curious
suicides and accidental deaths, but he had not gone into any details
about the others. Now he quickly told her about Parkins.

"Not her own dogs," Tessa agreed.

"She was savaged by whatever killed Armes.                  And the people tonight at
Cove Lodge."

This was the first that Harry Talbot had heard about the murders at Cove
Lodge. Sam had to explain about that and about how he and Tessa had met
at the laundry.

A strange expression settled on Harry's prematurely aged face. To
Tessa, he said, "Uh . . . you didn't see these things at the motel?
Not even a glimpse?"

"Only the foot of one of them, through the crack under the door. " Harry
started to speak, stopped, and sat in thoughtful silence.

He knows something, Sam thought.              More than we do.

For some reason Harry was not ready to share what he knew, for he
returned his scrutiny to the notebook on his lap and said, "Two days
after Paula Parkins died, there was one body taken to Callan's, around
nine-thirty at night."

"That would be September eleventh?"               Sam asked.

"Yes.There's no record of a death certificate issued that day."

"Nothing about it in the paper, either."

"Go on."

Harry said, "September fifteenth-Steve Heinz, Laura Dalcoe.                       He
supposedly killed her, then took his own life," Sam said.


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"Lovers' quarrel, we're to believe. Another quick cremation," Harry
noted. "And three nights later, on the eighteenth, two more bodies
delivered to Callan's shortly after one in the morning, just as I was
about to go to bed.

"No public record of those, either," Sam said.

"Two more out-of-towners who drove off the interstate for a visit or
just dinner?" Tessa wondered.

"Or maybe someone from another part of the county, passing on the county
road along the edge of town?"

"Could even have been locals," Harry said.

"I mean, there're always a few people around who haven't lived here a
long time, - 195 newcomers who rent instead of own their houses, don't
have many ties to the community, so if you wanted to cover their
murders, you could maybe concoct an acceptable story about them moving
away suddenly, for a new job, whatever, and their neighbors might buy
it."

if their neighbors weren't already "converted" and participating in the
cover-up, Sam thought.

"Then September twenty-third," Harry said.

"That would have been your sister's body, Tessa."

" Yes. By then I knew I had to tell someone what I'd seen. Someone in
authority. But who? I didn't trust anyone local because I'd watched
the cops bring in some of those bodies that were never reported in the
newspaper. County Sheriff. He'd believe Watkins before he'd believe
me, wouldn't he? Hell, everyone thinks a cripple is a little strange
anyway-strange in the head, I mean-they equate physical disabilities
with mental disabilities at least a little, at least subconsciously. So
they'd be predisposed not to believe me. And admittedly it is a wild
story, all these bodies, secret cremations. . . ." He paused. His
face clouded.

"The fact that I'm a decorated veteran wouldn't have made me any more
believable. That was a long time ago, ancient history for some of them.
In fact . . . no doubt they'd hold the war against me in a way.
Post-Vietnam stress syndrome, they'd call it. Poor old Harry finally
went crackers-don't you see?-from the war."

Thus far Harry had been speaking matter-of-factly, without much emotion.
But the words he had just spoken were like a piece of glass held against
the surface of a rippled pool, revealing realms below-in his case,
realms of pain, loneliness, and alienation.

Now emotion not only entered his voice but, a few times, made it crack
"And I've got to say, part of the reason I didn't try to tell anyone
what I'd seen was because . . . I was afraid. I didn't know what the
hell was going on. I couldn't be sure how big the stakes were. I
didn't know if they'd silence me, feed me to the furnace at Callan's one
night. You'd think that having lost so much I'd be reckless now,
unconcerned about losing more, about dying, but that's not the way it
is, not at all. Life's probably more precious to me than to men whore
whole and healthy.




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This broken body slowed me down so much that I've spent the last twenty
years out of the whirl of activity in which most of you exist, and I've
had time to really see the world, the beauty and intricacy of it. In
the end my disabilities have led me to appreciate and love life more. So
I was afraid they'd come for me, kill me, and I hesitated to tell anyone
what I'd seen. God help me, if I'd spoken out, if I'd gotten in touch
with the Bureau sooner, maybe some people might have been saved. Maybe .
..

your sister would've been saved."

"Don't even think of that," Tessa said at once.

"If you'd done anything differently, no doubt you'd be ashes now,
scraped out of the bottom of Callan's furnace and thrown in the sea.                          My
sister's fate was sealed. You couldn't unseal it."

Harry nodded, then switched off the penlight, plunging the room into
deeper darkness, though he had not yet finished going through the
information in his notebook. Sam suspected that Tessa's unhesitating
generosity of spirit had brought tears to Harry's eyes and that he did
not want them to see.

"On the twenty-fifth," he continued, not needing to consult the notebook
for details, "one body was brought to Callan's at ten-fifteen at night.
Weird, too, because it didn't come in either an ambulance or hearse or
police car. It was brought by Loman Watkins-Chief of police," Sam said
for Tessa's benefit.

"-but he was in his private car, out of uniform," Harry said. "They took
the body out of his trunk. It was wrapped in a blanket. The blinds
weren't shut at their windows that night, either, and I was able to get
in tight with the scope. I didn't recognize the body, but I did
recognize the condition of it-the same as Armes."

"Tom?"    Sam asked.

"Yes. Then the Bureau did come to town on the Sanchez Bustamante thing,
and when I read about it in the newspaper, I was so relieved because I
thought it was all going to come out in the open at last, that we'd have
revelations, explanations. But then there were two more bodies disposed
of at Callan's on the night of October fourth-Our team was in town
then," Sam said, "in the middle of their investigation. They didn't
realize any death certificates were - 197 filed during that time. You're
saying this happened under their noses?

" ,Yeah. I don't have to look in the notebook; I remember it clearly.
The bodies were brought around in Reese Dorn's camper truck. He's a
local cop, but he was out of uniform that night. They hauled the stiffs
into Callan's, and the blind at one window was open, so I saw them shove
both bodies into the crematorium together, as if they were in a real
sweat to dispose of them. And there was more activity at Callan's late
on the night of the seventh, but the fog was so thick, I can't swear
that it was more bodies being taken in. And finally . . . earlier
tonight. A child's body. A small child."

"Plus the two who were killed at Cove Lodge," Tessa said.

"That makes twenty-two victims, not the twelve that brought Sam here.
This town's become a slaughterhouse."

"Could be even more than we think," Harry said.



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"How so?"

"Well, after all, I don't watch the place every evening, all evening
long. And I go to bed by one-thirty, no later than two. Who's to say
there weren't visits I missed, that more bodies weren't brought in
during the dead hours of the night?

" Brooding about that, Sam looked through the eyepiece again. The rear
of Callan's remained dark and still. He slowly moved the scope to the
right, shifting the field of vision northward through the neighborhood.

"But why were they killed?"            Tessa said, No one had an answer.

"And by what?"       she asked.

Sam studied a cemetery farther north on conquistador, then sighed and
looked up and told them about his experience earlier in the night, on
Iceberry Way.

"I thought they were kids, delinquents, but now what I think is that
they were the same things that killed the people at Cove Lodge, the same
as the one whose foot you saw through the crack under the door."

He could almost feel Tessa frowning with frustration in the darkness
when she said, "But what are they?"

Harry Talbot hesitated.           Then "Boogeymen."


Not daring to use sirens, dousing headlights on the last quarter mile of
the approach, Loman came down on Mike Peyser's place at three-ten in the
morning, with two cars, five deputies, and shotguns. Loman hoped they
did not have to use the guns for more than intimidation. In their only
previous encounter with a regressive-Jordan Coombs on the fourth of
September-they had not been prepared for its ferocity and had been
forced to blow its head off to save their own lives. Shaddack had been
left with only a carcass to examine. He'd been furious at the lost
chance to delve into the psychology-and the functioning physiology-of
one of these metamorphic psychopaths. A tranquilizer gun would be of
little use, unfortunately, because regressives were New People gone bad,
and all New People, regressive or not, had radically altered metabolisms
that not only allowed for magically fast healing but for the rapid
absorption, breakdown, and rejection of toxic substances like poison or
tranquilizers. The only way to sedate a regressive would be to get him
to agree to be put on a continuous IV drip, which wasn't very damn
likely.

Mike Peyser's house was a one-story bungalow with front and rear porches
on the west and east sides respectively, nicely maintained, on an acre
and a half, sheltered by a few huge sweet gums that had not yet lost
their leaves. No lights shone at the windows.

Loman sent one man to watch the north side, another the south, to
prevent Peyser from escaping through a window. He stationed a third man
at the foot of the front porch to cover that door. With the other two
men-Sholnick and Penniworth-he circled to the rear of the place and
quietly climbed the steps to the back porch.

- Now that the fog had been blown away, visibility was good. But the
huffing and swirreling wind was a white noise that blocked out other
sounds they might need to hear while stalking Peyser.

Penniworth stood against the wall of the house to the left of the door,


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and Sholnick stood to the right.              Both carried semiautomatic 20-gauge
shotguns.

Loman tried the door.          It was unlocked.         He pushed it open and stepped
back.

His deputies entered the dark kitchen, one after the other, their
shotguns lowered and ready to fire, though they were aware that the
objective was to take Peyser alive if at all possible. But they were
not going to sacrifice themselves just to bring the living beast to
Shaddack. A moment later one of them found a light switch.

Carrying a 12-gauge of his own, Loman went into the house after them.
Empty bowls, broken dishes, and dirty Tupperware containers were
scattered on the floor, as were a few rigatoni red with tomato sauce,
half of a meatball, eggshells, a chunk of pie crust, and other bits of
food. One of the four wooden chairs from the breakfast set was lying on
its side; another had been hammered to pieces against a counter top,
cracking some of the ceramic tiles.

Straight ahead, an archway led into a dining room. Some of the
spill-through light from the kitchen vaguely illuminated the table and
chairs in there.

To the left, beside the refrigerator, was a door. Barry Shoinick opened
it defensively. Shelves of canned goods flanked a landing. Stairs led
down to the basement.

"We'll check that later," Loman said softly.

"After we've gone through the house."

Sholnick soundlessly snatched a chair from the breakfast set and braced
the door shut so nothing could come up from the cellar and creep in
behind them after they went into other rooms.

They stood for a moment, listening.

Gusting wind slammed against the house. A window rattled. From the
attic above came the creaking of rafters, and from higher still the
muffled clatter of a loose cedar shingle on the roof.

His deputies looked at Loman for guidance. Penniworth was only
twenty-five, could pass for eighteen, and had a face so fresh and
guileless that he looked more like a door-to-door peddler of religious
tracts than a cop. Shoinick was ten years older and had a harder edge
to him.

Loman motioned them toward the dining room.

They entered, turning the lights on as they went. The dining room was
deserted, so they moved cautiously into the living room.

Penniworth clicked a wall switch that turned on a chrome and brass lamp,
which was one of the few items not broken or torn apart. The cushions
on the sofa and chairs had been slashed; wads of foam padding, like
clumps of a poisonous fungus, lay everywhere. Books had been pulled
from shelves and ripped to pieces. A ceramic lamp, a couple of vases,
and the glass top of a coffee table were shattered. The doors had been
torn off the cabinet-style television set, and the screen had been
smashed. Blind rage and savage strength had been at work here.

The room smelled strongly of urine .                .   .   and of something else less


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pungent and less familiar. It was, perhaps, the scent of the creature
responsible for the wreckage. Part of that subtler stink was the sour
odor of perspiration, but something stranger was in it, too, something
that simultaneously turned Loman's stomach and tightened it with fear.

To the left, a hallway led back to the bedrooms and baths.                      Loman kept
it covered with his shotgun.

The deputies went into the foyer, which was connected to the living room
by a wide archway. A closet was on the right, just inside the front
door. Sholnick stood in front of it, his 20-gauge lowered. From the
side Penniworth jerked open the door. The closet contained only coats.

The easy part of the search was behind them. Ahead lay the narrow hall
with three doors off it, one half open and two ajar, dark rooms beyond.
There was less space in which to maneuver, more places from which an
assailant might attack.

Night wind soughed in the eaves.              It fluted across a rain gutter,
producing a low, mournful note.

Loman had never been the kind of leader who sent his men ahead into
danger while he stayed back in a position of safety. Although he had
shed pride and self-respect and a sense of duty along with most other
Old People attitudes and emotions, duty was still a habit with him-in
fact, less conscious than a habit, - 201 more like a reflex-and he
operated as he would have done before the Change. He entered the hall
first, where two doors waited on the left and one on the right. He
moved swiftly to the end, to the second door on the left, which was half
open; he kicked it inward, and in the light from the hall he saw a
small, deserted bathroom before the door bounced off the wall and swung
shut again.

Penniworth took the first room on the left. He went in and found the
light switch by the time Loman reached that threshold.

it was a study with a desk, worktable, two chairs, cabinets, tall
bookshelves crammed full of volumes with brightly colored spines, two
computers. Loman moved in and covered the closet, where Penniworth
warily rolled aside first one and then the other of two mirrored doors.

Nothing.

Barry Sholnick remained in the hallway, his 20-gauge leveled at the room
they hadn't investigated. When Loman and Penniworth rejoined him,
Sholnick shoved that door all the way open with the barrel of his
shotgun. As it swung wide, he jerked back, certain that something would
fly at him from the darkness, though nothing did. He hesitated, then
stepped into the doorway, fumbled with one hand for the light switch,
found it, said, "Oh, my God," and stepped quickly back into the hall.

Looking past his deputy into a large bedroom, Loman saw a hellish thing
crouched on the floor and huddled against the far wall. it was a
regressive, no doubt Peyser, but it did not look as much like the
regressed Jordan Coombs as Loman expected. There were similarities,
yes, but not many.

Easing by Shoinick, Loman crossed the threshold.

" Peys---9 The thing at the other end of the room blinked at him, moved
its twisted mouth. In a voice that was whispery yet guttural, savage
yet tortured as only the voice of an at least halfway intelligent
creature could be, it said, Peyser, Peyser, Peyser, me, Peyser, me, me.


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The odor of urine was here, too, but that other scent was now the
dominant one-sharp, musky.

Loman moved farther into the room. Penniworth followed. Sholnick
stayed at the doorway. Loman stopped twelve feet from Peyser, and
Penniworth moved off to one side, his 20-gauge held ready.


When they'd cornered Jordan Coombs in the shuttered movie theater back
on September fourth, he had been in an altered state somewhat resembling
a gorilla with a squat and powerful body. Mike Peyser, however, had a
far leaner appearance, and as he crouched against the bedroom wall, his
body looked more lupine than apelike. His hips were set at an angle to
his spine, preventing him from standing or sitting completely erect, and
his legs seemed too short in the thighs, too long in the calves. He was
covered in thick hair but not so thick that it could be called a pelt.

"Peyser, me, me, me .

Coombs's face had been partly human, though mostly that of a higher
primate, with a bony brow, flattened nose, and thrusting jaw to
accommodate large, wickedly sharp teeth like those of a baboon. Mike
Peyser's hideously transformed countenance had, instead, a hint of the
wolf in it, or dog; his mouth and nose were drawn forward into a
deformed snout. His massive brow was like that of an ape, though
exaggerated, and in his bloodshot eyes, set in shadowy sockets deep
beneath that bony ridge, was a look of anguish and terror that was
entirely human.

Raising one hand and pointing at Loman, Peyser said, help me, now, help,
something wrong, wrong, wrong, help.

Loman stared at that mutated hand with both fear and amazement,
remembering how his own hand had begun to change when he had felt the
call of regression at the Fosters' place earlier in the night. Elongated
fingers. Large, rough knuckles. Fierce claws instead of fingernails.
Human hands in shape and degree of dexterity, they were otherwise
utterly alien.

Shit, Loman thought, those hands, those hands. I've seen them in the
movies, or at least on the TV, when we rented the cassette of The
Howling. Rob Bottin. That was the name of the special effects artist
who created the werewolf. He remembered it because Denny had been a nut
about special effects before the Change. More than anything else these
looked like the goddamn hands of the werewolf in The Howling!

Which was too crazy to contemplate. Life imitating fantasy. The
fantastic made flesh. As the twentieth century rushed into its last
decade, scientific and technological progress had reached some divide,
where mankind's dream of a better life often could be fulfilled but also
where nightmares could be made real. Peyser - 203 was a bad, bad dream
that had crawled out of the subconscious and become flesh, and now there
was no escaping him by waking up; he would not disappear as did the
monsters that haunted sleep.

"How can I help you?"          Loman asked warily.

"Shoot him," Penniworth said.

Loman responded sharply "Not" Peyser raised both of his tine-fingered
hands and looked at them for a moment, as if seeing them for the first
time. A groan issued from him, then a thin and miserable wail.


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". . . change, can't change, can't, tried, want, need, want, want,
can't, tried, can't . . .

" From the doorway Sholnick said, "My God, he's stuck like that-he's
trapped. I thought the regressives could change back at will - They
can," Loman said.

"He can't," Sholnick said.

"That's what he said," Penniworth agreed, his voice quick and nervous.

"He said he can't change."

Loman said, "Maybe, maybe not. But the other regressives can change,
because if they couldn't, then we'd have found all of them by now. They
retreat from their altered state and then walk among us."

Peyser seemed oblivious of them. He was staring at his hands, mewling
in the back of his throat as if what he saw terrified him. Then the
hands began to change.

"You see," Loman said.

Loman had never witnessed such a transformation; he was gripped by
curiosity, wonder, and terror. The claws receded. The flesh was
suddenly as malleable as soft wax It bulged, blistered, pulsed not with
the rhythmic flow of blood in arteries but strangely, obscenely; it
assumed new form, as if an invisible SCUlptor were at work on it. Loman
heard bones crunching, splintering, as they, were broken down and
remade; the flesh melted and resolidified with a sickening, wet sound.
The hands became nearly human. Then the wrists and forearms began to
lose some of their rawboned lupine quality. In Peyser's face were
indications that the human spirit was struggling to banish the savage
that was now in control; the features of a predator began to give way to
a gentler and more civilized man. It was as if the monstrous Peyser was
only a beast's reflection in a pool of water out of which the real and
human Peyser was now rising.

Though he was no scientist, no genius of microtechnology, only a
policeman with a high-school education, Loman knew that this profound
and rapid transformation could not be attributed solely to the New
People's drastically improved metabolic .processes and ability to heal
themselves. No matter what great 'tides of hormones, enzymes, and other
biological chemicals Peyser's body could now produce at will, there was
no way that bone and flesh could before-formed so dramatically in such a
brief period of time. Over days or weeks, yes, but not in seconds.
Surely it was physically impossible. Yet it was happening. Which meant
that another force was at work in Mike Peyser, something more than
biological processes, something mysterious and frightening.

Suddenly the transformation halted. Loman could see that Peyser was
straining toward full humanity, clenching his halfhuman yet still
wolflike jaws together and grinding his teeth, a look of desperation and
iron determination in his strange eyes, but to no avail. For a moment
he trembled on the edge of human form. It seemed that if he could just
push the transformation one step farther, just one small step, then he
would cross a watershed after which the rest of the metamorphosis would
take place almost automatically, without the strenuous exertion of will,
as easily as a stream flowing downhill. But he could not reach that
divide.




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Penniworth made a low, strangled sound, as if he were sharing Peyser's
anguish.

Loman glanced at his deputy.             Penniworth's face glistened with a thin
film of perspiration.

Loman realized he was perspiring too; he felt a bead trickle down his
left temple. The bungalow was warm-an oil furnace kept clicking on and
off-but not warm enough to wring moisture from them. This was a cold
sweat of fear, but more than that. He also felt a tightness in his
chest, a thickening in his throat that made it hard to swallow, and he
was breathing fast, as if he'd sprinted up a hundred steps Letting out a
thin, agonized cry, Peyser began to regress again with the brittle
splintering noise of bones being remade, the oily-wet sound of flesh
being rent and re-knit, the savage creature - 205 reasserted itself, and
in moments Peyser was as he had been when they had first seen him a
hellish beast.

Hellish, yes, and a beast, but enviably powerful and with an odd,
terrible beauty of its own. The forward carriage of the large head was
awkward by comparison to the set of the human head, and the thing lacked
the sinuous inward curve of the human spine, yet it had a dark grace of
its own.

They stood in silence for a moment.

Peyser huddled on the floor, head bowed.

From the doorway, Sholnick finally said, "My God, he is trapped. "
Although Mike Peyser's problem could have been related to some glitch in
the technology on which conversion from Old to New Person was based,
Loman suspected that Peyser still possessed the power to reshape
himself, that he could become a man if he wanted to badly enough, but
that he lacked the desire to be fully human again. He had become a
regressive because he found that altered state appealing, so maybe he
found it so much more exciting and satisfying than the human condition
that now he did not truly want to return to a higher state.

Peyser raised his head and looked at Loman, then at Penniworth, then at
Sholnick, and finally at Loman again. His horror at his condition was
no longer apparent. The anguish and terror were gone from his eyes.
With his twisted muzzle he seemed to smile at them, and a new
wildness-both disturbing and appealing-appeared in his eyes. He raised
his hands before his face again and flexed the long fingers, clicked the
claws together, studying himself with what might have been wonder.

. . . hunt, hunt, chase, hunt, kill, blood, blood, need, need "How
the hell can we take him alive if he doesn't want to be taken?"
Penniworth's voice was peculiar, thick and slightly slurred.

Peyser dropped one hand to his genitals and scratched lightly,
absentmindedly . He looked at Loman again, then at the night pressing
against the windows.

"I feel .     Sholnick left the sentence unfinished.

Penniworth was no more articulate "If we .                  .   .    well, we could .


The pressure in Loman's chest had grown greater.                     His throat was
tighter, too, and he was still sweating.

Peyser let out a soft, ululant cry as eerie as any sound Loman had ever


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heard, an expression of longing, yet also an animal challenge to the
night, a statement of his power and his confidence in his own strength
and cunning. The wail should have been harsh and unpleasant in the
confines of that bedroom, but instead it stirred in Loman the same
unspeakable yearning that had gripped him outside of the Fosters' house
when he had heard the trio of regressives calling to one another far
away in the darkness.

Clenching his teeth so hard that his jaws ached, Loman strove to resist
that unholy urge.

Peyser loosed another cry, then said, "Run, hunt, free, free, need,
free, need, come with me, come, come, need, need. . .

" Loman realized that he was relaxing his grip on the 12-gauge. The
barrel was tilting down. The muzzle was pointing at the floor instead
of at Peyser.

run, free, free, need .

From behind Loman came an unnerving, orgasmic cry of release.

He glanced back at the bedroom doorway in time to see Sholnick drop his
shotgun. Subtle transformations had occurred in the deputy's hands and
face. He pulled off his quilted, black uniform jacket, cast it aside,
and tore open his shirt. His cheekbones and jaws dissolved and flowed
forward, and his brow retreated as he sought an altered state.

When Harry Talbot finished telling them about the Boogeymen, Sam
leaned forward on the high stool to the telescope eyepiece. He swung
the instrument to the left, until he focused on the - 207 vacant lot
beside Callan's, where the creatures had most recently put in an
appearance.

He was not sure what he was looking for. He didn't believe that the
Boogeymen would have returned to, that same place at precisely this time
to give him a convenient look at them. And there were no clues in the
shadows and trampled grass and shrubs, where they had crouched only a
few hours ago, to tell him what they might have been or on what mission
they had been embarked. Maybe he was just trying to anchor the
fantastic image of ape-dog-reptilian Boogeymen in the real world, tie
them in his mind to that vacant lot, and thereby make them more
concrete, so he could deal with them.

In any event Harry had another story besides that one. As they sat in
the darkened room, as if listening to ghost stories around a burnt-out
campfire, he told them how he'd seen Denver Simpson, Doc Fitz, Reese
Dorn, and Paul Hawthorne overpower Ella Simpson, take her upstairs to
the bedroom, and prepare to inject her with an enormous syringeful of
some golden fluid.

Operating the telescope at Harry's direction, Sam was able to find and
draw in tight on the Simpsons' house, on the other side of Conquistador
and just north of the Catholic cemetery. All was dark and motionless.

From the bed where she still had the dog's head in her lap, Tessa said,
"All of it's got to be connected somehow these 'accidental' deaths,
whatever those men were doing to Ella Simpson, and these . . .
Boogeymen.

"Yes, it's tied together," Sam agreed.

"And the knot is new Wave Microtechnology."


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He told them what he had uncovered while working with the VDT in the
patrol car behind the municipal building.

"Moonhawk?"      Tessa wondered.

"Conversions?       What on earth are they converting people into?                    I don't
know."

"Surely not into .         .   .   these Boogeymen?

"No, I don't see the purpose of that, and besides, from what I turned
up, I gather almost two thousand people in town have been . . . given
this treatment, put through this change, whatever the hell it is. If
there were that many of Harry's Boogeymen running loose, they'd be
everywhere; the town would be crawling with them, like a zoo in the
Twilight Zone."


"TWo thousand," Harry said.

"That's two-thirds of the town.              And the rest by midnight," Sam said.

"Just under twenty-one hours from now."

"Me, too, I guess?"         Harry asked.

"Yeah. I looked you up on their lists. You're scheduled for conversion
in the final stage, between six o'clock this coming evening and
midnight. So we've got about fourteen and a half hours before they come
looking for you."

"This is nuts," Tessa said.

"Yeah," Sam agreed.

"Totally nuts."

"It can't be happening," Harry said.

"But if it isn't happening, then why's the hair standing up on the back
of my neck?"

"Sholnick!"

Throwing aside his uniform shirt, kicking off his shoes, frantic to
strip out of all his clothes and complete his regression, Barry Sholnick
ignored Loman.

"Barry, stop, for God's sake, don't let this happen," Penniworth said
urgently. He was pale and shaking. He glanced from Sholnick to Peyser
and back again, and Loman suspected that Penniworth felt the same
degenerate urge to which Sholnick had surrendered himself.

".   .   .   run free, hunt, blood, blood, need .

Peyser's insidious chant was like a spike through Loman's head, and he
wanted it to stop. No, truthfully, it wasn't like a spike splitting his
skull, because it wasn't at all painful and was, in fact, thrilling and
strangely melodic, reaching deep into him, piercing him not like a shaft
of steel but like music. That was why he wanted it to stop because it
appealed to him, enticed him; it made him want to shed his
responsibilities and concerns, - 209 retreat from the too-complex life
of the intellect to an existence based strictly on feelings, on physical


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pleasures, a world whose boundaries were defined by sex and food and the
thrill of the hunt, a world where disputes were settled and needs were
met strictly by the application of muscle, where he'd never have to
think again or worry or care.

".   .   .   need, need, need, need, need, kill .

Sholnick's body bent forward as his spine re-formed. His back lost the
concave curvature distinctive of the human form. His skin appeared to
be giving way to scales "come, quick, quick, the hunt, blood, blood.

-and as Sholnick's face was reshaped, his mouth split impossibly wide,
opening nearly to each ear, like the mouth of some ever-grinning
reptile.

The pressure in Loman's chest was growing greater by the second. He was
hot, sweltering, but the heat came from within him, as if his metabolism
was racing at a thousand times ordinary speed, readying him for
transformation.

"No." Sweat streamed from him. "No!" He felt as if the room were a
cauldron in which he would be reduced to his essence; he could almost
feel his flesh beginning to melt.

Penniworth was saying, "I want, I want, I want, want," but he was
vigorously shaking his head, trying to deny what he wanted. He was
crying and trembling and sheet-white.

Peyser rose from his crouch and stepped away from the wall. He moved
sinuously, swiftly, and although he could not stand entirely erect in
his altered state, he was taller than Loman, simultaneously a
frightening and seductive figure.

Sholnick shrieked.

Peyser bared his fierce teeth and hissed at Loman as if to say, Either
join us or die.

With a cry composed partly of despair and partly of joy, Neil Penniworth
dropped his 20-gauge and put his hands to his face. As if that contact
had exerted an alchemical reaction, both his hands and face began to
change.

Heat exploded in Loman, and he shouted wordlessly, but without the joy
that Penniworth had expressed and without Sholnick's orgasmic cry. While
he still had control of himself, he raised the shotgun and squeezed off
a round point-blank at Peyser.


The blast took the regressive in the chest, blowing him backward against
the bedroom wall in a tremendous spray of blood. Peyser went down,
squealing, gasping for breath, wriggling on the floor like a
half-stomped bug, but he was not dead. Maybe his heart and lungs had
not sustained sufficient damage. If oxygen was still being conveyed to
his blood and if blood was still being pumped throughout his body, he
was already repairing the damage; his invulnerability was in some ways
even greater than the SUPERNATURAL imperviousness of a werewolf, for he
could not be easily killed even with a silver bullet; in a moment he
would be up, strong as ever.

Wave after wave of heat, each markedly hotter than the one before it
washed through Loman. He felt pressure from within, not only in his
chest but in every part of his body now. He had only seconds left in


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which his mind would be clear enough for him to act and his will strong
enough to resist. He scuttled to Peyser, shoved the muzzle of the
shotgun against the writhing regressive's chest, and pumped another
round into him.

The heart had to have been pulverized by that round. The body leaped
off the floor as the load tore through it. Peyser's monstrous face
contorted, then froze with his eyes open and sightless, his lips peeled
back from his inhumanly large, sharp, hooked teeth.

Someone screamed behind Loman.

turning, he saw the Sholnick-thing coming for him. He fired a third
round, then a fourth, hitting Sholnick in the chest and stomach.

The deputy went down hard, and began to crawl toward the hall, away from
Loman.

Neil Penniworth was curled in the fetal position on the floor by the
foot of the bed. He was chanting but not about blood and needs and
being free; he was chanting his mother's name, over and over, as if it
were a verbal talisman to protect him from the evil that wanted to claim
him.

Loman's heart was pounding so hard that the sound of it seemed to have
an external source, as if someone were thumping timpani in another room
of the house. He was half-convinced that he could feel his entire body
throbbing with his pulse, and that with each throb he was changing in
some subtle yet hideous way.

- 211 Stepping in behind Sholnick, standing over him, Loman rammed the
muzzle of the shotgun against the regressive's back, about where he
thought the heart would be, and pulled the trigger. Sholnick let out a
shrill scream when he felt the muzzle touch him, but he was too weak to
roll over and grab the gun away from Loman. The scream was cut off
forever by the blast.

The room steamed with blood. That complex scent was so sweet and
compelling that it took the place of Peyser's seductive chanting,
inducing Loman to regress.

He leaned against the dresser and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to
establish a firmer grip on himself. He clung to the shotgun with both
hands, clasping it tightly, not for its defensive value-it held no more
rounds-but because it was an expertly crafted weapon, which was to say
that it was a tool, an artifact of civilization, a reminder that he was
a man, at the pinnacle of evolution, and that he must not succumb to the
temptation to cast away all his tools and knowledge in exchange for the
more primal pleasures and satisfactions of a beast.

But the blood smell was strong and so alluring.                    .   .   .

Desperately trying to impress himself with all that would be lost in
this surrender, he thought of Grace, his wife, and remembered how much
he once had loved her. But he was beyond love now, as were all of the
New People. Thoughts of Grace could not save him. Indeed, images of
their recent, bestial rutting flashed through his mind, and she was not
Grace to him any more; she was simply female, and the recollection of
their savage coupling excited him and drew him closer to the vortex of
regression.

The intense desire to degenerate made him feel as though he were in a
whirlpool, being sucked down, down, and he thought that this was how the


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nascent werewolf was supposed to feel when he looked up into the night
sky and saw, ascending at the horizon, a full moon. The conflict raged
within him ù . . blood.....

.     .   .   freedom.....

-no.      Mind, knowledge .          .   .    hunt.....

.     .   .   kill.....

-no.      Explore, learn .         .     .   eat .   .    .


run...

.     .   .   hunt.....

.     .   .   tick.....

.     .   .   kill.....

-no, no!        Music, art, language His turmoil grew.

He was trying to resist the siren call of savagery with reason, but that
did not seem to be working, so he thought of Denny, his son. He must
hold fast to his humanity if only for Denny's sake. He tried to summon
the love he had once known for his boy, tried to let that love rebuild
in him until he could shout of it, but there was only a whisper of
remembered emotion deep in the darkness of his mind. His ability to
love had receded from him in much the way that matter had receded from
the center of existence following the Big Bang that created the
universe; his love for Denny was now so far away and long ago that it
was like a star at the outer edge of the universe, its light only dimly
perceived, with little power to illuminate and no power to warm. Yet
even that glimmer of feeling was something around which to build an
image of himself as human, human, first and always a man, not some thing
that ran on all fours or with its knuckles dragging on the ground, but a
man, a man.

His stentorian breathing slowed a little. His heartbeat fell from an
impossibly rapid dubdubdubdubdubdubdub to perhaps a hundred or a hundred
and twenty beats a minute, still fast, as if he were running, but
better. His head cleared, too, though not entirely, because the scent
of blood was an inescapable perfume.

He pushed away from the dresser and staggered to Penniworth.

The deputy was still curled in the tightest fetal position that a grown
man could achieve. Traces of the beast were in his hands and face, but
he was considerably more human than not. The chanting of his mother's
name seemed to be working nearly as well as the thread-thin lifeline of
love had worked for Loman.

Letting go of his shotgun with one cramped hand, Loman reached down to
Penniworth and took him by the hand.

"Come on, let's get out of here, boy, let's get away from this smell."

Penniworth understood and got laboriously to his feet. He leaned
against Loman and allowed himself to be led out of the T - 213 room,
away from the two dead regressives, along the hallway into the living
room.




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Here, the stink of urine completely smothered what trace of the blood
scent might have ridden the currents of air outward from the bedroom.
That was better. It was not a foul odor at all, as it had seemed
previously, but acidic and cleansing.

Loman settled Penniworth in an armchair, the only upholstered item in
the room that had not been torn to pieces.

"You going to be okay?"

Penniworth looked up at him, hesitated, then nodded. All signs of the
beast had vanished from his hands and countenance, though his flesh was
strangely lumpy, still in transition. His face appeared to be swollen
with a disabling case of the hives, large round lumps from forehead to
chin and ear to ear, and there were long, diagonal welts, too, that
burned an angry red against his pale skin. However, even as Loman
watched, those phenomena faded, and Neil Penniworth laid full claim to
his humanity.

To his physical humanity, at least.

"You sure?"      Loman asked.

"Yes.

"Stay right there."

"Yes.

" Loman went into the foyer and opened the front door. The deputy
standing guard outside was so tense because of all the shooting and
screaming in the house that he almost fired on his chief before he
realized who it was.

"What the hell?"        the deputy said.

"Get on the computer link to Shaddack," Loman said.

"He has to come out here now.             Right now.       I have to see him now."


Sam drew the heavy blue drapes, and Harry turned on one bedside lamp.
Soft as it was, too dim to chase away more than half the shadows, the
light nevertheless stung Tessa's eyes, which were already tired and
bloodshot.

For the first time she actually saw the room. It was sparely furnished
the stool; the tall table beside the stool; the telescope; a long,
modern-oriental, black lacquered dresser; a pair of matching
nightstands; a small refrigerator in one corner; and an adjustable
hospital-type bed, queen-size, without a spread but with plenty of
pillows and brightly colored sheets patterned with splashes and streaks
and spots of red, orange, purple, green, yellow, blue, and black, like a
giant canvas painted by a demented and color-blind abstract artist.

Harry saw her and Sam's reaction to the sheets and said, "Now, that's a
story, but first you've got to know the background. My housekeeper,
Mrs. Hunsbok, comes in once a week, and she does most of my shopping
for me. But I send Moose on errands every day, if only to pick up a
newspaper. He wears this set of . . . well, sort of saddlebags
strapped around him, one hanging on each side. I put a note and some
money in the bags, and he goes to the local convenience store-it's the
only place he'll go when he's wearing the bags, unless I'm with him. The


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clerk at the little grocery, Jimmy Ramis, knows me real well. Jimmy
reads the note, puts a quart of milk or some candy bars or whatever I
want in the saddlebags, puts the change in there, too, and Moose brings
it all back to me. He's a good, reliable service dog, the best. They
train them real well at Canine Companions for Independence. Moose never
chases after a cat with my newspaper and fresh milk in his backpack."

- 215 The dog raised his head off Tessa's lap, panted and grinned, as if
acknowledging the praise.

"One day he came home with a few items I'd sent him for, and he also had
a set of these sheets and pillow cases. I call up jimmy Ramis, see, and
ask him what's the idea, and Jimmy says he doesn't know what I'm talking
about, says he never saw any such sheets. Now, Jimmy's dad owns the
convenience store, and he also owns Surplus Outlet, out on the county
road. He gets all kinds of discontinued merchandise and stuff that
didn't sell as well as the manufacturers expected, picks it up at ten
cents on the dollar sometimes, and I figure these sheets were something2
he was having trouble unloading even at Surplus Outlet. Jimmy no doubt
saw them, thought they were pretty silly, and decided to have some fun
with me. But on the phone Jimmy says, 'Harry, if I knew anything about
the sheets, I'd tell you, but I don't." And I says, 'You trying to make
me believe Moose went and bought them all on his own, with his own
moneys' And Jimmy says, 'Well, no, I'd guess he shoplifted them
somewhere,' and I says, 'And just how did he manage to stuff them in his
own backpack so neat,' and Jimmy says, 'I don't know, Harry, but that
there is one hell of a clever dog-though it sounds like he doesn't have
good taste."

" Tessa saw how Harry relished the story, and she also saw why he was so
pleased by it. For one thing the dog was child and brother and friend,
all rolled into one, and Harry was proud that people thought of Moose as
clever. More important, Jimmy's little joke made Harry a part of his
community, not just a homebound invalid but a participant in the life of
his town. His lonely days were marked by too few such incidents.

"And you are a clever dog," Tessa told Moose.

Harry said, "Anyway, I decided to have Mrs. Hunsbok put them on the bed
next time she came, as a joke, but then I sort of liked them."

After drawing the drapes at the second window, Sam returned to the
stool, sat down, swiveled to face Harry, and said, "They're the loudest
sheets I've ever seen. Don't they keep you awake at night?

" Harry smiled.

"Nothing can keep me awake. I sleep like a baby. What keeps people
awake is worry about the future, about what might happen to them. But
the worst has already happened to me. Or they lie awake thinking about
the past, about what might have been, but I don't do that because I just
don't dare."

His smile faded as he spoke.

"So now what? What do we do next? " Gently removing Moose's head from
her lap, standing and brushing a few dog hairs from her jeans, Tessa
said, "Well, the phones aren't working, so Sam can't call the Bureau,
and if we walk out of town we risk an encounter with Watkins's patrols
or these Boogeymen. Unless you know a ham radio enthusiast who'd let us
use his set to get a message relayed, then so as far as I can see, we've
got to drive out."


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"Roadblocks, remember," Harry said.

She said, "Well, I figure we'll have to drive out in a truck, something
big and mean, ram straight through the damn roadblock, make it to the
highway, then out of their jurisdiction. Even if we do get chased down
by county cops, that's fine, because Sam can get them to call the
Bureau, verify his assignment, then they'll be on our side."

"Who's the federal agent here, anyway?"                 Sam asked.

Tessa felt herself blush.

"Sorry. See, a documentary filmmaker is almost always her own producer,
sometimes producer and director and writer too. That means if the art
part of it is going to work, the business part of it has to work first,
so I'm used to doing a lot of planning, logistics. Didn't mean to step
on your toes.

"Step on them any time."

Sam smiled, and she liked him when he smiled. She realized she was even
attracted to him a little. He was neither handsome nor ugly, and not
what most people meant by "plain," either. He was rather . . .
nondescript but pleasant-looking. She sensed a darkness in him,
something deeper than his current worries about events in Moonlight
Cove-maybe sadness at some loss, maybe long-repressed anger related to
some injustice he had suffered, maybe a general pessimism arising from
too much contact in his work with the worst elements of society. But
when he smiled he was transformed.

"You really going to smash out in a truck?"                   Harry asked.

"Maybe as a last resort," Sam said.

"But we'd have to find a rig big enough and then steal it, and that's an
operation in itself. Besides, they might have riot guns at the
roadblock, loaded - 217 with magnum rounds, maybe automatic weapons. I
wouldn't want to run that kind of flak even in a Mack truck. You can
ride into hell in a tank, but the devil will get his hands on you
anyway, so it's best not to go there in the first place."

"So where do we go?"         Tessa asked.

"To sleep," Sam said.

"There's a way out       of this, a way to get through to the Bureau. I can
sort of see it out       of the corner of my eye, but when I try to look
directly at it, it       goes away, and that's because I'm tired. I need a
couple of hours in       the sack to get fresh and think straight."

Tessa was exhausted, too, though after what had happened at Cove Lodge,
she was somewhat surprised that she not only could sleep but wanted to.
As she'd stood in her motel room, listening to the screams of the dying
and the savage shrieks of the killers, she wouldn't have thought she'd
ever sleep again.

Shaddack arrived at Peyser's at five minutes till four in the
morning. He drove his charcoal-gray van with heavily tinted windows,
rather than his Mercedes, because a computer terminal was mounted on the
console of the van, between the seats, where the manufacturer had
originally intended to provide a built-in cooler. As eventful as the
night had been thus far, it seemed a good idea to stay within reach of


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the data link that, like a spider, spun a silken web enmeshing all of
Moonlight Cove. He parked on the wide shoulder of the two-lane rural
blacktop, directly in front of the house.

As Shaddack walked across the yard to the front porch, distant rumbling
rolled along the Pacific horizon. The hard wind that had harried the
fog eastward had also brought a storm in from the west. During the past
couple of hours, churning clouds had clothed the heavens, shrouding the
naked stars that had burned briefly between the passing of the mist and
the coming of the thunderheads. Now the night was very dark and deep.
He shivered inside his cashmere topcoat, under which he still wore a
sweat suit.

A couple of deputies were sitting in black-and-whites in the driveway.
They watched him, pale faces beyond dusty car windows, and he liked to
think they regarded him with fear and reverence, for he was in a sense
their maker.

Loman Watkins was waiting for him in the front room. The place had been
wrecked. Neil Penniworth sat on the only undamaged piece of furniture;
he looked badly shaken and could not meet Shaddack's gaze. Watkins was
pacing. A few spatters of blood marked his uniform, but he looked
unhurt; if he'd sustained injuries, they had been minor and had already
healed. More likely, the blood belonged to someone else.

"What happened here?"          Shaddack asked.

Ignoring the question, Watkins spoke to his officer "Go out to the car,
Neil. Stay close to the other men."

"Yes, sir," Penniworth said.             He was huddled in his chair, bent forward,
looking down at his shoes.

"You'll be okay, Neil."

"I think so."

"It wasn't a question. It was a statement You'll be okay.                       You have
enough strength to resist. You've proven that already.

Penniworth nodded, got up, and headed for the door.

Shaddack said, "What's this all about?"

Turning toward the hallway at the other end of the room, Watkins said,
"Come with me." His voice was as cold and hard as ice, informed by fear
and anger, but noticeably devoid of the grudging respect with which he
had spoken to Shaddack ever since he had been converted in August.

Displeased by that change in Watkins, uneasy, Shaddack frowned and
followed him back down the hall.

The cop stopped at a closed door, turned to Shaddack.

"You told me that what you've done to us is improve our biological
efficiency by injecting us with these . . . these biochips. A
misnomer, really. They're not chips at all, but incredibly small
microspheres.

" In spite of the regressives and a few other problems that had
developed with the Moonhawk Project, Shaddack's pride of achievement was
undiminished. Glitches could be fixed. Bugs could be worked out of the
system. He was still the genius of his age; he not only felt this to be


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true, but knew it as well as he knew in which direction to look for the
rising sun each morning.

Genius .     .   .

The ordinary silicon microchip that made possible the computer
revolution had been the size of a fingernail, and had contained one
million circuits etched onto it by photo lithography. The smallest
circuit on the chip had been one-hundredth as wide as a human hair.
Breakthroughs in X-ray lithography, using giant particle accelerators
called synchrotrons, eventually made possible the imprinting of one
billion circuits on a chip, with features as small as one-thousandth the
width of a human hair. Shrinking dimensions was the primary way to gain
computer speed, improving both function and capabilities.

The microspheres developed by New Wave were one fourth ous and the size
of a microchip. Each was imprinted with a quarter-million circuits.
This had been achieved by the application of a radically new form of
X-ray lithography that made it possible to etch circuits on amazingly
small surfaces and without having to hold those surfaces perfectly
still.

Conversion of Old People into New People began with the injection of
hundreds of thousands of these microspheres, in solution, into the
bloodstream. They were biologically interactive in function, but the
material itself was biologically inert, so the immune system wasn't
triggered. There were different kinds of microspheres. Some were
heart-tropic, meaning they moved through the veins to the heart and took
up residence there, attaching themselves to the walls of the blood
vessels that serviced the cardiac muscle. Some spheres were
liver-tropic, lung-tropic, kidney-tropic, bowel-tropic, brain-tropic,
and so on. They settled in clusters at those sites and were designed in
such a way that, when touching, their circuits linked.

Those clusters, spread throughout the body, eventually provided about
fifty billion usable circuits that had the potential for data
processing, considerably more than in the largest supercomputers of the
1980s. In a sense, by injection, a super-supercomputer had been put
inside the human body.

Moonlight Cove and the surrounding area were constantly bathed in
microwave transmissions from dishes on top of the main building at New
Wave. A fraction of those transmissions involved the police computer
system, and another fraction could be drawn upon to power-up the
microspheres inside each of the New People.

A small number of spheres were of a different material and served as
transducers and power distributors. When one of the Old People received
his third injection of microspheres, the power spheres at once drew on
those microwave transmissions, converting them into electrical current
and distributing it throughout the network. The amount of current
needed to operate the system was exceedingly small.

Other specialized spheres in each cluster were memory units. Some of
those carried the program that would operate the system; that program
was loaded the moment power entered the network.

To Watkins, Shaddack said, "Long ago I became convinced that the basic
problem with the human animal is its extremely emotional nature. I've
freed you from that burden. In so doing, I've made you not only
mentally healthier but physically healthier as well."



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"How?   I know so little of how the Change is effected."

"You're a cybernetic organism now-that is, part man and part machine-but
you don't need to understand it, Loman. You use a telephone, yet you've
no idea of how to build a phone system from scratch. You don't know how
a computer works, yet you can use one. And you don't have to know how
the computer in you works in order to use it, either."

Watkins's eyes were clouded with fear.

"Do I use it .        .   .   or does it use me?"

"Of course, it doesn't use you."

"Of course .      .   .

" Shaddack wondered what had happened here tonight to have put Watkins
in such a state of extreme anxiety. He was more curious than ever to
see what was in the bedroom at the threshold of which they had halted.
But he was acutely aware that Watkins was in a dangerously excited state
and that it was necessary, if frustrating, to take the time to calm his
fears.

"Loman, the clustered microspheres within you don't constitute a mind.
The system's not in any way truly intelligent. It's a servant, your
servant. It frees you from toxic emotions."

- 221 Strong emotions-hatred, love, envy, jealousy, the whole long list
of human sensibilities-regularly destabilized the biological functions
of the body. Medical researchers had proved that different emotions
stimulated the production of different brain chemicals, and that those
chemicals in turn induced the various organs and tissues of the body to
either increase or reduce or alter their function in a less than
productive fashion. Shaddack was convinced that a man whose body was
ruled by his emotions could not be a totally healthy man and never
entirely clearthinking.

The microsphere computer within each of the New People monitored every
organ in the body. When it detected the production of various
amino-acid compounds and other chemical substances that were produced in
response to strong emotion, it used electrical stimuli to override the
brain and other organs, shutting off the flow, thus eliminating the
physical consequences of an emotion if not the emotion itself. At the
same time the microsphere computer stimulated the copious production of
other compounds known to repress those same emotions, thereby treating
not only the cause but the effect.

"I've released you from all emotions but fear," Shaddack said, "which is
necessary for self-preservation. Now that the chemistry of your body is
no longer undergoing wild swings, you'll think more clearly."

"So far as I've noticed, I've not suddenly become a genius."

"Well, you might not notice a greater mental acuity yet, but in time you
will."

"When?"

"When your body is fully purged of the residue of a lifetime of
emotional pollution. Meanwhile, your interior computer"he lightly
tapped Watkins's chest-"is also programmed to use complex electrical
stimuli to induce the body to create wholly new amino-acid compounds
that keep your blood vessels scoured and free of plaque and clots, kill


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cancerous cells the moment they appear, and perform a double score of
other chores, keeping you far healthier than ordinary men, no doubt
dramatically lengthening your life-span."

Shaddack had expected the healing process to be accelerated in New
People, but he had been surprised at the almost miraculous speed with
which their wounds closed. He still could not entirely understand how
new tissue could be formed so quickly, and his current work on Moonhawk
was focused on discovering an explanation for that effect. The healing
was not accomplished without a price, for the metabolism was
fantastically accelerated; stored body fat was burned prodigiously in
order to close a wound in seconds or minutes, leaving the healed man
pounds lighter, sweat-drenched, and fiercely hungry.

Watkins frowned and wiped one shaky hand across his sweaty face. "I can
maybe see that heating would be speeded up, but what gives us the
ability to so completely reshape ourselves, to regress to another form?
Surely not even buckets of these biological chemicals could tear down
our bodies and rebuild them in just a minute or two. How can that be?"

For a moment Shaddack met the other man's gaze, then looked away,
coughed, and said, "Listen, I can explain all of this to you later.
Right now I want to see Peyser. I hope you were able to restrain him
without doing much damage."

As Shaddack reached toward the door to push it open, Watkins seized his
wrist, staying his hand. Shaddack was shocked. He did not allow
himself to be touched.

"Take your hand off me."

"How can the body be so suddenly reshaped?"

"I told you, we'll discuss it later."

"Now." Watkins's determination was so strong that it carved deep lines
in his face.

"Now. I'm so scared I can't think straight. I can't function at this
level of fear, Shaddack. Look at me. I'm shaking. I feel like I'm
going to blow apart. A million pieces. You don't know what happened
here tonight, or you'd feel the same way. I've got to know How can our
bodies change so suddenly?

" Shaddack hesitated.

"I'm working on that."

Surprised, Watkins let go of his wrist and said, "You .                     .   .

you mean you don't know?"

"It's an unexpected effect. I'm beginning to understand it"which was a
lie-"but I've got a lot more work to do." First he had to understand
the New People's phenomenal healing powers, which were no doubt an
aspect of the same process that allowed them to completely metamorphose
into subhuman forms.

"You subjected us to this without knowing what all it might do to us?"

"I knew it would be a benefit, a great gift," Shaddack said - 223
impatiently, "No scientist can ever predict all the side effects. He
has to proceed with the confidence that whatever side effects arise will


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not outweigh the benefits."

"But they do outweigh the benefits," Watkins said, as close to anger as
a New Man could get.

"My God, how could you have done this to us?

" I did this for you.

" Watkins stared at him, then pushed open the bedroom door and said,
"Have a look.

" Shaddack stepped into the room, where the carpet was damp and some of
the walls festooned-with blood. He grimaced at the stink. He found all
biological odors unusually repellent, perhaps because they were a
reminder that human beings were far less efficient and clean than
machines. After stopping at the first corpse which lay facedown near
the door-and studying it, he looked across the room at the second body.

"TWo of them? Two regressives, and you killed both? Two chances to
study the psychology of these degenerates, and you threw away both
opportunities?"

Watkins was unbowed by the criticism.

"It was a life-or-death situation here.                 It couldn't have been handled
differently.

" He seemed angry to a degree inconsistent with the personality of a New
Man, though perhaps the emotion sustaining his icy demeanor was less
rage than fear. Fear was acceptable.

"Peyser was regressed when we got here," Watkins continued.

"We searched the house, confronted him in this room."

As Watkins described that confrontation in detail, Shaddack was gripped
by an apprehension that he tried not to reveal an( to which he did not
even want to admit. When he spoke he let only anger touch his voice,
not fear "You're telling me that your men, both Sholnick and Penniworth,
are regressives, that even you are a regressive?"

"Sholnick was a regressive, yes. In my book Penniworth isn't-not yet
anyway-because he successfully resisted the urge. Just as I resisted
it." Watkins boldly maintained eye contact, not once glancing away,
which further disturbed Shaddack.

"What I'm telling you is the same thing I told you in so many words a
few hours ago at your place Each of us, every damned one of us, is
potentially a regressive. It's not a rare sickness among the New
People. It's in all of us. You've not created new and better men any
more than Hitler's policies of genetic breeding could've created a
master race. You're not God; you're Dr.

Moreau. You will not speak to me like this," Shaddack said, wondering
who this Moreau was. The name was vaguely familiar, but he could not
place it.

"When you talk to me, I'd suggest you remember who I am."

Watkins lowered his voice, perhaps realizing anew that Shaddack could
extinguish the New People almost as easily as snuffing out a candle. But
he continued to speak forcefully and with too little respect.



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"You still haven't responded to the worst of this news."

"And what's that?"

"Didn't you hear me? I said that Peyser was stuck. He couldn't remake
himself. I doubt very much that he was trapped in an altered state. New
Men have complete control of their bodies, more control than I ever
anticipated. If he could not return to human form, that was strictly a
psychological block. He didn't really want to return. " For a moment
Watkins stared at him, then shook his head and said, "You aren't really
that dense, are you? It's the same thing. Hell, it doesn't matter
whether something went wrong with the microsphere network inside him or
whether it was strictly psychological. Either way, the effect was the
same, the result was the same He was stuck, trapped, locked into that
degenerate form. You will not speak to me like this," Shaddack repeated
firmly, as if repetition of the command would work the same way it did
when training a dog.

For all their physiological superiority and potential for mental
superiority, New People were still dismayingly people, and to the degree
they were people, they were that much less effective machines. With a
computer, you only had to program a command once. The computer retained
it and acted upon it always. Shaddack wondered if he would ever be able
to perfect the New People to the point at which future generations
functioned as smoothly and reliably as the average IBM PC.

Damp with sweat, pale, his eyes strange and haunted, Watkins was an
intimidating figure. When the cop took two steps to reduce the gap
between them, Shaddack was afraid and wanted to retreat, but he held his
ground and continued to meet Watkins's - 225 eyes the way he would have
defiantly met those of a dangerous German shepherd if he had been
cornered by one.

"Look at Sholnick," Watkins said, indicating the corpse at their feet.
He used the toe of his shoe to turn the dead man over.

Even riddled with shotgun pellets and soaked in blood, Sholnick's
bizarre mutation was unmistakable. His sightlessly staring eyes were
perhaps the& most frightful thing about him yellow with black irises,
not the round irises of the human eye but elongated ovals as in the eyes
of a snake.

outside, thunder rolled across the night, a louder peal than the one
Shaddack had heard when he'd been crossing Peyser's front lawn.

Watkins said, "The way you explained it to me-these degenerates undergo
willful devolution.

"That's right. You said the whole history of human evolution is carried
in our genes, that we still have in us traces of what the species once
was, and that the regressives somehow tap that genetic material and
devolve into creatures somewhere farther back on the evolutionary
ladder. What's your point?"

"That explanation made some sort of crazy sense when we trapped Coombs
in the theater and got a good look at him back in September. He was
more ape than man, something in between. it doesn't make crazy sense;
it makes perfect sense."

"But, Jesus, look at Sholnick. Look at him! When I gunned him down,
he'd halfway transformed himself into some goddamned creature that's
part man, part . . . hell, I don't know, part lizard or snake. You


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telling me that we evolved from reptiles, we're carrying lizard genes
from ten million years ago?"

Shaddack thrust both hands in his coat pockets, lest they betray his
apprehension with a nervous gesture or tremble.

"The first life on earth was in the sea, then something crawled onto the
land-a fish with rudimentary legs-and the fish evolved into the early
reptiles, and along the way mammals split off. If we don't contain
actual fragments of the genetic material of those very early
reptiles-and I believe we do-then at least we have racial memory of that
stage of evolution encoded in us in some other way we don't really
understand."


"You're jiving me, Shaddack.

"And you're irritating me."

"I don't give a damn. Come here, come with me, take a closer look at
Peyser. He was a friend of yours from way back, wasn't he?

Take a good, long look at what he was when he died."

Peyser was flat on his back, naked, right leg straight in front of him,
left leg bent under him at an angle, one arm flung out at his side, the
other across his chest, which had been shattered by a couple of shotgun
blasts. The body and the face-with its inhuman muzzle and teeth, yet
vaguely recognizable as Mike Peyser-were those of a shockingly horrific
freak, a dog-man, a werewolf, something that belonged in either a
carnival sideshow or an old horror movie. The skin was coarse. The
patchy coat of hair was wiry. The hands looked powerful, the claws
sharp.

Because his fascination exceeded his disgust and fear, Shaddack pulled
up his topcoat to keep the hem of it from brushing the bloody corpse,
and stooped beside Peyser's body for a closer look.

Watkins hunkered down on the other side of the cadaver.

While another avalanche of thunder rumbled down the night sky, the dead
man stared at the bedroom ceiling with eyes that were too human for the
rest of his twisted countenance.

"You going to tell me that somewhere along the way we evolved from dogs,
wolves?" Watkins asked.

Shaddack did not reply.

Watkins pressed the issue.

"You going to tell me that we've got dog genes in us that we can tap
when we want to transform ourselves? Am I supposed to believe God took a
rib from some prehistoric Lassie and made man from it before he took
man's rib to make a woman?"

Curiously Shaddack touched one of Mike Peyser's hands, which was
designed for killing as surely as was a soldier's bayonet. It felt like
flesh, just cooler than that of a living man.

"This can't be explained biologically," Watkins said, glaring at
Shaddack across the corpse.




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"This wolf form isn't something Peyser could dredge up from racial
memory stored in his genes. So how could he change like this? It's not
just your biochips at work here. It's something else . . . something
stranger."

Shaddack nodded.

"Yes."    An explanation had occurred to him, and he was excited by it.

"Something a great deal stranger .               .   .   but perhaps I understand it."

- 227 "So tell me.         I'd like to understand it.             Damned if I wouldn't.

I'd like to understand it real well.                 Before it happens to me."

,There's a theory that form is a function of consciousness."

"Huh?"

it holds that we are what we think we are. I'm not talking palp,
psychology here, that you can be what you want to be if you'll only like
yourself, nothing of that sort. I mean physically, we may have the
potential to be whatever we think we are, to override the morphic stasis
dictated by our genetic heritage."

"Gobbledegook," Watkins said impatiently.

Shaddack stood.       He put his hands in his pockets again.

"Let me put it this way The theory says that consciousness is the
greatest power in the universe, that it can bend the physical world to
its desire."

"Mind over matter."

"Right.

"Like some talk-show psychic bending a spoon or stopping a watch, "
Watkins said.

"Those people are usually fakes, I suspect. But, yes, maybe that power
is really in us. We just don't know how to tap it because for millions
of years we've allowed the physical world to dominate us. By habit, by
stasis, and by preference for order over chaos, we remain at the mercy
of the physical world. But what we're talking about here," he said,
pointing to Sholnick and Peyser, "is a lot more complex and exciting
than bending a spoon with the mind. Peyser felt the urge to regress,
for reasons I don't understand, perhaps for the sheer thrill of it-For
the thrill." Watkins's voice lowered, became quiet, almost hushed, and
was filled with such intense fear and mental anguish that it deepened
Shaddack's chill.

"Animal power is thrilling. Animal need. You feel animal hunger,
animal lust, bloodthirst-and you're drawn toward that because it seems
so . so simple and powerful, so natural. it's freedom."

"Freedom?"

"Freedom from responsibility, from worry, from the pressure of the
civilized world, from having to think too much. The temptation to
regress is tremendously powerful because you feel life will be so much
easier and exciting then," Watkins said, evidently speaking about what
he had felt when drawn toward an altered state.



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"When you become a beast, life is all sensation, just pain and pleasure,
with no need to intellectualize anything. That's part of it, anyway."

Shaddack was silent, unsettled by the passion with which Watkins-not
ordinarily an expressive man-had spoken of the urge to regress.

Another detonation rocked the sky, more powerful than any before it. The
first hard crack of thunder reverberated in the bedroom windows.

Mind racing, Shaddack said, "Anyway, the important thing is that when
Peyser felt this urge to become a beast, a hunter, he didn't regress
along the human genetic line. Evidently, in his opinion, a wolf is the
greatest of all hunters, the most desirable form for a predatory beast,
so he willed himself to become wolflike.

"Just like that," Watkins said skeptically.

"Yes, just like that. Mind over matter. The metamorphosis is mostly a
mental process. Oh, certainly, there are physical changes. But we might
not be talking complete alteration of matter . . . only of biological
structures. The basic nucleotides remain the same, but the sequence in
which they're read changes drastically. Structural genes are
transformed into operator genes by a force of will. . . ."

Shaddack's voice trailed off as his excitement rose to match his fear
and left him breathless. He'd done far more than he'd hoped to do with
the Moonhawk Project. The stunning accomplishment was the source of
both his sudden joy and escalating fear joy, because he had given men
the ability to control their physical form and, eventually, perhaps all
matter, simply by the exercise of will; fear, because he was not sure
that the New People could learn to control and properly use their power
...

or that he could continue to control them.

"The gift I've given to you-computer-assisted physiology and release
from emotion-unleashes the mind's power over matter. It allows
consciousness to dictate for7n."

Watkins shook his head, clearly appalled by what Shaddack was
suggesting.

"Maybe Peyser willed himself to become what he did. Maybe Sholnick
willed it too. But I'll be damned if I did. When I was overcome by the
desire to change, I fought it like an ex-addict sweating out a craving
for heroin. I didn't want - 229 it. it came over me . . . the way
the force of the full moon comes over a werewolf. No," Shaddack said.

"Subconsciously, you &d want to change, Loman, and you no doubt
partially wanted it even on a conscious level. You must have wanted it
to some extent because you spoke so forcefully about how attractive
regression was. You resisted using your power of mind over body only
because you found metamorphosis marginally more frightening than
appealing. If you lose some of your fear of it..... or if an altered
state becomes just a little more appealing..... well, then your
psychological balance will shift, and you'll remake yourself. But it
won't be some outside force at work. It'll be your own mind."

"Then why couldn't Peyser come back?"

"As I said, and as you suggested, he didn't want to."

"He was trapped."


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"Only by his own desire."

Watkins looked down at the grotesque corpse of the regressive. "What
have you done to us, Shaddack?"

"Haven't you grasped what I've said?"

"What have you done to us?"

"This is a great gift!"

"To have no emotions but fear?"

"That's what frees your mind and gives you the power to control your
very form," Shaddack said excitedly.

"What I don't understand is why the regressives have all chosen a
subhuman condition. Surely you have the power within you to undergo
evolution rather than devolution, to lift yourself up from mere humanity
to something higher, cleaner, purer. Perhaps you even have the power to
become a being of pure consciousness, intellect without any physical
form. Why have all these New People chosen to regress instead?"

Watkins raised his head, and his eyes had a half-dead look, as if they
had absorbed death from the very sight of the corpse.

"What good is it to have the power of a god if you can't also experience
the simple pleasures of a man?"

"But you can do and experience anything you want," Shaddack said
exasperatedly.

"Not love.

"What?    Not love or hate or joy or any emotion but fear."


"But you don't need them.           Not having them has freed you."

"You're not thick headed," Watkins said, "so I guess you don't
understand because you're psychologically . . . twisted, warped.

"You must not speak to me like-I'm trying to tell you why they all
choose a subhuman form over a superhuman form. It's because, for a
thinking creature of high intellect, there can be no pleasure separate
from emotion. If you deny men emotions, you deny them pleasure, so they
seek an altered state in which complex emotions and pleasure aren't
linked-the life of an unthinking beast."

"Nonsense. You are-" Watkins interrupted him again, sharply. "Listen to
me, for God's sake! If I remember, even Moreau listened to his
creatures.

" His face was flushed now instead of pale. His eyes no longer looked
half dead; a certain wildness had returned to them. He was only a step
or two from Shaddack and seemed to loom over him, though he was the
shorter of the two. He looked scared, badly scared-and dangerous.

He said, "Consider sex-a basic human pleasure. For sex to be fully
satisfying, it has to be accompanied by love or at least some affection.
To a psychologically damaged man, sex can still be good if it's linked
to hate or pride of domination; even negative emotions can make the act
pleasurable for a twisted man. But done with no emotion at all, -it's


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pointless, stupid, just the breeding impulse of an animal, just the
rhythmic function of a machine."

A flash of lightning burned the night and blazed briefly on the bedroom
windows, followed by a crash of thunder that seemed to shake the house.
That celestial flicker was, for an instant, brighter than the soft glow
of the single bedroom lamp.

In that queer light Shaddack thought he saw something happen to Loman
Watkins's face . . . a shift in the relationship of the features. But
when the lightning passed, Watkins looked quite like himself, so it must
have been Shaddack's imagination.

Continuing to speak with great force, with the passion of stark fear,
Watkins said, "It's not just sex, either. The same goes for other
physical pleasures. Eating, for example. Yeah, I still taste a piece
of chocolate when I eat it. But the taste gives me only a - 231 tiny
fraction of the satisfaction that it did before I was converted. Haven't
you noticed?

" Shaddack did not reply, and he hoped that nothing in his demeanor
would reveal that he had not undergone conversion himself. He was, of
course, waiting until the process had been more highly refined through
additional generations of the New People. But he suspected Watkins
would not react well to the discovery that their maker had not chosen to
submit himself to the blessing that he had bestowed on them.

Watkins said, "And do you know why there's less satisfaction?

Before conversion, when we ate chocolate, the taste had thousands of
associations for us. When we ate it, we subconsciously remembered the
first time we ate it and all the times in between, and subconsciously we
remembered how often that taste was associated with holidays and
celebrations of all kinds, and because of all that the taste made us
feel good. But now when I eat chocolate, it's just a taste, a good
taste, but it doesn't make me feel good any more - I know it should; I
remember that such a thing as 'feeling good' was part of it once, but
not now. The taste of chocolate doesn't generate emotional echoes any
more. It's an empty sensation, its richness has been stolen from me.
The richness of everything but fear has been stolen from me, and
everything is gray now-strange, gray, drab-as if I'm half dead."

The left side of Watkins's head bulged. His cheekbone enlarged. That
ear began to change shape and draw toward a point.

Stunned, Shaddack backed away from him.

Watkins followed, raising his voice, speaking with a slight slur but
with no less force, not with real anger but with fear and an unsettling
touch of savagery "Why the hell would any of us want to evolve to some
higher form with even fewer pleasures of the body and the heart?
Intellectual pleasures aren't enough, Shaddack. Life is more than that.
A life that's only intellectual isn't tolerable.

" As Watkins's brow gradually sloped backward, slowly melting away like
a wall of snow in the sun, heavier accretions of bone began to build up
around his eyes.

Shaddack backed into the dresser.

Still approaching, Watkins said, "Jesus!                 Don't you see yet?

Even a man confined to a hospital bed, paralyzed from the neck down, has


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more in his life than intellectual interests; no one's stolen his
emotions from him; no one's reduced him to fear and pure intellect.                         We
need pleasure, Shaddack, pleasure, pleasure. Life without it is
terrifying. Pleasure makes life worth living."

"Stop. You've made it impossible for us to experience the pleasurable
release of emotion, so we can't fully experience pleasures of the flesh,
either, because we're creatures of a high order and need the emotional
aspect to truly enjoy physical pleasure. It's both or neither in human
beings."

Watkins's hands, fisted at his sides, were becoming larger, with swollen
knuckles and tobacco-brown, pointed nails.

"You're transforming," Shaddack said.

Ignoring him, speaking more thickly as the shape of his mouth began to
change subtly, Watkins said, "So we revert to a savage, altered state.
We retreat from our intellect. In the cloak of the beast, our only
pleasure is the pleasure of the flesh, the flesh, flesh . . .

but at least we're no longer aware of what we've lost, so the pleasure
remains intense, so intense, deep and sweet, sweet, so sweet. You've
made..... made our lives intolerable, gray and dead, dead, all dead,
dead..... so we have to devolve in mind and in body . . . to find a
worthwhile existence. We . . . we have to flee . . . from the
horrible restrictions of this narrowed life . . .

this very narrowed life you've given us. Men aren't machines. Men .                           .
. men . . . men are not machines! You're regressing. For God's
sake, Loman!"

Watkins halted and seemed disoriented. Then he shook his head, as if to
cast off his confusion as he might a veil. He raised his hands, looked
at them, and cried out in terror. He glanced past Shaddack, at the
dresser mirror, and his cry grew louder, shriller.

Abruptly Shaddack was acutely aware of the stench of blood, to which he
had somewhat accustomed himself. Watkins must be even more affected by
it, though not repulsed, no, not in the least repulsed, but excited.

Lightning flashed and thunder shook the night again, and rain suddenly
came down in torrents, beating on the windows and drumming on the roof.

Watkins looked from the mirror to Shaddack, raised a hand as if to
strike him, then turned and staggered out of the room, into the hall,
away from the ripe stink of blood. Out there he dropped to his knees,
then onto his side. He curled into a ball, - 233 shaking violently,
gagging, whimpering, snarling, and intermittently chanting, "No, no, no,
no."

When he pulled back from the brink and felt in control of himself
once more, Loman sat up and leaned against the wall. He was wet with
perspiration again, and shaky with hunger. The partial transformation
and the energy expended to keep it from going all the way had left him
drained. He was relieved but also felt unfulfilled, as if some great
prize had been within his reach but then had been snatched away just as
he had touched it.

A hollow, somewhat susurrant sound surrounded him. At first he thought
it was an internal noise, all in his head, perhaps the soft boom and
sizzle of brain cells flaring and dying from the strain of thwarting the
regressive urge. Then he realized it was rain hammering on the roof of


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the bungalow.

When he opened his eyes, his vision was blurred. It cleared, and he was
staring at Shaddack, who stood on the other side of the hall, just
beyond the open bedroom door. Gaunt, long-faced, pale enough to pass
for an albino, with those yellowish eyes, in his dark topcoat, the man
looked like a visitation, perhaps Death himself.

If this had been Death, Loman might well have stood up and warmly
embraced him.

Instead, while he waited for the strength to get up, he said, "No more
conversions. You've got to stop the conversions."

Shaddack said nothing.

"You're not going to stop, are you?"

Shaddack merely stared at him.

"You're mad," Loman said.

"You're stark, raving mad, yet I've no choice but to do what you want .
. . or kill myself."

"Never talk to me like that again.               Never.     Remember who I am.

"I remember who you are," Loman said.                He struggled to his feet at last,
dizzy, weak.

"You did this to me without my consent. And if the time comes when I
can no longer resist the urge to regress, when I sink down into savage,
when I'm no longer scared shitless of you, I'll somehow hold on to
enough of my mind to remember where you are, too, and I'll come for you.

"You threaten me?"         Shaddack said, clearly amazed.

"No," Loman said.

"Threat isn't the right word."

"It better not be. Because if anything happens to me, Sun is programmed
to broadcast a command that'll be received by the clusters of
microspheres inside you and--will instantly kill us all," Loman
finished.

"Yeah, I know. You've told me. If you go, we all go with you, just
like people down there at Jonestown years ago, drinking their poisoned
KoolAid and biting the big one right along with Reverend Jim. You're our
Reverend Jim Jones, a Jim Jones for the high-tech age, Jim Jones with a
silicon heart and tightly packed semiconductors between the ears. No,
I'm not threatening you, Reverend Jim, because 'threat' is too dramatic
a word for it. A man making a threat has to be feeling something
powerful, has to be hot with anger. I'm a New Person. I'm only afraid.
That's all I can be. Afraid. So it's not a threat. No such a thing.
It's a promise."

Shaddack stepped through the bedroom doorway, into the hall. A drought
of cold air seemed to come with him. Maybe it was Loman's imagination,
but the hall seemed chillier with Shaddack in it.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

At last Shaddack said, "You'll continue to do what I say."


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"I don't have a choice," Loman noted.

"That's the way you made me-without a choice. I'm right there in the
palm of your hand, Lord, but it isn't love that keeps me there-it's
fear.

"Better," Shaddack said.

He turned his back on Loman and walked down the hall, into the living
room, out of the house, and into the night, the rain.

1P,.Qrt Two DAYBREAK IN HADES I could not stop something I knew was
wrong and terrible. I had an awful sense of powerlessness.

-ANDREI SAKHAROV Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the
guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

-WILL AND ARIEL DURANT Before dawn, having slept less than an hour,
Tessa Lockland was awakened by a coldness in her right hand and then the
quick, hot licking of a tongue. Her ann was draped over the edge of the
mattress, hand trailing just above the carpet, and something down there
was taking a taste of her.

She sat straight up in bed, unable to breathe.

She had been dreaming of the carnage at Cove Lodge, of half-seen beasts,
shambling and swift, with menacing teeth and claws like curved and
well-honed blades. Now she thought that the nightmare had become real,
that Harry's house had been invaded by those creatures, and that the
questing tongue was but the prelude to a sudden, savage bite.

But it was only Moose. She could see him vaguely in                        the dim glow that
came through the doorway from the night-light in the                       second-floor hall,
and at last she was able to draw breath. He put his                        forepaws on the
mattress, too well trained to climb all the way onto                       the bed. Whining
softly, he seemed only to want affection.

She was sure that she had closed the door before retiring. But she had
seen enough examples of Moose's cleverness to suppose that he was able
to open a door if he was determined. In fact she suddenly realized that
the interior doors of the Talbot house were fitted with hardware that
made the task easier for Moose not knobs but lever-action handles that
would release the latch when depressed either by a hand or a paw.

"Lonely?"     she asked, gently rubbing the Labrador behind the ears.

The dog whined again and submitted to her petting.

Fat drops of rain rattled against the window. It was falling %A,with
such force that she could hear it slashing through the trees outside.
the wind pressed insistently against the house.

"Well, as lone!y as you are, fella, I'm a thousand times that sleepy, so
you're going to have to scoot."

When she stopped petting him, he understood. Reluctantly he dropped to
the floor, padded to the door, looked back at her for a moment, then
went into the hall, glanced both ways, and turned left.

The light from the hall was minimal, but it bothered her. She got up
and closed the door, and by the time she returned to bed in the dark,
she knew she would not be able to go back to sleep right away.


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For one thing, she was wearing all her clothes-jeans and T-shirt and
sweater-having taken off only her shoes, and she was not entirely
comfortable. But she hadn't the nerve to un.dress, for that would make
her feel so vulnerable that she wouldn't sleep at all. After what had
happened at Cove Lodge, Tessa wanted to be prepared to move fast.

Furthermore, she was in the only spare bedroom-there was another, but
unfurnished-and the mattress and quilted spread had a musty odor from
years of disuse. It had once been Harry's father's room, as the house
had once been Harry's father's house, but the elder Talbot had died
seventeen years ago, three years after Harry had been brought home from
the war. Tessa had insisted she could do without sheets and just sleep
on top of the spread or, if cold, slip under the spread and sleep on the
bare mattress. After shooing Moose out and closing the door, she felt
chilled, and when she got under the spread, the musty odor seemed to
carry a new scent of mildew, faint but unpleasant.

Above the background patter and hiss of the rain, she heard the hum of
the elevator ascending. Moose probably had called it. Was he usually
so peripatetic at night?

Though she was grindingly weary, she was now too awake to shut her mind
off easily. Her thoughts were deeply troubling.

Not the massacre at Cove Lodge. Not the grisly stories of dead bodies
being shoveled like so much refuse into crematoriums. Not the Parkins
woman being torn to pieces by some species unknown. Not the monstrous
night stalkers. All of those macabre images no doubt helped determine
the channel into which her thoughts flowed, but for the most part they
were only - 239 a somber background for more personal ruminations about
her life and its direction.

Having recently brushed against death, she was more aware than usual of
her mortality. Life was finite. In the business and the busyness of
daily life, that truth was often forgotten.

Now she was unable to escape thinking about it, and she wondered if she
was playing too loose with life, wasting too many years. Her work was
satisfying. She was a happy woman; it was damned hard for a Lockland to
be unhappy, predisposed as they were to good humor. But in all honesty
she had to admit she was not getting what she truly wanted. If she
remained on her current course, she'd never get it.

What she wanted was a family, a place to belong. That came, of course,
from her childhood and adolescence in San Diego, where she had idolized
her big sister, Janice, and had basked in the love of her mother and
father. The tremendous amount of happiness and security she'd known in
her youth was what allowed her to deal with the misery, despair, and
terror that she sometimes encountered when working on one of her more
ambitious documentaries. The first two decades of her life had been so
full of joy, they balanced anything that followed.

The elevator had arrived on the second floor, and now, with a soft thump
and a renewed hum, it descended. She was intrigued that Moose, so
accustomed to using the elevator for and with his master, used it
himself at night, though the stairs would have been quicker. Dogs, too,
could be creatures of habit.

They'd had dogs at home when she was a kid, first a great golden
retriever named Barney, then an Irish Setter named Mickey Finn. .                          .   .




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Janice had married and moved away from home sixteen years ago, when
Tessa was eighteen, and thereafter entropy, the blind force of
dissolution, had pulled apart that cozy life in San Diego. Tessa's dad
died three years later, and soon after his funeral Tessa hit the road to
make her industrials and documentaries and travel films, and although
she had remained in touch with her mother and sister on a regular basis,
that golden time had passed.

Janice was gone now. And Marion wouldn't live forever, not even if she
actually gave up skydiving. More than anything, Tessa wanted to
re-create that home life with a husband of her own and children. She had
been married, at twenty-three, to a man who wanted kids more than he
wanted her, and when they had learned that she could never have
children, he had left. Adoption wasn't enough for him. He wanted
children that were biologically his. Fourteen months from wedding day
to divorce. She had been badly hurt.

Thereafter she had thrown herself into her work with a passion she'd not
shown previously. She was insightful enough to know that through her
art she was trying to reach out to all the world as if it were one big
extended family. By boiling down complex stories and issues to thirty,
sixty, or ninety minutes of film, she was trying to pull the world in,
reduce it to essences, to the size of one family.

But, lying awake in Harry Talbot's spare bedroom, Tessa knew she was
never going to be fully satisfied if she didn't radically shake up her
life and more directly seek the thing she so much wanted. It was
impossible to be a person of depth if you lacked a love for humankind,
but that generalized love could swiftly become airy and meaningless if
you didn't have a particular family close to you; for in your family you
saw, day to day, those specific things in specific people that
justified, by extension, a broader love of fellow men and women. She
was a stickler for specificity in her art, but she lacked it in her
emotional life.

Breathing dust and the faint odor of mildew, she felt as if her
potential as a person had long been lying as unused as that bedroom. But
not having dated for years, having sought refuge from heartbreak in hard
work, how did a woman of thirty-four begin to open herself to that part
of life she had so purposefully sealed off? Just then she felt more
barren than at any time since first learning that she would never have
children of her own. And at the moment, finding a way to remake her
life seemed a more important issue than learning where the Boogeymen
came from and what they were.

A brush with death could stir up peculiar thoughts.

In a while her weariness overcame her inner turmoil, and she drifted
into sleep again. Just as she dropped off, she realized that Moose
might have come to her room because he sensed something wrong in the
house. Perhaps he had been trying to alert her. But surely he would
have been more agitated and would have barked if there was danger.

Then she slept.

From Peyser's, Shaddack returned to his ultramodern house on the north
point of the cove, but he didn't stay long. He made three ham
sandwiches, wrapped them, and put them in a cooler with several cans of
Coke. He put the cooler in the van along with a couple of blankets and
a pillow. From the gun cabinet in his study he fetched a Smith & Wesson
.357 Magnum, a Remington 12-gauge semiautomatic pistol-grip shotgun, and
plenty of ammunition for both. Thus equipped, he set out in the storm


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to cruise Moonlight Cove and immediate outlying areas, intending to keep
on the move, monitoring the situation by computer until the first phase
of Moonhawk was concluded at midnight, in less than nineteen hours.

Watkins's threat unnerved him. Staying mobile, he wouldn't be easy to
find if Watkins regressed and, true to his promise, came after him. By
midnight, when the last conversions were performed, Shaddack would have
consolidated his power. Then he could deal with the cop.

Watkins would be seized and shackled before he transformed. Then
Shaddack could strap him down in a lab and study his psychology and
physiology to find an explanation for this plague of regression.

He did not accept Watkins's explanation. They weren't regressing to
escape life as New People. To accept that theory, he would have to
admit that the Moonhawk Project was an unmitigated disaster, that the
Change was not a boon to mankind but a curse, and that all his work was
not only misguided but calamitous in its effect. He could admit no such
thing.

As maker and master of the New People, he had tasted godlike power.                         He
was unwilling to relinquish it.

The rainswept, pre-dawn streets were deserted except for cars-some
police cruisers, some not-in which pairs of men patrolled in the hope of
spotting either Booker, Tessa Lockland the Foster girl, or regressives
on the prowl. Though they could not see through his van's heavily
smoked windows, they surely knew to whom the vehicle belonged.

Shaddack recognized many of them, for they worked at New Wave and were
among the contingent of one hundred that he had put on loan to the
police department only a few hours ago. Beyond the rain-washed
windshields, their pale faces floated like disembodied spheres in the
dark interiors of their cars, so expressionless that they might have
been mannequins or robots.

Others were patrolling the town on foot but were circumspect, keeping to
the deeper shadows and alleyways. He saw none of them.

Shaddack also passed two conversion teams as they went quietly and
briskly from one house to another. Each time a conversion was
completed, the team keyed in that data on one of their car VDTs so the
central system at New Wave could keep track of their progress.

When he paused at an intersection and used his own VDT to call the
current roster onto the screen, he saw that only five people remained to
be dealt with in the midnight to-six-o'clock batch of conversions. They
were slightly ahead of schedule.

Hard rain slanted in from the west, silvery as ice in his headlights.
Trees shook as if in fear. And Shaddack kept on the move, circling
through the night as if he were some strange bird of prey that preferred
to hunt on storm winds.

With Tucker leading, they had hunted and killed, bitten and torn,
clawed and bitten, hunted and killed and eaten the prey, drunk blood,
blood, warm and sweet, thick and warm, sweet and thick, blood, feeding
the fire in their flesh, cooling the fire with food. Blood.

Gradually Tucker had discovered that the longer they stayed in their
altered state, the less intensely the fire burned and the easier it was
to remain in subhuman form. Something told him that he should be
worried that it was increasingly easy to cling to the shape of a beast,


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but he could not raise much concern partly because his mind no longer
seemed able to focus about it, pa on complex thoughts for more than a
few seconds.

So they had raced over the fields and hills in the moonlight, raced and
roamed, free, so free in moonlight and fog, in fog and wind, and Tucker
had led them, pausing only to kill and eat, or to couple with the
female, who took her own pleasure with an aggressiveness that was
exciting, savage and exciting.

Then the rains came.

Cold.

Slashing.

Thunder, too, and blazing light in the sky.

Part of Tucker seemed to know what the long, jagged bolts of sky-ripping
light were. But he could not quite remember, and he was frightened,
dashing for the cover of trees when the light caught him in the open,
huddling with the other male and the female until the sky went dark
again and stayed that way for a while.

Tucker began to look for a place to lake shelter from the storm. He knew
that they should go back to where they had started from, to a place of
light and dry rooms, but he could not remember where that had been
exactly. Besides, going back would mean surrendering freedom and
assuming their born identities. He did not want to do that. Neither
did the other male and the female. They wanted to race and roam and
kill and rut and be free, free. If they went back they could not be
free, so they went ahead, crossing a hard-surface road, slinking up into
higher hills, staying away from the few houses in the area.

Dawn was coming, not yet on the eastern horizon but coming, and Tucker
knew that they had to find a haven, a den, before daylight, a place
where they could curl up around one another, down in darkness, sharing
warmth, darkness and warmth, safely curled up with memories of blood and
rutting, darkness and warmth and blood and rutting. They would be out
of danger there, safe from a world in which they were still alien, safe
also from the necessity to return to human form. When night fell again,
they could venture forth to roam and kill, kill, bite and kill, and
maybe the day would come when there were so many of their kind in the
world that they would no longer be outnumbered and could venture forth
in bright daylight as well, but not now, not yet.

They came to a dirt road, and Tucker had a dim memory of where ,re he
was, a sense that the road would quickly lead him to a place that could
provide the shelter that he and his pack needed. He followed it farther
into the hills, encouraging his companions with low growls of
reassurance. In a couple of minutes they came to a building, a huge old
house fallen to ruin, with the windows smashed in and the front door
hanging open on halfbroken hinges. Other gray structures loomed out of
the rain a barn in worse shape than the house, several outbuildings that
had mostly collapsed.

Large, hand-painted signs were nailed to the house, between two of the
second-floor windows, one sign above the other, in different styles of
lettering, as though a lot of time had passed between the hanging of the
first and the second. He knew they had meaning, but he couldn't read
them, though he strained to recall the lost language used by the species
to ..which he had once belonged.


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The two members of his pack flanked him. They, too, stared up at the
dark letters on the white background. Murky symbols in the rain and
gloom. Eerily mysterious runes.

ICARUS COLONY And under that THE OLD ICARUS COLONY RESTAURANT NATURAL
FOODS On the dilapidated barn was another sign-FLEA MARKET-but that
meant nothing more to Tucker than the signs on the house, and after a
while he decided it didn't matter if he understood them. The important
thing was that no people were nearby, no fresh scent or vibration of
human beings, so the refuge that he 245 sought might be found here, a
burrow, a den, A warm and dark place, warm and dark, safe and dark.

With one blanket and pillow, Sam had made his bed on a long sofa in
the living room, just off the front hall downstairs. He wanted to sleep
on the ground floor so he might be awakened by the sound of an intruder.
According to the schedule that Sam had seen on the VDT in the patrol
car, Harry Talbot wouldn't be converted until the following evening. He
doubted that they should accelerate their schedule simply because they
knew an FBI man was in Moonlight Cove. But he was taking no unnecessary
chances.

Sam often suffered from insomnia, but it did not trouble him that night.
After he took off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa, he listened
to the rain for a couple of minutes, trying not to think. Soon he slept.

His was not a dreamless sleep.             It seldom was.

He dreamed of Karen, his lost wife, and as always in nightmares, she was
spitting up blood and emaciated, in the final stages of her cancer,
after the chemotherapy had failed. He knew that he must save her. He
could not. He felt small, powerless, and terribly afraid.

But that nightmare did not wake him.

Eventually the dream shifted from the hospital to a dark and crumbling
building. It was rather like a hotel designed by Salvador Dali The
corridors branched off randomly; some were very short and some were so
long that the ends of them could not be seen; the walls and floors were
at surreal angles to one another, and the doors to the rooms were of
different sizes, some so small that only a mouse could have passed
through, others large enough for a man, and still others on a scale
suitable to a thirty-foot giant.

He was drawn to certain rooms. When he entered them he found in each a
person from his past or current life.

He encountered Scott in several rooms and had unsatisfactory, disjointed
conversations with him, all ending in unreasoning hostility on Scott's
part. The nightmare was made worse by the variation in Scott's age
Sometimes he was a sullen sixteen-year-old and sometimes ten or just
four or five. But in every incarnation he was alienated, cold, quick to
anger, and seething with hatred.

"This isn't right, this isn't true, you weren't like this when you were
younger," Sam told a seven-year-old Scott, and the boy made an obscene
reply.

In every room and regardless of his age, Scott was surrounded by huge
posters of black-metal rockers dressed in leather and chains, displaying
satanic symbols on their foreheads and in the palms of their hands. The
light was flickering and strange. In a dark corner Sam saw something
lurking, a creature of which Scott was aware, something the boy did not


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fear but which scared the hell out of Sam.

But that nightmare did not wake him, either.

In other chambers of that surreal hotel, he found dying men, the same
ones every time-Arnie Taft and Carl S(,ibin they were two agents with
whom he had worked and whom he had seen gunned down.

The entrance to one room was a car door-the gleaming door of a blue '54
Buick, to be exact. Inside he found an enormous, gray-walled chamber in
which was the front seat, dashboard, and steering wheel, nothing else of
the car, like parts of a prehistoric skeleton lying on a vast expanse of
barren sand. A woman in a green dress sat behind the wheel, her head
turned away from him. Of course, he knew who she was, and he wanted to
leave the room at once, but he could not. In fact he was drawn to her.
He sat beside her, and suddenly he was seven years old, as he had been
on the day of the accident, though he spoke with his grown-up voice
"Hello, Mom." She turned to him, revealing that the right side of her
face was caved in, the eye gone from the socket, bone punching through
torn flesh. Broken teeth were exposed in her cheek, so she favored him
with half of a hideous grin.

Abruptly they were in the real car, cast back in time. Ahead of them on
the highway, coming toward them, was the drunk in the white pickup
truck, weaving across the double yellow line, bearing down on them at
high speed. Sam cried out-"mongrels"'but she couldn't evade the pickup
this time any more than she had been able to avoid it thirty-five years
ago. It came at them as if they were a magnet and slammed into them
head-on. He thought it must be like that at the center of a bomb blast
a great roar pierced by the shriek of shredding metal. Everything went
black. Then, when he swam up from that gloom, he found himself pinned
in the wreckage. He was face to face with his dead mother, peering into
her empty eye socket. He began to scream.

That nightmare also failed to wake him.

Now he was in a hospital, as he'd been after the accident, for that had
been the first of the six times he'd nearly died. He was no longer a
boy, however, but a grown man, and he was on the operating table,
undergoing emergency surgery because he had been shot in the chest
during the same gun battle in which Carl Sorbino had died. As the
surgical team labored over him, he rose out of his body and watched them
at work on his carcass. He was amazed but not afraid, which was just
how he had felt when it had not been a dream.

Next he was in a tunnel, rushing toward dazzling light, toward the Other
Side. This time he knew what he would find at the other end because he
had been there before, in real life instead of in a dream. He was
terrified of it, didn't want to face it again, didn't want to look
Beyond. But he moved faster, faster, faster through the tunnel,
bulleted through it, his terror escalating with his speed. Having to
look again at what lay on the Other Side was worse than his dream
confrontations with Scott, worse than the battered and one-eyed face of
his mother, infinitely worse (faster, faster), intolerable, so he began
to scream (faster) and scream (faster) and scream That one woke him.

He sat straight up on the sofa and pinched off the cry before it left
his throat, An instant later he became aware that he was not alone in
the unlighted living room. He heard something move in front of him, and
he moved simultaneously, snatching his .38 revolver from the holster,
which he had taken off and laid beside the sofa.



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It was Moose.

"Hey, boy.

" The dog churned softly.

Sam reached out to pat the dark head, but already the Labrador was
moving away. Because the night outside was marginally less black than
the interior of the house, the windows were visible as fuzzy-gray
rectangles. Moose went to one at the side of the house, putting his
paws on the sill and his nose to the glass.

"Need to go out?" Sam asked, though they had let him out for ten
minutes just before they'd gone to bed.

The dog made no response but stood at the window with a peculiar
rigidity.

"Something out there?"          Sam wondered, and even as he asked the question,
he knew the answer.

Quickly and gingerly he crossed the dark room. He bumped into furniture
but didn't knock anything down, and joined the dog at the window.

The rain-battered night seemed at its blackest in this last hour before
dawn, but Sam's eyes were adjusted to darkness. He could see the side
of the neighboring house, just thirty feet away. The steeply sloping
property between the two structures was not planted with grass but with
a variety of shrubs and several starburst pines, all of which swayed and
shuddered in the gusty wind.

He quickly spotted the two Boogeymen because their movement was in
opposition to the direction of the wind and therefore in sharp contrast
to the storm dance of the vegetation. They were about fifteen feet from
the window, heading downslope toward Conquistador. Though Sam could
discern no details of them, he could see by their hunchbacked movement
and shambling yet queerly graceful gait that they were not ordinary men.

As they paused beside one of the larger pines, one of them looked toward
the Talbot house, and Sam saw its softly radiant, utterly alien amber
eyes. For a moment he was transfixed, frozen not by fear so much as by
amazement. Then he realized that the creature seemed to be staring
straight at the window, as if it could see him, and suddenly it loped
straight toward him.

Sam dropped below the        sill, pressing against the wall under the window,
and pulled Moose down        with him. The dog must have had some sense of the
danger, for he didn't        bark or whine - 249 or resist in any way, but lay
with his belly to the        floor and allowed himself to be held there, still
and silent.

A fraction of a second later, over the sounds of wind and rain, Sam
heard furtive movement on the other side of the wall against which he
crouched. A soft scuttling sound. Scratching.

He held his .38 in his right hand, ready in case the thing was bold
enough to smash through the window.

A few seconds passed in silence.              A few more.

Sam kept his left hand on Moose's back.                 He could feel the dog
shivering.


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After long seconds of silence, the sudden ticking startled Sam, for he
had just about decided that the creature had gone away.

Tick-tick-tick-tick.

it was tapping the glass, as if testing the solidity of the pane or
calling to the man it had seen standing there.

Tick-tick.         Pause.     Tick-tick-tick.

Tucker led his pack out of the mud and rain, onto the sagging porch of
the decrepit house. The boards creaked under their weight. One loose
shutter was banging in the wind; all the others had rotted and torn off
long ago.

He struggled to speak of his intentions, but he found it very difficult
to remember or produce the necessary words. Midst snarls and growls and
low brute mutterings, he only managed to say, ". . . here . . . hide
. . . here . . . safe . . .

" The other male seemed to have lost his speech entirely, for he could
produce no words at all.

With considerable difficulty, the female said, safe .                         .   .

here .        .   .   home.    .    .   .

" Tucker studied his two companions for a moment and realized they had
changed during their night adventures. Earlier, the female had
possessed a feline quality-sleek, sinuous, with cat ears and sharply
pointed teeth that she revealed when she hissed either in fear, anger,
or sexual desire. Though something of the cat was still in her, she had
become more like Tucker, wolfish, with a large head drawn forward into a
muzzle more canine than feline. She had lupine haunches, as well, and
feet that appeared to have resulted from the crossbreeding of man and
wolf, not paws but not hands either, tipped with claws longer and more
murderous than those of a real wolf. The other male, once unique in
appearance, combining a few insectile features with the general form of
a hyena, had now largely conformed to Tucker's appearance.

By unspoken mutual agreement, Tucker had become the leader of the pack.
Upon submitting to his rule, his followers evidently had used his
appearance as a model for their own. He realized that this was an
important turn of events, maybe even an ominous one.

He did not know why it should spook him, and he no longer had the mental
clarity to concentrate on it until understanding came to him. The more
pressing concern of shelter demanded his attention.

.     .   .    here .    .    .    safe .    .   .   here .

He led them through the broken, half-open door, into the front hall of
the moldering house. The plaster was pocked and cracked, and in some
places missing altogether, with lath showing through like the rib cage
of a half-decomposed corpse. In the empty living room, long strips of
wallpaper were peeling off, as if the place was shedding its skin in the
process of a metamorphosis as dramatic as any that 'Tucker and his pack
had undergone.

He followed scents through the house, and that was interesting, not
exciting but definitely interesting. His companions followed as he


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investigated patches of mildew, toadstools growing in a dank corner of
the dining room, colonies of vaguely luminescent fungus in a room on the
other side of the hall, several deposits of rat feces, the mummified
remains of a bird that had flown in through one of the glassless windows
and broken a wing against a wall, and the still ripe carcass of a
diseased coyote that had crawled into the kitchen to die.

During the course of that inspection, Tucker realized the house (' - 251
did not offer ideal shelter. The rooms were too large and drafty,
especially with windows broken out. Though no human scent lingered on
the air, he sensed that people still came here, not frequently but often
enough to be troublesome.

In the kitchen, however, he found the entrance to the cellar, and he was
excited by that subterranean retreat. He led the others down the
creaking stairs into that deeper darkness, where cold drafts could not
reach them, where the floor and walls were dry, and where the air had a
clean, lime smell that came off the concrete-block walls.

He suspected that trespassers seldom ventured into the basement. And if
they did . . . they would be walking into a lair from which they
could not possibly escape.

It was a perfect, windowless den. Tucker prowled the perimeter of the
room, his claws ticking and scraping on the floor. He sniffed in
corners and examined the rusted furnace. He was satisfied they'd be
safe. They could curl up secure in the knowledge that they would not be
found and if, by some chance, they were found, they could cut off the
only exit and dispense with an intruder quickly.

In such a deep, dark, secret place, they could become anything they
wanted, and no one would see them.

That last thought startled Tucker.               Become anything they wanted?

He was not sure where that thought originated or what it meant. He
suddenly sensed that by regressing he had initiated some process that
was now beyond his conscious control, that some more primitive part of
his mind was permanently in charge. Panic seized him. He had shifted
to an altered state many times before and had always been able to shift
back again. But now . . . His fear was sharp only for a moment,
because he could not concentrate on the problem, didn't even remember
what he meant by "regressing," and was soon distracted by the female,
who wanted to couple with him.

Soon the three of them were in a tangle, pawing at one another,
thrusting and thrashing. Their shrill, excited cries rose through the
abandoned house, like ghost voices in a haunted place.


Sam was tempted to rise, took through the window, and confront the
creature face to face, for he was eager to see what one of them looked
like close-up.

But as violent as these beings evidently were, a confrontation was
certain to result in an attack and gunfire, which would draw the
attention of the neighbors and then the police. He couldn't risk his
current hiding place, for at the moment he had nowhere else to go.

He clutched his revolver and kept one hand on Moose                    and remained below
the windowsill, listening. He heard voices, either                     wordless or so
muffled that the words did not come clearly through                    the glass above his
head. The second creature, re had joined the first                     at the side of the


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house.    Their grumbling sounded like a low-key argument.

Silence followed.

Sam crouched there for a while, waiting for the voices to resume or for
the amber-eyed beast to tap once more-tick-tickbut nothing happened. At
last, as the muscles in his thighs and calves began to cramp, he took
his hand off Moose and eased up to the window. He half expected the
Boogeyman to be there, malformed face pressed to the glass, but it was
gone.

With the dog accompanying him, he went from room to room on the ground
floor, looking out all the windows on four sides of the house. He would
not have been surprised to find those creatures trying to force entry
somewhere.

But for the sound of rain drumming on the roof and gurgling in the
downspouts, the house was silent.

He decided they were gone and that their interest in the house had been
coincidental. They weren't looking for him in particular, - 253 just
for prey. They very likely had glimpsed him at the window, and they
didn't want to let him go if he had seen them. But if they had come to
deal with him, they apparently had decided that they could no more risk
the sound of breaking glass and a noisy confrontation than he could, not
in the heart of town. They were secretive creatures. They might rarely
cut loose with an eerie cry that would echo across Moonlight Cove, but
only when in the grip of some strange passion. And thus far, for the
most part, they had limited their attacks to people who had been
relatively isolated.

Back in the living room he slipped the revolver into the holster again
and stretched out on the sofa.

Moose sat watching him for a while, as if unable to believe that he
could calmly lie down and sleep again after seeing what had been on the
prowl in the rain.

"Some of my dreams are worse than what's out there tonight," he told the
dog.

"So if I spooked easily, I'd probably never want to go to sleep again."

The dog yawned and got up and went out into the dark hall, where he
boarded the elevator. The motor hummed as the lift carried the Labrador
upstairs.

As he waited for sleep to steal over him again, Sam attempted to shape
his dreams into a more appealing pattern by concentrating on a few
images he would not mind dreaming about good Mexican food, barely
chilled Guinness Stout, and Goldie Hawn. Ideally, he'd dream about
being in a great Mexican restaurant with Goldie Hawn, who'd look even
more radiant than usual, and they'd be eating and drinking Guinness and
laughing.

Instead, when he did fall asleep, he dreamed about his father, a
mean-tempered alcoholic, into whose hands he had fallen at the age of
seven, after his mother had died in the car crash.


Nestled in the stack of grass-scented burlap tarps in the back of the
gardener's truck, Chrissie woke when the automatic garage door ascended
with a groan and clatter. She almost sat up in surprise, revealing


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herself. But remembering where she was, she pulled her head under the
top half-dozen tarps, which she was using as blankets. She tried to
shrink into the pile of burlap.

She heard rain striking the roof. It sliced into the gravel driveway
just beyond the open door, making a sizzling noise like a thousand
strips of bacon on an immense griddle. Chrissie was hungry. That sound
made her hungrier.

"You got my lunch box, Sarah?"

Chrissie didn't know Mr. Eulane well enough to recognize his voice, but
she supposed that was him, fo- Sarah Eulane, whose voice Chrissie did
recognize, answered at once "Ed, I wish you'd just come back home after
you drop me at the school. Take the day off. You shouldn't work in
such foul weather. Well, I can't cut grass in this downpour," he said.

"But I can do some other chores. I'll just pull on my vinyl anorak.
Keeps me dry as bone. Moses could've walked through the Red Sea in that
anorak and wouldn't have needed God's miracle to help him."

Breathing air filtered through the coarse, grass-stained cloth, Chrissie
was troubled by a tickling sensation in her nose, all the way into her
sinuses. She was afraid that she was going to sneeze.

STUPID YOUNG GIRL SNEEZES, REVEALING HERSELF TO ravenous ALIENS; EATEN
ALIVE; "SHE WAS A TASTY LITTLE morsel," SAYS ALIEN NEST QUEEN, "BRING US
MORE OF YOUR ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD BLOND FEMALES."

Opening the passenger door of the truck, a couple of feet from - 255
Chrissie's hiding place, Sarah said, "You'll catch your death, Ed."

You think I'm some delicate violet?" he asked playfully as he opened
the driver's door and got into the truck.

I think you're a withered old dandelion."

He laughed.

"You didn't think so last night."

,Yes, I did. But you're my withered old dandelion, and I don't want YOU
to just blow away on the wind."

one door slammed shut, then the other.

Certain that they could not see her, Chrissie pulled back the burlap,
exposing her head. She pinched her nose and breathed through her mouth
until the tickling in her sinuses subsided.

As Ed Eulane started the truck, let the engine idle a moment, then
reversed out of the garage, Chrissie could hear them talking in the cab
at her back. She couldn't make out everything they were saying, but
they still seemed to be bantering with each other.

Cold rain struck her face, and she immediately pulled her head under the
tarps again, leaving just a narrow opening by which a little fresh air
might reach her. If she sneezed while in transit, the sound of the rain
and the rumble of the truck's engine would cover it.

Thinking about the conversation she had overheard in the garage and
listening to Mr. Eulane laughing now in the cab, Chrissie thought she
could trust them. If they were aliens, they wouldn't be making dumb



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jokes and lovey talk. Maybe they would if they were putting on a show
for non-aliens, trying to convince the world that they were still Ed and
Sarah Eulane, but not when they were in private. When aliens were
together without unconverted humans nearby, they probably talked about .
..

well, planets they had sacked, the weather on MarS, the price of
flying-saucer fuel, and recipes for serving human beings. Who knew? But
surely they didn't talk as the Eulanes were talking.

On the other hand .         .   .

Maybe these aliens had only taken control of Ed and Sarah Eulane during
the night, and maybe they were not yet comfortable in their human roles.
Maybe they were practicing being human in private so they could pass for
human in public. Sure as the devil, if Chrissie revealed herself,
they'd probably sprout tentacles and lobster pincers from their chests
and either eat her alive, without condiments, or freeze-dry her and
mount her on a plaque and take her to their home world to hang on their
den wall, or pop her brain out of her skull and plug it into their
spaceship and use it as a cheap control mechanism for their inflight
coffeemaker.

In the middle of an alien invasion, you could give your trust only with
reluctance and considerable deliberation. She decided to stick to her
original plan.

The fifty-pound, plastic sacks of fertilizer and mulch and snail bait,
piled on both sides of her burlap niche, protected her from some rain,
but enough reached her to soak the upper layers of tarps. She was
relatively dry and toasty warm when they set out, but soon she was
saturated with grass-scented rainwater, cold to the bone.

She peeked out repeatedly to determine where they were. When she saw
that they were turning off the county route onto Ocean Avenue, she
peeled back the soggy burlap and crawled out of her hiding place.

The wall of the truck cab featured a window, so the Eulanes would see
her if they turned and looked back. Mr. Eulane might even see her in
the rearview mirror of she didn't keep very low. But she had to get to
the rear of the truck and be ready to jump off when they passed Our Lady
of Mercy.

On her hands and knees, she moved betweenand over-the supplies and
gardening equipment. When she reached the tailgate, she huddled there,
head down, shivering and miserable in the rain.

They crossed Shasta Way, the first intersection at the edge of town, and
headed down through the business district of Ocean Avenue. They were
only about four blocks from the church.

Chrissie was surprised that no people were on the sidewalks and that no
cars traveled the streets. It was early-she checked her watch, 703-but
not so early that everyone would still be home in bed. She supposed the
weather also had something to do with the town's deserted look; no one
was going to be out and about in that mess unless he absolutely had to
be.

There was another possibility Maybe the aliens had taken over such a
large percentage of the people in Moonlight Cove that they no longer
felt it necessary to enact the charade of daily life; with complete
conquest only hours away, all their efforts were bent on seeking the



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last of the unpossessed.           That was too unsettling to think about.

- 257 When they were one block from Our Lady of Mercy, Chrissie climbed
onto the white-board tailgate. She swung one leg over the top, then the
other leg, and clung to the outside of the gate with both hands, her
feet on the rear bumper. She could see the backs of the Eulanes' heads
through the rear window of the cab, and if they turned her way-or if Mr.
Eulane glanced at his rearview mirror-she'd be seen.

She kept expecting to be spotted by a pedestrian who would yell, "Hey,
you, hanging on that truck, are you nuts?" But there were no
pedestrians, and they reached the next intersection without incident.

The brakes squealed as Mr.            Eulane slowed for the stop sign.

As the truck came to a stop, Chrissie dropped off the tailgate.

Mr. Eulane turned left on the cross street. He was heading toward
Thomas Jefferson Elementary School on Palomino, a few blocks south,
where Mrs. Eulane worked and where, on an ordinary Tuesday morning,
Chrissie would soon be going to her sixth-grade classroom.

She sprinted across the intersection, splashed through the dirty
streaming water in the gutter, and ran up the steps to the front doors
of Our Lady of Mercy. A flush of triumph warmed her, for she felt that
she had reached sanctuary against all odds.

With one hand on the ornate brass handle of the carved-oak door, she
paused to look uphill and down. The windows of shops, offices, and
apartments were as frost-blank as cataracted eyes. Smaller trees leaned
with the stiff wind, and larger trees shuddered, which was the only
movement other than the driving rain. The wind was inconstant,
blustery; sometimes it stopped pushing the rain relentlessly eastward
and gathered it into funnels, whirling them up Ocean Avenue, so if she
squinted her eyes and ignored the chill in the air, she could almost
believe that she was standing in a desert ghost town, watching dust
devils whirl along its haunted streets.

At the corner beside the church, a police car pulled up to the stop
sign. Two men were in it. Neither was looking toward her.

She already suspected that the police were not to be trusted. Pulling
open the church door, she quickly slipped inside before they glanced her
way.

The moment she stepped into the oak-paneled narthex and drew in a deep
breath of the myrrh- and spikenard-scented air, Chrissie felt safe. She
stepped through the archway to the nave, dipped her fingers in the holy
water that filled the marble font on the right, crossed herself, and
moved down the center aisle to the fourth pew from the rear. She
genuflected, crossed herself again, and took a seat.

She was concerned about getting water all over the polished oak pew, but
there was nothing she could do about that. She was dripping.

Mass was under way. Besides herself, only two of the faithful were
present, which seemed to be a scandalously poor turnout, Of course, to
the best of her memory, though her folks always attended Sunday Mass,
they had brought her to a weekday service only once in her life, many
years ago, and she could not be sure that weekday Masses ever drew more
worshipers. She suspected, however, that the alien presence-or demons,
whatever-in Moonlight Cove was responsible for the low attendance. No
doubt space aliens were godless or, worse yet, bowed to some dark deity


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with a name like Yahgag or Scoghlatt.

She was surprised to see that the priest celebrating Mass, with the
assistance of one altarboy, was not Father Castelli. It was the young
priest-the curate, they called him-whom the archdiocese had assigned to
Father Castelli in August, His name was Father O'Brien. His first name
was Tom, and following his rector's lead, he sometimes insisted that
parishioners call him Father Tom. He was nice-though not as nice or as
wise or as amusing as Father Castelli-but she could no more bring
herself to call him Father Tom than she could call the older priest
Father Jim. Might as well call the Pope Johnny. Her parents sometimes
talked about how much the church had changed, how less formal it had
become over the years, and they spoke approvingly of those changes. In
her conservative heart, Chrissie wished that she had been born and
raised in a time when the Mass had been in Latin, elegant and
mysterious, and when the service had not included the downright silly
ritual of "giving peace" to worshipers around you. She had gone to Mass
at a cathedral in San Francisco once, when they were on vacation, and
the service had been a special one, in Latin, conducted according to the
old liturgy, and she had loved it. Making ever faster airplanes,
improving television from black and white to color, saving lives with
better medical technology, junking those clumsy old records for compact
discs - 259 all those changes were desirable and good. But there were
some things in life that shouldn't change, because it was their
changelessness that you loved about them. If you lived in a world of
constant, rapid change in all things, where did you turn for stability,
for a place of peace and calm and quiet in the middle of all that buzz
and clatter? That truth was so evident to Chrissie that she could not
understand why grown-ups were not aware of it. Sometimes adults were
thick headed.

She sat through only a couple of minutes of the Mass, just long enough
to say a prayer and beseech the Blessed Virgin to intercede on her
behalf, and to be sure that Father Castelli was not somewhere in the
nave-sitting in a pew like an ordinary worshiper, which he did
sometimes-or perhaps at one of the confessionals. Then she got up,
genuflected, crossed herself, and went back into the narthex, where
candle-shaped electric bulbs flickered softly behind the amber-glass
panes of two wallmounted lamps. She opened the front door a crack,
peeking out at the rain-washed street.

Just then a police car came down Ocean Avenue. It was not the same one
she'd seen when she had gone into the church. it was newer, and only
one officer was in it. He was driving slowly, scanning the streets as
if looking for someone.

As the police cruiser reached the corner on which Our Lady of Mercy
stood, another car passed it, coming uphill from the sea. That one
wasn't a patrol car but a blue Chevy. Two men were in it, giving
everything a slow looking over, peering left and right through the rain,
as the policeman was doing. And though the men in the Chevy and the
policeman did not wave to each other or signal in any way, Chrissie
sensed that they were involved in the same pursuit. The cops had linked
up with a civilian posse to search for something, someone.

Me, she thought.

They were looking for her because she knew too much. Because yesterday
morning, in the upstairs hall, she had seen the aliens in her parents.
Because she was the only obstacle to their conquest of the human race.
And maybe because she would taste good if they cooked her up with some



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Martian potatoes.

Thus far, although she had learned that aliens were taking Possession of
some people, she had seen no evidence that they were actually eating
others, yet she continued to believe that somewhere, right now, they
were snacking on body parts. It just felt right.

When the patrol car and the blue Chevy passed, she pushed the heavy door
open another few inches and stuck her head out in the rain. She looked
left and right, then again, to be very sure that no one was in sight
either in a car or on foot. Satisfied, she stepped outside and dashed
east to the corner of the church. After looking both ways on the cross
street, she turned the corner and hurried along the side of the church
toward the rectory behind it.

The two-story house was all brick with carved granite lintels and a
white-painted front porch with scalloped eaves, respectable-looking
enough to be the perfect residence for a priest. The old plane trees
along the front walk protected her from the rain, but she was already
sodden. When she reached the porch and approached the front door, her
tennis shoes made squelchingsqueaking noises.

As she was about to put her finger on the doorbell button, she
hesitated. She was concerned that she might be walking into an alien
lair-an unlikely possibility but one which could not be lightly
dismissed. She also realized that Father O'Brien might be saying Mass
in order that Father Castelli, a hard worker by nature, could enjoy a
rare sleep-in, and she war loath to disturb him if that was the case.

Young Chrissie, she thought, undeniably courageous and clever, was
nonetheless too polite for her own good. While standing on the priest's
porch, debating the proper etiquette of an early-morning visit, she
suddenly was snatched up by slavering, nine-eyed aliens and eaten on the
spot. Fortunately she was too dead to hear hie way they belched and
farted after eating her, for surely her refined sensibilities would have
been gravely offended.

She rang the bell.         Twice.

A moment later a shadowy and strangely lumpish figure appeared beyond
the crackle-finished, diamond-shaped panes )n the top half of the door.
She almost turned and ran but told herself that the glass was distorting
the image and that the figure beyond was not actually grotesque.

Father Castelli opened the door and blinked in surprise when he saw her.
He was wearing black slacks, a black shirt, a Roman collar, and a
tattered gray cardigan, so he hadn't been fast asleep, - 261 thank God.
He was a shortish man, about five feet seven, and round but not really
fat, with black hair going gray at the temples. Even his proud beak of
a nose was not enough to dilute the effect of his otherwise soft
features, which gave him a gentle and compassionate appearance.

He blinked again-this was the first time Chrissie had seen him without
his glasses-and said, "Chrissie?" He smiled, and she knew that she had
done the right thing by coming to him, because his smile was warm and
open and loving.

"Whatever brings you here at this hour, in this weather?"                      He looked
past her to the rest of the porch and the walkway beyond.

"Where're your parents?"

"Father," she said, not altogether surprised to hear her voice crack, "I


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have to see you."

His smile wavered.

"Is something wrong?"

"Yes, Father.          Very wrong.       Terribly, awfully wrong."

"Come in, then, come in.              You're soaked!"         He ushered her into the foyer
and closed the door.

"Dear girl, what is this all about?

"

"Aliens, F-f-father, " she said, as a chill made her stutter.

"Come on back to the kitchen," he said.

"It's the warmest room in the house.                   I was just fixing breakfast."

"I'll ruin the carpet," she said, indicating the oriental runner that
lay the length of the hallway, with oak flooring on both sides.

"Oh, don't worry about that. It's an old thing, but it stands up well
to abuse. Sort of like me! Would you like some hot cocoa? I was
making breakfast, including a big pot of piping hot cocoa."

She followed him gratefully back the dimly lighted hall, which smelled
of lemon oil and pine disinfectant and vaguely of incense.

The kitchen was homey. A well-worn, yellow linoleum floor. Pale yellow
walls. Dark wood cabinets with white porcelain handles. Gray and
yellow Formica counter tops. There were appliances-refrigerator, oven,
microwave oven, toaster, electric can opener-as in any kitchen, which
surprised her, though when she thought about it, she didn't know why she
would have expected it to be any different. Priests needed appliances
too. They couldn't just summon up a fiery angel to toast some bread or
work a miracle to brew a pot of hot cocoa.


The place smelled wonderful. Cocoa was brewing. Toast was toasting.
Sausages were sizzling over a low flame on the gas stove.

Father Castelli showed her to one of the four padded vinyl chairs at the
chrome and Formica breakfast set, then scurried about, taking care of
her as if she were a chick and he a mother hen. He rushed upstairs,
returned with two clean, fluffy bath towels, and said, "Dry your hair
and blot your damp clothes with one of them, then wrap the other one
around you like a shawl. It'll help you get warm." While she was
following his instructions, he went to the bathroom off the downstairs
hall and fetched two aspirins. He put those on the table in front of
her and said, "I'll get you some orange juice to take them with. Lots
of vitamin C in orange juice. Aspirin and vitamin C are like a one-two
punch; they'll knock a cold right out of you before it can take up
residence." When he returned with the juice, he stood for a moment
looking down at her, shaking his head, and she figured she must look
bedraggled and pitiful.

"Dear girl, what on earth have you been up to?" He seemed not to have
heard what she'd said about aliens when she'd first crossed his
threshold.




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"No, wait. You can tell me over breakfast.                    Would you like some
breakfast?"

"Yes, please, Father. I'm starved. The only thing I've eaten since
yesterday afternoon was a couple of Hershey bars."

y "Nothing but Hershey bars?"             He sighed.

"Chocolate is one of God's graces, but it's also a tool the devil uses
to lead us into temptation-the temptation of gluttony." He patted his
round belly. "l, myself, have often partaken of this particular grace,
but I would never"-he exaggerated the word "never" and winked at
her-"never, not ever, heed the devil's call to overindulge! But, see
here, if you've been eating only chocolate, your teeth will fall out. So
. . . I've got plenty of sausages, plenty to share. I was about to
cook a couple of eggs for myself too. Would you like a couple of eggs?"

"Yes, please."

"And toast?"

"Yes.We've got some wonderful cinnamon sweetrolls there on the table.
And the hot chocolate, of course."

Chrissie washed down the two aspirins with orange juice.

- 263 As he carefully cracked eggs into the hot frying pan, Father
Castelli glanced at her again.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, Father.       Are you sure?"

"Yes.   Now.     I'm all right now."

"It'll be nice having company for breakfast," he said.

Chrissie drank the rest of her juice.

He said, "When Father O'Brien finishes saying Mass, he never wants to
eat. Nervous stomach." He chuckled.

"They all have bad stomachs when they're new. For the first few months
they're scared to death up there on the altar. It's such a sacred duty,
you see, offering the Mass, and the young priests are always afraid of
flubbing up in some way that'll be . . . oh, I don't know . . .

that'll be an insult to God, I guess. But God doesn't insult very
easily. If He did, He'd have washed His hands of the human race a long
time ago! All young priests come to that realization eventually, and
then they're fine. Then they come back from saying Mass, and they're
ready to run through the entire week's food budget in one breakfast.

" She knew that he was talking just to soothe her. He had noticed how
distraught she was. He wanted to settle her down so they could discuss
it in a calm, reasonable manner. She didn't mind. She needed to be
soothed.

Having cracked all four eggs, he turned the sausages with a fork, then
opened a drawer and took out a spatula, which he placed on the counter
near the egg pan. As he got plates, knives, and forks for the table, he
said, "You look more than a little scared, Chrissie, like you'd just
seen a ghost. You can calm down now. After so many years of schooling
and training, if a young priest can be afraid of making a mistake at


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Mass, then anyone can be afraid of anything. Most fears are things we
create in our own minds, and we can banish them as easily as we called
them forth."

"Maybe not this one," she said.

"We'll see.

" He transferred eggs and sausages from frying pans to plates, For the
first time in twenty-four hours, the world seemed right. As Father
Castelli put the food on the table and encouraged her to dig in,
Chrissie sighed with relief and hunger.

Shaddack usually went to bed after dawn, so by seven o'clock Thursday
morning he was yawning and rubbing at his eyes as he cruised through
Moonlight Cove, looking for a place to hide the van and sleep for a few
hours safely beyond Loman Watkins's reach. The day was overcast, gray
and dim, yet the sunlight seared his eyes.

He remembered Paula Parkins, who'd been torn apart by regressives back
in September. Her 1.5-acre property was secluded, at the most rural end
of town. Though the dead woman's family-in Colorado-had put it up for
sale through a local realestate agent, it had not sold. He drove out
there, parked in the empty garage, cut the engine, and pulled the big
door down behind him.

He ate a ham sandwich and drank a Coke. Brushing crumbs from his
fingers, he curled up on the blankets in the back of the van and drifted
toward sleep.

He never suffered insomnia, perhaps because he was so sure of his role
in life, his destiny, and he had no concern about tomorrow. He was
absolutely convinced he would bend the future to his agenda.

All of his life Shaddack had seen signs of his uniqueness, omens that
foretold his ultimate triumph in any pursuit he undertook.

Initially he had noticed those signs only because Don Runningdeer had
pointed them out to him. Runningdeer had been an Indian-of what tribe,
Shaddack had never been able to learn-who had worked for the judge,
Shaddack's father, back in Phoenix, as a full-time gardener and
all-around handyman. Runningdeer was lean and quick, with a weathered
face, ropy muscles, and calloused hands; his eyes were bright and as
black - 265 as oil, singularly powerful eyes from which you sometimes
had to look away ... and from which you sometimes could not look away,
no matter how much you might want to. The Indian took an interest in
young Tommy Shaddack, occasionally letting him help with some yard
chores and household repairs, when neither the judge nor Tommy's mother
was around to disapprove of their boy doing common labor or associating
with "social inferiors.

" Which meant he hung out with Runningdeer almost constantly between the
ages of five and twelve, the period during which the Indian had worked
for the judge, because his parents were hardly ever there to see and
object.

one of the earliest detailed memories he had was of Runningdeer and the
sign of the self-devouring snake. . . .

He had been five years old, sprawled on the rear patio of the big house
in Phoenix, among a collection of Tonka Toys, but he'd been more
interested in Runningdeer than in the miniature trucks and cars. The



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Indian was wearing jeans and boots, shirtless in the bright desert sun,
trimming shrubs with a large pair of wood-handled shears. The muscles
in Runningdeer's back, shoulders, and arms worked fluidly, stretching
and flexing, and Tommy was fascinated by the man's physical power. The
judge, Tommy's father, was thin, bony, and pale. Tommy himself, at
five, was already visibly his father's son, fair and tall for his age
and painfully thin. By the day he showed Tommy the selfdevouring snake,
Runningdeer had been working for the Shaddacks two weeks, and Tommy had
been increasingly drawn to him without fully understanding why.
Runningdeer often had a smile for him and told funny stories about
talking coyotes and rattlesnakes and other desert animals. Sometimes he
called Tommy "Little Chief," which was the first nickname anyone had
given him. His mother always called him Tommy or Tom; the judge called
him Thomas. So he sprawled among his Tonka Toys, playing with them less
and less, until at last he stopped playing altogether and simply watched
Runningdeer, as if mesmerized.

He was not sure how long he lay entranced in the patio shade, in the hot
dry air of the desert day, but after a while he was surprised to hear
Runningdeer call to him.

"Little Chief, come look at this."

He was in such a daze that at first he could not respond.                      His

arms and legs would not work.             He seemed to have been turned to stone.

"Come on, come on, Little Chief.              You've got to see this."

At last Tommy sprang up and ran out onto the lawn, to the hedges
surrounding the swimming pool, where Runningdeer had been trimming.

"This is a rare thing," Runningdeer said in a somber voice, and he
pointed to a green snake that lay at his feet on the sunwarmed decking
around the pool.

Tommy began to pull back in fear.

But the Indian seized him by the arm, held him close, and said, "Don't
be afraid. It's only a harmless garden snake. It's not going to hurt
you. In fact it's been sent here as a sign to you.

" Tommy stared wide-eyed at the eighteen-inch reptile, which was curled
to form an 0, its own tail in its mouth, as if eating itself. The
serpent was motionless, glassy eyes unblinking. Tommy thought it was
dead, but the Indian assured him that it was alive.

"This is a great and powerful sign that all Indians know," said
Runningdeer. He squatted in front of the snake and pulled the boy down
beside him.

"It is a sign," he whispered, "a SUPERNATURAL sign, sent from the great
spirits, and it's always meant for a young boy, so it must have been
meant for you. A very powerful sign.

" Staring wonderingly at the snake, Tommy said, "Sign?                     What do you
mean? It's not a sign. It's a snake."

"An omen.     A presentiment.         A sacred sign," Runningdeer said.

As they hunkered before the snake, he explained such things to Tommy in
an intense, whispery voice, all the while holding him by one arm. Sun
glare bounced off the concrete decking. Shimmering waves of heat rose


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from it too. The snake lay so motionless that it might have been an
incredibly detailed jeweled choker rather than a real snake-each scale a
chip of emerald, twin rubies for the eyes. After a while Tommy drifted
back into the queer trance that he'd been in while lying on the patio,
and Runningdeer's voice slithered serpentlike into his head, deep inside
his skull, curling and sliding through his brain.

Stranger still, it began to seem that the voice was not really b - 267
Runningdeer's at all, but the snake's. He stared unwaveringly at the
viper and almost forgot that Runningdeer was there, for what the snake
said to him was so compelling and exciting that it filled Tommy's
senses, demanded his entire attention, even though he did not fully
understand what he was hearing. This is a sign of destiny, the snake
said, a sign of power and destiny, and you will be a man of great power,
far greater than your father, a man to whom others will bow down, a man
who will be obeyed, a man who will never fear the future because he will
make the future, and you will have anything you want, anything in the
world. But for now, said the snake, this is to be our secret. No one
must know that I've brought this message to you, that the sign has been
delivered, for if they know that you are destined to hold power over
them, they will surely kill you, slit your throat in the night, tear out
your heart, and bury you in a deep grave. They must not know that you
are the king-to-be, a god-on-earth, or they will smash you before your
strength has fully flowered. Secret. This is our secret. I am the
self-devouring snake, and I will eat myself and vanish now that I've
delivered this message, and no one will know I've been here. Trust the
Indian but no one else.

No one.    Ever.

Tommy fainted on the pool decking and was ill for two days. The doctor
was baffled. The boy had no fever, no detectable swelling of lymph
glands, no nausea, no soreness in the joints or muscles, no pain
whatsoever. He was merely gripped by a profound malaise, so lethargic
that he did not even want to bother holding a comic book; watching TV
was too much effort. He had no appetite. He slept fourteen hours a day
and lay in a daze most of the rest of the time.

"Perhaps mild sunstroke," the doctor said, "and if he doesn't snap out
of it in a couple of days, we'll put him in the hospital for tests."

During the day, when the judge was in court or meeting with his
investment associates, and when Tommy's mother was at the country club
or at one of her charity luncheons, Runningdeer slipped into the house
now and then to sit by the boy's bed for ten minutes. He told Tommy
stories, speaking in that soft and strangely rhythmic voice.

Miss Karval, their live-in housekeeper and part-time nanny, knew that
neither the judge nor Mrs. Shaddack would approve of the Indian's
sickbed visits or any of his other associations with Tommy. But Miss
Karval was kindhearted, and she disapproved of the lack of attention
that the Shaddacks gave to their offspring. And she liked the Indian.
She turned her head because she saw no harm in it-if Tommy promised not
to tell his folks how much time he spent with Runningdeer.

Just when they decided to admit the boy to a hospital for tests, he
recovered, and the doctor's diagnosis of sunstroke was accepted.
Thereafter, Tommy tagged along with Runningdeer most days from the time
his father and mother left the house until one of them returned. When
he started going to school, he came right home after classes; he was
never interested when other kids invited him to their houses to play,
for he was eager to spend a couple of hours with Runningdeer before his


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mother or father appeared in the late afternoon.

And week by week, month by month, year by year, the Indian made Tommy
acutely aware of signs that foretold his great though as yet
unspecified-destiny. A patch of four-leaf clovers under the boy's
bedroom window. A dead rat floating in the swimming pool. A score of
chirruping crickets in one of the boy's bureau drawers when he came home
from school one afternoon. Occasionally coins appeared where he had not
left them-a penny in every shoe in his closet; a month later, a nickel
in every pocket of every pair of his par s; later still, a shiny silver
dollar inside an apple that Runningdeer was peeling for him-and the
Indian regarded the coins with awe, explaining that they were some of
the most powerful signs of all.

"Secret," Runningdeer whispered portentously on the day after Tommy's
ninth birthday, when the boy reported hearing soft bells ringing under
his window in the middle of the night.

On arising, he had seen nothing but a candle burning on the lawn.
Careful not to wake his parents, he sneaked outside to take a closer
look at the candle, but it was gone.

"Always keep these signs secret, or they'll realize that you're a child
of destiny, that one day you'll have tremendous power over them, and
they'll kill you now, while you're still a boy, and weak. Who's
'they'?" Tommy asked.

'They, them, everyone," the Indian said mysteriously.

'But who?"

- 269 'Your father, for one."

"Not him."

"Him especially," Runningdeer whispered.

"He's a man of power. He enjoys having power over others, intimidating,
armtwisting to get his way. You've seen how people bow and scrape to
him.

" Indeed, Tommy had noticed the respect with which everyone spoke to his
father-especially his many friends in politics-and a couple of times had
glimpsed the unsettling and perhaps more honest looks they gave the
judge behind his back. They appeared to admire and even revere him to
his face, but when he was not looking they seemed not only to fear but
loathe him.

"He is satisfied only when he has all the power, and he won't let go of
it easily, not for anyone, not even for his son. If he finds out that
you're destined to be greater and more powerful than he is . . . no
one can save you then. Not even me."

Perhaps if their family life had been marked by more affection, Tommy
would have found the Indian's warning difficult to accept. But his
father seldom spoke to him in more than a perfunctory way, and even more
seldom touched him-never a real hug and never a kiss.

Sometimes Runningdeer brought a gift of homemade candy for the boy.

"Cactus candy," he called it. There was always just one piece for each
of them, and they always ate it together, either sitting on the patio
when the Indian was on his lunch break, or as Tommy followed his mentor


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around the    two-acre property on a series of chores. Soon after eating
the cactus    candy, the boy was overcome by a curious mood. He felt
euphoric.     When he moved, he seemed to float. Colors were brighter,
prettier.     The most vivid thin of all was Runningdeer His hair was .

impossibly black, his skin a beautiful bronze, his teeth radiantly
white, his eyes as dark as the end of the universe. Every sound-even
the crisp snick-snick-snick of hedge clippers, the roar of a plane
passing overhead on its way to Phoenix airport, the insect-hum of the
pool motor-became music; the world was full of music, though the most
musical of all things was Runningdeer's voice. Odors also became
sharper flowers, cut grass, the oil with which the Indian lubricated his
tools. Even the stink of perspiration was pleasant. running deer
smelled like fresh-baked bread and hay and copper pennies.


Tommy seldom remembered what Runningdeer talked about4 after they ate
their cactus candy, but he did recall that the Indian spoke to him with
a special intensity. A lot of it had to do with the sign of the
moonhawk.

"If the great spirits send the sign of the moonhawk, you'll know you're
to have tremendous power and be invincible. Invincible! But if you do
see the moonhawk, it'll mean the great spirits want something from you
in return an act that will truly prove your worthiness." That much
stuck with Tommy, but he remembered little else. Usually, after an
hour, he grew weary and went to his room to nap; his dreams them were
particularly vivid, more real than waking life, and' always involved the
Indian. They were simultaneously frightening and comforting dreams.

On a rainy Saturday in November, when Tommy was ten, he sat on a stool
by the workbench at one end of the four-car garage, watching as
Runningdeer repaired an electric carving knife that the judge always
used to slice the turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The air was
pleasantly cool and unusually humid for Phoenix. Runningdeer and Tommy
were talking about the rain, the upcoming holiday, and things that had
happened at school recently. They didn't always talk about signs and
destiny, or otherwise Tommy might not have liked the Indian so much;
Runningdeer was a great listener.

When the Indian finished repairing the -electric knife, he plugged it in
and switched it on. The blade shivered back and forth so fast that the
cutting edge was a blur.

Tommy applauded.

" You see this?" Runningdeer asked, raising the knife higher and
squinting at it in the glow from the fluorescent bulbs overhead.

Bright glints flew from the shuttling blade, as if it were busily
slicing up the light itself.

"What?"    Tommy asked.

"This knife, Little Chief. It's a machine. A frivolous machine, not a
really important machine like a car or airplane or electric wheelchair.
My brother is . . . crippled . . . and must get around in an
electric wheelchair. Did you know that, Litdc Chiefs"

"No.One of my brothers is dead, the other crippled."

- 271 'm sorry.



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"They are my half-brothers, really, but the only ones I have.

"How did it happen?         Why?"

Runningdeer ignored the questions.

"Even if this knifeS purpose is just to carve a turkey that could be
carved as well by hand, it's still efficient and clever. Most machines
are much more efficient and clever than people."

The Indian lowered the cutting instrument slightly and turned to face
Tommy. He held the purring knife between them and looked past the
shimmering blade into Tommy's eyes.

The boy felt himself slipping into a spell similar to that he'd
experienced after eating cactus candy, though they had eaten none.

"The white man puts great faith in machines," Runningdeer said. "He
thinks machines are ever so much more reliable and clever than people.
if you want to be truly great in the white man's world, Little Chief,
you must make yourself as much like a machine as you can. You must be
efficient. You must be relentless like a machine. You must be
determined in your goals, allowing no desires or emotions to distract
you."

He moved the purring blade slowly toward Tommy's face, until the boy's
eyes crossed in an attempt to focus on the cutting edge.

"With this I could lop away your nose, slice off your lips, carve away
your cheeks and ears . . .

" Tommy wanted to slip off the workbench stool and run.

But he could not move.

He realized that the Indian was holding him by one wrist.

Even if he had not been held, he would have been unable to flee. He was
paralyzed. Not entirely by fear, either. There was something seductive
about the moment; the potential for violence was in an odd way . . .
exciting.

" . . . cut off the round bail of your chin, scalp you, lay bare the
bone, and you'd bleed to death or die of one cause or another but . . .
The blade was no more than two inches from his nose.

"--.       but the machine would go on .

One inch.

"--.       the knife would still purr and slice, purr and slice Half an
inch.


because machines don't die Tommy could feel the faint, faint breeze
stirred by the continuously moving electric blade.

machines are efficient and reliable. If you want to do well in the
white man's world, Little Chief, you must be like a machine.

" Runningdeer switched off the knife.                He put it down.

He did not let go of Tommy.



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Leaning close, he said, "If you wish to be great, if you wish to please
the spirits and do what they ask of you when they send you the sign of
the moonhawk, then you must be determined, relentless, cold,
single-minded, uncaring of consequences, just like a machine.

" Thereafter, especially when they ate cactus candy together, they often
talked of being as dedicated to a purpose and as reliable as a machine.
As he approached puberty, Tommy's dreams 'were less often filled with
sexual references than with images of the moonhawk and with visions of
people who looked normal on the outside but who were all wires and
transistors and clicking metal switches on the inside.

In the summer of his twelfth year, after seven years in the Indian's
company, the boy learned what had happened to Runningdeer's
half-brothers. At least he learned some of it. He surmised the rest.

He and the Indian were sitting on the patio, having lunch and watching
the rainbows that appeared and faded in the mist thrown up by the lawn
sprinklers. He had asked about Runningdeer's brothers a few times since
that day at the workbench, more than a year and a half earlier, but the
Indian had never answered him. This time, however, Runningdeer stared
off toward the distant, hazy mountains and said, "This is a secret I
tell you."

"All right."

"As secret as all the signs you've been given."

"Sure."

"Some white men, just college boys, got drunk and were cruising around,
maybe looking for women, certainly looking for trouble. They met my
brothers by accident, in a restaurant parking lot. One of my brothers
was married, and his wife was with him, and the college boys started
playing tease-the-Indians, but they also really liked the look of my
brother's wife. They - 273 wanted her and were drunk enough to think
they could just take her. There was a fight. Five against my two
brothers, they beat one to death with a tire iron. The other will never
walk again. They took my brother's wife with them, used her."

Tommy was stunned by this revelation.

At last the boy said, " I hate white men."

Runningdeer laughed.

"I really do," Tommy said.

"What happened to those guys who did it?                 Are they in prison now?"

"No prison."      Runningdeer smiled at the boy.               A fierce, humorless smile.

"Their fathers were powerful men. Money. Influence. So the judge let
them off for 'insufficient evidence. My father should've been the
judge. He wouldn't let them off - Wouldn't he?" the Indian said.

"Never.    Are you so sure?"

Uneasily, Tommy said, "Well The Indian was silent.

"I hate white men," Tommy repeated, this time motivated more by a desire
to curry favor with the Indian than by conviction.

Runningdeer laughed again and patted Tommy's hand.


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Near the end of that same summer, Runningdeer came to Tommy late on a
blazing August day and, in a portentous and ominous voice, said, "There
will be a full moon tonight, Little Chief. Go into the backyard and
watch it for a while. I believe that tonight the sign will finally
come, the most important sign of all."

After moonrise, which came shortly after nightfall, Tommy went out and
stood on the pool apron, where Runningdeer had shown him the
self-devouring snake seven years earlier. He stared up at the lunar
sphere for a long time, while an elongated reflection of it shimmered on
the surface of the water in the swimming pool. It was a swollen yellow
moon, still low in the sky and immense.

Soon the judge came out onto the patio, calling to him, and Tommy said,
"Here."

The judge joined him by the pool.

"What're you doing, Thomas?"

"I m "Watching for.

"For what?"

Just then Tommy saw the hawk silhouetted by the moon. For years he had
been told he would see it one day, had been prepared for it and all that
it would mean, and suddenly there it was, frozen for a moment in
midflight against the round lunar lamp.

"There!" he said, for the moment having forgotten that he could trust
no one but the Indian.

"There what?"       the judge asked.

"Didn't you see it?"

"Just the moon."

"You weren't looking or you'd have seen it."

"Seen what?"

His father's blindness to the sign only proved to Tommy that he was,
indeed, special and that the portent had been meant for his eyes
only-which reminded him that he could not trust his own father. He
said, "Uh . . . a shooting star."

"You're standing out here watching for shooting stars?"

"They're actually meteors," Tommy said, talking too fast.

" See, tonight the earth's supposed to be passing through a meteor belt,
so there'll be lots of them."

"Since when are you interested in astronomy?"

"I'm not."     Tommy shrugged.

"Just wondered what it'd look like. Pretty boring.

" He turned away from the pool and started back toward the house, and
after a moment the judge accompanied him.



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The next day, Wednesday, the boy told Runningdeer about the moonhawk.

"But I didn't get any messages from it. I don't know what the great
spirits want me to do to prove myself." The Indian smiled and stared at
him in silence for what began to be an uncomfortably long time. Then he
said, "Little Chief, we'll talk about that at lunch."

Miss Karval had Wednesdays off, and Runningdeer and Tommy were at home
alone. They sat side by side on patio chairs for lunch. The Indian
seemed to have brought nothing but cactus candy, and Tommy had no
appetite for anything else.

Long ago the boy had ceased to eat the candy for its flavor but devoured
it eagerly for its effect. And over the years its impact on him had
grown constantly more profound.

- 275 soon the boy was         in that much-desired dreamlike plane, where
colors were bright and         sounds were loud and odors were sharp and all
things were comforting         and appealing. He and the Indian talked for
nearly an hour, and at         the end of that time Tommy came to understand
that the great spirits         expected him to kill his father four days hence,
Sunday morning.

"That's my day off," said Runningdeer, "so I will not be here to offer
you support. But in fact that's probably the spirits' intention-that
you should have to prove yourself all on your own. At least we'll have
the next few days to plan it together, so that when Sunday comes you'll
be prepared.

,Yes," the boy said dreamily.

"Yes.   We'll plan it together."

Later that afternoon, the judge came home from a business meeting that
had followed his court session. Complaining of the heat, he went
straight upstairs to take a shower. Tommy's mother had come home half
an hour earlier. She was in an armchair in the living room, feet on a
low upholstered stool, reading the latest issue of Town & Country and
sipping at what she called a "precocktail-hour cocktail." She barely
looked up when the judge leaned in from the hall to announce his
intention of showering.

As soon as his father went upstairs, Tommy went to the kitchen and got a
butcher's knife from the rack by the stove.

Runningdeer was outside, mowing the lawn.

Tommy went into the living room, walked up to his mother, and kissed her
on the cheek. She was surprised by the kiss but more surprised by the
knife, which he rammed into her chest three times. He carried the same
knife upstairs and buried it in the judge's stomach as he stepped out of
the shower.

He went to his room and took off his clothes. There was no blood on his
shoes, little on his jeans, but a lot on his shirt. After he quickly
washed up in his bathroom sink and sluiced all traces of blood down the
drain, he dressed in fresh jeans and shirt. He carefully bundled his
bloody clothes in an old towel and carried them into the attic, where he
hid them in a corner behind a seaman's trunk. He could dispose of them
later.

Downstairs he passed the living room without looking in at his dead
mother. He went straight to the desk in the judge's study and opened


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the right bottom drawer.           From behind a stack of files, he withdrew the
judge's revolver.


In the kitchen he turned off the overhead fluorescents, so the only
light was what came through the windows, which was bright enough but
left some parts of the room in cool shadows. He put the butcher's knife
on the counter by the refrigerator, squarely in some of those shadows.
He put the revolver on one of the chairs at the table, and pulled the
chair only partway out, so the gun could be reached but not easily seen.

He went out through the French doors that connected the kitchen to the
patio, and yelled for Runningdeer. The Indian did not hear the boy over
the roar of the lawnmower, but happened to look up and see him waving.
Frowning, he shut off the mower and crossed the half-cut lawn to the
patio.

"Yes, Thomas?" he said, because he knew that the judge and Mrs.
Shaddack were at home.

"My mother needs your help with something," Tommy said.

"She asked me to fetch you."

"My help?"

"Yeah.    In the living room."

"What's she want?"

"She needs some help with .            .   .    well, it's easier to show you than to
talk about it."

The Indian followed him through the French doors, into the large
kitchen, past the refrigerator, toward the hall door.

Tommy halted abruptly, turned, and said, "O! yeah, Mother says you'll
need that knife, that one there behind you on the counter, by the
refrigerator.

" Runningdeer turned, saw the knife lying on the shadowed tile top of
the counter, and picked it up. His eyes went very wide.

"Little Chief, there's blood on this knife. There's blood-" Tommy had
already plucked the revolver off the kitchen chair. As the Indian
turned toward him in surprise, Tommy held the gun in both hands and
fired until he emptied the cylinder, though the recoil slammed painfully
through his arm and shoulders, nearly knocking him off his feet. At
least two of the rounds hit Runningdeer, and one of them tore out his
throat.

The Indian went down hard.            The knife clattered out of his hand and spun
across the floor.

With one shoe, Tommy kicked the knife closer to the corpse, so it would
definitely look as if the dying man had been wielding it.

- 277 The boy's understanding of the great spirits' message had been
clearer than his mentor's. They wanted him to free himself at once from
everyone who had more than a little power over him the judge, his
mother, and Runningdeer. Only then could he achieve his own lofty
destiny of power.

He had planned the three murders with the coolness of a computer and had


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executed them with machinelike determination and efficiency. He felt
nothing. Emotions had not interfered with his actions. Well, in truth,
he was scared and a little excited even exhilarated-but those feelings
had not distracted him.

After staring for a moment at Runningdeer's body, Tommy went to the
kitchen phone, dialed the police, and hysterically reported that the
Indian, shouting of revenge, had killed his parents and that he, Tommy,
had killed the Indian with his father's gun. But he didn't put it so
succinctly. He was so hysterical, they had to pry it from him. In fact
he was so shattered and disoriented by what had happened that they had
to work patiently with him for three or four tedious minutes to get him
to stop babbling and give them his name and address. In his mind he had
practiced hysteria all afternoon, since lunch with the Indian. Now he
was pleased that he sounded so convincing.

He walked out to the front of the house and sat in the driveway and wept
until the police arrived. His tears were more genuine than his
hysteria. He was crying with relief.

He'd seen the moonhawk twice again, later in life. He saw it when he
needed to see it, when he wanted to be reassured that some course of
action he wished to follow was correct.

But he never killed anyone again-because he never needed to.

His maternal grandparents took him into their home and raised him in
another part of Phoenix. Because he had endured such tragedy, they more
or less gave him everything that he wanted, as if to deny him anything
would be unbearably cruel and, just possibly, might be the additional
straw of burden that would break him at last. He was the sole their of
his father's estate, which was fattened by large life-insurance
policies; therefore he was guaranteed a first-rate education and plenty
of capital with which to start out in life after graduation from the
university. The world lay before him, filled with opportunity. And
thanks to Runningdeer, he had the additional advantage of knowing beyond
a doubt that he had a great destiny and that the forces of fate and
heaven wanted him to achieve tremendous power over other men.

Only a madman killed without a compelling need.

With but rare exception, murder simply was not an efficient method of
solving problems.

Now, curled up in the back of the van in Paula Parkins's dark garage,
Shaddack reminded himself that he was destiny's child, that he had seen
the moonhawk three times. He put all fear of Loman Watkins and of
failure out of his mind. He sighed and slipped over the edge of sleep.

He dreamed the familiar dream. The vast machine. Half metal and half
flesh. Steel pistons stroking. Human hearts dependably pumping
lubricants of all kinds. Blood and oil, iron and bone, plastic and
tendon, wires and nerves.

Chrissie was amazed that priests ate so well. The table in the
rectory kitchen was heavily laden with food an immense plateful of
sausages, eggs, a stack of toast, a package of sweetrolls, another of
blueberry muffins, a bowl of hash-brown potatoes that had been warming
in the oven, fresh fruit, and a bag of marshmallows for the hot cocoa.
Father Castelli was pudgy, sure, but Chrissie had always thought of
priests as abstemious in all things, denying themselves at least some of
the pleasures of food and drink just as they denied themselves marriage.


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If Father Castelli consumed as much at every meal, he ought to weigh
twice what he did. No, three times as much!

As they ate, she told him about the aliens taking over her folks. In
deference to Father Castelli's predisposition toward spiritual answers,
and as a means of keeping him hooked, she left the door open on demonic
possession, though personally she - 279 much favored the alien-invasion
explanation. She told him what she'd seen in the upstairs hall
yesterday, how she'd been locked in the pantry and, later, had been
pursued by her parents and Tucker in their strange new shapes.

The priest expressed astonishment and concern, and several times he
demanded more details, but he did not once pause significantly in his
eating. In fact he ate with such tremendous gusto that his table
manners suffered. Chrissie was as surprised by his sloppiness as she
was by the size of his appetite. A couple of times he had egg yolk on
his chin, and when she got up the nerve to point it out to him, he made
a joke about it and immediately wiped it off. But a moment later she
looked up, and there was more egg yolk. He dropped a few miniature
marshmallows and didn't seem to care. The front of his black shirt was
speckled with toast crumbs, a couple of tiny pieces of sausage, flecks
of potatoes, sweetroll crumbs, muffin crumbs. . . .

Really, she was beginning to think that Father Castelli was as guilty as
any man had ever been of the sin of gluttony.

But she loved him in spite of his eating habits because he' never once
doubted her sanity or expressed a lack of belief in her wild story. He
listened with interest and utmost seriousness, and seemed genuinely
concerned, even frightened, by what she told him.

"Well, Chrissie, they've made maybe a thousand movies about alien
invasions, hostile creatures from other worlds, and they've written
maybe ten thousand books about it, and I've always said that man's mind
can't imagine anything that isn't possible in God's world. So who
knows, hmmmm? Who's to say they might not have landed here in Moonlight
Cove? I'm a film buff, and I've always liked scary movies best, but I
never imagined that I'd find myself in the middle of a real-life scary
movie. He was sincere. He never patronized her.

Although Father Castelli continued to eat with undiminished appetite,
Chrissie finished breakfast and her story at the same time. Because the
kitchen was warm, she was rapidly drying out, and only the seat of her
pants and her running shoes were still really wet. She felt
sufficiently reinvigorated to consider what lay ahead of her now that
she had reached help.

"What next7 We've got to call in the Army, don't you think, Father?"

"Perhaps the Army and the Marines," he said after a moment of
deliberation.

"The Marines might be better at this sort of thing.

" 'Do you think .

'What is it, dear girl?"

"Do you think there's any chance . . .                   well, any chance of getting my
folks back? The way they were, I mean?"

He put down a muffin that he had been raising to his mouth, and he
reached across the table, between the plates and tins of food, to take


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her hand. His fingers were slightly greasy with butter, but she did not
mind, for he was so reassuring and comforting; right now she needed a
lot of reassuring and comforting.

"You'll be reunited with your parents," Father Castelli said with great
sympathy.

"I absolutely guarantee that you will."

She bit her lower lip, trying to hold back her tears.

"I guarantee it," he repeated.

Abruptly his face bulged. Not evenly like an inflating balloon. Rather,
it bulged in some places and not others, rippled and pulsed, as if his
skull had turned to mush and as if balls of worms were writhing and
squirming just under the skin.

"I guarantee it!"

Chrissie was too terrified to scream. For a moment she could not move.
She was paralyzed by fear, frozen in her chair, unable to summon even
enough motor control to blink or draw a breath.

She could hear his bones loudly crackling-crunching-popping as they
splintered and dissolved and reshaped themselves with impossible speed.
His flesh made a disgusting, wet, oozing sound as it flowed into new
forms almost with the ease of hot wax.

The priest's skull swelled upward and swept back in a bony crest, and
his face was hardly human at all now but partly crustacean, partly
insectile, vaguely wasplike, with something of the jackal in it, too,
and with fiery hateful eyes.

At last Chrissie cried out explosively, "No!"                   Her heart was pounding so
hard that each beat was painful.

"No, go away, let me alone, let me go!"

His jaws lengthened, then split back nearly to his ears in a menacing
grin defined by double rows of immense sharp teeth.

"No, no!

" She tried to get up.

She realized that he was still holding her left hand.

- 281 He spoke in a voice eerily reminiscent of those of her mother and
Tucker when they had stalked her as far as the mouth of the culvert last
night ". . . need, need . . . want . . . give me . . . give
me . . .

need - - - " He didn't look like her parents had looked when
transformed. Why wouldn't all the aliens look the same?

He opened his mouth wide and hissed at her, and thick yellowish saliva
was strung like threads of taffy from his upper to his lower teeth.
Something stirred inside his mouth, a strange looking tongue; it thrust
out at her like a jack-in-the-box popping forth on its spring, and it
proved to be a mouth within his mouth, another set of smaller and even
sharper teeth on a stalk, designed to get into tight places and bite
prey that took refuge there.



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Father Castelli was becoming something startlingly familiar the creature
from the movie Alien. Not exactly that monster in every detail but
uncannily similar to it.

She was trapped in a movie, just as the priest had said, a real-life
horror flick no doubt one of his favorites. Was Father Castelli able to
assume whatever shape he wanted, and was he becoming this beast only
because it pleased him to do so and because it would best fulfill
Chrissie's expectations of alien invaders?

This was crazy.

Beneath his clothes, the priest's body was changing too. His shirt
sagged on him in some places, as if the substance of him had melted away
beneath it, but in other places it strained at the seams as his body
acquired new bony extrusions and inhuman excrescences. Shirt buttons
popped. Fabric tore. His Roman collar came apart and fell askew on his
hideously resculpted neck.

Gasping, making a curious uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound in the back of her throat
but unable to stop, she tried to pull free of him. She stood up,
knocking her chair over, but she was Still held fast. He was very
strong. She could not tear loose.

His hands also had begun to change. His fingers had lengthened. They
were plated with a horn-like substance-smooth, hard, and shiny
black-more like pincers with digits than like human hands.

". . . need . . . want, want . . . need. She plucked up her
breakfast knife, swung it high over her head, and drove it down with all
her might, stabbing him in the forearm, just above the wrist, where his
flesh still looked more human than not. She had hoped that the blade
would pin him to the table, but she didn't feel it bite all the way
through him to the wood beneath.

His shriek was so shrill and piercing that it seemed to vibrate through
Chrissie's bones.

His armored, demonic hand spasmed open. She yanked free of him.
Fortunately she was quick, for his hand clamped shut again a fraction of
a second later, pinching her fingertips but unable to hold her.

The kitchen door was on the priest's side of the table.                     She could not
reach it without exposing her back to him.

With a cry that was half scream and half roar, he tore the knife from
his arm and threw it aside. He knocked the dishes and food from the
table with one sweep of his bizarrely mutated arm, which was now eight
or ten inches longer than it had been. It protruded from the cuff of
his black shirt in nightmarish gnarls and planes and hooks of the dark,
chitinous stuff that had replaced his flesh.

Mary, Mother of God, pray for me; mother, most pure, pray for me; Mother
most chaste, pray for me. Please, Chrissie thought.

The priest grabbed hold of the table and threw it aside, tool as if it
weighed only ounces. It crashed into the refrigerator. Now nothing
separated her from him.

From it.

She feinted toward the kitchen door, taking a couple of steps in that
direction.


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The priest-not really a priest any more; a thing that sometimes
masqueraded as a priest-swung to his right, intending to cut her off and
snare her.

Immediately she turned, as she'd always intended, and ran in the
opposite direction, toward the open door that led to the downstairs
hall, leaping over scattered toast and links of sausage. The trick
worked. Wet shoes squishing and squeaking on the linoleum, she was past
him before he realized she actually was going to his left.

She suspected that he was quick as well as strong.                     Quicker than she, no
doubt. She could hear him coming behind her.

- 283 If she could only reach the front door, get out onto the porch and
into the yard, she would probably be safe. She suspected that he would
not follow her beyond the house, into the street, where others might see
him. Surely not everyone in Moonlight Cove had already been possessed
by these aliens, and until the last real person in town was taken over,
they could not strut around in a transformed state, eating young girls
with impunity].

Not far.     Just the front door and a few steps beyond.

She had covered two-thirds of the distance, expecting to feel a claw
snag her shirt from behind, when the door opened ahead of her. The other
priest, Father O'Brien, stepped across the threshold and blinked in
surprise.

At once she knew that she couldn't trust him, either. He could not have
lived in the same house as Father Castelli without the alien seed having
been planted in him. Seed, spoor, slimy parasite, spirit-whatever was
used to effect possession, Father O'Brien undoubtedly had had it rammed
or injected into him.

Unable to go forward or back, unwilling to swerve through the archway on
her right and into the living room because that was a dead end-in every
sense of the word-she grabbed hold of the newel post, which she was just
passing, and swung herself onto the stairs. She ran pell-mell for the
second floor.

The front door slammed below her.

By the time she turned at the landing and started up the second flight
of stairs, she heard both of them climbing behind her.

The upper hall had white plaster walls, a dark wood floor, and a wood
ceiling. Rooms lay on both sides.

She Sprinted to the end of the hall and into a bedroom furnished only
with a simple dresser, one nightstand, a double bed with a white
chenille spread, a bookcase full of paperbacks, and a crucifix on the
wall. She threw the door shut after her but didn't bother trying to
lock or brace it. There was no time. They'd smash through it in
seconds, anyway.

Repeating, "Mary mother of God, Mary mother of God," in a breathless and
desperate whisper, she rushed across the room to the window that was
framed by emerald-green drapes. Rain washed down the glass.

Her Pursuers were in the upstairs hall.                 Their footsteps boomed through
the house.



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She grabbed the handles on the sash and tried to pull the window up.                          It
would not budge. She fumbled with the latch, but it already was
disengaged.

Farther back the hall toward the head of the stairs, they were throwing
open doors, looking for her.

The window was either painted shut or perhaps swollen tight because of
the high humidity. She stepped back from it.

The door behind her crashed inward, and something snarled.

Without glancing behind her, she tucked her head down and crossed her
arms over her face and threw herself through the window, wondering if
she could kill herself by jumping from the second story, figuring it
depended where she landed. Grass would be good. Sidewalk would be bad.
The pointed spires of a wrought-iron fence would be real bad.

The sound of shattering glass was still in the air when she hit a porch
roof two feet below the window, which was virtually a miracle-she was
uncut too-so she kept saying MarymotherofGod as she did a controlled
roll through hammering rain toward the edge of the shingled expanse.
When she reached the brink, she clung there for a moment, her left side
on the roof, right side supported by a creaking and rapidly sagging rain
gutter, and she looked back at the window.

Something wolfish and grotesque was coming after her.

She dropped. She landed on a walkway, on her left side, jarring her
bones, clacking her teeth together so hard that she feared they'd fall
out in pieces, and scraping one hand badly on the concrete.

But she didn't lie there pitying herself. She scrambled up and, huddled
around her pain, turned from the house to run into the street.

Unfortunately she wasn't in front of the rectory. She was behind it, in
the rear yard. The back wall of Our Lady of Mercy bordered the lawn on
her right, and a seven-foot-high brick wall encircled the rest of the
property.

Because of the wall and the trees on both sides of it, she could not see
either the neighboring house to the south or the one to the west, on the
other side of the alley that ran behind the property. If she couldn't
see the rectory's neighbors, they couldn't see her, either, even if they
happened to be looking out a window.

That privacy explained why the wolf-thing dared to come onto - 285 the
roof, pursuing her in broad-if rather gray and dismal daylight.

She briefly considered going into the house, through the kitchen, down
the hall, out the front door, into the street, because that was the last
thing they'd expect. But then she thought Are YOu insane?

She did not bother to scream for help. Her thudding heart seemed to
have swollen until her lungs had too little room to expand, so she could
barely get enough air to remain conscious, on her feet, and moving. No
breath was left for a scream. Besides, even if people heard her call
for help, they wouldn't necessarily be able to tell where she was; by
the time they tracked her down, she would be either torn apart or
possessed, because the scream would have slowed her by a fateful second
or two.

Instead, limping slightly to favor a pulled muscle in her left leg but


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losing no time, she hurried across the expansive rear lawn. She knew
she could not scale a blank seven-foot wall fast enough to save herself,
especially not with one stingingly abraded hand, so she studied the
trees as she ran. She needed one close to the wall; maybe she could
climb into it, crawl out on a branch, and drop into the alleyway or into
the neighbor's yard.

Above the slosh and patter of the rain, she heard a low growl behind
her, and she dared to glance over her shoulder. Wearing only tatters of
a shirt, freed entirely from shoes and trousers, the wolf-thing that had
been Father O'Brien leaped from the edge of the porch roof in pursuit.

She finally saw a suitable tree-but an instant later noticed a gate in
the wall at the southwest corner. She hadn't seen it sooner because it
had been screened from her by some shrubbery that she had just passed.

Gasping for air, she put her head down, tucked her arms against her
sides, and ran to the gate. She hit the bar latch with her hand,
popping it out of the slot in which it had been cradled, and burst
through into the alley. Turning left, away from Ocean Avenue toward
Jacobi Street, she ran through deep puddles nearly to the end of the
block before risking a glance behind her.

Nothing had followed her out of the rectory gate.

twice she had been in the hands of the aliens, and twice she had
escaped. She knew she would not be so lucky if she were captured a
third time.

t Shortly before nine o'clock, after less than four hours of sleep
altogether, Sam Booker woke to the quiet clink and clatter of someone at
work in the kitchen. He sat up on the living-room sofa, wiped at his
matted eyes, put on his shoes and shoulder holster, and went down the
hall.

Tessa Lockland was humming softly as she lined up pans, bowls, and food
on the wheelchair-low counter near the stove, preparing to make
breakfast.

"Good morning," she said brightly when Sam came into the kitchen.

'What's good about it?"           he asked.

'Just listen to that rain," she said.

"Rain always makes me feel clean and fresh."

"Always depresses me.And it's nice to be in a warm, dry kitchen,
listening to the storm but cozy."

He scratched at the stubble of beard on his unshaven cheeks. "Seems a
little stuffy in here to me."

'Well, anyway, we're still alive, and that's good."

'I guess so.

" 'God in heaven!"         She banged an empty frying pan down on the stove and
scowled at him.

"Are all FBI agents like you"" 'In what way?"

'Are they all sourpusses?



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'I'm not a sourpuss.            You're a classic Gloomy Gus," 'Well, life isn't a
carnival."

'It isn't?"

Life is hard and mean."

"Maybe.       But isn't it a carnival too?"

- 287 "Are all documentary filmmakers like you?"

-'In what way?"

Pollyannas?"

"That's ridiculous - I'm no Pollyanna.

"Oh, no?"

"No. Here we are trapped in a town where reality seems to have been
temporarily suspended, where people are being torn apart by species
unknown, where Boogeymen roam the streets at night, where some mad
computer genius seems to have turned human biology inside out, where
we're all likely to be killed or 'converted' before midnight tonight,
and when I come in here you're grinning and sprightly and humming a
Beatles tune."

"It wasn't the Beatles."

" Huh?       Rolling Stones."

"And that makes a difference?"

She sighed.

"Listen, if you're going to help eat this breakfast, you're going to
help make it, so don't just stand there glowering.

"

"All right, okay, what can I do?"

"First, get on the intercom there and call Harry, make sure he's awake.
Tell him breakfast in . . . ummmm . . . forty minutes. Pancakes
and eggs and shaved, fried ham."

Sam pressed the intercom button and said, "Hello, Harry," and Harry
answered at once, already awake. He said he'd be down in about half an
hour.

"Now what?"         Sam asked Tessa.

"Get the eggs and milk from the refrigerator-but for God's sake don't
look in the cartons."

"Why not?"

She grinned.

"You'll spoil the eggs and curdle the milk."

"Very funny."

I thought so."



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While making pancake mix from scratch, cracking six eggs into glass
dishes and preparing them so they could be quickly sliPPed into the
frying pans when she needed them, directing Sam to set the table and
help her with other small chores, chopping onions, and shaving ham,
Tessa alternately hummed and sang songs by Patti La Belle and the
Pointer Sisters. Sam knew whose music it was because she told him,
announcing each song as if she were a disc jockey or as if she hoped to
educate him and loosen him up. While she worked and sang, she danced in
place, shaking her bottom, swiveling her hips, rolling her shoulders,
sometimes snapping her fingers, really getting into it.

She was genuinely enjoying herself, but he knew that she was also
needling him a little and getting a kick out of that too. He tried to
hold fast to his gloom, and when she smiled at him, he did not return
her smile, but damn she was cute. Her hair was tousled, and she wasn't
wearing any makeup, and her clothes were wrinkled from having been slept
in, but her slightly disheveled look only added to her allure.

Sometimes she paused in her soft singing and humming to ask him
questions, but she continued to sing and dance in place even while he
answered her.

"You figured what we're going to do yet to get out of this corner we're
in?"

" I have an idea."

"Patti La Belle, 'New Attitude,' " she said, identifying the song she
was singing.

"Is this idea of yours a deep, dark secret? No. But I have to go over
it with Harry, get some information from him, so I'll tell you both at
breakfast."

At her direction he was hunched over the low counter, cutting thin
slices of cheese from a block of Cheddar when she broke into her song
long enough to ask, "Why did you say life is hard and mean?"

"Because it is."

"But it's also full of fun-No.               -and beauty-No." 'I-and hope-"
'Bullshit.

It is."

,It isn't."

"Yes, it is."

'It isn't."

,Why are you so negative?"

Because I want to be."

"But why do you want to be?"

- 289 "Jesus, You're relentless."

'Pointer Sisters, 'Neutron Dance."

" She sang a bit, dancing in place as she put eggshells and other scraps
down the garbage disposal. Then she interrupted her tune to say, "What
could've happened to you to make you feel that life's only mean and


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hard?

" ,You don't want to know."

,yes, I do.

" He finished with the cheese and put down the slicer.

"You really want to know?"

" I really do."

"My mother was killed in a traffic accident when I was just seven. I was
in the car with her, nearly died, was actually trapped in the wreckage
with her for more than an hour, face to face, staring into her eyeless
socket, one whole side of her head bashed in. After that I had to go
live with my dad, whom she'd divorced, and he was a mean-tempered son of
a bitch, an alcoholic, and I can't tell you how many times he beat me or
threatened to beat me or tied me to a chair in the kitchen and left me
there for hours at a time, until I couldn't hold myself any more and
peed in my pants, and then he'd finally come to untie me and he'd see
what I'd done and he'd beat me for that."

He was surprised by how it all spilled from him, as if the floodgates of
his subconscious had been opened, pouring forth all the sludge that had
been pent up through long years of stoic self-control.

"So as soon as I graduated from high school, I got out of that house,
worked my way through junior college, living in cheap rented rooms,
shared my bed with armies of cockroaches every night, then applied to
the Bureau as soon as I could, because I wanted to see justice in the
world, be a part of bringing justice to the world, maybe because there'd
been so little fairness or justice in my life. But I discovered that
more than half the time justice doesn't triumph. The bad guys get away
with it, no matter how hard you work to bring them down, because the bad
guys are often pretty damned clever, and the good guys never allow
themselves to be as mean as they have to be to get the job done. But at
the same time, when you're an agent, mainly what you see is the sick
underbelly of society, you deal with the scum, one kind of scum or
another, and day by day it makes you mort; cynical, more disgusted with
people and sick of them."

He was talking so fast that he was almost breathless.                      She had stopped
singing.

He continued with an uncharacteristic lack of emotional control,
speaking so fast that his sentences sometimes ran together, "And my wife
died, Karen, she was wonderful, you'd have liked her, everybody liked
her, but she got cancer and she died, Painfully, horribly, with a lot of
suffering, not easy like Ali McGraw in the movies, not with just a sigh
and a smile and a quiet goodbye, but in agony. And then I lost my son
too. Oh, he's alive, sixteen, nine when his mother died and sixteen
now, physically alive and mentally alive, but he's emotionally dead,
burnt out in his heart, cold inside, so damned cold inside. He likes
computers and computer games and television, and he listens to black
metal. You know what black metal is? It's heavy-metal music with a
twist of satanism, which he likes because it tells him there are no
moral values, that everything is relative, that his alienation is right,
that his coldness inside is right, it tells him that whatever feels good
is good. You know what he said once?"

She shook her head.



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"He said to me, 'People aren't important. People don't count. Only
things are important. Money is important, liquor is important, my
stereo is important, anything that makes me feel good is important, but
I'm not important." He tells me that nuclear bombs are important because
they'll blow up all those nice things some day, not because they'll blow
up people-after all, people are nothing, just polluting animals that
spoil the world. That's what he says. That's what he tells me he
believes. He says he can prove it's all true. He says that next time
you see a bunch of people standing around a Porsche, admiring the car,
look real hard at their faces and you'll see that they care more about
that car than about each other. They're not admiring the workmanship,
either, not in the sense that they're thinking about the people who made
the car. It's as if the Porsche was organic, as if it grew or somehow
made itself. They admire it for itself, not for what it represents of
human engineering skills and craftsmanship. The car is more alive than
they are. They draw energy from the car, from the sleek lines of it,
from the thrill of imagining 291 its power under their hands, so the car
becomes more real and important than any of the people admiring it."

and far more "That's bullshit," Tessa said with conviction.

"But that's what he tells me, and I know it's crap, and I try to reason
with him, but he's got all the answers-or thinks he has. And sometimes
I wonder . . . if I wasn't so soured on life myself, so sick of so
many people, would I be able to argue with them more persuasively? If I
wasn't who I am, would I be more able to save my son?

He stopped.

He realized he was trembling.

They were both silent for a moment.

Then he said, "That's why I say life is hard and mean."

"I'm sorry, Sam."

"Not your fault."

"Not yours either."

He sealed the Cheddar in a piece of Saran Wrap and returned it to the
refrigerator while she returned to the pancake mix she was making.

"But you had Karen," she said.

"There's been love and beauty in your life."

"Sure.Well, then-But it doesn't last."

"Nothing lasts forever."

"Exactly my point," he said.

"But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a blessing while we have it. If
you're always looking ahead, wondering when this moment of joy is going
to end, you can never know any real pleasure in life."

"Exactly my point," he repeated.

She left the wooden mixing spoon in the big metal bowl and turned to
face him.



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"But that's wrong. I mean, life is filled with moments of wonder,
pleasure, joy . . . and if we don't seize the moment, if we don't
sometimes turn off thoughts of the future and relish the moment, then
we'll have no memory of joy to carry us through the bad times-and no
hope."

He stared at her, admiring her beauty and vitality. But then he began
to think about how she would age, grow infirm, and die just as
everything died, and he could no longer bear to look at her. Instead he
turned his gaze to the rain-washed window above the sink.

"Well, I'm sorry if I've upset you, but you'll have to admit you asked
for it. You insisted on knowing how I could be such a Gloomy Gus."

"Oh, you're no Gloomy Gus," she said.

"You go way beyond that. You're a regular Dr.                   Doom."

He shrugged.

They returned to their culinary labors.

After escaping through the gate at the rear of the rectory yard,
Chrissie stayed on the move for more than an hour while she tried to
decide what to do next. She had planned to go to school and tell her
story to Mrs. Tokawa if Father Castelli proved unhelpful. But now she
was no longer willing to trust even Mrs.

Tokawa. After her experience with the priests, she realized the aliens
would probably have taken possession of all the authority figures in
Moonlight Cove as a first step toward conquest. She already knew the
priests were possessed. She was certain that the police had been taken
over as well, so it was logical to assume that teachers also had been
among the early victims.

As she moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, she alternately cursed
the rain and was grateful for it. Her shoes and jeans and flannel shirt
were sodden again, and she was chilled through and through. But the
darkish-gray daylight and the rain kept people indoors and provided her
with some cover. in addition, as the wind subsided, a thin cold fog
drifted in from the sea, not a fraction as dense as it had been last
night, just a beardlike mist that clung to the trees, but enough to
further obscure the passage of one small girl through those unfriendly
streets.

Last night's thunder and lightning were gone too. She was no - 293
longer in danger of being flash-roasted by a sudden bolt, which was at
least some comfort.

yoUNG GIRL FRIED TO A CRISP BY LIGHTNING THEN EATEN 13Y ALIENS; SPACE
CREATURES ENJOY HUMAN POTATO CHIPS; "IF WE CAN MAKE THEM WITH RUFFLES,"
SAYS ALIEN NEST QUEEN, "THEY'LL BE PERFECT WITH ONION DIP."

She moved as much as possible through alleyways and backyards, crossing
streets only when necessary and always quickly, for out there she saw
too many pairs of somber-faced, sharpeyed men in slow-moving cars,
obvious patrols. Twice she almost ran into them in alleys, too, and had
to dive for cover before they spotted her. About a quarter of an hour
after she fled through the rectory gate, she noticed more patrols in the
area, a sudden influx of cars and men on foot. Foot patrols scared her
the most. Pairs of men in rain slickers were better able to conduct a
search and were more difficult to escape from than men in cars. She was
terrified of walking into them unexpectedly.


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Actually she spent more time in hiding than on the move. Once she
huddled for a while behind a cluster of garbage cans in an alley. She
took refuge under a brewer's spruce, the lower branches of which nearly
touched the ground, like a skirt, providing a dark and mostly dry
retreat. TWice she crawled under cars and lay for a while.

She never stayed in one place for more than five or ten minutes. She was
afraid that some alien-possessed busybody would see her as she crawled
into her hiding place and would call the police to report her, and that
she would be trapped.

By the time she reached the vacant lot on Juniper Lane, beside Callan's
Funeral Home, and curled up in the deepest brush-dry grass and bristly
chaparral-she was beginning to wonder if she would ever think of someone
to turn to for help. For the first time since her ordeal had begun, she
was losing hope. and her A huge fir spread its branches across part of
the lot, clump of brush was within its domain, so she was sheltered from
the worst of the rain. More important, in the deep grass, curled on her
side, she could not be seen from the street or from the windows of
nearby houses.

Nevertheless, every minute or so, she cautiously raised her head far
enough to look quickly around, to be sure that no one was creeping up on
her. During that reconnoitering, looking cast past the alleyway at the
back of the lot, toward Conquistador, she saw a part of the big
redwood-and-glass house on the east side of that street. The Talbot
place. At once she remembered the man in the wheelchair.

He had come to Thomas Jefferson to speak to the fifth- and sixth-grade
students last year, during Awareness Days, a week.

long program of studies that was for the most part wasted time, though
he had been interesting. He had talked to them about the, difficulties
and the amazing abilities of disabled people.

At first Chrissie had felt so sorry for him, had just pitied him half to
death, because he'd looked so pathetic, sitting there ill his
wheelchair, his body half wasted away, able to use only one hand, his
head slightly twisted and tilted permanently to one side. But then as
she listened to him she realized that he had a wonderful sense of humor
and did not feel sorry for himself, so it seemed mo-re and more absurd
to pity him. 'They had an opportunity to ask him questions, and he had
been so willing to discuss the intimate details of his life, the sorrows
and joys of it, that she had finally come to admire him a whole lot.

And his dog Moose had been terrific.

Now, looking at the redwood-and-glass house through the tips of the
rain-shiny stalks of high grass, thinking about Harry Talbot and Moose,
Chrissie wondered if that was a place she could go for help.

She dropped back down in the brush and thought about it for a couple of
minutes.

Surely a wheelchair-bound cripple was one of the last people the aliens
would bother to possess-if they wanted him at ai She immediately was
ashamed of herself for thinking such thing. A wheelchair-bound cripple
was not a second-class human being. He had just as much to offer the
aliens as anyone else.

On the other hand .         .   .   would a bunch of aliens have an enlightened



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view of disabled people? Wasn't that a bit much to expect? After all,
they were aliens. Their values weren't supposed to be the same as those
of human beings. If they went around planting seeds-or spoors or slimy
baby slugs or what - 295 expected to treat disabled people with the
proper respect any In than they would help old ladies to cross the
street.

Harry Talbot.

The more she thought about him, the more certain Chrissie became that he
had thus far been spared the horrible attention of the aliens.

After she called him Dr. Doom, he sprayed the Jenn-Air griddle with
Pam, so the pancakes wouldn't stick.

She turned on the oven and put a plate in there, to which she could
transfer the cakes to keep them warm as she made them.

Then, in a tone of voice that immediately clued him to the fact that she
was bent on persuading him to reconsider his bleak assessment of life,
she said, "Tell me-Can't you leave it alone yet?"

"No.

He sighed.

She said, "If you're this damned glum, why not .

"Kill myself'.)Why not?"

He laughed bitterly.

"On the drive up here from San Francisco, I played a little game with
myself-counted the reasons that life was worth living. I came up with
just four, but I guess they're enough, because I'm still hanging
around."

"What were they?"

"One-good Mexican food."

"I'll go along with that."

"Two-Guinness Stout."

"I like Heineken Dark myself."

"It's okay, but it's not a reason to live. Guinness is a reason ever-in
people, and if they ate people, surely they couldn't be to live."


"What's number three?"

"Goldie Hawn.       You know Goldie Hawn?"

"Nope. Maybe I don't want to, 'cause maybe I'd be disappointed. I'm
talking about her screen image, the idealized Goldie Hawn."

"She's your dream girl, huh?"

"More than that. She . . . hell I don't know . . . she seems
untouched by life, undamaged, vital and happy and innocent and n.

" 'Think you'll ever meet hersYou've got to be kidding."



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She said, "You know what?"

"What?"

"If you did meet Goldie Hawn, if she walked up to you at a party and
said something funny, something cute, and giggled in that way she has,
you wouldn't even recognize her."

"Oh, I'd recognize her, all right."

"No, you wouldn't. You'd be so busy brooding about how unfair, unjust,
hard, cruel, bleak, dismal, and stupid life is that you would not seize
the moment. You wouldn't even recognize the moment. You'd be too
shrouded in a haze of gloom to see who she was. Now, what's your fourth
reason for living?"

He hesitated.

"Fear of death."

She blinked at him.

"I don't understand. If life's so awful, why is death to be feared? I
underwent a near-death experience. I was in surgery, having a bullet
taken out of my chest, and I almost bought the farm. Rose out of my
body, drifted up to the ceiling, watched the surgeons for a while, then
found myself rushing faster and faster down a dark tunnel toward this
dazzling light-the whole screwy scenario.

She was impressed and intrigued.              Her clear blue eyes were wide with
interest.

"And?"

"I saw what lies beyond."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Damned serious."

"You're telling me that you know there's an afterlife?"

"Yes.    A God?"

"Yes.

Astonished, she said, "But if you know, there's a God and that we move
on from this world, then you know life has purpose, meaning,So?

,Well, it's doubt about the purpose of life that lies at the root of
most people's spells of gloom and depression. Most of us, if we'd
experienced what you'd experienced well, we'd never worry again. We'd
have the strength to deal with any adversity, knowing there was meaning
to it and a life beyond. So what's wrong with you, mister? Why didn't
you lighten up after that?

Are you just a bullheaded dweeb or what?"

" Dweeb?     Answer the question."

The elevator kicked in and ascended from the first-floor hall.

"Harry's coming," Sam said.




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"Answer the question," she repeated.

"Let's just say that what I saw didn't give me hope.                       It scared the hell
out of me."

"Well? Don't keep me hanging. What'd you see on the Other Side? If I
tell you, you'll think I'm crazy."

"You've got nothing to lose.             I already think you're crazy."

He sighed and shook his head and wished that he'd never brought it up.
How had she gotten him to open himself so completely?

The elevator reached the third floor and halted.

Tessa stepped away from the kitchen counter, moving closer to him, and
said, "Tell me what you saw, dammit."

"You won't understand."

"What am I-a moron?Oh, you'd understand what I saw, but you wouldn't
understand what it meant to me."

"Do you understand what it meant to you?

"Oh, yes," he said solemnly.

"Are you going to tell me willingly, or do I have to take a meat fork
from that rack and torture it out of you? The elevator had started down
from the third floor.

He glanced toward the hall.

"I really don't want to discuss it."

"You don't, huh?"

" No.

" You saw God but you don't want to discuss it."

a "That's right."

"Most guys who see God-that's the only thing they ever want to discuss.
Most guys who see God-they form whole religions based on the one meeting
with Him, and they tell millions of people about it."

"But l-Fact is, according to. what I've read, most people who undergo a
near-death experience are changed forever by it. And always for the
better. If they were pessimists, they become optimists. If they were
atheists, they become believers. Their values change, they learn to
love life for itself, they're goddamned radiant! But not you. Oh, no,
you become even more dour, even more grim, even more bleak."

The elevator reached the ground floor and fell silent.

"Harry's coming," Sam said.

"Tell me what you saw."

"Maybe I can tell you," he said, surprised to find that he was actually
willing to discuss it with her at the right time, in the right place.

"Maybe you.      But later."



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Moose padded into the kitchen, panting and grinning at them, and Harry
rolled through the doorway a moment later.

Good morning," Harry said chipperly. m with a gen Did you steep well?"
Tessa asked, favoring him nine smile of affection that Sam envied.

Harry said, "Soundly, but not as soundly as the dead-thank God.

"

"Pancakes?"         Tessa asked him.

'Stacks, please.

'Eggs?

"Dozens."

"Toast?       Loaves.

"I like a man with an appetite."

Harry said, "I was running all night, so I'm famished."

"Running?"

"In my dreams.          Chased by Boogeymen."

While Harry got a package of dog food from under one of t - 299 counters
and filled Moose's dish in the corner, Tessa went to the griddle,
sprayed it with Pam again, told Sam that he was in charge of the eggs,
and started to ladle out the first of the pancakes from the bowl of
batter. After a moment she said, "Patti ca La Belle, 'Stir It Up,' "
and began to sing and dance in place again.

"Hey," Harry said, "I can give you music if you want music.

" He rolled to a compact under-the-counter-mounted radio that neither
Tessa nor Sam had noticed, clicked it on, and moved the tuner across the
dial until he came to a station playing "I Heard it Through the
Grapevine" by Gladys Knight and the Pips.

"All right," Tessa said, and she began to sway and pump and grind with
such enthusiasm that Sam couldn't figure out how she poured the pancake
batter onto the griddle in such neat puddles.

Harry laughed and turned his motorized wheelchair in circles, as if
dancing with her.

Sam said, "Don't you people know that the world is coming to an end
around us?"

They ignored him, which he supposed was what he deserved.

rain and mist and By a roundabout route, cloaking herself in the
whatever shadows she could find, Chrissie reached the al ley to the east
of Conquistador. She entered Talbot's backyard through a gate in a
redwood fence and scurried from one clump of shrubbery to another, twice
nearly stepping in dog poop-Moose was an amazing dog, but not without
faults-until she reached the steps to the back porch.

She heard music playing inside. It was an oldie, from the days when her
parents had been teenagers. And in fact it had been one of their
favorites. Though Chrissie didn't remember the title, o she did recall


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the name of the group-Junior Walker Stars.                  and the AR.

Figuring that the music, combined with the drumming rain, would cover
any sounds she made, she crept up the steps onto the redwood porch and,
in a crouch, moved to the nearest window. She hunkered below the sill
for a while, listening to the people in there. They were talking, often
laughing, sometimes singing, along with the songs on the radio.

They didn't sound like aliens.             They sounded pretty much like ordinary
people.

Were aliens likely to enjoy the music of Stevie Wonder and the Four Tops
and the Pointer Sisters? Hardly. To human ears, alien music probably
sounded like knights in armor playing bag.

pipes while simultaneously falling down a lo-g set of stain amidst a
pack of baying hounds. More like Twisted Sister than like the Pointer
Sisters.   Eventually she rose up just far enough to peer over the sill
through a gap in the curtains. She saw Mr. Talbot in his wheel.

chair, Moose, and a strange man and woman. Mr. Talbot was beating time
with his good hand on the arm of his wheelchair, and Moose was wagging
his tail vigorously if out of synch with the music. The other man was
using a spatula to scoop eggs out of a couple of frying pans and shift
them onto plates, glowering, at the woman now and then as he did so,
maybe not approving of the way she abandoned herself to the song, but
still tapping his right foot to the music. The . woman was making
flapjacks and transferring them to a warming platter in the oven, and as
she worked she shimmied and swayed and dipped; she had good moves.

Chrissie crouched down again and thought about what she had seen.
Nothing about their behavior was particularly odd if they were people,
but if they were aliens they surely wouldn't be bopping to the radio
while they made breakfast. Chrissie had a real hard time believing that
aliens-like the thing masquerading as Father Castelli-could have either
a sense of humor or rhythm Surely, all that aliens cared about was
taking possession of new hosts and finding new recipes for cooking
tender children.

Nevertheless she decided to wait until she had a chance to watch them
eating. From what she'd heard her mother and Tucker say in the meadow
last night, and from what she had seen at - 301 breakfast with the
Father Castelli creature, she believed that the aliens were ravenous,
each with the appetite of half a dozen men. if Harry Talbot and his
guests didn't make absolute hogs of themselves when they sat down to
eat, she could probably trust them.

Loman had stayed at Peyser's house, supervising the cleanup and
overseeing the transfer of the regressives' bodies to Callan's hearse.
He was afraid to let his men handle it alone, for fear that the sight of
the mutated bodies or the smell of blood would induce them to seek
altered states of their own. He knew that all of them-not least of all
himself-were walking a taut wire over an abyss. For the same reason, he
followed the hearse to the funeral home and stayed with Callan and his
assistant until Peyser's and Sholnick's bodies were fed into the
white-hot flames of the crematorium.

He checked on the progress of the search for Booker, the Lockland woman,
and Chrissie Foster, and he made a few changes in the pattern of the
patrols. He was in the office when the report came in from Castelli,
and he went directly to the rectory at Our Lady of Mercy to hear
firsthand how the girl could have slipped away from them. They were


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full of excuses, Mostly fame. He suspected they had regressed in order
to toy with the girl, just for the thrill of it, and while playing with
her had unintentionally given her a chance to escape. Of course they
would not admit to regression.

Loman increased the patrols in the immediate area, but there was no sign
of the girl. She had gone to ground. Still, if she had come into town
instead of heading out to the freeway, they were More likely to catch
her and convert her before the day was done.


At nine o'clock he returned to his house on Iceberry Way to get
breakfast. Since he'd nearly degenerated in Peyser's bloodspattered
bedroom, his clothes had felt loose on him. He had lost a few pounds as
his metabolic processes had consumed his own flesh to generate the
tremendous energy needed to regress and to resist regression.

The house was dark and silent. Denny was no doubt upstairs, in front of
his computer, where he had been last night. Grace had left for work at
Thomas Jefferson, where she was a teacher; she had to keep up the
pretense of an ordinary life until everyone in Moonlight Cove had been
converted.

At the moment no children under twelve had been put through the Change,
partly because of difficulties New Wave technicians had had in
determining the correct dosage for younger converts, Those problems had
been solved, and tonight the kids would be brought into the fold.

In the kitchen Loman stood for a moment, listening to the rain on the
windows and the ticking of the clock.

At the sink he drew a glass of water. He drank it, another, then two
more. He was dehydrated after the ordeal at Peyser's.

The refrigerator was chock full of five-pound hams, roast beef, a
half-eaten turkey, a plate of porkchops, chicken breasts, sausages, and
packages of bologna and dried beef. The accelerated metabolisms of the
New People required a diet high in protein. Besides, they had a craving
for meat.

He took a loaf of pumpernickel from the breadbox and sat down with that,
the roast beef, the ham, and a jar of mustard." He stayed at the table
for a while, cutting or ripping thick hunks of meat, wrapping them in
mustard-slathered bread, and tearing off large bites with his teeth.
Food offered him less subtle pleasure than when he'd been an Old Person;
now the smell and taste of it raised in him an animal excitement, a
thrill of greed and gluttony. He was to some degree repelled by the way
he tore at his food and swallowed before he'd finished chewing it
properly, but every effort that he made to restrain himself soon gave
way to even more feverish consumption. He slipped into a half-trance,
hypnotized by the rhythm of chewing and swallowing. At one point he
became clearheaded enough to realize he had gotten the chicken breasts
from the refrigerator and was eating them 10,3 with enthusiasm, though
they were uncooked. He let himself slip mercifully back into the
half-trance again.

Finished eating, he went upstairs to look in on Denny.

When he opened the door to the boy's room, everything at first seemed to
be just as it had been the last time he'd seen it, during the previous
night. The shades were lowered, the curtains drawn, the room dark
except for the greenish light from the VDT. Denny sat in front of the



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computer, engrossed in the data that flickered across the screen.

Then Loman saw something that made his skin prickle.

He closed his eyes.

Waited.

Opened them.

It was not an illusion.

He felt sick. He wanted to step back into the hall and close the door,
forget what he'd seen, go away. But he could not move and could not
avert his eyes.

Denny had unplugged the computer keyboard and put it on the floor beside
his chair. He'd unscrewed the front cover plate from the
data-processing unit. His hands were in his lap, but they weren't
exactly hands any more. His fingers were wildly elongated, tapering not
to points and fingernails but to metallic-looking wires, as thick as
lamp cords, that snaked into the guts of the computer, vanishing there.

Denny no longer needed the keyboard.

He had become part of the system. Through the computer and its modern
link to New Wave, Denny had become one with Sun.

"Denny')" He had assumed an altered state, but nothing like that sought
by the regressives.

" Denny?

" The boy did not answer.

"Denny!

" An odd, soft clicking and electronic pulsing sounds came from the
computer.

Reluctantly, Loman entered the room and walked to the desk.                       He looked
down at his son and shuddered.

Denny's mouth hung open. Saliva drooled down his chin. He had become
so enraptured by his contact with the computer that he had not bothered
to get up and eat or go to the bathroom; he had urinated in his pants.

His eyes were gone. In their place were what appeared to be twin
spheres of molten silver as shiny as mirrors. They reflected the data
that swarmed across the screen in front of them.

The pulsing sounds, soft electronic oscillations, were not coming from
the computer but from Denny.

The eggs were good, the pancakes were better, and the coffee was
strong enough to endanger the porcelain finish of the cups but not so
strong that it had to be chewed. As they ate, Sam outlined the method
he had devised for getting a message out of town to the Bureau.

"Your phone's still dead, Harry. I tried it this morning. And I don't
think we can risk heading out to the interstate on foot or by car, not
with the patrols and roadblocks they've established; that'll have to be
a last resort. After all, as far as we know, we're the only people who
realize that something truly . . . twisted is happening here and that


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the need to stop it is urgent. Us and maybe the Foster girl, the one
the cops talked about in their VDT conversation last night."

"If she's literally a girl," Tessa said, "just a child, even if she's a
teenager, she won't have much of a chance against them. We've got to
figure they'll catch her if they haven't already."

Sam nodded.

"And if they nail us, too, while we're trying to get out of town,
there'll be no one left to do the job. So first we've got to try a
low-risk course of action."

"Is any option low risk?" Harry wondered as he mopped up some egg yolk
with a piece of toast, eating slowly and with a touching precision
necessitated by his having only one useful hand.

- 305 pouring a little more maple syrup over his pancakes, surprised by
how much he was eating, attributing his appetite to the possibility that
this was his last meal, Sam said, "See . . .

this is a wired town."

"Wired?"

"Computer-linked. New Wave gave computers to the police, so they'd be
tied into the web-And the schools," Harry said.

"I remember reading about it in the paper last spring or early summer.
They gave a lot of computers and software to both the elementary and the
high schools. A gesture of civic involvement, they called it."

"Seems more ominous than that now, doesn't it?"                    Tessa said.

"Sure as hell does."

Tessa said, "Seems now like maybe they wanted their computers in the
schools for the same reason they wanted the cops computerized-to tie
them all in tightly with New Wave, to monitor and control. Sam put down
his fork.

"New Wave employs, what, about a third of the people in town')Probably
that," Harry said.

"Moonlight Cove really grew after New Wave moved in ten years ago.                         In
some ways it's an old-fashioned company town-life here isn't just
dependent upon the main employer but pretty much socially centered
around it too.

" After sipping some coffee so strong it was nearly as bracing as
brandy, Sam said, "A third of the people . . . which works out to
maybe forty percent or so of the adults."

Harry said, "I guess SO."

"And you've got to figure everyone at New Wave is part of the
conspiracy, that they were among the first to be . . . converted.

" Tessa nodded.

"I'd say that's a given."

"And they're even more than usually interested in computers, of course,
because they're working in that industry, so it's a good bet most or all


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of them have computers in their homes."

Harry agreed.

"And no doubt many if not all of their home computers can be tied by
modern directly to New Wave, so they can work at home in the evening or
on weekends if they have to. And now, With this conversion scheme
nearing a conclusion, I'll bet they're working round the clock; data
must be flying back and forth over their phone lines half the night. If
Harry can tell me of someone within a block of here who works for New
Wave-There're several," Harry said.

"-then I could slip out in the rain, try their house, see if anyone's
home. At this hour they'll probably be at work. If no one's there,
maybe I can get a call out on their phone."

"Wait, wait," Tessa said.

"What's all this about phones?             The phones don't work."

Sam shook his head.

"All we know is that the public phones are out of service, as is
Harry's. But remember New Wave controls the telephone-company computer,
so they can probably be selective about what lines they shut down. I'll
bet they haven't cut off the service of those who've already undergone .
this . . . conversion. They wouldn't deny themselves communication.
Especially not now, in a crisis, and with this scheme of theirs nearly
accomplished. There's a better than fifty-percent chance that the only
lines they've shut down are the ones they figure we might get to-pay
phones, phones in public places-like the motel-and the phones in the
homes of people who haven't yet been converted."

Fear permeated Loman Watkins, saturated him so completely that if it
had possessed substance, it could have been wrung from his flesh in
quantities to rival the rivers currently pouring forth from the
storm-racked sky outside. He was afraid for himself, for what he might
yet become. He was afraid for his son, too, who sat at the computer in
an utterly alien guise. And he was also afraid of his son, no use
denying that, scared half to death of him and unable to touch him.

A flood of data coruscated across the screen in blurred green - 307
waves. Denny's glistening, liquid, silvery eyes-like puddles of mercury
in his sockets-reflected the luminescent tides of letters, numbers,
graphs, and charts. Unblinkingly.

Loman remembered what Shaddack had said at Peyser's house when he had
seen that the man had regressed to a lupine form that could not have
been a part of human genetic history. Regression was not merely-or even
primarily-a physical process.

it was an example of mind over matter, of consciousness dictating form.
Because they could no longer be ordinary people, and because they simply
could not tolerate life as emotionless New people, they were seeking
altered states in which existence was more endurable. And the boy had
sought this state, had willed himself to become this grotesque thing.

"Denny9 " No response.

The boy had fallen entirely silent.               Not even electronic noises issued
from him any longer.

The metallic cords, in which the boy's fingers ended, vibrated


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continuously and sometimes throbbed as if irregular pulses of thick,
inhuman blood were passing through them, cycling between organic and
inorganic portions of the mechanism.

Loman's heart was pounding as fast as his running footsteps would have
been if he could have fled. But he was held there by the weight of his
fear. He had broken out in a sweat. He struggled to keep from throwing
up the enormous meal he had just eaten.

Desperately he considered what he must do, and the first thing that
occurred to him was to call Shaddack and seek his help. Surely Shaddack
would understand what was happening and would know how to reverse this
hideous metamorphosis and restore Denny to human form.

But that was wishful thinking. The Moonhawk project was now out of
control, following dark routes down into midnight horrors that Tom
Shaddack had never foreseen and could not avert.

Besides, Shaddack would not be frightened by what was happening to
Denny. He would be delighted, exuberant. Shaddack WOuld view the boy's
transformation as an elevated altered state, as much to be desired as
the degeneration of the regressives was to be avoided and scorned. Here
was what Shaddack truly sought, the forced evolution of man into
machine.

In memory even now, Loman could hear Shaddack talking agitatedly in
Peyser's blood-spattered bedroom what I don't understand is why the
regressives have all chosen a subhuman condition. Surely you have the
power within you to undergo evolution rather than devolution, to lift
yourself up from mere humanity to something higher, cleaner, purer .

Loman was certain that Denny's drooling, silver-eyed incarnation was not
a higher form than ordinary human existence, neither cleaner nor purer.
In its way it was as much a degeneration as Mike Peyser's regression to
a lupine shape or Coombs's descent into apelike primitiveness. Like
Peyser, Denny had surrendered intellectual individuality to escape
awareness of the emotionless life of a New Person; instead of becoming
just one of a pack of subhuman beasts, he had become one of many
dataprocessing units in a complex supercomputer network. He had
relinquished the last of what was human in him-his mind-and had become
something simpler than a gloriously complex human being A bead of drool
fell from Denny's chin, leaving a wet circle on his denim-clad thigh.

Do you know fear now?          Loman wondered.         You can't love.

Not any more than I can.           But do you fear anything now?

Surely not.      Machines could not feel terror.

Though Loman's conversion had left him unable to experience any emotion
but fear, and though his days and nights had become one long ordeal of
anxiety of varying intensity, he had in a perverse way come to love
fear, to cherish it, for it was the only feeling that kept him in touch
with the unconverted man he had once been. If his fear were taken from
him, too, he would be only a machine of flesh. His life would have no
human dimension whatsoever.

Denny had surrendered that last precious emotion. All he had left to
fill his gray days were logic, reason, endless chains of calculations,
the never-ending absorption and interpolation of facts. And if Shaddack
was correct about the longevity of the New People, those days would
mount into centuries.



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Suddenly eerie electronic noises came from the boy again.

They echoed off the walls.

- 309 Those sounds were as strange as the cold, mournful songs and cries
of some species dwelling in the deepest reaches of the sea.

TO call Shaddack and reveal Denny to him in this condition would be to
encourage the madman in his insane and unholy pursuits. Once he saw
what Denny had become, Shaddack might find a way to induce or force all
of the New People to transform themselves into identical, thoroughgoing
cybernetic entities. That prospect boosted Loman's fear to new heights.

The boy-thing fell silent again.

Loman drew his revolver from its holster.                  His hand was shaking badly.

Data rushed ever more frantically across the screen and swam
simultaneously across the surface of Denny's molten eyes.

Staring at the creature that had once been his son, Loman dragged
memories from the trunk of his pre-Change life, desperately trying to
recall something of what he'd once felt for Denny-the love of father for
son, the sweet ache of pride, hope for the boy's future. He remembered
fishing trips they had taken together, evenings spent in front of the
TV, favorite books shared and discussed, long hours during which they'd
worked happily together on science projects for school, the Christmas
that Denny had gotten his first bicycle, the kid's first date when he
had nervously brought the Talmadge girl home to meet his folks. . . .

Loman could summon forth images of those times, quite detailed memory
-pictures, but they had no power to warm him.

y He knew he should feel something if he was going to kill his only
child, something more than fear, but he no longer had that capacity. To
hold fast to whatever remained of the human being in him, he ought to be
able to squeeze out one tear, at least one, as he squeezed off the shot
from the Smith & Wesson he remained dry-eyed. but Without warning
something erupted from Denny's forehead.

Loman cried out and stumbled backward two steps in surprise.

At first he thought the thing was a worm, for it was shiny-oily and
segmented, as thick as a pencil. But as it continued to extrude, he saw
that it was more metallic than organic, terminating in a fish-mouth plug
three times the diameter of the "worm" itself. Like the feeler of a
singularly repulsive insect, it weaved back and forth in front of
Denny's face, growing longer and longer, until it touched the computer.

He is willing this to happen, Loman reminded himself.

This was mind over matter, not short-circuited genetics. Mental power
made concrete, not merely biology run amok. This was what the boy
wanted to become, and if this was the only life he could tolerate now,
the only existence he desired, then why shouldn't he be allowed to have
it?

The hideous wormlike extrusion probed the exposed mechanism, where the
cover plate had once been. It disappeared inside, making some linkage
that helped the boy achieve a more intimate bond with Sun than could he
had solely through his mutated hands and mercuric eyes.



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A hollow, electronic, blood-freezing wail came from the boy's mouth,
though neither his lips nor tongue moved.

Loman's fear of taking action was at last outweighed by his fear of not
acting. He stepped forward, put the muzzle of the revolver against the
boy's right temple, and fired two rounds.

Crouching on the back porch, leaning against the wall of the house,
rising up now and then to look cautiously through the window at the
three people gathered around the kitchen table, Chrissie grew slowly
more confident that they could be trusted. Above the dull roar and
sizzle of the rain, through the closed window, she could hear only
snatches of their conversation. After a while, however, she determined
that they knew something was terribly wrong in Moonlight Cove. The two
strangers seemed to be hiding out in Mr. Talbot's house and were on the
run as much as she was. Apparently they were working on a plan to get
help from authorities outside of town.

She decided against knocking on the door. It was solid wood, - 311 'i
with no panes in the upper half, so they would not be able to see who
was knocking. She had heard enough to know they were all tense, maybe
not as completely frazzle-nerved as she was her self, but definitely on
edge. An unexpected knock at the door would give them all massive heart
attacks-or maybe they'd pick up guns and blast the door to smithereens,
and her with it.

Instead she rose up in plain sight and rapped on the window. Mr. Talbot
jerked his head in surprise and pointed, but even as he was pointing,
the other man and the woman flew to their feet with the suddenness of
marionettes snapped upright on strings. Moose barked once, twice. The
three people-and the dog-stared in surprise at Chrissie. From the
expression on their faces, she might have been not a bedraggled
eleven-year-old girl but a chainsaw-wielding maniac wearing a leather
hood to conceal a deformed face.

She supposed that right now, in alien-infested Moonlight Cove, even a
pathetic, rain-soaked, exhausted little girl could be an object of
terror to those who didn't know that she was still human. In hope of
allaying their fear, she spoke through the windowpane "Help me. Please,
help me."

The machine screamed. Its skull shattered under the impact of the
two slugs, and it was blown out of its seat, toppling to the floor of
the bedroom and pulling the chair with it. The elongated fingers tore
loose of the computer on the desk. The segmented wormlike probe snapped
in two, halfway between the computer and the forehead from which it had
sprung. The thing lay on the floor, twitching, spasming.

Loman had to think of it as a machine.                 He could not think of it as his
son. That was too terrifying.


The face was misshapen, wrenched into an asymmetrical real . mask by
the impact of the bullets as they'd torn through the cranium.

The silvery eyes had gone black. Now it appeared as if puddles of oil,
not mercury, were pooled in the sockets in the thing's' skull.

Between plates of shattered bone, Loman saw not merely the gray matter
he had expected but what appeared to be coiled wire, glinting shards
that looked almost ceramic, odd geometrical shapes. The blood that
seeped from the wounds was accompanied by wisps of blue smoke.



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Still, the machine screamed.

The electronic shrieks no longer came from the boy-thing but from the
computer on the desk. Those sounds were so bizarre that they were as
out of place in the machine half of the organism as they had been in the
boy half.

Loman realized these were not entirely electronic walls. They also had
a tonal quality and character that were unnervingly." human.

The waves of data ceased flowing across the screen. One word was
repeated hundreds of times, filling line after line on the display NO NO
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO ...

He suddenly knew that Denny was only half dead. The part of the boy's
mind that had inhabited his body was extinguished, but another fragment
of his consciousness still lived somehow within the computer, kept alive
in silicon instead of brain tissue.

that part of him was screaming in this machine-cold voice. j On the
screen WHERE'S THE REST OF ME WHERE'S THE REST, OF ME WHERE'S THE REST
OF ME NO NO NO No NO NO NO NO....

Loman felt as if his blood was icy sludge pumped by a heart as jellied
as the meat in the freezer downstairs. He had never known a chill that
penetrated as deep as this one.

He stepped away from the crumpled body, which at last stopped twitching,
and turned his revolver on the computer. He emptied the gun into the
machine, first blowing out the screen. Because the blinds and drapes
were closed, the room was nearly dark.

He blasted the circuitry to pieces. Thousands of sparks flared in the
blackness, spraying out of the data-processing unit. But with a final
sputter and crackle, the machine died, and the gloom closed in again.

The air stank of scorched insulation.                And worse.

Loman left the room and walked to the head of the stairs. He stood
there a moment, leaning against the railing. Then he descended to the
front hall.

He reloaded his revolver, holstered it.

He went out into the rain.

He got in his car and started the engine.

"Shaddack," he said aloud.

Tessa immediately took charge of the girl. She led her upstairs,
leaving Harry and Sam and Moose in the kitchen, and got her out of her
wet clothes.

"Your teeth are chattering, honey."

"I'm lucky to have any teeth to chatter."

"Your skin's positively blue."

"I'm lucky to have skin," the girl said.

"I noticed you're limping too."


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"Yeah.    I twisted an ankle."

"Sure it's just sprained?"

"Yeah. Nothing serious.            Besides-I know," Tessa said, "You're lucky to
have ankles."

"Right. For all I know, aliens find ankles particularly tasty, the same
way some people like.pig's feet. Yuch." She sat on the edge of the bed
in the guest room, a wool blanket pulled around her nakedness, and
waited while Tessa got a sheet from the linen supplies and several
safety pins from a sewing box that she noticed in the same closet.


Tessa said, "Harry's clothes are much too big for you, so we'll wrap you
in a sheet temporarily. While your clothes are in the dryer, you can
come downstairs and tell Harry and Sam and me all about it."

It's been quite an adventure," the girl said.

'Yes, you look as if you've been through a lot."

"It'd make a great book."

'You like books?"

,Oh, yes, I love books."

hing but evidently determined to be sophisticated Chrissie threw back
the blanket and stood and allowed Tessa to drape the sheet around her.
Tessa pinned it in place, fashioning a toga of sorts.

As Tessa worked, Chrissie said, "I think I'll write a book about all of
this one day. I'll call it The Alien Scourge or maybe Nest Queen,
although naturally I won't title it Nest Queen unless it turns out there
really is a nest queen somewhere. Maybe they don't reproduce like
insects or even like animals. Maybe they're basically a vegetable
lifeform. Who knows? If they're basically a vegetable lifeform, then
I'd have to call the book something like Space Seeds or Vegetables of
the Void or maybe Murderous Martian Mushrooms. It's sometimes good to
use alliteration in titles. Alliteration. Don't you like that word? It
sounds so nice. I like words. Of course, you could always go with a
more poetic title, haunting, like Alien Roots, Alien Leaves. Hey, if
they're vegetables, we may be in luck, because maybe they'll eventually
be killed off by aphids or tomato worms, since they won't have developed
protection against earth pests, just like a few tiny germs killed off
the mighty Martians in War of the Worlds.

" Tessa was reluctant to disclose that their enemies were not from the
stars, for she was enjoying the girl's precocious chatter. Then she
noticed that Chrissie's left hand was injured. The palm had been badly
abraded; the center of it looked raw.

" I did that when I fell off the porch roof at the rectory," the girl
said.

"You fell off a roof. Yeah. Boy, that was exciting. See, the
wolf-thing was coming through the window after me, and I didn't have
anywhere else to go. Twisted my ankle in the same fall and then had to
, she - 315 run across the yard to the back gate before he caught me.
You know, Miss Lockland-Please call me Tessa."




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A )patently Chrissie was unaccustomed to addressing adults by d their
Christian names. She frowned and was silent for a moment, evidently
struggling with the invitation to informality.

She decided it would be rude not to use first names when asked to do so.

"Okay . . . Tessa. Well, anyway, I can't decide what the                          aliens are
most likely to do if they catch us. Maybe eat our kidneys?                        Or don't
they eat us at all? Maybe they just shove alien bugs in our                       ears, and
the bugs crawl into our brains and take over. Either way, I                       figure it s
worth falling off a roof to avoid them.

Having finished pinning the toga, Tessa led Chrissie down the hall to
the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet for something with which
to treat the scraped palm. She found a bottle of iodine with a faded
label, a half-empty roll of adhesive tape, and a package of gauze pads
so old that the paper wrapper around each bandage square was yellow
with age. The gauze itself looked fresh and white, and the iodine was
undiluted by time, still strong enough to sting.

Barefoot, toga-clad, with her blond hair frizzing and curling as it
dried, Chrissie sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat and submitted
stoically to the treatment of her wound. She didn't protest in any way,
didn't cry Out-or even hiss-in pain.

But she did talk "That's the second time I've fallen off a roof, so I
guess I must have a guardian angel looking over me. About a year and a
half ago, in the spring, I think these birds-starlings I think they
were-built a nest on the roof of one of our stables at home, and I just
had to see what baby birds looked like in the nest, so when my folks
weren't around, I got a ladder and waited for the mama bird to fly off
for more food, and then I real quick climbed up there to have a peek.
Let me tell you, before they get their feathers, baby birds are just
about the ugliest things You'd want to see-except for aliens, of course.
They're withered little wrinkled things, all beaks and eyes, and STUMPY
little wings like deformed arms. If human babies looked that bad when
they were born, the first people back a few million Years ago would've
flushed their newborns down the toilet if they'd had toilets-and
wouldn't have dared have any more of

them, and the whole race would've died out before it even really got
started."

Still painting the wound with iodine, trying without success to repress
a grin, Tessa looked up and saw that Chrissie was squeezing her eyes
tightly shut, wrinkling her nose, struggling very hard to be brave.

'i "Then the mama and papa bird came back," the girl said, and saw me at
the nest and flew at my face, shrieking. I Was so startled that I
slipped and fell off the roof. Didn't hurt myself at all that
time-though I did land in some horse manure. Which isn't a thrill, let
me tell you. I love horses, but they'd be ever so much more lovable if
you could teach them to use a litterbox like a cat."

Tessa was crazy about this kid.

Sam leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table and.

listened attentively to Chrissie Foster. Though Tessa had heard I the
Boogeymen in the middle of a kill at Cove Lodge and had glimpsed one of
them under the door of her room, and though Harry had watched them at a
distance in night and fog, and though Sam had spied two of them last



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night through a window in Harry's living room, the girl was the only one
present who.

had seen them close up and more than once.

But it was not solely her singular experience that held Sam's attention.
He also was captivated by her sprightly manner, good humor, and
articulateness. She obviously had considerable inner strength, real
toughness, for otherwise she would not have survived the previous night
and the events of this morning. Yet she remained charmingly innocent,
tough but not hard. She was one of those kids who gave you hope for the
whole damn human race.

- 317 A kid like Scott used to be.

And that was why Sam was fascinated by Chrissie Foster. He saw in her
the child that Scott had been. Before he . . . changed, With regret
so poignant that it manifested itself as a dull] ache in his chest and a
tightness in his throat, he watched the girl and listened to her, not
only to hear what information she had to impart but with the unrealistic
expectation that by studying her he would at last understand why his own
son had lost both innocence and hope.

-21 Down in the darkness of the Icarus Colony cellar, Tucker and his
pack did not sleep, for they did not require it. They lay curled in the
deep blackness. From time to time, he and the other male coupled with
the female, and they tore at one another in savage frenzy, gashing flesh
that began to heal at once, drawing one another's blood simply for the
pleasure of the scent;immortal freaks at play.

The darkness and the barren confines of their concrete-walled burrow
contributed to Tucker's growing disorientation. By the hour he
remembered less of his existence prior to the past night's exciting
hunt. He ceased to have much sense of self. Individuality was not to
be encouraged in the pack when hunting, and in the burrow it was even a
less desirable trait; harmony in that windowless, claustrophobic space
required the relinquishment of self to group.

His waking dreams were filled with images of dark, wild shapes creeping
through night-clad forests and across moonwashed meadows. When
occasionally a memory of human form flickered through his mind, its
origins were a mystery to him; more than that, he was frightened by it
and quickly shifted his fantasies back to
running-hunting-killing-coupling scenes in which he was just a part of
the pack, one aspect of a single shadow, one extension of a larger
organism, free from the need to think, having no desire but to be.

At one point he became aware that he had slipped out of his wolflike
form, which had become too confining. He no longer wanted to be the
leader of a pack, for that position carried with; it too much
responsibility. He didn't want to think at all. Just be. Be. The
limitations of all rigid physical forms seemed insufferable.

He sensed that the other male and the female were aware of his
degeneration and were following his example.

He felt his flesh flowing, bones dissolving, organs and vessels
surrendering form and function. He devolved beyond the primal ape, far
beyond the four-legged thing that laboriously had crawled out of the
ancient sea millennia ago, beyond, beyond, until he was but a mass of
pulsing tissue, protoplasmic soup, throbbing in the darkness of the
Icarus Colony cellar.


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Loman rang the doorbell at Shaddack's house on the north point, and
Evan, the manservant, answered.

"I'm sorry, Chief Watkins, but Mr.               Shaddack isn't here."

"Where's he gone?"

"I don't know."

Evan was one of the New People. To be sure of dispatching him, Loman
shot him twice in the head and then twice in the chest while he lay on
the foyer floor, shattering both brain and heart. Or data-processor and
pump. Which was needed now biological or mechanical terminology? How
far had they progressed toward becoming machines?

Loman closed the door behind him and stepped over Evan's body. After
replenishing the expended rounds in the revolver's, - 319 cylinder, he
searched the huge house room by room, floor by floor, looking for
Shaddack.

Though he wished that he could be driven by a hunger for revenge, could
be consumed by anger, and could take satisfaction in bludgeoning
Shaddack to death, that depth of feeling was denied him. His son's
death had not melted the ice in his heart. He couldn't feel grief or
rage.

Instead he was driven by fear. He wanted to kill Shaddack before the
madman made them into something worse than they'd already become.

By killing Shaddack-who was always linked to the supercomputer at New
Wave by a simple cardiac telemetry device Loman would activate a program
in Sun that would broadcast a microwave death order. That transmission
would be received by all the microsphere computers wedded to the
innermost tissues of the New People. Upon receiving the death order,
each biologically interactive computer in each New Person would
instantly still the heart of its host. Every one of the converted in
Moonlight Cove would die. He too would die.

But he no longer cared. His fear of death was outweighed by his fear of
living, especially if he had to live either as a regressive or as that
more hideous thing that Denny had become.

In his mind he could see himself in that wretched condition gleaming
mercurial eyes, a wormlike probe bursting bloodlessly from his forehead
to seek obscene conjugation with the computer. If skin actually could
crawl, his own would have crept off his body.

u When he could not find Shaddack at home, he set out for New Wave,
where the maker of the new world was no doubt in his office busily
designing neighborhoods for this hell that he called Paradise.


Shortly after eleven o'clock, as Sam was leaving, Tessa stepped out onto
the back porch with him and closed the door, leaving-,' Harry and
Chrissie in the kitchen. The trees at the rear of the property were
just tall enough to prevent neighbors, even those uphill, from looking
into the yard. She was sure they could not be seen in the deeper
shadows of the porch.

" Listen, " she said, " it makes no sense for you to go alone.

"It makes perfect sense."


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The air was chilly and damp.             She hugged herself.

She said, "I could ring the front doorbell, distract anyone inside,
while you went in the back."

" I don't want to have to worry about you."

"I can take care of myself."

"Yeah, I believe you can," he said.

'Well?

'But I work alone."

"You seem to do everything alone."

He smiled thinly.

"Are we going to get into another arguments about whether life is a tea
party or hell on earth?"

"That wasn't an argument we had.              It was a discussion."

Well, anyway, I've shifted to undercover assignments for the ve very
reason that I can pretty much work alone. I don't want a partner any
more, Tessa, because I don't want to see any moro of them die."

She knew he was referring not only to the other agents WhO had been
killed in the line of duty with him but also to his late wife.

"Stay with the girl," he said.

"Take care of her if anything happens.                 She's like you, after all."

"What?"

- 321 -,She's one of those who knows how to love life. How to deeply
love it, no matter what happens. It's a rare and precious talent."

You know too," she said.

-'No.    I've never known."

"Dammit, everyone is born with a love of life. You still have it, Sam.
You've just lost touch with it, but you can find it again -'Take care of
her," he said, turning away and descending the porch steps into the
rain.

,You better come back, damn you. You promised to tell me what you saw
at the other end of that tunnel, on the Other Side.

you just better come back.

" Sam departed through silver rain and thin patches of gray fog.

As she watched him go, Tessa realized that even if he never told her
about the Other Side, she wanted him to come back for many other reasons
both complex and surprising.

The Coltrane house was two doors south of the Talbot place, on
Conquistador. Two stories. Weathered cedar siding. A covered patio
instead of a rear porch.



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Moving quickly along the back of the house, where rain drizzled off the
patio cover with a sound exactly like crackling fire, Sam peered through
sliding glass doors into a gloomy family 'room and then through French
windows into an unlighted kitchen. When he reached the kitchen door, he
withdrew his revolver from the holster under his leather jacket and held
it down at his side, against his thigh.

He could have walked around front and rung the bell, which Might have
seemed less suspicious to the people inside. But that Would mean going
out to the street, where he was more likely to be seen not only by
neighbors but by the men Chrissie said were patrolling the town.

He knocked on the door, four quick raps. When no one responded, he
knocked again, louder, and then a third time, lo still. If anyone was
home, the knock would have been answered Harley and Sue Coltrane must be
at New Wave, where they worked.

The door was locked.         He hoped it had no dead bolt.

Though he had left his other tools at Harry's, he had brought a thin,
flexible metal loid. Television dramas had popularized the notion that
any credit card made a convenient and uninc minating loid, but those
plastic rectangles too often got wedged in the crack or snapped before
the latch bolt was slipped. He preferred time-proven tools. He worked
the loid between door and frame, below the lock, and slid it up,
applying pressure when he met resistance. The lock popped. He tried
the door and there was no dead bolt; it opened with a soft creak.

He stepped inside and quietly closed the door, making sure that the lock
did not engage. If he had to get out fast, he did NOTwant to fumble
with a latch.

The kitchen was illuminated only by the dismal light of the

rain-darkened day that barely penetrated the windows. Evidently the
vinyl flooring, wall-covering, and tile were of the palest hues for in
that dimness everything seemed to be one shade of green or another.

He stood for almost a minute, listening intently.

A kitchen clock ticked.

Rain drummed on the patio cover.

His soaked hair was pasted to his forehead.                   He pushed it aside, out of
his eyes.

When he moved, his wet shoes squished.

He went directly to the phone, which was mounted on the wall above a
corner secretary. When he picked it up, he got no dial tone, but the
line was not dead, either. It was filled with strange sounds clicking,
low beeping, soft oscillations-all of which blended into mournful and
alien music, an electro threnody.

The back of Sam's neck went cold.

Carefully, silently, he returned the handset to its cradle.

He wondered what sounds could be heard on a telephone that was - 323
being used as a link between two computers, with a modern.

was one of the Coltranes at work elsewhere in the house, tied in by a



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home computer to New Wave?

Somehow he sensed that what he had heard on the line was not as simply
explained as that. It had been damned eerie.

A dining room lay beyond the kitchen. The two large windows were
covered with gauzy sheers, which further filtered the ashen daylight. A
hutch, buffet, table, and chairs were revealed as blocks of black and
slate-gray shadows. Again he stopped to listen. Again he heard nothing
unusual.

The house was laid out in a classic California design, with no
downstairs hall. Each room led directly to the next in an open and airy
floorplan. Through an archway he entered the large living room,
grateful that the house had wall-to-wall carpeting, on which his wet
shoes made no sound.

The living room was less shadowy than any other part of the house that
he had seen thus far, yet the brightest color was a pearly gray. The
west windows were sheltered by the front porch, but rain streamed over
those facing north. Leaden daylight, passing through the panes,
speckled the room with the watery-gray shadows of the hundreds of beads
that tracked down the glass, and Sam was so edgy that he could almost
feel those small ameboid phantoms crawling over him.

Between the lighting and his mood, he felt as if he were in an old
black-and-white movie. One of those bleak exercises in film noir.

The living room was deserted, but abruptly a sound came from the last
room downstairs. At the southwest corner. Beyond the foyer. The den,
most likely. It was a piercing trill that made his teeth ache, followed
by a forlorn cry that was neither the voice of a man nor that of a
machine but something in between, a semi-metallic voice wrenched by fear
and twisted with despair. That was followed by low electronic pulsing,
like a massive heartbeat.

Then silence.

He had brought up his revolver, holding it straight out in front of him,
ready to shoot anything that moved. But everything was as still as it
was silent.

The trill, the eerie cry, and the base throbbing surely could not be
associated with the Boogeymen that he'd seen last night outside of
Harry's house, or with the other shape-changers Chrissie described.
Until now, an encounter with one of them had been the thing he feared
most. But suddenly the unknown entity in the den was more frightening.

Sam waited.

Nothing more.

He had the queer feeling that something was listening for his movements
as tensely as he was listening for it.

He considered returning to Harry's to think of some other way to send a
message to the Bureau, because Mexican food 3 Guinness Stout and Goldie
Hawn movies-even Swing Shift, now seemed precious beyond value, not
pathetic reasons to live, but pleasures so exquisite that no words
existed to adequately' describe them.

The only thing that kept him from getting the hell out of there was
Chrissie Foster. The memory of her bright eyes. Her innocent face. The


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enthusiasm and animation with which she had, recounted her adventures.
Perhaps he had failed Scott, and perhaps it was too late for the boy to
be hauled back from the brink. But Chrissie was still alive in every
vital sense of the wordl' physically, intellectually, emotionally-and
she was dependent on him. No one else could save her from conversion.

Midnight was little more than twelve hours away.

He edged through the living room and quietly crossed the, foyer. He
stood with his back against the wall beside the half, open door to the
room from which the weird sounds had come; Something clicked in there.

He stiffened.

Low, soft clicks. Not the tick-tick-tick of claws like those he had
heard tapping on the window last night. More like a long series of
relays being tripped, scores of switches being closed dominoes falling
against one another click-click-click-clicke
clickety-click-click-clickety. . . .

Silence once more.

Holding the revolver in both hands, Sam stood in front of the door and
pushed it open with one foot. He crossed the threshold and assumed a
shooter's stance just inside the room the windows were covered by
interior shutters, and the only light was from two computer screens.
Both were fitted with monitors that resulted in black text on an amber
background.   - 325 Everything in the room not wrapped in shadows was
touched by that golden radiance.

- Two people sat before the terminals, one on the right side of the
room, the other on the left, their backs to each other.

-,Don't move," Sam said sharply.

They neither moved nor spoke.             They were so still that at first he
thought they were dead.

The peculiar light was brighter yet curiously less revealing from the
half-burnt-out daylight that vaguely illuminated the other rooms. As his
eyes adjusted, Sam saw that the two people at the computers were not
only unnaturally still but were not really people any more. He was
drawn forward by the icy grip of horror.

oblivious of Sam, a naked man, probably Harley Coltrane, sat in a
wheeled, swivel-based chair at the computer to the right of the door,
against the west wall He was connected to the VDT by a pair of
inch-thick cables that looked less metallic than organic, glistening
wetly in the amber glow. They extended from within the bowels of the
data-processing unit-from which the cover plate had been removed-and
into the man's bare torso below his rib cage, melding bloodlessly with
the flesh. They throbbed.

"Dear God," Sam whispered.

Coltrane's lower arms were utterly fleshless, just golden bones. The
meat of his upper arms ended smoothly two inches above the elbows; from
those stumps, bones thrust out as cleanly as robotic extrusions from a
metal casing. The skeletal hands were locked tightly around the cables,
as if they were merely a pair of clamps.

When Sam stepped nearer to Coltrane and looked closer, he saw the bones
were not as well differentiated as they should have been but had half


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melted together. Furthermore, they were veined with metal. As he
watched, the cables pulsed with such vigor that they began to vibrate
wildly. If not held fast by the clamping hands, they might have torn
loose either from the man or the machine.

Get out.

A voice spoke within him, telling him to flee, and it was his own voice,
though not that of the adult Sam Booker. It was the voice of the child
he had once been and to which his fear was P, I 1 encouraging him to
revert. Extreme terror is a time machine thousand times more efficient
than nostalgia, hurtling us backward through the years, into that
forgotten and intolerable condition of helplessness in which so much of
childhood is spent.

Get out, run, run, get out!

Sam resisted the urge to bolt.

He wanted to understand. What was happening? What had, these people
become? Why? What did this have to do with the Boogeymen who prowled
the night? Evidently through micro.

technology Thomas Shaddack had found a way to alter, radically and
forever, human biology. That much was clear to Sam, but knowing just
that and nothing else was like sensing that something lived within the
sea without ever having seen a fish. so much more lay beneath the
surface, mysterious.

Get out.

Neither the man before him nor the woman across the room seemed remotely
aware of him. Apparently he was in no imminent danger.

Run, said the frightened boy within.

Rivers of data-words, numbers, charts and graphs of myriad types-flowed
in a flood-like rampage across the amber screen, while Harley Coltrane
stared unwaveringly at that darkly flickering display. He could not have
seen it as an ordinary man would have, for he had no eyes. They'd been
torn from his sockets and replaced by a cluster of other sensors tiny
beads of ruby glass, small knots of wire, waffle-surfaced chips of some
ceramic material, all bristling and slightly recessed in the deep black
holes in his scull.

Sam was holding the revolver in only one hand now. He kept his finger
on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself, for he was
shaking so badly that he might unintentionally let off a shot.

The man-machine's chest rose and fell. His mouth hung open, and
bitterly foul breath rushed from him in rhythmic waves.

A rapid pulse was visible in his temples and in the gruesomely swollen
arteries in his neck. But other pulses throbbed where none should have
been in the center of his forehead; along each jawline; at four places
in his chest and belly; in his upper arms, where dark ropy vessels had
thickened and risen above subcutaneous fat, sheathed now only by his
skin. His circulatory system-.

- 327 seemed to have been redesigned and augmented to assist new
functions that his body was being called upon to perform. Worse Yet,
those pulses beat in a strange syncopation, as if at least two hearts
pounded within him.


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A shriek erupted from the thing's gaping mouth, and Sam twitched and
cried out in surprise. This was akin to the unearthly sounds that he
had heard while in the living room, that had drawn him here, but he had
thought they'd come from the computer.

Grimacing as the electronic wail spiraled higher and swelled into
painful decibels, Sam let his gaze rise from the man-machine's open
mouth to its "eyes." The sensors still bristled in the sockets. The
beads of ruby glass glowed with inner light, and Sam wondered if they
registered him on the infrared spectrum or by some other means. Did
Coltrane see him at all?

perhaps the man-machine had traded the human world for a different
reality, moving from this physical plane to another level, and perhaps
Sam was an irrelevancy to him, unnoticed.

The shriek began to fade, then cut off abruptly.

Without realizing what he'd done, Sam had raised his revolver and, from
a distance of about eighteen inches, pointed it at Harley Coltrane's
face. He was startled to discover that he also had slipped his finger
off the guard and onto the trigger itself and that he was going to
destroy this thing.

He hesitated. Coltrane was, after all, still a man-at least to some
extent. Who was to say that he didn't desire his current state more
than life as an ordinary human being? Who was to say that he was not
happy like this? Sam was uneasy in the role of judge, but an even
uneasier executioner. As a man who believed that life was hell on
earth, he had to consider the possibility that Coltrane's condition was
an improvement, an escape.

Between man and computer, the glistening, semiorganic cables thrummed.
They rattled against the skeletal hands in which they were clamped.

Coltrane's rank breath was redolent with both the stench of rotting meat
and overheated electronic components.

Sensors glistened and moved within the lidless eye sockets.

Tinted gold by the light from the screen, Coltrane's face seemed to be
frozen in a perpetual scream. The vessels pulsing in his jaws and
temples looked less like reflections of his owl, heartbeat than like
parasites squirming under his skin.

With a shudder of revulsion, Sam squeezed the trigger. The blast was
thunderous in that confined space. Coltrane's head snapped back with
the impact of the point-blank shot, then dropped forward, chin on his
chest, smoking and bleeding.

The repulsive cables continued to swell and shrink and swell as if with
the rhythmic passage of inner fluid.

Sam sensed that the man was not entirely dead.                    He turned the gun on the
computer screen.

One of Coltrane's skeletal hands released the cable around which it had
been firmly clamped. With a click-snick-snack of bare bones, it whipped
up and seized Sam's wrist.

Sam cried out. . The room filled with electronic clicks and snaps and
beeps and warblings.


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The hellish hand held him fast and with such tremendous strength that
the bony fingers pinched his flesh, then began to cut through it. He
felt warm blood trickle down his arm, under his shirt sleeve. With a
flash of panic he realized that the unhuman power of the man-machine was
ultimately sufficient to crush his wrist and leave him crippled. At best
his hand would swiftly go numb from lack of circulation, and the
revolver would drop from his grasp.

Coltrane was struggling to raise his half-shattered head.

Sam thought of his mother in the wreckage of the car, face torn open,
grinning at him, grinning, silent and unmoving but,.

grinning.     .   .   .

Frantically he kicked at Coltrane's chair, hoping to send it" rolling
and spinning away. The wheels had been locked The bony hand squeezed
tighter, and Sam screamed. His vision blurred.

Still, he saw that Coltrane's head was coming up slowly.                     slowly.

Jesus, I don't want to see that ruined face!

With his right foot, putting everything he had into the kick, Sam struck
once, twice, three times at the cables between Coltrane and the
computer. They tore loose from Coltrane, popping out of his flesh with
a hideous sound, and the man slumped in, his chair. Simultaneously the
skeletal hand opened and fell away from Sam's wrist. With a cold rattle
it struck the hard plastic mat under the chair.

electronic pulses thumped like soft drumbeats and echoed off the walls,
while under them a thin bleat wavered continuously through three notes.

Gasping and half in shock, Sam clamped his left hand around his bleeding
wrist, as if that would still the stinging pain.

Something brushed against his leg.

He looked down and saw the semiorganic cables, like pale headless
snakes, still attached to the computer and full of malevolent life. They
seemed to have grown, as well, until they were twice the length they had
been when linking Coltrane to the machine. One snared his left ankle,
and the other curled sinuously around his right calf.

He tried to tear loose.

They held him fast.

They twined up his legs.

Instinctively he knew they were seeking bare flesh on the upper half of
his body, and that upon contact they would burrow into him and make him
part of the system.

He was still holding the revolver in his blood-slicked right hand. He
aimed at the screen.

Data was no longer flowing across that amber field. Instead, Coltrane's
face looked out from the display. His eyes had been restored, and it
seemed as if he could see Sam, for he was looking directly at him and
speaking to him . . . need . . . need . . . want, need.

Without understanding a damned thing about it, Sam knew Coltrane was


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still alive. He had not died-or at least not all of him had
perished-with his body. He was there, in the machine somehow.

As if to confirm that insight, Coltrane influenced the glass screen of
the VDT to relinquish the convex plane of its surface and adapt to the
contours of his face. The glass became as flexible as gelatin,
thrusting outward, as if Coltrane actually existed within the machine,
physically, and was now pushing his face Out of it.

This was impossible. Yet it was happening. Harley Coltrane seemed to
be controlling matter with the power of his mind, a mind not even any
longer linked to a human body.

Sam was mesmerized by fear, frozen, paralyzed.                    His finger lay immovable
against the trigger.

Reality had been ripped, and through that tear a nightmare world of
infinite malign possibilities seemed to be rushing into the world that
Sam knew and-suddenly-loved.

One of the snakelike cables had reached his chest and found its way
under his sweater to bare skin. He felt as if he'd been touched by a
white-hot brand, and the pain broke his trance.

He fired two rounds into the computer, shattering the screen first,
which was the second face of Coltrane's into which he'd pumped a .38
slug. Though Sam half expected it to absorb the bullet without effect,
the cathode-ray tube imploded as if still made of glass. The other
round scrambled the guts of the data-processing unit, at last finishing
off the thing that Coltrane had become.

The pale, oily tentacles fell away from him. They blistered, began to
bubble, and seemed to be putrefying before his eyes.

Eerie electronic beeps, crackles, and oscillations, not ear-torturingly
loud but uncannily piercing, still filled the room.

When Sam looked toward the woman who had been seated at the other
computer, against the east wall, he saw that the mucus-like cables
between her and the machine had lengthened, allowing her to turn in her
chair to face him. Aside from those semiorganic connections and her
nakedness, she was in a different but no less hideous condition from her
husband. Her eyes were gone, but her sockets did not bristle with a
host of sensors. Rather, two reddish orbs, three times the size of
ordinary eyes, filled enlarged sockets in a face redesigned to
accommodate them; they were less eyes than eye-shaped receptors, no
doubt designed to see in many spectrums of light, and in fact Sam became
aware of an image of himself in each red lens, reversed. Her legs,
belly, breasts, arms, throat, and face were heavily patterned with
swollen blood vessels that lay just beneath her, skin and that seemed to
stretch it to the breaking point, so she looked as if she were a design
board for branch-pattern circuitry. Some of those vessels might,
indeed, have carried blood, but some of them throbbed with waves of
radium-like illumination, some green and some sulfurous yellow.

' - 331 A segmented, wormlike probe, the diameter of a pencil, erupted
from her forehead, as if shot from a gun, and streaked toward Sam,
closing the ten feet between them in a split second, striking him above
the right eye before he could duck. The tip bit into his skin on
contact. He heard a whirring sound, as of fan blades spinning at maybe
a thousand revolutions a minute. Blood ran down his brow and along the
side of his nose. But he was squeezing off the last two rounds in his


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gun even as the probe came at him. Both shots found their mark. One
slammed into the woman's upper body, and one took out the computer
behind her in a blaze of sparks and crackling electrical bolts that
jumped to the ceiling and snaked briefly across the plaster before
dissipating. The probe went limp and fell away from him before it could
link his brain to hers, which evidently had been its intention.

Except for gray daylight that entered through the paper-thin cracks
between the slats of the shutters, the room was dark.

Crazily, Sam remembered something a computer specialist had said at a
seminar for agents, when explaining how the Bureau's new system worked
"Computers can perform more effectively when linked, allowing parallel
processing of data.

" Bleeding from the forehead and the right wrist, he stumbled backward
to the door and flicked the light switch, turning on a floor lamp) He
stood there -as far as he could get from the two grotesque corpses and
still see them-while he began to reload the revolver with rounds he dug
out of the pockets of his jacket.

The room was preternaturally silent.

Nothing moved.

Sam's heart was hammering with such force that his chest ached dully
with each blow.

Twice he dropped cartridges because his hands were shaking. He didn't
stoop to retrieve them. He was half convinced that the moment he wasn't
in a position to fire with accuracy or to run, one of the dead creatures
would prove not to be dead, after all, and like a flash would come at
him, spitting sparks, and would seize him before he could rise and
scramble out of its way.

Gradually he became aware of the sound of rain. After losing half of
its force during the morning, it was now falling harder than at any time
since the storm had first broken the previous night. No thunder shook
the day, but the furious drumming of the rain itself-and the insulated
walls of the house-had probably muffled the gunfire enough to prevent it
being heard by neighbors. He hoped to God that was the case. Otherwise,
they were coming even now to investigate, and they would prevent his
escape.

Blood continued to trickle down from the wound on his forehead, and some
of it got into his right eye. It stung. He wiped at his eye with his
sleeve and blinked away the tears as best he could.

His wrist hurt like hell. But if he had to, he could hold the revolver
with his left hand and shoot well enough in close quarters. .

When the .38 was reloaded, Sam edged back into the room, to the smoking
computer on the worktable along the west wall, where Harley Coltrane's
mutated body was slumped in a chair, trailing its bone-metal arms.
Keeping one eye on the dead man-machine, he took the phone off the
modern and hung it up. Then he lifted the receiver and was relieved to
hear a dial tone.

His mouth was so dry that he wasn't sure he'd be able to speak clearly
when his call got through.

He punched out the number of the Bureau office in Los Angeles.



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The line clicked.

A pause.

A recording came on "We are sorry that we are unable to complete your
call at this time."

He hung up, then tried again.

"We are sorry that we are unable to complete-" He slammed the phone
down.

Not all of the telephones in Moonlight Cove were operable. And
evidently, even from those in service, calls could be placed only to
certain numbers. Approved numbers. The local phone company had been
reduced to an elaborate intercom to serve the converted. % As he turned
away from the phone, he heard something move, behind him. Stealthy and
quick.

He swung around, and the woman was three feet away. She, was no longer
connected to the ruined computer, but one 04, those organic-looking
cables trailed across the floor from the base of her spine and into an
electrical socket.

- 333 Free-associating in his terror, Sam thought So much for your
flimsy kites, Dr. Frankenstein, so much for the need for storms d
lightning; -these days we just plug the monsters into the wall, them a
jolt of the juice direct, courtesy of Pacific Power & "O t.

tigh A reptilian hiss issued from her, and she reached for him.

instead of fingers, her hand had three multiple-pronged plugs similar to
the couplings with which the elements of a home computer were joined,
though these prongs were as sharp as nails.

Sam dodged to the side, colliding with the chair in which Harley
Coltrane still slumped, and nearly fell, firing at the woman-thing as he
went. He emptied the five-round .38.

The first three shots knocked her backward and down. The other two tore
through vacant air and punched chunks of plaster out of the walls
because he was too panicked to stop pulling the trigger when she fell
out of his line of fire.

She was trying to get up.

Like a goddamn vampire, he thought.

He needed the high-tech equivalent of a wooden stake, a cross, a silver
bullet.

The artery-circuits that webbed her naked body were still pulsing with
light, although in places she was sparking, just as the computers
themselves had done when he had pumped a couple of slugs into them.

No rounds were left in the revolver.

He searched his pockets for cartridges.

He had none.

Get out.

An electronic wail, not deafening but more nerve-splintering than a


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thousand sharp fingernails scraped simultaneously down a blackboard,
shrilled from her.

two segmented, wormlike probes burst from her face and flew straight at
him. Both fell inches short of him-perhaps a sign of her waning
energy-and returned to her like splashes of quicksilver streaming back
into the mother mass.

But she was getting up.

Sam scrambled to the doorway, stooped, and snatched up the 'two
cartridges he had dropped when he had reloaded the gun.

e broke open the cylinder, shook out the empty brass casings, Jammed in
the last two rounds.


neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed .         .    .   neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed She was on her feet,
coming toward him.

This time he held the Smith & Wesson in both hands, aimed carefully, and
shot her in the head. 2 Take out the data processor, he thought with a
flash of black humor. Only way to stop a determined machine. Take out
its data processor, and it's nothing but a tangle of junk.

She crumpled to the floor. The red light went out of the unhuman eyes;
they were black now. She was perfectly still.

Suddenly flames erupted from her bullet-cracked skull, spurting from the
wound, from her eyes, nostrils, and gaping mouth, He moved quickly to
the socket to which she was still tethered, and he kicked at the
semiorganic plug that she had extruded from her body, knocking it loose.

The flames still leaped from her.

He could not afford a house fire. The bodies would be found and the
neighborhood, Harry's house included, would be searched door-to-door. He
looked around for something to throw over her to smother the flames, but
already the blaze within the skull was subsiding. In a moment it burned
itself out.

The air reeked of a dozen foul odors, some of which did not bear
contemplation.

He was mildly dizzy. Nausea stole over him.                    He gagged clenched his
teeth, and forced back his gorge.

Though he wanted desperately to get out of there, he took time to unplug
both computers. They were inoperable and dammaged beyond repair, but he
was irrationally afraid that, like Frankenstein's homebuilt man in movie
sequel after sequel, they would somehow come to life if exposed to
electricity.

He hesitated at the doorway, leaned against the jamb to take some of the
weight off his weak and trembling legs, looked at the computers and the
strange corpses. He had expected them to revert to normal appearance
when they were dead, the way they were in the movies, upon taking a
silver bullet in the heart or beaten with a silver-headed cane, always
metamorphosed for the last time, becoming their tortured, too-human
selves, finally re leased from the curse. Unfortunately this was not
Lycanthropy. This was not a supernatural affliction, but something
worse that men had brought upon themselves with no help from demonic
spirits or other things that went bump in the night. The coltranes - 355


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as they had been, monstrous half-breeds of flesh and blood and
silicon-human and machine.

He could not comprehend how they had become what they had become, but he
half remembered that a word existed for them, and in a moment he
recalled it. Cyborg a person whose biological functioning was aided by
or dependent on a mechanical or electronic device. People wearing
pacemakers to regulate arrhythmic hearts were cyborgs, and that was a
good thing. Those whose kidneys had both failed-and who received
dialysis on a regular basis-were cyborgs, and that was good too. But
with the Coltranes the concept had been carried to extremes. They were
the nightmare side of advanced cybernetics, in whom not merely
physiological but mental function had become aided by and almost
certainly dependent on a machine.

Sam began to gag again. He turned quickly away from the smoke-hazed den
and backtracked through the house to the kitchen door, by which he had
entered.

Every step of the way, he was certain that he would hear a voice behind
him, half human and half electronic neeeeeeeeeeed"-and would look back
to see one of the Coltranes lumbering toward him, reanimated by a last
small supply of current stored in battery cells.

At the main gate of New Wave Microtechnology, on the highlands along
the northern perimeter of Moonlight Cove, the guard, wearing a black
rain slicker with the corporate logo on the breast, squinted at the
oncoming police cruiser. When he recognized Loman, he waved him through
without stopping him. Loman had been well known there even before he
and they had become new People.

New Wave Power, prestige, and profitability were not hidden in an
unassuming corporate headquarters. The place had been designed by a
leading architect who favored rounded corners.

gentle angles, and the interesting juxtaposition of curved walls-F some
concave, some convex. The two large three-story buildings-one erected
four years after the other-were faced with buff-colored stone, had huge
tinted windows, and blended welt with the landscape.

Of the fourteen hundred people employed there, nearly a thousand lived
in Moonlight Cove. The rest resided in other communities elsewhere in
the county. All of them, of course, lived within the effective reach of
the microwave broadcasting dish on the roof of the main structure.

As he followed the entrance road around the big buildings toward the
parking area behind, Loman thought Sure as hell Shaddack's our very own
Reverend Jim Jones. Needs to be sure he can take every last one of his
devoted followers with him any time he wants. A modern pharaoh. When he
dies, those attending him die, too, as if he expects them to continue to
attend him in the next world. Shit. Do we even believe in a next world
any more?

No. Religious faith was akin to hope, and it required emotional
commitment.

New People did not believe in God any more than they

believed in Santa Claus. The only thing they believed in was the power
of the machine and the cybernetic destiny of humanity Maybe some of them
didn't even believe in that.

Loman didn't.       He no longer believed in anything at all-which scared him


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because he had once believed in so many things.

The ratio of New Wave's         gross sales and profits to its number of
employees was high even         for the microtechnology industry, its ability to
pay for the best talent         in its field was reflected in the percentage of
high-ticket cars in the         two enormous lots.

Mercedes. BMW. Porsche. Corvette. Cadillac Seville.                         Jaguar.     high
end Japanese imports with every bell and whistle.

Only half the usual number of cars were in the lot. it looked as if a
high percentage of the staff was at home, working through the modern.
How many were already like Denny?

Side by side on the rainswept macadam, those cars reminded Loman of the
orderly ranks of tombstones in a cemetery.

those quiescent engines, all that cold metal, all those hundreds of wet
windshields reflecting the flat gray autumn sky, suddenly poemed a
presentiment of death. To Loman, that parking lot represented the
future of the entire town silence, stillness, the terrible eternal peace
of the graveyard.

if the authorities outside of Moonlight Cove tumbled to what was
happening there, or if it turned out that virtually every one of the New
People was a regressive-or worse-and the Moonhawk Project was a
disaster, the remedy would not be poisoned koolaid this time, like
Reverend Jim Jones used down there in Jonestown, but lethal commands
broadcast in bursts of microwaves, received by microsphere computers
inside the New People, instantly translated into the language of the
governing program, and acted upon. Thousands of hearts would stop as
one, The New People would fall, as one, and Moonlight Cove would in an
instant become a graveyard of the unburied.

Loman drove through the first parking lot, into the second, and headed
toward the row of spaces reserved for the top executives.

. If I wait for Shaddack to see that Moonhawk's gone bad and to take us
with him, Loman thought, he won't be doing it because he cares about
cleaning up the messes he makes, not that damn albino-spider-of-a-man.
He'll take us with him just for the bloody hell of it, just so he can go
out with a big bang, so the world will stand in awe of his power, a man
of such incredible power that he could command thousands to die
simultaneously with him.

More than a few sickos would see him as a hero, idolize him. Some
budding young genius might want to emulate him. That was no doubt what
Shaddack had in mind. At best, if Moonhawk succeeded and all of mankind
was eventually converted, Shaddack literally would be master of his
world. At worst, if it all went bad and he had to kill himself to avoid
falling into the hands of the authorities, he would become a nearly
mythical figure of dark inspiration, whose malign legend would encourage
legions of the mad and power-mad, a Hitler for the silicon age.

Loman braked at the end of the row of cars.

He wiped at his greasy face.             His hand was shaking.

He was filled with a longing to abandon this responsibility and seek the
Pressure-free existence of the regressive.

But he resisted.



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If Loman killed Shaddack first, before Shaddack had a chance to kill
himself, the legend would be finished. Loman would die a few seconds
after Shaddack died, as would all the New People, but at least the
legend would have to incorporate the fact that this high-tech Jim Jones
had perished at the hands of one of the creatures he'd created. His
power would be shown to be finite; he would be seen as clever but not
clever enough, a flawed god, sharing both the hubris and the fate of
Wells's Moreau, and his work more universally would be viewed as folly.

Loman turned right, drove to the. row of executive parking spaces, and
was disappointed to see that neither Shaddack's Mercedes nor his
charcoal-gray van was in his reserved slot. He might still be there. He
could have been driven to the office by someone else or could have
parked elsewhere.

Loman swung his cruiser into Shaddack's reserved space.                     He cut the
engine.

He was carrying his revolver in a hip holster. He had checked twice
before to be sure it was fully loaded. He checked again.

Between Shaddack's house and New Wave, Loman had parked along the road
to write a note, which he would leave on Shaddack's body, clearly
explaining that he had killed his maker. When authorities entered
Moonlight Cove from the unconverted world beyond, they would find the
note and know.

He would execute Shaddack not because he was motivated by noble purpose.
Such high-minded self-sacrifice required a depth of feeling he could no
longer achieve. He would murder Shaddack strictly because he was
terrified that Shaddack would learn about Denny, or would discover that
others had become what Denny had become, and would find a way to make
all of them' enter into an unholy union with machines. Molten silver
eyes . . .

Drool spilling from the gaping mouth .                 .   .

The segmented probe bursting from the boy's forehead and seeking the
vaginal heat of the computer . . .

Those blood-freezing images, and others, played through, Loman's mind on
an endless loop of memory.

He'd kill Shaddack to save himself from being forced to b& come what
Denny had become, and the destruction of Shaddack's legend would just be
a beneficial side-effect.

He holstered his gun and got out of the car. He hurried through the -
339 rain to the main entrance, pushed through the etched-glass doors
into the marble-floored lobby, turned right, away from the elavators,
and approached the main reception desk. In corporate luxury, the place
rivaled the most elaborate headquarters of high-tech companies in the
more famous Silicon Valley, farther south. Detailed marble moldings,
polished brass trim, fine crystal sconces, and modernistic crystal
chandeliers were testament to New Wave's success.

The woman on duty was Dora Hankins. He had known her all of his life.
She was a year older than he. In high school he had dated her sister a
couple of times.

She looked up as he approached, said nothing.



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"Shaddack?"      he said.

"Not in."

"You sure?"

"Yes.When's he due?"

"His secretary will know."

"I'll go UP."

"Fine.

" As he boarded an elevator and pushed the 3 on the control board, Loman
reflected on the small talk in which he and Dora Hankins would have
engaged in the days before they had been put through the Change. They
would have bantered with each other, exchanged news about their
families, and commented on the weather. Not now. Small talk was a
pleasure of their former world. Converted, they had no use for it. In
fact, though he recalled that small talk had once been a part of
civilized life, Loman could no longer quite remember why he ever had
found it worthwhile or what kind of pleasure it had given him.

Shaddack's office suite was on the northwest corner of the third floor.
The first room off the hall was the reception lounge, Plushly carpeted
in beige Edward Fields originals, impressively furnished in plump
Roche-Bobois leather couches and brass tables with inch-thick glass
tops. The single piece of art was a Painting by Jasper Johns-an
original, not a print.

What happens to artists in the new word coming?                    Loman wondered.

But he knew the answer. There would be none. Art was emotion embodied
in paint on a canvas, words on a page, music in a symphony hall. There
would be no art in the new world. And if there was, it would be the art
of fear. The writer's most frequently used words would all be synonyms
of darkness. The musician would write dirges of one form or another.
The painter's most used pigment would be black.

Vicky Lanardo, Shaddack's executive secretary, was at her desk. She
said, "He's not in."

Behind her the door to Shaddack's enormous private office!; stood open.
No lights were on in there. It was illuminated only' by the light of
the storm-torn day, which came through the blinds in ash-gray bands.

"When will he be in?"          Loman asked.

"I don't know."

"No appointments?"

"None.

"Do you know where he is?"

"NO."

Loman walked out. For a while he prowled the half-deserted corridors,
offices, labs, and tech rooms, hoping to spot Shaddack.

Before long, however, he decided that Shaddack was not lurking about the
premises. Evidently the great man was staying mobile on this last day


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of Moonlight Cove's conversion.

Because of me, Loman thought. Because of what I said to him last. night
at Peyser's. He's afraid of me, and he's either staying mobile or gone
to ground somewhere, making himsel' difficult to find.

Loman left the building, returned to his patrol car, and sel out in
search of his maker.

in the downstairs half-bath off the kitchen, naked from the waist up,
Sam sat on the closed lid of the commode, and Tessa performed the same
kind of nursing duties she'd performed earlier for Chrissie. But Sam's
wounds were more serious than the girl's.

In a dime-size circle on his forehead, above his right eye, the skin had
been tensed off, and in the center of the circle the flesh had been
entirely eaten away, revealing a speck of bared bone about an eighth of
an inch in diameter. Stanching the flow of blood from those tiny,
severed capillaries required a few minutes of continuous pressure,
followed by the application of iodine, a liberal coating of NuSkin, and
a tightly taped gauze bandage. But even after all these efforts, the
gauze slowly darkened with red stain.

As Tessa worked on him, Sam told them what had happened ". . . so if
I hadn't shot her in the head, just then . . . if I'd been a second
or two slower, I think that damn thing, that probe, whatever it was, it
would have bored right through my skull and sunk into my brain, and
she'd have connected with me the way she was connected with that
computer."

Her toga forsaken in favor of dry jeans and blouse, Chrissie stood just
inside the bathroom, white-faced but wanting to hear all.

Harry had pulled his wheelchair into the doorway.

Moose was lying at Sam's feet, rather than at Harry's. The dog seemed
to realize that at the moment the visitor needed comforting more than
Harry did.

Sam was colder to the touch than could be explained by his time in the
chilly rain. He was trembling, and periodically the shivers that passed
through him were so powerful that his teeth chattered.


The more Sam talked, the colder Tessa became, too, and ill time his
shivers were communicated to her.

His right wrist had been cut on both sides, when Harley Coltrane had
gripped him with a powerful bony hand. No major blood vessels had been
severed; neither gash required stitches, and Tessa quickly stopped the
bleeding there. The bruises, which had barely begun to appear and would
not fully flower for hours yet, were going to be worse than the cuts. He
complained of pain in the joint, and his hand was weak, but she did not
think that any bones had been broken or crushed.

as if they'd somehow been given the ability to control their physical
form," Sam said shakily, "to make anything they wanted of themselves,
mind over matter, just like Chrissie said when she told us about the
priest, the one who started to become the creature from that movie.

The girl nodded.

"I mean, they changed before my eyes, grew these probes, tried to spear


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me. Yet with this incredible control of their bodies, of their physical
substance, all they apparently wanted to make of themselves was . . .
something out of a bad dream."

The wound on his abdomen was the least of                the three. As on his
forehead, the skin was stripped away in a                dime-sized circle, though the
probe that had struck him there seemed to                have been meant to burn rather
than cut its way into him. His flesh was                 scorched, and the wound itself
was pretty much cauterized.

From his wheelchair Harry said, "Sam, do you think they're really people
who control themselves, who have chosen to become machinelike, or are
they people who've somehow been taken over by machines, against their
will?"

"I don't know," Sam said.

"It could be either, I guess."

"But how could they be taken over, how could this happen, how could such
a change in the human body be accomplished?

And how does what's happened to the Coltranes tic in with the
Boogeymen?"

"Damned if I know," Sam said.

"Somehow it's all related to New Wave. Got to be. And none of us here
knows anything much about the cutting edge of that kind of technology,
so we don't even have the basic knowledge required to speculate
intelligently. It might as well be magic to us, SUPERNATURAL. The only
way we'll ever really understand what's happened is to get help from
outside, quarantine Moonlight Cove, seize New Wave's labs and records,
and reconstruct it the way fire marshals reconstruct the history of a
fire from what they sift out of the ashes."

"Ashes?"     Tessa asked as Sam stood up and as she helped him into his
shirt.

"This talk about fires and ashes-and other things you've said-make it
sound as if you think whatever's in Moonlight Cove is building real fast
toward an explosion or something."

"It is," he said.

At first he tried to button his shirt with one hand, but then he allowed
Tessa to do it for him. She noticed that his skin was still cold and
that his shivers were not subsiding with time.

He said, "All these murders they've got to cover up, these things that
stalk the night . . . there's a sense that a collapse has begun, that
whatever they tried to do here isn't turning out like they expected, and
that the collapse is accelerating.

" He was breathing too quickly, too shallowly.                    He paused, took a deeper
breath.

"What I saw in the Coltranes' house . . . that didn't look like
anything anyone could have planned, not something you'd want to do to
people or that they'd want for themselves. It looked like an experiment
out of control, biology run amok, reality turned inside out, and I swear
to God that if those kinds of secrets are hidden in the houses of this
town, then the whole project has to be collapsing on New Wave right now,


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coming down fast and hard on their heads, whether they want to admit it
or not. It's all blowing up now, right now, one hell of an explosion,
and we're in the middle of it."

From the moment he'd stumbled through the kitchen door, dripping rain
and blood, throughout the time Tessa had cleaned and bandaged his
wounds, she had noticed something that frightened her more than his
paleness and shivering. He kept touching them. He had embraced Tessa
in the kitchen when she gasped at the sight of the bleeding hole in his
forehead; he'd held her and leaned against her and assured her that he
was okay. Primarily he seemed to be reassuring himself that she and
Harry and Chrissie were okay, as if he had expected to come back and
find them . . . changed. He hugged Chrissie, too, as if she were his
own daughter, and he said, "It'll be all right, everything'll be all
right," when he saw how frightened she was. Harry held Out a hand in
concern, and Sam grasped it and was reluctant to let go. In the
bathroom, while Tessa dressed his wounds, he had repeatedly touched her
hands, her arms, and had once put a hand against her cheek as if
wondering at the softness and warmth of her skin. He reached out to
touch Chrissie, too, where she stood inside the bathroom door, patting
her shoulder, holding her hand for a moment and giving it a reassuring
squeeze. Until now he had not been a toucher. He had been reserved,
self-contained, cool, even distant. But during the quarter of an hour
he'd spent in the Coltrane house, he had been so profoundly shaken by
what he had seen that his shell of self-imposed isolation had cracked
wide open; he had come to want and need the human contact that, only a
short while ago, he had not even ranked as desirable as good Mexican
food, Guinness Stout, and Goldie Hawn films. " When she contemplated the
intensity of the horror necessary to transform him so completely and
abruptly, Tessa was more frightened than ever because Sam Booker's
redemption seemed akin to that of a sinner who, on his deathbed,
glimpsing hell, turns desperately to the god he once shunned, seeking
comfort and reassurance. Was he less sure now of their chances of
escaping? Perhaps he was seeking human contact because, having denied
it to himself for so many years, he believed that only hours remained in
which to experience the communion of his own kind before the great, deep
endless darkness settled over them.

Shaddack awoke from his familiar and comforting dream of human and
machine parts combined in a world-spanning engine of, incalculable power
and mysterious purpose. He was, as always-refreshed as much by the
dream as by sleep itself.

He got out of the van and stretched. Using tools he found in the
garage, he forced open the connecting door to the late Paula - 345
parkins's house. He used her bathroom, then washed his hands and face,
Upon returning to the garage, he raised the big door. He pulled the van
out into the driveway, where it could better transmit and receive data
by microwave.

Rain was still falling, and depressions in the lawn were filled with
water. Already wisps of fog stirred in the windless air, which probably
meant the banks of fog that rolled in from the sea later in the day
would be even denser than those last night.

He took another ham sandwich and a Coke from the cooler and ate while
using the van's VDT to check on the progress of Moonhawk- The 600 A.M.
to 600 P.m. schedule for four hundred and fifty conversions was still
under way. Already, at 1250, slightly less than seven hours into the
twelve-hour program, three hundred and nine had been injected with
full-spectrum micro spheres. The conversion teams were well ahead of



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schedule.

He checked on the progress of the search for Samuel Booker and the
Lockland woman. Neither had been found.

Shaddack should have been worried about their disappearance. But he was
unconcerned. He had seen the moonhawk, after all, not once but three
times, and he had no doubt that ultimately he would achieve all of his
goals.

The Foster girl was still missing too. He didn't trouble himself about
her either. She had probably encountered something deadly in the night.
At times regressives could be useful.

Perhaps Booker and the Lockland woman had fallen victim to those same
creatures. It would be ironic if the regressives-the only flaw in the
project, and a potentially serious one-should prove to have preserved
the secret of Moonhawk.

Through the VDT, he tried to reach Tucker at New Wave, then at his home,
but the man was at neither place. Could Watkins be correct? Was Tucker
a regressive and, like Peyser, un able to find his way back to human
form? Was he out there in the woods right now, trapped in an altered
state?

Clicking off the computer, Shaddack sighed. After everyone had been
converted at midnight, this first phase of Moonhawk Would not be
finished. Not quite. They'd evidently have a few messes to mop up.


In the cellar of the Icarus Colony, three bodies had become one. The
resultant entity was without rigid shape, boneless, featureless, a mass
of pulsing tissue that lived in spite of lacking a brain and heart and
blood vessels, without organs of any kind. It was" primal, a thick
protein soup, brainless but aware, eyeless but seeing, earless but
hearing, without a gut but hungry.

The agglomerations of silicon microspheres had dissolved within it. That
inner computer could no longer function in the radically altered
substance of the creature, and in turn the beast had no use any more for
the biological assistance that the microspheres had been designed to
provide. Now it was not linked to Sun, the computer at New Wave. If
the microwave transmitter. .

there sent a death order, it would not receive the command-, and would
live.

It had become the master of its physiology by reducing itself, to the
uncomplicated essence of physical existence. Their three minds also had
become one. The consiousness now dwelling in that darkness was as
lacking in complex form as the amorphous, jellied body it inhabited.

It had relinquished its memory because memories were recordings of
events and relationships that had consequences, and consequences-good or
bad-implied that one was responsible for one's actions. Flight from
responsibility had driven the creature to regression in the first place.
Pain was another shedding memory-the pain of recalling what had been
lost.

Likewise, it had surrendered the capacity to consider the future, to
plan, to dream.

Now it had no past of which it was aware, and the concept of a future


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was beyond its ken. It lived only for the moment, Unthinking,
unfeeling, uncaring.

347 It had one need.         To survive.

And to survive, it needed only one thing.                  To feed.

The breakfast dishes had been cleared from the table while Sam was at
the Coltranes' house, battling monsters that apparently had been part
human and part computer and part zombies-and maybe, for all they knew,
part toaster oven. After Sam was bandaged, Chrissie gathered with him
and Tessa and Harry around the kitchen table again, to listen to them
discuss what action to take next.

Moose stayed at Chrissie's side, regarding her with soulful brown eyes,
as if he adored her more than life itself. She couldn't resist giving
him all the petting and scratching-behind-the-ears that he wanted.

"The greatest problem of our age," Sam said, "is how to keep
technological progress accelerating, how to use it to improve the
quality of life-without being overwhelmed by it. Can we employ the
computer to redesign our world, to remake our lives, without one day
coming to worship it?" He blinked at Tessa and said, "It's not a silly
question."

Tessa frowned.

"I didn't say it was. Sometimes we have a blind trust in machines, a
tendency to believe that whatever a computer tells us is gospel-TO
forget the old maxim," Harry injected, "which says 'garbage in, garbage
out."

" Exactly," Tessa agreed.

"Sometimes, when we get data or analyses from computers, we treat it as
if the machines were all infallible. Which is dangerous because a
computer application Can be conceived, designed, and implemented by a
madman, Perhaps not as easily as by a benign genius but certainly as
effectively.

Sam said, "Yet people have a tendency-no, even desire-to want to depend
on the machines." a deep "Yeah," Harry said, "that's our sorry damn
need to shift responsibility whenever we possibly can. A spineless
desire to get out from under responsibility is in our genes, I swear it
is, and the only way we get anywhere in this world is by constantly
fighting our natural inclination to be utterly irresponsible. Some.

times I wonder if that's what we got from the devil when Eve listened to
the serpent and ate the apple-this aversion to responsibility. Most
evil has it roots there.

" Chrissie noticed this subject energized Harry. With his one good arm
and a little help from his half-good leg, he levered himself higher in
his wheelchair. Color seeped into his previously pale face. He made a
fist of one hand and stared at it intently, as if holding something
precious in that tight grip, as if he held the idea there and didn't
want to let go of it until he had fully explored it.

He said, "Men steal and kill and lie and cheat because they, feel no
responsibility for others. Politicians want power, and they want
acclaim when their policies succeed, but they seldom T stand up and take
the responsibility for failure. The world's full of people who want to
tell you how to live your life, how to make heaven right here on earth,


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but when their ideas turn out half-baked, when it ends in Dachau or the
Gulag or the mass murders that followed our departure from Southeast
Asia, they turn their heads, avert their eyes, and pretend they had no
responsibility for the slaughter."

He shuddered, and Chrissie shuddered too, though she was not entirely
sure that she entirely understood everything he was, saying.

"Jesus," he continued, "if I've thought about this once, I've thought
about it a thousand times, ten thousand, maybe because, of the war."

"Vietnam, you mean?"         Tessa said.

Harry nodded.       He was still staring at his fist.

"In the war, to; survive, you had to be responsible every minute of
every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every
action You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival
wasn't something that could be achieved alone. That was maybe the one
positive thing about fighting in a war-it clarifies - 349 your thinking
and makes YOU realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates
good men from the damned. I don't regret the war, not even considering
what happened to me there. I learned that great lesson, learned to be
responsible in all things, and I still feel responsible to the people we
were fighting for, always will, and sometimes when I think of how we
abandoned Moln to the killing fields, the mass graves, I lay awake at
night and cry because they depended on me, and to the extent that I was
a part of the process, I'm responsible for failing them."

They were all silent.

Chrissie felt a peculiar pressure in her chest, the same feeling she
always got in school when a teacher-any teacher, any subject began to
talk about something which had been previously unknown to her and which
so impressed her that it changed the way she looked at the world. It
didn't happen often, but it was always both a scary and wonderful
sensation. She felt it now, because of what Harry had said, but the
sensation was ten times or a hundred times stronger than it had ever
been when some new insight or idea had been passed to her in geography
or math or science.

Tessa said, "Harry, I think your sense of responsibility in this case is
excessive."

He finally looked up from his fist.

"No. it can never be. Your sense of responsibility to others can never
be excessive." He smiled at her.

"But I know you just well enough to suspect you're already aware of
that, Tessa, whether you realize it or not." He looked at Sam and said,
"Some of those who came out of the war saw no good at all in it. When I
meet up with them, I always suspect they were the ones who never learned
the lesson, and I avoid them-though I suppose that's unfair. Can't help
it. But when I meet a man from the war and see he learned the lesson,
then I'd trust him with my life. Hell, I'd trust him with my soul,
which in this case seems to be what they want to steal. You'll get us
out of this, Sam." At last he opened his fist. "I've no doubt of that."

Tessa seemed surprised.           To Sam she said, "You were in Vietnam?

" Sam nodded.



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"Between junior college and the Bureau."

"But You never mentioned          it. This morning, when we were eating
breakfast, when you told          me all the reasons you saw the world so
differently from the way          I saw it, you mentioned your wife's death, the
murder of your partners,          your situation with your son, but not that."

Sam stared at his bandaged wrist for a while and finally said, "The war
is the most personal experience of my life."

"What an odd thing to say."

"Not odd at all," Harry said.

"The most intense and the= most personal."

Sam said, "If I'd not come to terms with it, I'd probably still talk
about it, probably run on about it all the time. But I have come to
terms with it. I've understood. And now to talk about it casually with
someone I've just met would . . . well, cheapen it, I guess."

Tessa looked at Harry and said, "But you knew he was ill Vietnam?

"Yes.    I "Just knew it somehow."

"Yes."    Sam had been leaning over the table.                 Now he settled back in his
chair.

"Harry, I swear I'll do my best to get us out of this. But I wish I had
a better grasp of what we're up against. It all,' comes from New Wave.
But exactly what have they done, and how can it be stopped? And how can
I hope to deal with it when, I don't even understand it?"

To that point Chrissie had felt that the conversation had been way over
her head, even though all of it had been fascinating and though some of
it had stirred the Teaming feeling in her But now she felt that she had
to contribute "Are you really sure .

it's not aliens?"

"We're sure," Tessa said, smiling at her, and Sam ruffled her hair.

"Well," Chrissie said, "what I mean is, maybe what went wrong at New
Wave is that aliens landed there and used it as a base, and maybe they
want to turn us all into machines, like the Coltranes, so we can serve
them as slaves-which, when you think about it, is more sensible than
wanting to eat us. They're aliens, after all, which means they have
alien stomachs and alien digestive juices, and we'd probably be real
hard to digest, giving them heartburn, maybe even diarrhea."

Sam, who was sitting in the chair beside Chrissie, took both - 351 her
hands and held them gently in his, as aware of her abraded palm as he
was aware of his own injured wrist.

"Chrissie, I don't know if you've been paying too much attention to what
Harry's been saying-" -'Oh, yes," she said at once.

"All of it."

"Well, then you'll understand when I tell you that wanting to . blame
all these horrors on aliens is yet another way of shifting the
responsibility from where it really belongs-on us, on people, on our
very real and very great capacity to do harm to one another. it's hard
to believe that anybody, even crazy men, would want to make the


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Coltranes into what they became, but somebody evidently did want just
that. If we try to blame it on aliens or the devil or God or trolls or
whatever-we won't be likely to see the situation clearly enough to
figure out how to save ourselves. You understand?

"Sort of."

He smiled at her.        He had a very nice smile, though he didn't flash it
much.

"I think you understand it more than sort of."

"More than sort of," Chrissie agreed.

"It'd sure be nice if it was aliens, because we'd just have to find
their nest or their hive or whatever, burn them out real good, maybe
blow up their spaceship, and it would be over and done with. But if
it's not aliens, if it's us-people like us-who did all this, then maybe
it's never quite over and done with."

With increasing frustration, Loman Watkins cruised from one end Of
Moonlight Cove to the other, back and forth, around and around in the
rain, seeking Shaddack. He had revisited the house on the north point
to be sure Shaddack had not returned there, and also to check the garage
to see which vehicle was missing.


Now he was looking for Shaddack's charcoal-gray van with tinted windows,
but he was unable to locate it.

Wherever he went, conversion teams and search parties were at work.
Though the unconverted were not likely to notice anything too unusual
about those men's passage through town, Loman was constantly aware of
them.

At the north and south roadblocks on the county route and at the main
blockade on the eastern end of Ocean Avenue, out toward the interstate,
Loman's officers were continuing to deal with outsiders wanting to enter
Moonlight Cove. Exhaust plumes rose from the idling patrol cars,
mingling with the wisps of fog that had begun to slither through the
rain. The red and blue emergency beacons were reflected in the wet
macadam, so it seemed as if streams of blood, oxygenated and
oxygen-depleted, n flowed along the pavement.

There weren't many would-be visitors because the town was neither the
county seat nor a primary shopping center for people in outlying
communities. Furthermore, it was close to the end of the county road,
and there were no destinations beyond it, so no one wanted to pass
through on the way to somewhere else. Those who did want to come into
town were turned away, if at all possible, with a story about a toxic
spill at New Wave. Those,' who seemed at all skeptical were arrested,
conveyed to the jail, and locked in cells until a decision could be made
either to kill, or convert them. Since the establishment of the
quarantine in the early hours of the morning, only a score of people had
been stopped at the blockades, and only six had been Jailed.

Shaddack had chosen his proving ground well. Moonlight Cove was
relatively isolated and therefore easier to control.

Loman was of a mind to order the roadblocks dismantled, and to drive
over to Aberdeen Wells, where he could spill their whole story to the
county sheriff. He wanted to blow the Moon-, hawk Project wide open.



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He was no longer afraid of Shaddack's rage or of dying. well . . .
not true. He was afraid of Shaddack and of death, but they'll held less
fear for him than the prospect of becoming somethi like Denny had
become. He would have as soon entrusted him] self to the mercies of the
sheriff in Aberdeen and the federal authorities-even scientists who,
while cleaning up the mess in Moonlight Cove, might be sorely tempted to
dissect him-than stay in - 353 town and inevitably surrender the last
few fragments of his humanity either to regression or to some nightmare
wedding of his body and mind with a computer.

But if he ordered his officers to stand down, they would be suspicious,
and their loyalty lay more with Shaddack than with him, for they were
bound to Shaddack by terror. They were still more frightened of their
New Wave master than of anything else, for they had not seen what Denny
had become and did not yet guess that their future might hold in store
something even worse than regression to a savage state. Like Moreau's
beastmen, they kept The Law as best they could, not daring-at least for
now to betray their maker. They would probably try to stop Loman from
sabotaging the Moonhawk Project, and he might wind up dead or, worse,
locked in a jail cell.

He couldn't risk revealing his counterrevolutionary commitment, for then
he might never have a chance to deal with Shaddack. In his mind's eye
he saw himself caged at the jail, with Shaddack smiling coldly at him
through the bars, as they wheeled in a computer with which they somehow
intended to fuse him.

Molten silver eyes .         .    .

He kept on the move in the rain-hammered day, squinting through the
streaked windshield. The wipers thumped steadily, as though ticking off
time. He was acutely aware that midnight was drawing nearer.

He was the puma-man, on the prowl, and Moreau was out there in the
island jungle that was Moonlight Cove.

Initially the protean creature was content to feed on the things it
found when it extended thin tendrils of itself down the drain in the
cellar floor or through fine cracks in the walls and into the moist
surrounding earth. Beetles. Grubs. Earthworms. It no longer knew the
names of those things, but it avidly consumed them.

Soon, however, it depleted the supply of insects and worms within ten
yards of the house. It needed a more substantial meal.

It churned, seethed, perhaps striving to marshal its amorphous tissues
into a shape in which it could leave the cellar and seek prey. But it
had no memory of previous forms and no desire whatsoever to impose
structural order on itself.

The consciousness which inhabited that jellied mass no longer had more
than the dimmest sense of self-awareness, yet it was still able to
remake itself to an extent that would satisfy its needs. Suddenly a
score of lipless, toothless mouths opened in that fluid form. A blast
of sound, mostly beyond the range of human hearing, erupted from it.

Throughout the moldering structure above the shapeless beast, dozens of
mice were scurrying, nibbling at food, nest-building!.

and grooming themselves.           They stopped, as one, when the call.

blared up from the cellar.



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The creature could sense them above, in the crumbling walls, though it
thought of them not as mice but as small warm masses of living flesh.
Food. Fuel. It wanted them. It needed them.

It attempted to express that need in the form of a wordless but
compelling summons.

In every corner of the house, mice twitched. They brushed at, their
faces with forepaws, as if they'd scurried through cobwebs and were
trying to scrape those clingy, gossamer strands out of their fur.

A small colony of eight bats lived in the attic, and they also reacted
to the urgent call. They dropped from the rafters on which they hung,
and flew in frenzied, random patterns in the long upper room, repeatedly
swooping within a fraction of an inch of the walls and one another.

But nothing came to the creature in the basement. Though the call had
reached the small animals for which it had been intended, it did not
have the desired effect.

The shapeless thing fell silent.

Its many mouths closed.

One by one the bats returned to their perches in the attic.

The mice sat as if in shock for a moment, then resumed their usual
activities.

- 355 A couple of minutes later, the protean beast tried again with a
different pattern of sounds, still pitched beyond human hearing but more
alluring than before.

The bats flung themselves from their perches and rolled through the
attic in such turmoil that an observer might have thought they numbered
a hundred instead of only eight. The beating of their wings was louder
than the rush of rain on the roof.

Everywhere, mice rose on their hind feet, sitting at attention, ears
pricked. Those in the lower reaches of the house, nearer the source of
the summons, shivered violently, as though they saw before them a
crouched and grinning cat.

Screeching, the bats swooped through a hole in the attic floor, into an
empty room on the second story, where they circled and soared and dove
ceaselessly.

Two mice on the ground floor began to creep toward the kitchen, where
the door to the basement stood open. But both stopped on the threshold
of that room, frightened and confused.

Below, the shapeless entity tripled the power of its call.

One of the mice in the kitchen suddenly bled from the ears and fell
dead.

Upstairs, the bats began to bounce off walls, their radar shot.

The cellar dweller cut back somewhat on the force of its summons.

The bats immediately swooped out of the upstairs room, into the hallway,
down the stairwell, and along the ground-floor hall. As they went, they
flew over a double score of scurrying mice.



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Below, the creature's many mouths had connected, forming one large
orifice in the center of the pulsing mass.

In swift succession the bats flew straight into that gaping maw like
black playing cards being tossed one at a time into a waste can. They
embedded themselves in the oozing protoplasm and were swiftly dissolved
by powerful digestive acids.

An army of mice and four rats-even two chipmunks that eagerly abandoned
their nest inside the dining-room walls swarmed down the steep cellar
steps, falling over one another, squeaking excitedly. They fed
themselves to the waiting entity.

After that flurry of movement, the house was still.

The creature stopped its siren song.                For the moment.


Officer Neil Penniworth was assigned to patrol the northwest quadrant of
Moonlight Cove. He was alone in the car because even with the hundred
New Wave employees detailed to the police department during the night,
their manpower was stretched thin.

Right now, he preferred to work without a partner. Since the episode                          at
Peyser's house, when the smell of blood and the sight of Peyser's
altered form had enticed Penniworth to regress, he had been afraid to                         be
around other people. He had avoided total degeneration last night .                           .
. but only by the thinnest of margins. If he witnessed someone else                           in
the act of regression, the urge might stir within him, too, and this
time he was not sure that e could successfully repress that dark
yearning.

He was equally afraid to be alone. The struggle to hold fast to his
remaining shreds of humanity, to resist chaos, to be responsible, was
wearying, and he longed to escape this new, hard life. Alone, with no
one to see him if he began to surrender the very form and substance of
himself, with no one to talk him out of it or even to protest his
degeneration, he would be lost.

The weight of his fear was as real as a slab of iron, crushing the life
out of him. At times he had difficulty drawing breath, as though his
lungs were banded by steel and restricted from full expansion.

The dimensions of the black-and-white seemed to shrink, until he felt
almost as confined as he would have been in a straitjacket. The
metronomic thump of the windshield wipers grew louder, at least to his
ears, until the volume was as thunderous as an endless series of cannon
volleys. Repeatedly during the morning and early afternoon, he pulled
off the road, flung open - 357 the door, and scrambled out into the
rain, drawing deep breaths - of the cool air.

Of As the day progressed, however, even the world outside of the car
began to seem smaller than it had been. He stopped on Holliwell Road,
half a mile west of New Wave's headquarters, and got out of the cruiser,
but he felt no better. The low roof of storm clouds denied him the
sight of the limitless sky. Like semitransparent curtains of tinsel and
thinnest silk, the rain and fog hung between him and the rest of the
world. The humidity was cloying, stifling. Rain overflowed gutters,
churned in muddy torrents through roadside ditches, dripped from every
branch and leaf of every tree, pattered on the macadam pavement, tapped
hollowly on the patrol car, sizzled, gurgled, chuckled, snapped against
his face, beat upon him with such force that it seemed he was being



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driven to his knees by thousands of tiny hammers, each too small to be
effective in itself but with brutal cumulative effect.

Neil clambered back into the car with as much eagerness as he had
scrambled out of it.

He understood that it was neither the claustrophobic interior of the
cruiser nor the enervating enwrapment of the rain that he was
desperately trying to escape. The actual oppressor was his life as a
New Person. Able to feel only fear, he was locked in an emotional
closet of such unendurably narrow dimensions that he could not move at
all. He was not suffocating because of external entanglements and
constrictions; rather, he was bound from within, because of what
Shaddack had made of him.

Which meant there was no escape.

Except, perhaps, by regression.

Neil could not bear life as he must now live it. On the other hand he
was repelled and terrified by the thought of devolution into some
subhuman form.

His dilemma appeared irresoluble.

He was as distressed by his inability to stop thinking about his
predicament as he was by the predicament itself. It pried constantly at
his mind. He could find no surcease.

The closest he came to being able to put his worry-and some of his
fear-out of mind was when he was working with the mobile VDT in the
patrol car. When he checked the computer bulletin board to see if
messages awaited him, when he accessed the Moonhawk schedule to learn
how conversions were progressing, or undertook any other task with the
computer, his attention became so focused on the interaction with the
machine that briefly his anxiety subsided and his nagging clostrophobia
faded.

From adolescence, Neil had been interested in computing, although he had
never become a hacker. His interest was more

obsessive than that. He'd started with computer games, of course but
later had been given an inexpensive PC. Later still he had bought a
modern with some of the money earned at a job. Though he could not
afford much long-distance time and never spent leisurely hours using the
modern far from the backwaters of Moonlight Cove into the data nets
available in the outside world, he found his on-line systems engrossing
and fun.

Now, as he sat in the parked car along Holliwell Road, and used the VDT,
he thought that the inner world of the computer was admirably clean,
comparatively simple, predictable, and sane. So unlike human
existence-whether that of New People or Old In there, logic and reason
ruled. Cause and effect and side-effects were always analyzed and made
perfectly clear. In there, all black and white-or, when gray, the gray
was carefully ensured, quantified and qualified. Cold facts were easier
to deal with than feelings. A universe formed purely of data, abstract
from matter and event, seemed so much more desirable than real universe
of cold and heat, sharp and blunt, smooth rough, blood and death, pain
and fear.

Calling up menu after menu, Neil probed ever deeper into the Moonhawk
research files within Sun. He needed none of the data that he summoned


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forth but found solace in the process of obtaining it.

He began to see the terminal screen not as a cathode-ray tube on which
information was displayed, but as a window into another world. A world
of facts. A world free of troubling contradictions . . . and
responsibility. In there, nothing could be felt. there was only the
known and the unknown, either an abundant n of facts about a particular
subject or a dearth of them, but feeling; never feeling; feeling was the
curse of those whose existence was dependent upon flesh and bone.

A window into another world.

- 359 He touched the screen.

He wished the window could be opened and that he could go through it to
that place of reason, order, peace.

With the fingertips of his right hand, he traced circles across the warm
glass screen.

Strangely, he thought of Dorothy, swept up from the plains of Kansas
with her dog Toto, spun high into the tornado, and d out of that
depression-era grayness into a world far more intriguing. If only some
electronic tornado could erupt from the VDT and carry him to a better
place . . .

His fingers passed through the screen.

He snatched his hand back in astonishment.

The glass had not ruptured.            Chains of words and numbers glowed on the
tube, as before.

At first he tried to convince himself that what he had seen had been a
hallucination. But he did not believe that.

He flexed his fingers.          They appeared unhurt.

He looked out at the storm-swept day. The windshield wipers were not
switched on. Rain rippled down the glass, distorting the world beyond;
everything out there looked twisted, mutated, strange. There could
never be order, sanity, and peace in such a place as that.

Tentatively he touched the computer screen once more.                      It felt solid.

Again, he thought of how desirable the clean, predictable world of the
computer would be-and as before his hand slipped through the glass, up
to the wrist this time. The screen had opened around him and sealed
tight to him, as if it were an organic membrane. The data continued to
blaze on the tube, the Words and numbers forming lines around his
intruding hand.

His heart was racing.          He was afraid but also excited.

He tried to wiggle his fingers in that mysterious, inner warmth. He
could not feel them. He began to think they had dissolved or been cut
off, and that when he withdrew his hand from the machine, the stump of
his wrist would spout blood.

He withdrew it anyway.

His hand was whole.

But it was not quite a hand any more.                The flesh on the upper sides from


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the tips of his fingernails to his wrist, appeared to be veined with
copper and threads of glass. In those glass filaments beat a steady and
luminous pulse.

He turned his hand over. The undersides of his fingers and his palm
resembled the surface of a cathode-ray tube. DataM burned there, green
letters on a background glassy and dark. When he compared the words and
numbers on his hand to those on the car's VDT, he saw they were
identical. The information on the VDT changed; simultaneously, so did
that on his hand.

Abruptly, he understood that regression into bestial form was not the
only avenue of escape open to him, that he could enter, into the world
of electronic thought and magnetic memory, Of knowledge without fleshly
desire, of awareness without feeling, This was not an insight
strictly-or even primarily-intellectual in nature. It wasn't just
instinctive understanding, either. On some level more profound than
either intellect or instinct, he knew that he could remake himself more
thoroughly than even Shaddack had remade him.

He lowered his hand from the tilted computer screen to the
data-processing unit in the console between the seats. As easily,' as
he had penetrated the glass, he let his hand slide through the keyboard
and cover plate, into the guts of the machine.

He was like a ghost, able to pass through walls, ectoplasmic.

A coldness crept up his arm.

The data on the screen were replaced by cryptic patterns of light.

He leaned back in his seat.

The coldness had reached his shoulder.                 It flowed into his neck, He
sighed.

He felt something happening to his eyes. He wasn't sun what. He could
have looked at the rearview mirror. He didn't care. He decided to
close his eyes and let them become whatever, was necessary as part of
this second and more complete conversion.

This altered state was infinitely more appealing than that of the
regressive. Irresistible.

The coldness was in his face now. His mouth was numb. and Something
also was happening inside his head. He was becoming as aware of the
inner geography of his brain circuits an% synapses as he was of the
exterior world. His body was not As much a part of him as it had once
been; he sensed less throng - 361 as if his nerves had been mostly
abraded away; he could not tell if it was warm or chilly in the car
unless he concentrated on accumulating that data. His body was just a
machine after all, and a rack for sensors, designed to protect and serve
the inner him, the calculating mind.

The coldness was inside his skull.

It felt like scores. then hundreds, then thousands of ice-cold spiders
scurrying over the surface of his brain, burrowing into it.

Suddenly he remembered that Dorothy had found Oz to be a living
nightmare and ultimately had wanted desperately to find her way back to
Kansas. Alice, too, had found madness and terror down the rabbit hole,
beyond the looking-glass. . . .


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A million cold spiders.

inside his skull.

A billion.

Cold, cold.

Scurrying.

Still circling through Moonlight Cove, seeking Shaddack, Loman saw
two regressives sprint across the street.

He was on Paddock Lane, at the southern end of town, where the
Properties were big enough for people to keep horses. Ranch houses lay
on both sides, with small private stables beside or behind them. The
homes set back from the street, behind splitrail or white ranch fencing,
beyond deep and lushly landscaped lawns.

. The pair of regressives erupted from a dense row of mature -foot-high
azaleas that were still bushy but flowerless this in the season. They
streaked on all fours across the roadway, leaped a ditch, and crashed
through a hedgerow, vanishing behind it.

Although immense pines were lined up along both sides of Paddock Lane,
adding their shadows to the already darkish day, Loman was sure of what
he had seen. They had been modeled after dream creatures rather than
any single animal of the real world part wolf, perhaps, part cat, part
reptile. They were swift and looked powerful. One of them had turned
its head toward him, and in the shadows its eyes had glowed as pink-red
as those of a rat.

He slowed but did not stop. He no longer cared about identifying and
apprehending regressives. For one thing, he'd already identified them
to his satisfaction all of the converted. He knew ,4.1 that stopping
them could be accomplished only by stopping Shaddack. He was after much
bigger game.

However, he was unnerved to see them brazenly on the prow in daylight,
at two-thirty in the afternoon. Heretofore, they had been secretive
creatures of the night, hiding the shame of their regression by seeking
their altered states only well after sunset If they were prepared to
venture forth before nightfall, the Moonhawk Project was disintegrating
into chaos even faster than he had expected. Moonlight Cove was not
merely teetering on the brink of hell but had already tipped over the
edge and into the pit.

They were in Harry's third-floor bedroom again, where they passed the
last hour and a half, brainstorming and urgently discussing their
options. No lamps were on. Watery afternoon light washed the room,
contributing to the somber mood.

"So we're agreed there are two ways we might send a message out of
town," Sam said.

- 363 "But in either case," Tessa said uneasily, "you have to go away
there and cover a lot of ground to get where you need to go. Sam
shrugged.

Tessa and Chrissie had taken off their shoes and sat on the bed, their
backs against the headboard. The girl clearly intended to stay Close to
Tessa; she seemed to have imprinted on her the way a baby chick, freshly


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hatched from the egg, imprints on the t adult bird, whether it's the
mother or not.

Tessa said, "It's not going to be as easy as Slipping two doors to the
Coltrane house. Not in daylight. You think I ought to wait until it
gets dark?" Sam asked.

"Yes.   The fog will come in more heavily, too, as the afternoon fades."

She meant what she said, though she was worried about the delay. During
the hours that they bided their time, more people be converted.
Moonlight Cove would become an increasing* alien, dangerous, and
surprise-filled environment.

Turning to Harry, Sam said, 'What time's it get dark?"

Harry was in his wheelchair. Moose had returned to his master,
thrusting his burly head under the arm of the chair and onto Harry's
lap, content to sit for long stretches in that awkward posture in return
for just a little petting and scratching and an occasional reassuring
word.

Harry said, "These days, twilight comes before six o'clock."

Sam was sitting at the telescope, though at the moment he was not using
it. A few minutes ago he had surveyed the streets and reported seeing
more activity than earlier-plenty of car and foot patrols- As steadily
fewer local residents remained unconverted, the conspirators behind
Moonhawk were growing bolder in their Policing actions, less concerned
than they'd once been about calling attention to themselves.

Glancing at his watch, Sam said, "I can't say I like the idea Of wasting
three hours or more. The sooner we get the word out, the more people
we'll save from . . . from whatever's being done to them. "But if YOU
get caught because you didn't wait for nightfall,"

"then the chances of saving anyone become a hell of A lot Slimmer.

" ."The lady has a Point," Harry said.

"A good one," Chrissie said.

"Just because they're not aliens doesn't mean they're going to be any
easier to deal with."

Because even the working telephones would allow a caller to dial only
approved numbers within town, they'd given up on hope. But Sam had
realized that any PC connected by modern with the supercomputer at New
Wave-Harry said they called Sun-might provide a way out of town, an
electronic high-way on which they could circumvent the current
restrictions on the phone lines and the roadblocks.

As Sam had noted last night while using the VDT in the police car, Sun
maintained direct contacts with scores of other computers-including
several FBI data banks, both those approved for wide access and those
supposedly sealed to all but bureau agents. If he could sit at a VDT,
link in to Sun, and through Sun link to a Bureau computer, then he could
transmit a call for help that would appear on Bureau computer screens
and spew out in hard copy from the laser printers in their offices.

They were assuming, of course, that the restrictions on outside contact
that applied to all other phone lines in town did not apply to the lines
by which Sun maintained its linkages wit the broader world. If Sun's


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routes out of Moonlight Cove were clipped off, too, they were utterly
without hope.

Understandably, Sam was reluctant to enter the houses of the people who
worked for New Wave, afraid that he would encounter more people like the
Coltranes. That left only two ways to attain a cess to a PC that could
be linked to Sun.

First, he could try to get into a black-and-white and use one of their
mobile terminals, as he'd done last night. But they were alert to his
presence now, making it harder to sneak into an unused patrol car.
Furthermore, all of the cars were probably now in use, as the cops
searched diligently for him and no doubt, for Tessa as well. And even
if a cruiser were parked behind the municipal building, that area was at
the moment, bound to be a lot busier than the last time he had been
there, Second, they could use the computers at the high school on
Roshmore Way. New Wave had donated them not out of a normal concern for
the educational quality of local schools but as more means of tying the
community to it. Sam believed, and Tessa agreed, that the school's
terminals probably had the capacity to link with Sun.

- 365 Moonlight Cove Central, was the combination junior or-senior high
school was called, stood on the west side of Roshmore Way, two blocks
west of Harry's house and a full block south. In ordinary times it was
a pleasant five-minute walk. But with the streets under surveillance
and every house potentially a watchtower occupied by enemies, reaching
Central high School now without being seen was easy as crossing a
minefield.

Chrissie said, "they're still in class at Central.

You can't just walk in there and use a computer."

"Especially," Tessa said, "since you can figure the teachers were among
the first to be converted."

"What time are classes over?"             Sam asked.

"Well, at Thomas Jefferson we get out at three o'clock, but they go an
extra half hour at Central.

"Three-thirty," Sam said.

Checking his watch, Harry said, "Forty-seven minutes yet.                      But even
then, there'll be after-school activities, won't there?"

"Sure," Chrissie said.

"Band, probably football practice, a few other clubs that don't meet
during regular activity period. What time would all that be done with?"

"I know band practice is from a quarter to four till a quarter . to
five," Chrissie said, "because I'm friends with a kid one year older
than me who's in the band. I play a clarinet. I want to be in the
band, too, next year. If there is a band. If there is a next "year."

"So, say by five o'clock the place is cleared out."

"Football practice runs later than that.                 Would they practice today, in
pouring rain?"

"I guess not."




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"If You're going to wait until five or five-thirty," Tessa said, then
You might as well wait just a little while longer and head over there
after dark.

" Sam nodded.       "I guess so."

"Sam, You're forgetting," Harry said.

What? series, time shortly after you leave here, maybe as early as six
O'clock sharp, they'll be coming to convert me.

&&Jesus.

"That's right!"       Sam said.

Moose lifted his head off his master's lap and from beneath the arm Of
the wheelchair. He sat erect, black ears pricked, as if he understood
what had been said and was already anticipating the doorbell or
listening for a knock downstairs.

" I believe you do have to wait for nightfall before you go, you'll have
a better chance," Harry said, "but then you'll have to take Tessa and
Chrissie with you. It won't be safe to leave them here.

"We'll have to take you too," Chrissie said at once.

" You and Moose. I don't know if they convert dogs, but we have to take
Moose just to be sure. We wouldn't want to have to worry about him
being turned into a machine or something."

Moose chuted.

"Can he be trusted not to bark?"              Chrissie asked.

wouldn't want him to yap at something at a crucial moment.

I guess we could always wind a long strip of gauze bandage around his
snout, muzzle him, which is sort of cruel and would probably hurt his
feelings, since muzzling him would mean we don't emtirely trust him, but
it wouldn't hurt him physically, of course and I'm sure we could make it
up to him later with a juicy steak or- " Suddenly recognizing an unusual
solemnity in the silence of her companions, the girl fell silent too.
She blinked at Harry, Sam, and frowned at Tessa, who still sat on the
bed beside her. the Darker clouds had begun to plate the sky since they
had come upstairs, and the room was receding deeper into shadows. at
the moment Tessa could see Harry Talbot's face almost clearly in the
gray dimness. She was aware of how he was struggling to conceal his
fear, succeeding for the most part, managing a genuine smile and an
unruffled tone of voice, betrayed only by his expressive eyes.

To Chrissie, Harry said, "I won't be going with you, honey."

"Oh," the girl said. She looked at him again, her gaze slipping down
from Harry to the wheelchair on which he sat.

"But you came to . our school that day to talk to us.                      You leave the
house sometimes. You must have a way to get out."

Harry smiled.

"The elevator goes down to the garage on the cellar level. I don't
drive any more, so there's no car down there and I can easily roll out
into the driveway, to the sidewalk."



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"Well, then!"       Chrissie said.

Harry looked at Sam and said, "But I can't go anywhere on these streets,
steep as they are in some places, without soma - 367 e chair has brakes,
and the motor has quite a lot of power, but half the time



not enough for these slopes."

"We'll be with you," Chrissie said earnestly.

"We can help."

--Dear girl, you can't sneak quickly through three blocks of occupied
territory and drag me with you at the same time," Harry said firmly.
"For one thing, you'll have to stay off the streets as much as possible,
move from yard to yard and between as much as you can, while I can only
roll on pavement, especially in this weather, with the ground so soggy."
'We can carry you."

,No," Sam said.

"We can't. Not if we hope to get to the school and get assistance and
get a message out to the Bureau. it's a sho d' bW full of danger, and
we've got to travel light. Sorry, Harry."

"No need to apologize, " Harry said.

" I wouldn't have it any other way. You think I want to be dragged or
shoulder-carried like a bag of cement across half the town?"

In obvious distress, Chrissie got off the bed and stood with her small
hands fisted at her sides. She looked from Tessa to Sam to Tessa again,
silently pleading with them to think of a way to save Harry.

Outside the gray sky was mottled now with ugly clouds that were nearly
black.

The rain eased up, but Tessa sensed that they were entering a brief
lull, after which the downpour would continue with greater fury than
ever.

Both the spiritual and the physical gloom deepened.

MOOse whined softly.

Tears shimmered in Chrissie's eyes, and she seemed unable to bear
looking at Harry. She went to a north window and stared down at the
house next door and at the street beyond-staying just far enough back
from the glass to avoid being spotted by anyone outside.

Tessa wanted to comfort her.

She wanted to comfort Harry too.

MO, than that .       .    .   she wanted to make everything right.

All writer-producer-director, she was a mover and shaker, at taking
charge, making things happen. She always knew how to solve a problem,
what to do in a crisis, how to keep the ball rolling once a project had
begun. But now she was at She could not always script reality with the
assurance she brought to the writing of her films; sometimes the real
world resisted conforming to her demands. Maybe that was why she had


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chosen a career over a family, even after having enjoyed a wonderful
family atmosphere as a child. The real world of daily life and struggle
was sloppy, unpredictable, full of loose ends; she couldn't count on
being able to tie it all up the way she could when she took aspects of
it and reduced them to a neatly structured film. Life was life, broad
and rich . . . but film was only .n essences. Maybe she dealt better
with essences than with life all its gaudy detail.

Her genetically received Lockland optimism, previously as bright as a
spotlight, had not deserted her, though it definitely had dimmed for the
time being.

Harry said, "It's going to be all right."

"How?"    Sam asked.

"I'm probably last on their list," Harry said.

"They wouldn't be worried about cripples and blind people. Even if we
learn something's up, we can't try to get out of town and get help. Mrs.
Sagerian-she lives over on Pinecrest-she's blind, and I'll bet she and I
are the last two on the schedule. They'll wait to do us until near
midnight. You see if they don't. Bet on it. So what you've got to do
is go to the high school and get through to the Bureau, bring help in
here pronto, before midnight comes, and then I'll be all right."

Chrissie turned away from the window, her cheeks wet with tears. "You
really think so, Mr. Talbot? You really, honestly think they won't
come here until midnight?"

With his head tilted to one side in a perpetual twist that was,
depending on how you looked at it, either jaunty or heartwrenching,
Harry winked at the girl, though she was farther away from him than
Tessa and probably didn't see the wink.

"if I'm jiving you, honey, may God strike me with lightning this
instant.

" Rain fell but no lightning struck.

"See?"    Harry said, grinning.

Though the girl clearly wanted to believe the scenario that Harry had
painted for her, Tessa knew that they could not count on his being the
last or next to last on the final conversion schedule. What he'd said
made a little sense, actually, but it was just too neat. Like a
narrative development in a film script. Real life, - 369 Tessa had just
reminded herself, was sloppy, unpredictable. She desperately wanted to
believe that Harry would be safe until a few minutes till midnight, but
the reality was that he would be at risk as soon as the clock struck six
and the final series of conversions was under way.

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.


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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 pro-, genitors, 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 -
371 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. 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,


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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, their to the crown of light, and at
midnight he would ascend the throne.

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 Ian 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.


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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.

- 373 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



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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 THE 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 p - 375
immortal words of the modern American intellectual, John 'YO! They "
still didn't answer him.

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 ul did not allow him to be spooked.

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 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.



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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, ling 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 nol 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, She was free of
arthritis and other major complaints, thank God. She still lived in her
bungalow on Concord Circle, an odd little hal 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


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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-halucination 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, a I 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.

By 455, when no one at all had passed through the lobby, Dora was
apprehensive. The building was oddly silent, though hundreds of people
were working there in offices and labs farther back on the ground floor
and in the two floors overhead. In fact the place seemed deserted.

At five o'clock no one had yet left for the day, and Dora had decided to
see what was going on. She abandoned her post at the main reception
desk, walked to the end of the large marble lobby, through a brass door,
into a less grand corridor floored with vinyl tile. Offices lay on both
sides. She went into the first room on the left, where eight women


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served as a secretarial pool for minor department heads who had no
personal secretaries of their own.

The eight were at their VDTS. In the fluorescent light, Dora had no
trouble seeing how intimately flesh and machine had joined.

Fear was the only emotion Dora had felt in weeks. She thought she had
known it in all its shades and degrees. But now it fell over her with
greater force, darker and more intense, than anything she had
experienced before.

A glistening probe erupted from the wall to Dora's right, le was more
metallic than not, yet it dripped what appeared to b* yellowish mucus.
The thing shot straight to one of the secretaries and bloodlessly
pierced the back of her head. From the top one of the other women's
heads, another probe erupted, r( like a snake to the music of a
charmer's flute, hesitated, then with tremendous speed snapped to the
ceiling, piercing t4 acoustic tile without disturbing it, and vanished
toward the room above.

Dora sensed that all of the computers and people of Nev Wave had somehow
linked into a single entity and that the building 379 itself was swiftly
being incorporated into it. She wanted to but couldn't move-maybe
because she knew any escape attempt would prove futile.

A moment later they plugged her into the network.

Soldonna was carefully taping up a sign on the wall behind the front
desk at the Moonlight Cove Town Library. It was part of Fascinating
Fiction Week, a campaign to get kids to read more fiction.

She was the assistant librarian, but on Tuesdays, when her boss, Cora
Danker, was off, Betsy worked alone. She liked Cora, but Betsy also
liked being by herself. Cora was a talker, filling every free minute
with gossip or her boring observations on the characters and plots of
her favorite TV programs. Betsy, a lifelong bibliophile obsessed with
books, would have been delighted to talk endlessly about what she'd
read, but Cora, though head librarian, hardly read at all.

Betsy tore a fourth piece of Scotch tape off the dispenser and fixed the
last corner of the poster to the wall. She stepped back to admire her
work.

She had made the poster herself. She was proud of her modest artistic
talent. In the drawing, a boy and a girl were holding books and staring
bug-eyed at the open pages before them. Their hair was standing on end.
The girl's eyebrows appeared to have jumped off her face, as had the
boy's ears. Above them was the legend BOOKS ARE PORTABLE FUNHOUSES,
FILLED WITH THRILLS AND SURPRISES.

From back in the stacks at the other end of the library came a curious
sound-a grunt, a choking cough, and then what might have been a snarl.
Next came the unmistakable clatter of a row of books falling from a
shelf to the floor.

The only person in the library, other than Betsy, was Dale Foy, a
retiree who'd been a cashier at Lucky's supermarket until three years
ago when he'd turned sixty-five. He was always searching for thriller
writers he had never read before and complaining that none of them was
as good as the really old-time tale-spinners, by which he meant John
Buchan rather than Robert Louis Stevenson.

Betsy suddenly had the terrible feeling that Mr.                     Foy had suffered a


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heart attack in one of the aisles, that she had heard him

gurgling for help, and that he had pulled the books to the floor when
he'd grabbed at a shelf. In her mind she could see him writhing in
agony, unable to breathe, his face turning blue an( his eyes bulging, a
bloody foam bubbling at his lips. . . .

Years of heavy reading had stropped Betsy's imagination until it was as
sharp as a straight razor made from fine German steel She hurried around
the desk and along the head of the aisles looking into each of the
narrow corridors, which were flanked by nine-foot-high shelves.

"Mr.      Foy?    Mr.    Foy, are you alright?

" In the last aisle she found the fallen books but no sign of Dale Foy.
Puzzled, she turned to go back the way she had come, and there was Foy
behind her. But changed. And even Betsy So donna's sharp imagination
could not have conceived of the thing that Foy had become-or of the
things that he was about to do to her. The next few minutes were as
filled with surprises as a hundred books she had ever read, though there
was not a happy) ending.

Because of the dark storm clouds that clotted the sky, an dead twilight
crept over Moonlight Cove, and the entire town seemed to be celebrating
Fascinating Fiction Week at the library. The dying day was, for many,
filled with thrills and surprises, just like a funhouse in the most
macabre carnival that had ever pitched its tents.

Sam swept the beam of the flashlight around the attic. It had a
rough board floor but no light fixture. Nothing was stored there except
dust, spider webs, and a multitude of dead, dry bees that had built
nests in the rafters during the summer and had died - 381 due to the
work of an exterminator or at the end of their satisfied, he returned to
the trapdoor and went backward down -& wooden rungs, into the closet of
Harry's third-floor bedroom. They had removed many of the hanging
clothes to be able to open the trap and draw down the collapsible
ladder.

Tessa, Chrissie, Harry, and Moose were waiting for him just outside the
closet door, in the steadily darkening bedroom.

Sam said, "Yeah, it'll do.

" - -I haven't been up there since before the war," Harry said.

"A little dirty,         a few spiders, but you'll be safe. If you're not at
the end of their         list, if they do come for you early, they'll find the
house empty, and         they'll never think of the attic. Because how could a
man with two bad         legs and one bad arm drag himSelf up there?"

Sam was not sure that he believed what he was saying. But for his own
peace of mind as well as Harry's, he wanted to believe.

"Can I take Moose up there with me?"

"Take that handgun you mentioned," Tessa said, "but not Moose.
Well-behaved as he is, he might bark at just the wrong moment.

"

"Will Moose be safe down here .                 .   .   when they come?"

Chrissie wondered.


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"I'm sure he will be," Sam said.

"They don't want dogs.

Only people."

"We better get you up there, Harry," Tessa said.

"It's twenty Past five.           We've got to be out of here soon."

The bedroom was filling with shadows almost as rapidly as a Ous filling
with blood-dark wine.


THE NIGHT BELONGS TO THEM Montgomery told me that's the Law. became
oddly weakened about nightfall; that then the animal was at its
strongest; a spirit of adventure sprang up in them at the dusk they
would dare things they never seemed to dream about by day.

-H. G. WELLS, The Island of Dr. Moreau The scrub-covered hills that
surrounded the abandoned Icarus colony coyotes gophers and field mice
and rabbits and a few foxes .=tumbled out of their burrows and shivered
in the rain, listen. In the two nearest stands of pine, sweet gum, and
autumn birch, one just to the south and one immediately east of the old
colony, squirrels and raccoons stood to attention.

The birds were the first to respond. In spite of the rain, they flew
from their sheltered nests in the trees, in the dilapidated old barn,
and in the crumbling eaves of the main building itself. Cowing and
screeching, they spiraled into the sky, darted and ramped, then streaked
directly to the house. Starlings, wrens, owls, and hawks all came in
shrill and flapping profusely". Some flew against the walls, as if
struck blind, battening constantly until they broke their necks, or
until they snapped their wings and fell to the ground where they
fluttered and flapped until they were exhausted or had perished. Others,
equally frenzied, found open doorways and windows through which they
entered without damaging themselves.

Though wildlife within a two-hundred-yard radius had heard the call,
only the nearer animals responded obediently. Rabbits hopped, squirrels
scurried, coyotes loped, foxes dashed, and raccoons waddled in that
curious way of theirs, through wet grass rain-bent weeds and mud, toward
the source of the siren song. Some were predators and some, by nature,
were timid creatures, but they moved side by side without conflict. It
might have been a scene from an animated Disney film-the neighborly and
harmonious folk of field and forest responding to the sweet guitar Or
harmonica music of some elderly black man who, when they gathered around
him, would tell them stories of magic and adventure- But there was no
kindly, tale-spinning Negro where they were going, and the music that
drew them was cold, and without melody.

While Sam struggled to lift Harry up the ladder and into the attic,
Tessa and Chrissie took the wheelchair to the basement garage. It was a
heavy-duty motorized model, not a light colapsible chair, and would not
fit through the trap. Tessa Chrissie parked it just inside the big
garage door, so it looked as if Harry had gotten this far in his chair
and had left the house, perhaps in a friend's car.

"You think they'll fall for it?"              Chrissie asked worriedly.

"There's a chance," Tessa said.



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"Maybe they'll even think Harry left town yesterday before the
roadblocks went up."

Tessa agreed, but she knew-and suspected Chrissie knew that the chance
of the ruse working was slim. If Sam and Harry really had been as
confident in the attic trick as they pretended they would have wanted
Chrissie to be tucked up there, instead of sent out into the
storm-lashed, nightmare world of Moonlight Cove.

They rode the elevator back to the third floor, where Sam was just
folding the ladder and pushing the trapdoor into place. Moose watched
him curiously.

"Five forty-two," Tessa said, checking her watch.

Sam snatched up the closet pole, which he'd had to remove to pull down
the trap, and he reinserted it into its braces.

They put the clothes back."

Shirts and slacks, still on hangers, had been transferred to the bed.
Working together, passing the garments like amateur firemen relaying
pails of water, they quickly restored the closet to its former
appearance.

- 387 Tessa noticed that traces of fresh blood were soaking through the
baandage on Sam's right wrist. His wounds were pulling exertion.
Although they weren't mortal injuries, they hurt a lot, and anything
that weakened or distracted him during the ordeal ahead decreased their
chances of success.

At the door, Sam said, "God, I hate to leave him there.

thirty-six, " Tessa reminded him. She   pulled on a leatherjacket, and
while Chrissie slipped into a too-large but waterproof blue nylon
windbreaker that belonged to Harry, Sam reloaded his revolver. He had
used up all the rounds in his pockets while at the Coltranes'. But
Harry owned a .45 revolver and a .38 pistol, both of which he had taken
with him into the attic, and he had a box of ammunition for each, so Sam
had taken a score or so of the .38 cartridges.

holstering the gun, he went to the telescope and studied the - terrane
that lay west and south toward Central School.

"Still lots of cops off-duty," he reported.

-"Patrols?"      Tessa asked.

"But also lots of rain.           And fog's coming in faster, thicker."

Thanks to the storm, an early twilight was upon them and day was fading.
Although some bleak light still burned above the churning clouds, night
might as well have fallen, for cloaks of gloom lay over the wet and
huddled town.

"Five fifty," Tessa said.

Chrissie said, "If Mr.          Talbot's at the top of their list, they could be
here any minute."

Turning from the telescope, Sam said, "All right.                     Let's go."

Tessa and Chrissie followed him out of the bedroom.                        They took the
stairs down to the first floor.


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Moose used the elevator.


Shaddack was a child tonight.

Circling repeatedly through Moonlight Cove, from the sea the the hills,
from Holliwell Road on the north to Paddock Lane on the south, he could
not remember ever having been in a better mood. He altered the patterns
of his patrol, largely to be sure that eventually he would cover every
block of every street in town; the sight of each house and every citizen
on foot in the storm affected him in a way they never had previously,
because soon they would be his to do with as he pleased.

He was filled with excitement and anticipation, the likes of which he
had not felt since Christmas Eve when he was a young boy. Moonlight
Cove was a huge toy, and in a few hours, when midnight struck, when this
dark evening ticked over into the hole( he would be able to have so much
fun with his marvelous toy. He would indulge in games which he had long
wanted to but which he had denied himself. Henceforth, no urge or
desire would be denied, for despite the bloodiness or outrageousness of
whatever game he chose, there would be no referees, no authorities, to
penalize him.

And like a child sneaking into a closet to filch coins from his father's
coat to buy ice cream, he was so completely transformed by contemplation
of the rewards that he had virtually forgotten there was a potential for
disaster. Minute by minute, the threat of the regressives faded from
his awareness. He did not entirely forget about Loman Watkins, but he
no longer was able to remember exactly why he had spent the day hiding
from the police chief in the garage at the Parkins house.

More than thirty years of unrelenting self-control, stamina and
undeviating application of his mental and physical resources, beginning
with the day he had murdered his - parents and 389 Runningdeer, thirty
years of repressing his needs and desires, sublimating them in his work,
had at last led him to the brink of his dream's realization. He could
not doubt. To question his mission or worry about its outcome would be


to doubt his sacred destiny and insult the great spirits who had
fashioned him. He was now incapable of even seeing a downside; he
turned his


mind away from any incipient thought of disaster.

He sensed the great spirits in the storm.

He sensed them moving secretly through his town.

They were there to witness and approve his ascension to the throne of
destiny.

He had eaten no cactus candy since the day he had killed his mother,
father, and the Indian, but over the years he had been subject to vivid
flashbacks. They came upon him unexpectedly.

one moment he would be in this world, and the next instant he would be
in that other place, the eerie world parallel to this one, where the
cactus candy had always conveyed him, a reality in which colors were
simultaneously more vivid and more subtle, where every object seemed to
have more angles and dimensions than in the ordinary world, where he


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seemed to be strangely weightless-buoyant as a helium-filled balloon-and
where the voices of spirits spoke to him- The flashbacks had been
frequent during the year following the murders, striking him about twice
a week, then had gradually declined in number-though not in
intensity-through his teenage years. Those dreamy, fugue-like spells,
which usually lasted an hour or two but could occasionally last half a
day, were responsible in part for his reputation, with family and
teachers, of being a somewhat detached child. They all had sympathy for
him, naturally, because they assumed that whatever detachment he
displayed was a result of the shattering trauma that he had endured.

Now, cruising in his van, he was phasing slowly into that Cactus-candy
condition. This flashback was unexpected, too, but it didn't snap upon
him as all the others had. He sort of . . .

drifted into it, deeper, deeper. And the further he went, the more he
suspected that this time he would not be pulled rudely back from that
realm of higher consciousness. From now on he Would be a resident of
both worlds, which was how the great $spirits themselves lived, with
awareness of both the higher and lower states of existence. He even
began to think that what he was undergoing now, spiritually, was a
conversion of his will, a thousand times more profound than that which
the citizens of Moonlight Cove had undergone.

in this exalted state, everything was special and wondrous to Shaddack.
The twinkling lights of the rainswept town seemed like jewels sprinkled
through the descending darkness. The molten, silvery beauty of the rain
itself astonished him, as did the swiftly dimming, gorgeously turbulent
gray sky.

As he braked at the intersection of Paddock Lane and Sadd back Drive, he
touched his breast, feeling the tele he wore from a chain around his
neck, unable to remember what it was, and that seemed mysterious and as
wonderful, as well. Then he recalled that the device monitor and
broadcast his heartbeat, which was received by a unit at New Wave. It
was effective over a distance of five miles, an would work even when he
was indoors. If the reception of his heartbeat was interrupted for more
than one minute, Sun was programmed to feed a destruct order, via
microwave, to the microsphere computers in all of the New People.

A few minutes later, on Bastenchurry Road, when he touched the device,
the memory of its purpose again proved elusive.

He sensed that it was a powerful object, that whoever wore it held lives
of others in his hands, and the fantasy-tripping child in him decided
that it must be an amulet, bestowed upon spirits, one more sign that he
stood astride the two in the ordinary plane of ordinary men and the
realm of the great spirits, the gods of the cactus candy.

His slowly phased-in flashback, like time-released medication, had
carried him back into the condition of his youth at least to those seven
years when he'd been in the thrall of runningdeer. He was a child. And
he was a demigod. He was the favored child of the moonhawk, so he could
do anything he wanted to anyone, with anyone, and as he continued to
drive, he fantasized about just what he might want to do . . . and to
whom. Now and then he laughed softly and slightly shrilly, and his eyes
gleamed like those of a cruel and twisted boy studying d effects of fire
on captive ants.

moose padded around them and wagged his tail so hard it seemed in danger
of flying off, Chrissie waited in the kitchen for Tessa and Sam until
more light bled out of the dying day.


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At last Sam said, "All right.             Stay close.       Do what I say every step of
the way.

He looked at Chrissie and Tessa for a long moment before suddenly
opening the door; without any of them speaking a word, they hugged one
another. Tessa kissed Chrissie on the cheek, and Sam kissed her, and
Chrissie returned their kisses. She didn't have to be told why they all
suddenly felt so affectionate. They Were people, real people, and
expressing their feelings was important, because before the night was
out they might not be people any more. Maybe they wouldn't ever again
feel the of things real people felt, so those feelings were more
precious by the second.

Who knew what those weird shape-changers felt?                    Who would Want to know?

Besides, if they didn't reach Central, it would be because one Of the
search parties or a couple of the Boogeymen nailed them along the way.
In that case this might be their last chance to say goodbye to one
another.

Finally Sam led them onto the porch.

Carefully, Chrissie closed the door behind them. Moose didn't try to
get out. He was too good and noble a dog for such cheap tricks. But he
did stick his snout in the narrowing crack, sniffing her and trying to
lick her hand, so she was afraid she was going to pinch his nose. He
pulled back at the last moment, and the door clicked shut.

SAM led them down the steps and across the yard toward the house to the
south of Harry's. No lights were on there. Chrissie hoped no one was
home, but she figured some monstrous creature was at one of the dark
windows right now, peering out at them and licking its chops.

The rain seemed colder than when she'd been on the run last night, but
that might have been because she had just come out of the warm, dry
house. Only the palest gray glow still illuminated the sky to the west.
The icy, slashing droplets seemed to be tearing the last of the light
out of the clouds and driving it into the earth, pulling down a deep,
damp darkness. Before they had even reached the fence separating
Harry's property from the next, Chrissie was grateful for the hooded
nylon windbreaker even though it was so big on her that it made her feel
as if she was a little kid playing dress-up in her parents' clothes.

It was a picket fence, easy to clamber over. They followed San across
the neighbor's backyard to another fence. Chrissie was over that one,
too, and into yet another yard, with Tessa close behind her, before she
realized they had reached the Coltranes' place.

She looked at the blank windows. No lights on here, either which was a
good thing, because if there had been lights, to, that would mean
someone had found what was left of the Coltranes after their battle with
Sam.

Crossing the yard toward the next fence, Chrissie was overcome by the
fear that the Coltranes had somehow reanimated themselves after Sam had
fired all of those bullets into them that they were standing in the
kitchen and looking out the south windows right this minute, that they
had seen their nemesis an two companions, and that they were even now
opening the door. She expected two robot-things to come clanking out
with metal arms and working massive metal hands, sort of like versions
of the walking dead in old zombie movies, miniature radar-dish antennae



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whirling around and around steam hissing from body vents.

Her fear must have slowed her, because Tessa ran into her from behind
and gave her a gentle push to hurry her. Chrissie crouched and hurried


to the south side of the yard.

Sam helped her over a wrought-iron fence with spear points on the
staves. She would probably have gored herself if she'd had to scale it
alone. Chrissie shishkebab.

People were home at the next house, and Sam took careful -M - 393 and
some shrubbery to study the lay of things before con g. Chrissie and
Tessa quickly joined him there.

While clambering over the last fence, she'd rubbed the abraded her left
hand, even though it was bandaged. It hurt, but she gritted her teeth
and made no complaint.    through the branches of what appeared to be a
mulberry bush, He peered at the house, which was only twenty feet away.

She saw four people through the kitchen windows. They were getting
dinner together. A middle-aged couple, a gray-haired grandfather and a
teenage girl.

She wondered if they had been converted yet. She suspected Doll but
their was no way to be sure. And since the robots and boogeymen
sometimes hid in clever human disguises, you couldn't trust anyone, not
even your best friend . . . or your parents. Pretty much the same as
when aliens were taking over.

'Even if they look out, they won't see us," Sam said.

"Come On.

Chrissie followed him from the cover of the mulberry bush and across the
open lawn toward the next property line, thanking God for the fog, which
was getting denser by the minute.

.     Eventually they reached the house at the end of the block.

The south side of that lawn fronted the cross street, Bergenwood Way,
which led down to Conquistador.

When they were two-thirds of the way across the lawn, less than twenty
feet from the street, a car turned the corner a block and a half uphill
and started down. Following Sam's lead, Chrissie threw herself flat on
the soggy lawn because there was no nearby shrubbery behind which to
take refuge. If they tried to scramble too far, the driver of the
approaching car might get close enough to spot them while they were
still scuttling for cover.

NO streetlamps flanked Bergenwood, which was in their favor.

The last of the ashen light was gone from the western sky mother boon.

As the car drew nearer, moving slowly either because of the bad weather
or because its occupants were part of a patrol, its lights were diffused
by the fog, which seemed not to be !reflecting that light but glowing
with a radiance of its own. Oh*it in the night for yards on both sides
of the car were half lighted and weirdly distorted by those slowly
churning, groundluminous clouds.




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When the car was less than a block away, someone riding in the back seat
switched on a hand-held spotlight. He directed out his side window,
playing it over the front lawns of the houses that faced on Bergenwood
and the side lawns of houses that faced the cross streets. At the moment
the beam was pointed in the opposite direction, south, toward the other
side of Bergenwood But by the time they had driven this far, they might
decide to spotlight the properties to the north of Bergenwood.

"Backtrack," Sam said fiercely.

"But stay down and craw crawl.             " The car reached the intersection, half
a block uphill.

Chrissie crawled after Sam, not straight back . the way they had come
but toward the nearby house. She didn't see anywhere he could hide,
because the back-porch railing was pretty open and there were no large
shrubs. Maybe he figured to slip around the side of the house until the
patrol passed, but she didn't think she and Tessa would make it to the
corner in time.

When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that the spotlight was still
sweeping the front lawns and between the houses on the south flank of
the street. However, there was the side-glow effect of the headlights to
worry about, and that was going to wash across this lawn in a few
seconds.

She was half crawling and half slithering on her belly, moving fast,
though no doubt squashing lots of snails and earthworms that had come
out to bask on the wet grass, which didn't bear thinking about. She
came to a concrete walkway close to t house-and realized that Sam had
disappeared.

She halted on her hands and knees, looking left and right.

Tessa appeared at her side.

"Cellar steps, honey.          Hurry!"

Scrambling forward, she discovered a set of exterior concrete steps
leading down to a cellar entrance. Sam was at the bottom, where
collected rainwater gurgled softly into a drain in front of the closed
cellar door. Chrissie joind him in that haven, slipping below ground
level, and Tessa followed. About four seconds later a spotlight swept
across the back of the house and even played for a moment inches above
their heads, on the concrete lip of the stairwell.

They huddled in silence, unmoving, for a minute or so and the spotlight
swung away from them and the car passed Chrissie was sure that something
inside the house had heard them, that - 395 the door at Sam's back would
fly open at any second, that something would leap at them, a creature
part werewolf and part computer, snarling and beeping, its mouth
bristling with both teeth and programming keys, saying something like,
"To be




eaten press ENTER and proceed."

She was relieved when at last Sam whispered, "Go."

They recrossed the lawn toward Bergenwood Way.                    This time the street


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remained conveniently deserted.

As Harry promised, a stone-lined drainage channel ran along Bergenwood-
According to Harry, who had played in it when he was a kid, the channel
was about three feet wide and five feet deep. Judging by those
dimensions, a foot or so of runoff surged through it at the moment.
Those currents were swift, almost black, revealed at the bottom of the
shadow trench only by an occasional dark glint and chuckle of swirreling
water.

The channel offered a considerably less conspicuous route than the open
street. They moved uphill a few yards until they saw the mortared, iron
handholds that Harry had promised they'd find every hundred feet along
the open sections of the channel- Sam climbed down first, Chrissie went
second, and Tessa brought up the rear.

,Sam hunched over to keep his head below street level, and Tessa a bit
less than he did. But Chrissie didn't have to hunch at all. Being
eleven had its advantages, especially when you were on the run from
werewolves or ravenous aliens or robots or Nazis, and or another during
the past twenty-four hours, she had been On the run from the first
three, but not from Nazis, e too, thank ."*God, though who knew what
might happen next.

The churning water was cold around her feet and calves. She was
surprised to discover that although it only reached her knees it had
considerable force. it pushed and tugged relentlessly, as though it
were a living thing with a mean desire to topple her. She was not in
any danger of falling as long as she stood in one place feet widely
planted, but she was not sure how long she could maintain her balance
while walking. The watercourse sloped steeply downhill. The old stone
floor, after several rainy seasons, was well polished by runoff. Because
of a combination of factors, the channel was the next best thing to an
amusement-park flume ride.


if she fell, she'd be swept all the way downhill, to within a block of
the bluff, where the channel widened straight down into the earth. Harry
had said somethi about safety bars dividing the passage into narrow
slots just before the downspout, but she figured that if she were swept
down there and had to rely on those bars, they would prove to be missing
or rusted out, leaving a straight shot to the bottom. The channel came
out again at the base of the cliffs, then led part of the way across the
beach, discharging the runoff onto the sand or, at I tide, into the sea.

She had no difficulty picturing herself tumbling and twisting
helplessly, choking on filthy water, desperately but unsuccessfully
grabbing at the stone channel for purchase, suddenly plummeting a couple
of hundred feet straight down, banging against the walls of the shaft
when it went vertical, breaking bone smashing her head to bits, hitting
the bottom with . . .

Well, yes, she could easily picture it, but suddenly she didn't see any
wisdom in doing so.

Fortunately Harry had warned them of this problem, so Sam had come
prepared. From under his jacket and around his waist he unwound a
length of rope that he had removed from a long unused pulley system in
Harry's garage. Though the rope was old, Sam said it was still strong,
and Chrissie hoped he was right. He had tied one end around his waist
before leaving the house. Now he looped the other end through
Chrissie's belt and finally tied it around Tessa's waist, leaving


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approximately three feet of play between each of them. If one of them
fell-and face it, Chrissie was far and away the one most likely to fall
most likely to be swept




to a wet and bloody death-the others could stand fast until she had time
to regain her footing.

That was the plan, anyway.

Securely linked, they started down the channel. Sam hunched over so no
one in a passing car would see his head bobbling above the stone rim of
the watercourse, Chrissie hunched over a bit, too, keeping her feet wide
apart, sort of troll-walking as she had done last night in the meadow.

Per Sam's instructions, she held on to the line with both hands, taking
up the slack when she him, to avoid tripping on it, then paying it out
again - 397 a couple of feet. Behind her, Tessa was doing the same
Chrissie felt the subtle tug of the rope on her belt.

The channel was heading toward a culvert half a block downhill.

It went underground at Conquistador and stayed submerged not just
through the intersection but for two entire blocks, appearing again at
Roshmore way.

glancing up, past Sam at the mouth of the pipe, she saw.                     It was round,
concrete rather than stone.

It was larger than the rectangular channel, about five feet in diameter
no doubt so workmen could get into it easily and clean it when it became
choked with debris. However, neither the length or the size of the
culvert made her uneasy; it was the blackness of it that prickled the
nape of her neck, for it was darker even than the essence of night at
the bottom of the drainage channel itself-absolutely, absolutely black,
and it seemed as if they were marching into the gaping mouth of some
historic behemoth.

A car cruised by slowly on Bergenwood, another on Conr. Their
headlights were refracted by the incoming bankof the night itself seemed
to glow, but little of that queer luminousity reached down into the
watercourse, and none of it gott into the mouth of the tunnel .

Sam Crossed the threshold of that tunnel and, within disappeared
entirely from sight, Chrissie followed with hesitation, although not
without trepidation. They proceded at a slower pace, for the floor of
the culvert was not steeply sloped but curved, as well, and even more
treacherous than the stone drainage channel.

Sam had a flashlight, but Chrissie knew he didn't want to use it so
close to the end of the tunnel. The backwash of the beam would be
visible from outside and draw the attention of one of the creatureS.

liven was as utterly lightless as the inside of a whale's NOt that she
knew what a whale's belly was like, inside, doubted it was equipped with
a lamp or even a Donald duck night-light, like the one she'd had when
she was years r, The whale's belly image seemed fitting because she had
the creepy feeling that the pipe was really a stomach and the rushing
water was digestive juice, and that already her tennis shoes and the



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legs of her jeans were dissolving in the corrosive flood.

Then she fell. Her feet slipped on something, perhaps a fungus that was
growing on the floor and attached so tightly to the concrete that the
runoff had not torn it away. She let go of the line and windmilled her
arms, trying to keep her balance, she went down with a tremendous
splash, and instantly felt herself borne away by the water.

She had enough presence of mind not to scream.                    As it would draw one of
the search teams-or worse.

Gasping for breath, spluttering as water slopped into her mouth, she
collided with Sam's legs, knocking him off balance She felt him falling.
She wondered how long they'd all lie, dead and decomposing, at the
bottom of the long vertical drain, at the foot of the bluff, before
their bloated, purple remains were found.

In the tomb-perfect darkness, Tessa heard the girl fall, and immediately
halted, planting her legs as wide and firmly as she could on that sloped
and curved floor, keeping both hands on the security line. Within a
second that rope pulled taut as Chrissie was swept away by the water.

Sam grunted, and Tessa realized that the girl had been catapaulted into
him. Slack developed on the line for an instant, but went taut again,
pulling her forward, which she took to mean that Sam was staggering
ahead, trying to stay on his fee, the girl pressing against his lower
legs and threatening to push them out from under him. If Sam had been
brought down, and seized by tumultuous currents, the line would not have
been merely taut; the drag would have been great enough to pull Tessa
off her feet.

- 399 She heard a lot of splashing ahead.                  A soft curse from Sam.

The water was creeping higher. At first she thought she was imagining
it, but then she realized the torrent had risen to above her knees.

The damned darkness was the worst of it, not being able to see anything,
virtually blind, unable to be sure what was hapening. suddenly she was
jerked forward again. TWo, three-oh, a dozen steps.

it fall!

stumbling, almost losing her balance, realizing that they were on the
edge of disaster, Tessa leaned backward on the line, using utness to
steady herself instead of rushing forward with the hope of developing
slack again. She hoped to God she didn't t too much and get yanked off
her feet.

me swayed. The line pulled hard at her waist. Without slack loop
through her hands, she was unable to take most of the . with her arms.

The pressure of water against the back of her legs was growing.

her feet skidded.

the videotape fast-forwarded through an editing machine, strange
thoughts flew through her mind, scores of them in a few seconds, all
unbidden, and some of them surprised her. She thought about living,
surviving, about not wanting to die, and that wasn't so surprising, but
then she thought about Chrissie, not wanting to fail the girl, and in
her mind she saw a fled image of her and Chrissie together, in a cozy
house someWhere, living as mother and daughter, and she was surprised at
how much she wanted that, which seemed wrong because Chrissie's parents


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were not dead, as far as anyone knew, might not even be hopelessly
changed, because the conversion -whatever it was-just might be
reversible. Chrissie's family might be put back together again. Tessa
couldn't see a picture in her mind. It didn't seem as much a
possibility as she He together. But it might happen. Then she thought
of ever having a chance to make love to him, and that her, because
although he was sort of attractive, she truly realized she was drawn to
him in any romantic way. Of -fis grit in the face of spiritual despair
was appealing, and strictly serious four-reasons-for-living shtick made
him an intriguing challenge. Could she give him a fifth? Or supplant
Goldie Hawn as the fourth? But until she found herself tottering on the
brink of a watery death, she didn't realize how very much he had
attracted her in such a short time.

Her feet skidded again. Beneath the surging water, the no, was much
more slippery than it had been in the stone channel as if moss grew on
the concrete. Tessa tried to dig in her heels. Sam cursed under his
breath. Chrissie made a coughing choking sound.

The depth of water in the center of the tunnel had risen about eighteen
or twenty inches.

A moment later the line jerked hard, then went completely slack.

The rope had snapped.          Sam and Chrissie had been swept down into the
tunnel.

The gurgle-slosh-slap of gushing water echoed off the wall and echoes of
the echoes overlaid previous echoes, and Tessa's heart was pounding so
loud she could hear it, but still she should have heard their cries,
too, as they were carried away. Yet for one awful moment they were
silent.

Then Chrissie coughed again.             Only a few feet away.

A flashlight snapped on.           Sam was hooding most of the light with his
hand.

Chrissie was sideways in the passage, pressed up out of the worst of the
flow, her back and the palms of both hands braced against the side of
the tunnel.

Sam stood with his feet planted wide apart. Water churned and foamed
around his legs. He had gotten turned around. He was facing uphill
now.

The rope hadn't snapped, after all; the tension had been released
because both Sam and Chrissie had regained their equilibrium.

"You all right?"        Sam whispered to the girl.

She wrinkled her face in distaste, spat once, twice, and said, "Yuch."

Looking at Tessa, Sam said, "Okay?"

She couldn't speak. A rock-hard lump had formed in her throat. She
swallowed a few times, blinked. A delayed wave of relief passed through
her, reducing the almost unbearable pressure in her chest, and at last
she said, "Okay. Yeah. ka believed when they got to the end of the
culvert without 1. He stood for a moment, just outside the lower mouth
n, happily looking up at the sky. Because of the thick fog He couldn't
actually see the sky, but that was a technicality; he felt relieved to
good to be out in the open air again, if still knee muddy water.


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They were virtually in a river now. Either the rain was falling in the
hills, at the far east end of town, or some break in the system had
collapsed. The level had swiftly risen t midthigh on pas Sam and nearly
to Chrissie's waist, and it tugged and poured from the conduit at their
back with impressive force.   Keeping their footing in those cataracts
was getting more difficult by the second.

Sam turned, reached for the girl, drew her close, and said, I'm going to
hold tight to your arm from here on."

She nodded.

The night was grave-deep, and even inches from her face,he could see
only a shadowy impression of her features. When he looked up at Tessa,
who stood a few feet behind the girl, she was not more than a black
shape and might not have been Tessa at all.

holding 9 fast to the girl, he turned and looked again at the He block
ahead of them, this new section of stone water tunnel had extended for
two blocks before pouring the waters forth into another one-block length
of open drainage channel Just as Harry had remembered from the days when
he was a kid and, against every admonition of his parents, had played in
the drainage system. Thank God for disobedient children She nodded,
still gagging on the dirty water she had swallowed ahead.

the water course fed into another concrete culvert. That pipe, according
to Harry, terminated at the mouth of the long vertical at the west end
of town. Supposedly, in the last ten feet of sloping line, a row of
sturdy, vertical iron bars was set inches apart and extended floor to
ceiling, creating a barrier through which only water and smaller objects
could pass.

There was virtually no chance of being carried all the way in
two-hundred-foot drop.

But Sam didn't want to risk it. There must be no more fan After being
washed to the end and crashing against the safety barrier, if they were
not suffering from myriad broken bones, and they were able to get to
their feet and move, climbing back through that long culvert, on a steep
slope, against the onrushing flow of the water, was not an ordeal he was
willing to contemplate let alone endure.

All of his life he had felt he'd failed people. Though he been only
seven when his mother had died in the accident, he had always been eaten
by guilt related to her death, as if he should have been able to save
her in spite of his tender age and in of having been pinned in the
wreckage of the car with her. Lab Sam had never been able to please his
drunken, mean, son-of-a-bitch of a father-and had suffered grievously
for his failure. Like Harry, he felt that he had failed the people of
nam, though the decision to abandon them had been made by authorities
who far outranked him and with whom he could have had no influence.
Neither of the Bureau agents who had died with him had died because of
him, yet he felt he had failed them too. He had failed Karen, somehow,
though people told him he was mad to think that he had any
responsibility for her cancer it was just that he couldn't help thinking
that if he'd loved her more, loved her harder, she would have found the
will to pull through. God knew, he had failed him Chrissie squeezed his
hand.

He returned the squeeze.




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She seemed so small.

Earlier in the day, gathered in Harry's kitchen, they'd had a
conversation about responsibility. Now, suddenly, him real 4if - 403
could never be excessive. He had never imagined that the key insights
of his life would come to him while he was standing nearly waist-deep in
muddy water in a drainage channel on the run from enemies both human and
inhuman, but that was where he received it. He realized that his
problem was the alacrity with which he shouldered responsibility or the
weight of it that he was willing to carry. No, hell no, the problem was
that he had allowed his sense of responsibility to affect his ability to
cope with failure. All men failed from time to time, and often the
fault lay not in the man himself but the role of fate. When he failed,
he had to learn not only to go on but to enjoy going on. Failure could
not be allowed to rob him of the very pleasure of life. Such a turning
away from life was blasphemous, if you believed in God-and just plain
stupid if you didn't. It was like saying, "Men fail, but I shouldn't
because I'm more than just a man, I'm somewhere up there between the
angels and God." He saw why he had lost Scott too he had lost his own
love of life, his sense of fun, and he ceased to be able to share
anything meaningful with the boy-or to halt Scott's own descent into
nihilism when it had begun.

Al the moment, if he had tried to count his reasons for living, it would
have had more than four items. It would have had hundreds. Thousands.

All of this understanding came to him in an instant, while he was
holding Chrissie's hand, as if the flow of time had been stretched by
some quirk of relativity. He realized that if he failed to save the
girl or Tessa, but got out of this mess himself, he would nevertheless
have to rejoice at his own salvation and get on with life. Although
their situation was dark and their hope gone, his spirits soared, and he
almost laughed aloud. The living nightmare they were enduring in
Moonlight Cove had profoundly shaken him, revealing important truths to
him, truths which were simple and should have been easy to see during
his Years of torment, but which he received gratefully in spite of their
simplicity and his own previous thickheadedness. Maybe the truth was
always simple when you found it.

that his sense of responsibility was so highly developed that-, .. Y"h,
okay, maybe he could go on now even if he failed in bordered on
obsession, but he still agreed with what Harry was saying"possibilities
to others, even if he lost Chrissie and Tessa*Oo shit, he wasn't going
to lose them. Damned if he was.

said A man's commitment to others, especially to friends 3 Damned if he
was.

He held Chrissie's hand and cautiously edged along the stone channel,
grateful for the comparative unevenness of that pavement and the
moss-free traction it provided. The water was deep enough to give him a
slight buoyant feeling, which walking" he dragged his feet along the
bottom.

In less than a minute they reached a set of iron rungs mortars into the
masonry of the channel wall. Tessa moved in, and for a while they all
just hung there, gripping iron, grateful for the solid feel of it and
the anchor it provided.

A couple of minutes later, when the rain abruptly slacked Sam was ready
to move again. Being careful not to - step on Tessa's and Chrissie's
hands, he climbed a couple of rungs and looked out at the street.


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Nothing moved but the fog.

This section of open watercourse flanked Moonlight Co Central School.
The athletic field was just a few feet from git and, sitting beyond that
open space, barely visible in the darkness and mist, was the school
itself, illuminated only by a couple of dim security lamps.

The property was encircled by a nine-foot-high chain fence. But Sam
wasn't daunted by that. Fences always had gates.    - 405 -room CIO set,
pull down the trap, open the folding stairs, and c his head up to look
around, maybe he wouldn't be diligent enough to be t probing every
corner of the place. When he saw bare walls and a flurry of spiders on




his first sweep of the flash, maybe he would click off the beam and
retreat.

0 the attic at all would look into it properly, exploring every cormer.
But whether that hope was absurd or not, Harry clung to it; he was good
at nurturing hope, making hearty stew from the thinnest broth of it,
because for half his life, hope was mostly what had sustained him.

He was not uncomfortable. As preparation for the unheated atic with
Sam's help to speed the dressing process, he had put on wool socks,
warmer pants than what he had been wearing, .and two sweaters.

r Funny, how a lot of people seemed to think that a paralyzed man could
feel nothing in his unresponsive extremities. In some that was true;
all nerves were blunted, all feeling lost.

out spinal injuries came in myriad types; short of a total severing of
the cord, the range of sensations left to the victim varied widely.

In Harry's case, though he had lost all use of one arm and leg and
nearly all use of the other leg, he could still feel hot and cold. When
something pricked him he was aware-if not of pain-at least of a blunt
pressure.

Physically, he felt much less than when he'd been a whole Man; no
argument about that. But all feelings were not physical. oddly enough,
though he was sure that few people would believe him, his handicap
actually had enriched his emotional life. Though by necessity something
of a recluse, he had learned to compensate for a dearth of human
contact. Books had helped. Books opened the world to him. And the
telescope. But mostly his unwavering will to lead as full a life as
possible was what had kept him Whole in mind and heart.

If these were his final hours, he would blow out the candle with no
bitterness when the time came to extinguish it. He re it harder to put
each foot down after he lifted it, so instead-was absurd, of course.
Anyone who went to the trouble to look Harry's waited in the attic,
hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

He was propped against the outer wall of the long, unlighted chamber,
tucked in the corner at the extreme far end from the trapdoor through
which he had been lifted. Wtted what he had lost, but more important,
he treasured what There was nothing had kept. In the last analysis, he
felt that he had lived a life in that upper room behind which he could
hide.


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But if someone went so far as to empty out the closet rnasl was in the
balance was good, worthwhile, precious.

He had two guns with him. A .45 revolver. A .38 pistol. If they came
into the attic after him, he would use the pistol on them until it was
empty. Then he would make them eat all but one of the rounds in the
revolver. That last cartridge would be for himself.

He had brought no extra bullets. In a crisis, a man wit only one good
hand could not reload fast enough to make the effort more than a comic
finale.

The drumming of rain on the roof had subsided. He wondered if this was
just another lull in the storm or if it was ending.

It would be nice to see the sun again.

He worried more about Moose than about himself. The pool damn dog was
down there alone. When the Boogeymen or the makers came at last, he
hoped they wouldn't hal And if they came into the attic and forced him
to shoot he hoped that Moose would not be long without To Loman, as he
cruised, Moonlight Cove seemed both dea and teeming with life.

Judged by the usual signs of life in a small town, the bur was an empty
husk, as defunct as any sun-dried ghost town in the heart of the Mohave.
The shops, bars, and restaurants closed. Even the usually crowded Perez
Family restaurant shuttered, dark; no one had showed up to open for
business The only pedestrians out walking in the aftermath were foot
patrols or conversion teams. Likewise, t and two-man patrols in private
cars had the streets However, the town seethed with perverse life.

he saw strange, swift figures moving through the fog, still secretive
but far bolder than they had been for nights. When he stopped or slowed
to study those mar udefl 407 them paused in deep shadows to gaze at him
with blue or green or smoldering red eyes, as if they were recconing
their chances of attacking his black-and-white and pulling him out of it
before he could take his foot off the brake and get out of there.
Watching them, he was filled with an urge to abandon his car, his
clothes, and the rigidity of his form, to join them in their simpler
world of hunting, and rutting. Each time he quickly turned away from
them and drove on before they-or he-could act upon such impulses. Here
and there he passed houses in which eerie lights wed, and against the
windows of which moved shadows so grotesque and unearthly that his heart
quickened and his palms got damp, though he was well removed from them
and probably beyond their reach. He did not stop to investigate what
creatures might inhabit those places or what tasks they were engaged
upon, for he sensed that they were kin to the thing he had become and
that they were more dangerous, in many ways than the prowling
regressives.

He now lived in a Lovecraftian world of primal and cosmic kingdoms, of
monstrous entities stalking the night, where human beings were reduced
to little more than cattle, where the JudeoChristian universe of a
love-motivated God had been replaced by the creation of the old gods who
were driven by dark lusts, a need for cruelty, and a never-satisfied
thirst for power. In the air, in the eddying fog, in the shadowed and
dripping trees, in unlighted streets, and even in the sodium-yellow
glare of the lamps on the main streets, there was the pervasive sense
that nothing good could happen that night . . . but that anything
else could happen, no matter how fantastical or bizarre.



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Having read uncounted paperbacks over the years, he was familiar with
Lovecraft. He had not liked him a hundredth as well as Louis L'Amour,
largely because L'Amour had dealt in reality, while H.P. Lovecraft had
traded in the impossible.

It had seemed to Loman at the time. Now he knew that "'SU could create,
in the real world, hells equal to any that the most imaginative writer
could dream up.

LOvecraftian despair and terror flooded through Moonlight in greater
quantities than those in which the recent rain fall As he drove through
those transmuted streets, Loman kept his service revolver on the car
seat beside him, within easy reach.

Shaddack he must find Shaddack.

Going south on Juniper, he stopped at the intersection of Ocean Avenue.
At the same time another black-and-white passed by Loman, headed north.

at the stop sign directly opposite No traffic was moving on Ocean.
Rolling his window down, Loman pulled slowly across the intersection and
braked with no more than a foot separated the other cruiser, ore From
the number on the door, above the police-department shield, Loman knew
it was Neil Penniworth's patrol car. when he looked through the side
window, he did not see the young officer. He saw something that might
once have been Penniworth, still vaguely human, illuminated by the gas
gauge and speedometer lights but more directly by the glow of the mobile
VDT in there. Twin cables, like the one that had erupted from Denny's
forehead to join him more intimately with his PC, sprouted from
Penniworth's skull; and although the light was poor, it appeared as if
one of those extrusions snaked into the dashboard, while the other
looped through the steering wheel and   down toward the console-mounted
computer. The shape of Penniworth's skull had changed dramatically,
too, drawing forward.

bristling with spiky features that must have been sensors of son kind
and that gleamed softly like burnished metal in the light of the VDT;
his shoulders were larger, queerly scalloped pointed; he appeared
earnestly to have sought the form of a baroque robot. His hands were
not on the steering wheel, or perhaps he did not even have hands any
more; Loman suspected that Penniworth had not just become one with his
mobile computer terminal but with the patrol car itself.

Penniworth slowly turned his head to face Loman.

In his eyeless sockets, crackling white fingers of electricity wiggled
and jittered ceaselessly.

Shaddack had said that the New People's freedom from emotion had given
them the ability to make far greater use of their innate brain power,
even to the extent of exerting mental control over the form and function
of matter. Their consciousness dictated their form; to escape a world
in which they were ne permitted emotion, they could become whatever they
chose. - 409 they could not return to the Old People they had been.

Evidently life as a cyborg was free of anxiety, for Penniworth had
sought release from fear and longing-perhaps some kind of iteration, as
well-in this monstrous incarnation.

But what did he feel now? What purpose did he have?                        And he remain in
that altered state because he truly preferred it?

was he like Peyser-trapped either for physical reasons or an aberrant


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aspect of his own psychology would not allow him to reassume the human
form to which, otherwise, he preferred to return?

Loman reached for the revolver on the seat beside him.

A segmented cable burst from the driver's door of Penniworth's car,
without shredding Metal, extruding as if a part of the door had melted
and re-formed to produce it-except that it looked at least semiorganic.
The probe struck Loman's side window with a snap.

The revolver eluded Loman's sweaty hand, for he could not take his eyes
off the probe to look for the gun.

The glass did not crack, but a quarter-size patch bubbled and transmuted
in an instant, and the probe weaved into the car, straight at Loman's
face. It had a fleshy sucker mouth, like an eel, but the tiny, sharply
pointed teeth within it looked like steel.

He ducked his head, forgot about the revolver, and tramped the
accelerator to the floor. The Chevy almost seemed to rear a fraction of
a second; then with a surge of power that slammed Loman into the seat,
it shot forward, south on Juniper. For a moment the probe between the
cars stretched to main brushed the bridge of Loman's nose-and abruptly
eled back into the vehicle from which it had come.

He drove fast all the way to the end of Juniper before slowing down to
make a turn. The wind of his passage whistled at the hole that the
probe had melted in his window.

Loman's worst fear seemed to be unfolding. Those New people* Who didn't
choose regression were going to transform themselves-or be transformed
at the demand of Shaddack-into hybrids of man and machine.

Find Shaddack, Murder the maker and release the anguished hunters he had
made.


Preceded by Sam and followed by Tessa, Chrissie squirmed through the
mushy turf of the athletic field. In places the grass gave way to gluey
mud, which pulled noisily at her shoes and she thought she sounded like
a sort of goofy alien plodding along on big, sucker-equipped feet. Then
it occurred to her that in a way she was an alien in Moonlight Cove to a
different sort of creature from what the majority of the citizens had
become.

They were two-thirds of the way across the field when they were halted
by a shrill cry that split the night as cleanly as a sharp ax would
split a dry cord of wood. That unhuman cry rose and fell and rose
again, savage and uncanny but the call of one of those beasts that she'd
thought were aliens. Though the rain had stopped, the air was laden
with moisture, and in that humidity, the unearthly shriek carried wel
like the bell-clear notes of a distant trumpet.

Worse, the call at once was answered by the beast's excited kin. At
least half a dozen equally chilling shrieks arose perhaps as far south
as Paddock Lane and as far north as Holliwell Road, from the high hills
in the east end of town and the beach-facing bluffs only a couple of
blocks to the west.

All of a sudden Chrissie longed for the cold, lightless cul churning
with waist-deep water so filthy that it might have come from the devil's
own bathtub. This open ground seemed dangerous by comparison.



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A new cry arose as the others faded, and it was closer than any that had
come before it. Too close.

"Let's get inside," Sam said urgently.

Chrissie was beginning to admit to herself that she might make a good
Andre Norton heroine, after all. She was sex - 411 grainy-eyed with
exhaustion, starting to feel sorry for herself and hungry again. She
was sick and tired of adventure. She longed for warm rooms and lazy
days with good books and going to movie theaters and wedges of
double-fudge cake. By this time a true adventure-story heroine would
have worked out a ks of brilliant stratagems that would have brought the
beasts of moonlight Cove to ruin, would have found a way to turn the
-people into harmless car-washing machines, and would be on her way to
being crowned princess of the kingdom by acclaimation of the respectful
and grateful citizenry.

They hurried to the end of the field, rounded the bleachers, sed the
deserted parking lot to the back of the school.

The thing attacked them.

Okay you, God.       Your friend, Chrissie.

the thing howled again.

mes even God seemed to have a perverse streak.

There were six doors at different places along the back of the school.
They moved from one to another, as Sam tried them all examineding the
locks in the hand-hooded beam of his flashlight. He apparently couldn't
pick any of them, which disappointed her, because she'd imagined FBI men
were so well ed that in an emergency they could open a bank vault with
Oft and a hairpin.

He also tried a few windows and spent what seemed a long time peering
through the panes with his flashlight. He was examining not the rooms
beyond but the inner sills and frames of the windows.

' At the last door-which was the only one that had glass in the top of
it, the others being blank rectangles of metal-Sam clicked Off the
flashlight, looked solemnly at Tessa, and spoke to her in it low voice.

"I don't think there's an alarm system here. Could be wrong. But
there's no alarm tape on the glass and, as far as I can see, no
hard-wired contacts along the frames or at the window latches."

"Are those the only two kinds of alarms they might have?" she whispered.

"Well, there're motion-detection systems, either employing electronic
transmitters or electric eyes. But they'd be too elaborate for just a
school, and probably too sensitive for a building like this."

"So now what?"

"Now I break a window."

Chrissie expected him to withdraw a roll o from a pocket of his coat and
tape one of the par sound of shattering glass and to prevent the sha
noisily to the floor inside. That was how they usually diid it in
books. But he just turned sideways to the door, drew h forward, then
rammed it back and drove his elbow thro eight-inch-square pane in the
lower-right corner of the window grid. Glass broke and clattered to the


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floor with an awful racket.            Maybe he had forgotten to bring his tape.

He reached through the empty pane, felt for the locks, engaged them, and
went inside first. Chrissie followed him, trying not to step on the
broken glass.

Sam switched on the flashlight. He didn't hood it quite 1 much as he
had done outside, though he was obviously trying to keep the backwash of
the beam off the windows.

They were in a long hallway. It was full of the cedar-pine smell that
came from the crumbly green disinfectant and di attractor that for years
the janitors had sprinkled on the floor and then swept up, until the
tiles and walls had become impregnated with the scent. The aroma was
familiar to her from Thomas Jefferson Elementary, and she was
disappointed to find it here. She had thought of high school as a
special, mysterious place but how special or mysterious could it be if
they used the same disinfectant as at the grade school?

Tessa quietly closed the outside door behind them.

They stood listening for a moment.

The school was silent.

They moved down the hall, looking into classrooms an laboratories and
supply closets on both sides, searching for the computer lab. In a
hundred and fifty feet they reached a junction with another hall. They
stood in the intersection for a moment heads cocked, listening again.

The school was still silent.

And dark.     The only light in any direction was the flashlight which Sam
still held    in his left hand but which he no longer hooded with his
right. He     had withdrawn his revolver from his holster and needed his
right hand    for that.

After a long wait, Sam said, "Nobody's here."

- 413 which did seem to be the case.

Chrissie felt better, safer.

briefly go on the Other hand, if he really believed they were the only
people in the school, why didn't he put his gun away?

Shaddackdrove through his domain, impatient for midnight, which was
still five hours away, Thomas Shaddack had largely reached a childlike
condition. Now that his triumph was at hand he could cast off the
masquerade of a grown man, which he had long sustained, and he was
relieved to do so. He had not been an adult, really, but a boy whose
emotional development had been forever arrested at the age of twelve,
when the image of the moonhawk had not only come to him but been in him;
he had thereafter faked emotional ascension to match his physical
growth.

Now it was no longer necessary to pretend.

On one level, he had always known this about himself, and had considered
it to be his great strength, an advantage over those who had put
childhood behind them. A boy of twelve ,could harbor and nurture a
dream with more determination than an adult, for adults were constantly
distracted by conflicting needs and desires. A boy on the edge of


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puberty, however, had the single-mindedness to focus on and dedicate
himself only to a single Big Dream. Properly bent, a twelve-year-old
boy was the perfect monomaniac.

The Moonhawk Project, his Big Dream of godlike power, would not have
reached fruition if he had matured in the usual way. He owed his
impending triumph to arrested development, a boy again, not secretly any
more




but openly, eager for his every whim, to take whatever he wanted, to do
things that broke the rules. twelve-year-old boys reveled in breaking
the rules, challenging authority. At their worst, twelve year-old boys
were naturally lawless, on the verge of hormonal induced rebellion.

But he was more than lawless. He was a boy flying on cotton candy that
had been eaten long ago but that had left a psychic not a physical
residue. He was a boy who knew that he was god. Any boy's potential
for cruelty paled in comparison to the cruelty of the gods.

To pass the time until midnight, he imagined what he would do with his
power when the last of Moonlight Cove had fallen under his command. Some
of his ideas made him shiver in a strange mixture of excitement and
disgust.

He was on    Iceberry Way when he realized the Indian was with him. He was
surprised    when he turned his head and saw Runningdeer sitting in the
passenger    seat. Indeed he stopped the the middle of the street and
stared in    disbelief, Shocked and afraid.

But Runningdeer did not menace him. In fact the Indian didn't even
speak to him or look at him, but stared straight ahead through the
windshield. Slowly understanding came to Shaddack. The Indian's spirit
was his now, his possession as surely as was the van. The spirits had
given him the Indian as an advisor, as a reward for having made a
success of Moonhawk. But he, not Runningdeer, was in control this time,
and the Indian would speak only when spoken to.

"Hello, Runningdeer," he said.

The Indian looked at him.

"Hello, Little Chief."

"You're mine now."

"Yes, Little Chief."

For just a brief flicker of time, it occurred to Shaddack that he was
mad and that Runningdeer was an illusion coughed up by a sick mind. But
monomaniacal boys do not have the capacity for an extended examination
of their mental condition, and the thought passed out of his mind as
quickly as it had entered.

th To Runningdeer, he said, "You'll do what I say."

"Always."

Immensely pleased, Shaddack let up on the brake pedal and drove on. The
headlights revealed an amber-eyed thing Of fantastic shape, drinking
from a puddle on the pavement. He - 415 to regard it as a thing of


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consequence, and when it loped away he let it vanish from his memory as
swiftly as it disappeared from the night-mantled street.

Sliding a sly glance at the Indian, he said, "You know one I'M going to
do some of these days?"

"What's that, Little Chief?" When I've converted everyone, not just the
people in moonlight Cove but everyone in the world, when no one stands
against me then I'll spend some time tracking down your family, all of
your remaining brothers, sisters, even your cousins, and I'll find of
their children, and all their wives and husbands, and all their
children's wives and husbands . . . and I'll make them pay your
charges, I'll really, really make them pay." A whining Wance had
entered his voice. He disapproved of the tone he himself was using, but
he could not lose it.

"I'll kill all them hack them to bloody bits and pieces, I'll do it
myself. I'll let them know that it's because of their relation to you
that they have to suffer, and they'll despise you and curse your name,
they'll be sorry you ever existed. And I'll rape all the women and hurt
them, hurt them all, really bad, and then I'll kill them too. What you
think of that? Huh?"

"if it's what you want, Little Chief."

"Damn right it's what I want."

."Then you may have it."

"Damn right I may have it."

Shaddack was surprised when tears came to his eyes.                        He stopped at an
intersection and didn't move on.

"It wasn't right what you did to me.

The Indian said nothing.

"Say it wasn't right!"

"It wasn't right, Little Chief.              It wasn't right at all."

"it wasn't right."

Shaddack pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He
blotted his eyes. Soon his tears dried up.

He smiled at the nightscape revealed through the windshield.

He glanced at Runningdeer.

The indian was staring forward, silent.

He said, "Of course, without you, I might never have heard of the
moonhawk."


The computer lab was on the ground floor, in the center of the building,
near a confluence of corridors. Windows looked on a courtyard but could
not be seen from any street, which allowed Sam to switch on the overhead
lights.

It was a large chamber, laid out like a language lab, with each VDT in
its own three-sided cubicle. Thirty computers-at the upper end,


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hard-disk systems-were lined up along three walls and a back-to-back row
down the middle of the room.

New Wave logo appeared in the center of the screen.

With no telephones, no modems, maybe the computers really had been given
to the school for student training, without additional intention of
tying the kids to New Wave during this stage of the Moonhawk Project.

The logo blinked off, and a menu appeared on the screen. Because they
were hard-disk machines with tremendous capacity, their programs were
already loaded and ready to go as soon as the system was powered up. The
The menu offered him choices A. TRAINING 1 B. TRAINING 2 - 417 word
PROCESSING ACCOUNTING C)THER Sam hesitated, not because he couldn't
decide what letter to choose but because he was suddenly afraid of using
the machine.

avidly remembered the Coltranes. Though it had seemed to him that they
had elected to meld with their computers, that their rination began
within them, he had no way of knowing then that it had not been the
other way around. Maybe the computers had somehow reached out and
seized them. That was impossible. Besides, thanks to Harry's
observations, they knew that people in Moonlight Cove were being
converted by injection, not by some insidious force that passed through
computer keys into the pads of their fingers. He was hesitant
nevertheless.

Finally he pressed E and got a list of school subjects until he finally
got a menu on which the final selection was NEw WAVE. When he keyed in
that choice, words began moving across the screen.

HELLO.    STUDENT.

YOU ARE NOW IN CONTACT with THE SUPERCOMPUTER AT new WAVE
MICROTECHNOLOGY.

MY NAME IS SUN.

I'M HERE TO SERVE YOU.

The school machines were wired directly to New Wave.                       Modems now were
unnecessary.

Looking around at the wealth of hardware, Tessa said, "No. ALL
LANGUAGES New Wave sure was generous, huh?" MATH "Maybe 'thorough' is a
better word," Sam said. ALL SCIENCES He walked along a row of VDTS,
looking for telephone lines and modems, but he found none. History
ENGLISH Tessa and Chrissie stayed back by the open lab door, peering out
at the dark hallway.

Sam sat down at one of the machines and switched it on. He pressed F. A
third menu appeared, and the process continued. would YOU LIKE TO SEE
MENUS?

OR WILL YOU SPECIFY INTEREST?

Considering the wealth of menus in the police department system alone,
which he had reviewed last night in the patrol car he figured he could
sit here all evening just looking at menu after menu after submenu
before he found what he wanted.

He typed in MOONLIGHT COVE POLICE DEPARTMENT THIS FILE RESTRICTED.



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PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF YOUR TEACHER.

He supposed that the teachers had individual codes that, depending on
whether or not they were allow them to access otherwise restricted data
To hit on one of their codes was to begin trying combinations of digits,
but since he didn't even know how many were in a code, there were
millions if not billions of possibilities. He could sit there until his
hair turned white and his teeth fell out, and not luck into a good
number.

Last night he had used Officer Reese Dorn's personal computer-access
code, and he wondered whether it worked only on a designated
police-department VDT or whether any Computer tied to Sun would accept
it. Nothing lost for trying.

He typed in 2B2699.

The screen cleared.         Then HELLO, OFFICER DORN.

Again he requested the police-department data system.

This time it was given to him.

CHOOSE ONE A. DISPATCHER B. CENTRAL FILES C.                      BULLETIN BOARD 0.
OUTSYSTEM MODEM He pressed 0.

He was shown a list of computers nationwide with which SUN could link
through the police-department's modern.

- 419 His hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He was sure something
was going to go wrong, if only because nothing had thus far, not from
the minute he had driven into town.

He glanced at Tessa.

"Everything okay?"

She squinted at the dark hallway, then blinked at him.

"Seems ok.     Any luck?"

...   maybe."     He turned to the computer again and y, "Please....

He scanned the long roster of possible outsystem links. He found FBI
KEy, which was the name of the latest and most sophisticated of the
Bureau's computer networks-a highly secure, interoffice Storage,
-retrieval, and -transmission system housed at headquarters in
Washington, which had been installed only within the year. Supposedly
no one but approved agents at the home office in the Bureau's field
offices, accessing with their own special codes, were able to use FBI
KEY.

So much for high security.

expecting trouble, Sam selected FBI KEY. The menu disappeared. The
screen remained blank for a moment. Then, the display, which proved to
be a full-color monitor, the FBI i appeared in blue and gold. The word
KEY appeared bet.

at, a series of questions was flashed on the screen-WHAT IS YOUR BUREAU
ID NUMBER? NAME? DATE OF BIRTH? DATE OF BUREAU INDUCTION? MOTHER'S
maden NAME?-and when he answered those, he was rewarded with access.

"Bingo!"     he said, daring to be optimistic.


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Tessa said, "What's happened?"

"I'm in the Bureau's main system in D.C."

"You're a hacker," Chrissie said.

"I'm a fumbler.       But I'm in."

"Now what?"      Tessa asked.

"I'll ask for the current operator in a minute. But first I want to
send greetings to every damned office in the country, make um all sit up
and take notice."

"Greetings?

" Prom the extensive FBI KEY menu, Sam called up item G IMMEDIATE
INTEROFFICE TRANSMISSION. He intended to send a message to every Bureau
field office in the country, not just to San Francisco, which was the
closest one from which he hoped to obtain help. There was one chance in
a million that the night operator in San Francisco would overlook the
message among reams of other transmisions, in spite of the ACTION ALERT
heading he would put on to it. If that happened, if someone was asleep
at the wheel att this most inopportune of moments, they wouldn't be for
long, because every office in the country would be asking HQ for more
details about the Moonlight Cove bulletin and requesting an explanation
of why they had been fed an alert about a situation outside their
regions.

He did not understand half of what was happening in this town. He could
not have explained, in the shorthand of a Bureau bulletin, even as much
as he did understand. But he quickly crafted a summary which he
believed was as accurate as it had to be-and which he hoped would get
them off their duffs and running.

ACTION ALERT MOONLIGHT COVE, CALIFORNIA * SCORES DEAD.                     CONDITION
DETERIORATING.

hundreds MORE COULD DIE WITHIN HOURS.

* NEW WAVE MICROTECHNOLOGY engaged IN ILLICIT EXPERIMENTS ON Human
SUBJECTS, WITHOUT their knowledge. conspiracy OF wide SCOPE.

thousands OF PEOPLE contaminated.

* REPEAT, ENTIRE population OF TOWN CONTAMINATED.

* * SITUATION EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

CONTAMINATED CITIZENS SUFFER LOSs OF FACULTIES, EXHIBIT TENDENCY To
extreme VIOLENCE.

* * REPEAT, EXTREME VIOLENCE.

REQUEST IMMEDIATE QUARANTINE by - 421 ARMY SPECIAL FORCES.                      ALSO REQUEST
IMMEDIATE, MASSIVE, ARMED BACKUP BY Bureau PERSONNEL.

He Gave his position at the high school on Roshmore, so incoming support




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would have a place to start looking for him, though he was not certain
that he, Tessa, and Chrissie could safely continue to take refuge there
until reinforcements arrived.

He signed off with his name and Bureau ID number.

This message was not going to prepare them for the shock of what they
would find in Moonlight Cove, but at least it would get them on the move
and encourage them to come prepared for anything.

He typed TRANSMIT, but then he had a thought and wiped the word from the
screen. He typed REPEAT transmission the computer asked NUMBER OF
REHEATS?

He typed 99.

The computer acknowledged the order.

Then he typed TRANSMIT again and pressed the ENTER key key.

WHAT OFFICES?

He typed ALL.

The screen went blank.          Then TRANSMITTING.

At the moment every KEY laser printer in every Bureau field office in
the country was printing out the first of ninety-nine copies of his
message. Night staffers everywhere soon would be climbing the walls.

He almost whooped with delight.

there was more to be done.            They were not out of this yet.

Sam quickly returned to the KEY menu and tapped selection A-NIGHT
OPERATOR. Five seconds later he was in touch with the agent manning the
KEY post at the Bureau's central 'communications room in Washington. A
number flashed on the screen-the operator's ID- followed by a name, ANNE
DENTON, Taking immense satisfaction in using high technology to the
downfall of Thomas Shaddack, New Wave, and the Moonhawk Project, Sam
entered into a long-distance, unspoken 442, electronic conversation with
Anne Denton, intending to spell out the horrors of Moonlight Cove in
more detail.

Though Loman no longer was interested in the activities Of the police
department, he switched on the VDT in his car every few minutes or so to
see if anything was happening. He expected Shaddack to be in touch with
members of the department from time to time. If he was lucky enough to
catch a VDT dialog between Shaddack and other cops, he might be able to
pinpoint the bastard's location from something that was said.

He didn't leave the computer on all the time because he was

afraid of it. He didn't think it would jump at him and suck his brains
or anything, but he did recognize that working with it too long might
induce in him a temptation to become what Penniworth and Denny had
become-in the same way that being around the regressives had given rise
to a powerful urge to devolve.

He had just pulled to the side of Holliwell Road, where his restless
cruising had taken him, had switched on the machine was engaged in


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conversation, when the word ALERT appeared in large letters on the
screen. He pulled his hand back from the keyboard as if something had
nipped at him.

The computer said, SUN REQUESTS DIALOGUE.

Sun? The supercomputer at New Wave?                 Why would it accessing the police
department's system?

Before another officer at headquarters or in another car could query the
machine, Loman took charge and typed DIALog APPROVED.

REQUEST CLARIFICATION, Sun said.

Loman typed YES, which could mean GO AHEAD.

- 423 answering its questions from its own self-assessment program which
allowed it to monitor its own workings as if it were an observer, Sun
said, ARE telephone CALLS FROM unapproved NUMBERS IN moon COVE ANO ALL
NUMBERS OUTSIDE restricted?

Lomand was about to call up the dialogue channel to see if he could
query Sun as to Booker's activities and where SUN'S RESERVED TELEPHONE
LINES INJDED IN AFOREMENTIONED PROHIBITION? the NEW Wave computer
asked, speaking of itself in third person. Loman typed UNCLEAR.

trendy leading him through it step by step, Sun explained it hill its
own dedicated phone lines, outside the main dialing area by which its
users could call other computers all over the country and access them.

He already knew this, so he typed YES.

ARE SUN'S RESERVED telephone LINES INJOINED IN AFOREMENTIONED
PROHIBITION? it god.

If he'd had Denny's interest in Computers, he might have turn
immediately to what was happening, but he was still confused So he typed
-why?-meaning Why do YOU ASK?

OUTSYSTEM MODEM NOW IN USE.

BY WHOM?

SAMUEL BOOKER.

Loman would have laughed if he had been capable of glee.

The agent had found a way out of Moonlight Cove, and now the shit was
going to hit the fan at last.

another name appeared on the upper left corner of the
screen-Shaddack-indicating that New Wave's own mo was watching the
dialogue on his VDT and was cutting in.

Lomand was content to let his maker and Sun converse uninterrupted
Shaddack asked for more details.

Sun responded FBI KEY SYSTEM ACCESSED.

Loman could imagine Shaddack's shock. The beast master's id appeared on
the screen portions. Which meant he wanted a menu of options from Sun
to deal with the situation.




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Sun presented him with five choices, the fifth of which was SHUT down,
and Shaddack chose that one.

A moment later Sun reported FBI KEY SYSTEM/1 LIN SHUT DOWN.

Loman hoped that Booker had gotten enough of a message out to blow
Shaddack and Moonhawk out of the water.

On the screen, from Shaddack to Sun BOOKER'S terminal?                     DO YOU REQUIRE
LOCATION?

YES.

MOONLIGHT COVE CENTRAL SCHOOL, COMPUTER LAB.

Loman was three minutes away from Central .   He wondered how close
Shaddack was to the school. Harry heard the doorbell ring down in the
house below him. His stomach twisted. He felt as if he were in a
roller coaster, Just pulling away from the boarding ramp.

He wondered how close Shaddack was to the school.                     It di The bell rang
again.

matter. Near or far, Shaddack would bust his ass to get --. A long
silence followed. They knew he was crippled. They and prevent Booker
from compromising the Moonhawk project-or to take vengeance if it had
already been compromise At last Loman knew where he could find his
maker.

When Sam was only six exchanges into his dialogue with Ann Denton in
Washington, the link was cut off. The screen will blank.

He wanted to believe that he had been disconnected by line problems
somewhere along the way. But he knew it wasn't the case.

He got up from his chair so fast that he knocked it over.

Chrissie jumped up in surprise, and Tessa said "What What's wrong?"

"They know we're here," Sam said.

"They're coming.

They'd give him time to answer.

Finally it rang again.

He looked at his watch. Only 724. He took no comfort in the fact that
they had not put him at the end of their schedule.

The bell rang again.         Then again.        Then insistently.

In the distance, muffled by the two intervening floors, Moose began
barking. 15 Tessa grabbed Chrissie's hand. With Sam, they hurried out
of the computer lab. The batteries in the flashlight must not have been
fresh, for the beam was growing dimmer. She hoped it would last long
enough for them to find their way out. Suddenly the school's
layout-which had been uncomplicated when they had not been in a
life-or-death rush to negotiate its byways seemed like a maze.

They crossed a junction of four halls, entered another corridor, and
went about twenty yards before Tessa realized they were going the wrong
direction.



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"This isn't how we came Doesn't matter, " Sam said.

" Any door out will do.

They had to go another ten yards before the failing flashlight beam was
able to reach all the way to the end of the hall, revealing that it was
a dead end.

"This way," Chrissie said, pulling loose of Tessa and turning back into
the darkness from which they'd come, forcing them either to follow or
abandon her.

Shaddack figured they wouldn't have tried to break in on any side
that faced a street, where they might b seen. the Indian agreed-so he
drove around to the back provided too formidable a barrier metal doors
that would have prevented entry. he drove and studied the windows,
trying to spot a broken pane.

The last rear door, the only one with glass in the top, in an angled
extension of the building. He was driving toward for a moment, just
before the service road swung to the left to go around that wing, and
from a distance of only a few yarns with all the other panes reflecting
the glare of his headlights, his attention was caught by the missing
glass at the bottom righ "There," he told Runningdeer.

"Yes, Little Chief."

He parked near the door and grabbed the loaded 12-gauge semiautomatic
pistol-grip shotgun from the seat behind him. The box of extra shells
was on the passenger side. He opened it, grabbed four or five, stuffed
them in a coat pocket grabbed four or five more, then got out of the van
and headed toward the door with the broken window.

The soft thuds reverberated through the house, even into the attic, and
Harry thought he heard glass breaking far away.

Moose barked furiously. He sounded like the most vicious attack dog
ever bred, not a sweet black Lab. Maybe he would be willing to defend
his home and master in spite of his naturally sweet temperament.

Don't do it, boy, Harry thought. Don't try to be a hero. Just crawl
away in a corner somewhere and let them pass, lick their hands if they
offer them, and don't-the dog squealed and fell silent.

No, Harry thought, and a pang of grief tore through him.                     He had lost
not just a dog but his best friend.

-Moose, too, had a sense of duty.

Silence settled over the house.              They would be searching the ground
floor now.

His grief and fear receded as his anger grew.                   Moose.

Dammit, Poor harmless Moose. He could feel the flush of rage spread
over his face. He wanted to kill them all.

He picked up the .38 pistol in his one good hand and held it in his lap.
They wouldn't find him for a while, but he felt better with the gun in
his hand.

In the service he had won competition medals for both rifle shooting and
performance with a handgun. That had been a long time ago. He had not



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fired a gun, even in practice, for more than twenty years, since that
faraway and beautiful Asian day where on a morning of exceptionally
lovely blue skies, he been crippled for life. He kept the .38 and the
.45 cleaned Oiled, mostly out of habit; a soldier's lessons and routines
A clank. for life-and now he was glad of that.

, A rumble-purr of machinery.

The elevator.

18 Halfway down the correct hallway, holding the dimming light in his
left hand and the revolver in his other, having just caught up with
Chrissie, Sam heard a siren approaching outside It was not on top of
them, but it was too close. He couldn't tell if the patrol car was
actually closing in on the back of the school toward which they were
headed, or coming to the front entrance. Apparently Chrissie was
uncertain too. She stopped running and said, "Where, Sam? Where?"

From behind them Tessa said, "Sam, the doorway!"

For an instant he didn't understand what she meant. Then he saw the
door swinging open at the end of the hall, about thirty yards away, the
same door by which they had entered. A figure stepped inside. The
siren was still wailing, drawing nearer, there were more of them on the
way, a whole platoon of them. The guy who'd come through the door was
just the first. six feet five if he was an inch, but otherwise only a
silhouette minimally backlighted by the security lamp outside and to the
right of the door.

Sam didn't have to determine if this man was an enemy, because they were


all enemies of them-their name was legion-and he knew every last one the
shot


was wide. His marksmanship was lousy because of his injured wrist, which
hurt like hell after their misadventures in the culvert. With the
recoil, pain burst out of that joint and all   the way back to his
shoulder, then back again, Jesus, pain flowing around like acid inside
him, from shoulder to fingertips.

the strength went out of his hand. He almost dropped the gun As the
roar of Sam's shot slammed back to him from the 'A Sam squeezed off a
shot with his .38, not bothering to deW the - 429 the corridor, the guy
at the far end opened fire with a weapon of his own, but he had heavy
artillery. A shotgun. Fortunately he was not good with it. He was
aiming too high, not aware that the kick would throw the muzzle up.
Consequently the first shot went into the ceiling only ten yards ahead
of him, tearing one of the unlit fluorescent fixtures and a bunch of
acoustic tile. His reaction confirmed his lack of experience with guns;
overcompensated for the kick, swinging the muzzle too far down as he
pulled the trigger a second time, so the follow-up round struck the
floor far short of the target.

Sam did not remain an idle observer of the misdirected gun shot. he ran
across the hall, seized Chrissie and pushed her to the left, the second
and through a door into a dark room, even as buckshot gouged chunks out
of the vinyl flooring. Tessa came behind them. She threw the door shut
and leaned against it, as if she thought that she was Superwoman and
that pellets penetrating the door would bounce harmlessly from her back.

Sam shoved the woefully dim flashlight at her.


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"With my wound, I'm going to need both hands to manage the gun."

Tessa swept the weak yellow beam around the chamber. They were in the
band room- To the right of the door, a tiered platform-full of chairs
and music stands-rose up to the back wall.

to the left was a large open area, the band director's podium, a
stand-wood and metal desk. And two doors. Both standing open, leading
to adjoining rooms.

Chrissie needed no urging to follow Tessa toward the nearer away from
those doors, and Sam brought up the rear, moving backward, covering the
hall door through which they had come.

Outside, the siren had died.             Now there would be more than one man with
a shotgun.


They had searched the first two floors.                 They were in the third floor
bedroom.

Harry could hear them talking. Their voices rose to him through the
ceiling, to his floor. But he couldn't quite make out what they were
saying.

He almost hoped they would spot the attic trap in the closet and would
decide to come up. He wanted a chance to blow a couple of them away.
For Moose. After twenty long years being a victim, he was sick to death
of it; he wanted a chance to let them know that Harry Talbot was still a
man to be recconed with-and that although Moose was only a dog, his
nevertheless a life taken only with serious consequences.

20 In the eddying fog, Loman saw the single patrol car outside
Shaddack's van. He braked next to it just as Paul got out from behind
the wheel. Amberlay was lean a and very bright, one of Loman's best
young officers, but looked like a high-school boy now, too small to be a
cop-, scared.

When Loman got out of his car, Amberlay came to him, - 431 band, visibly
shaking.

"Only you and me?        Where the hell's everybody else?                  This is a major
alert."

--Where's everybody else?"            Loman asked.

"Just listen, Paul.

listen."

.From every part of town, scores of wild voices were lifted in song,
either calling to one another or challenging the young moon that floated
above the wrung-out clouds.

Loman hurried to the back of the patrol car and opened the trunk. His
unit, like every other, carried a 20-gauge riot gun for which he'd never
had use in peaceable Moonlight Cove. But New Wave, . which had
generously equipped the force, did not stint equipment even if it was
perceived as unnecessary. He pulled the gun from its clip mounting on
the back wall of the trunk.

him, Amberlay said, "You telling me they've regressed? All of them,
everyone on the force, except you and me?" Just listen," Loman repeated


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as he leaned the 20-gauge against the bumper.

But that's crazy!"         Amberlay insisted.

"Jesus, God, you mean this whole thing is coming down on us, the whole
damn thing?

" Loman grabbed a box of shells that was in the right wheelwell of the
trunk, tore off the lid.

"Don't you feel the yearning, "No!"               Amberlay said too quickly.

"No, I don't feel it, I don't feel anything.

"I feel it, " Loman said, putting five rounds in the 20-guage in the
chamber, four in the magazine.

"Oh, Paul, I sure as hell feel it. I want to tear off my clothes and
change, change, and just run, be free, go with them, hunt and kill and
run with "Not me, no, never," Amberlay said.

"Liar," Loman said. He brought up the loaded gun and fired at Amberly
point-blank, blowing his head off.

He couldn't have trusted the young officer, couldn't have his back on
him, not with the urge to regress so strong and those voices in the
night singing their siren songs. As he stuffed more shells into his
pockets, he heard a shotgun from inside the school.

He wondered if that gun was in the hands of Booker or Shaddack

struggling to control his raging terror, fighting off AM- easy in the
movies and on the boob tube when, in fact, the gun jumped in your hands
as if it was alive.

He knew better now, and he was going to brace himself when he fired,
spread his legs and brace himself, so his shots wouldn't be blowing
holes in the ceiling or bouncing off the floor any more and He would
nail them cold the next time he got a whack at them and they'd be sorry
for making him chase them, for not lying down and being dead when he
wanted them to be dead.

The door out of the band room had led into a hall that served to
soundproofed practice rooms, where student musicians could play fine
music for hours at a time without disturbing anyone. at the end of that
narrow corridor, Tessa pushed through another door and coaxed just
enough out of the flashlight to see they were in a chamber as large as
the band room. It also had tiered platforms rising to the back. A
student-drawn one wall, complete with winged angels singing, prothis the
home of The World's Best Chorus.

Chrissie and Sam followed her into the room, a shotgun in the distance.
It sounded as if it was outside. But even when the door to the corridor
of practice rooms swung shut behind them, another shotgun discharged,
closer than the first, probably beck at the door to the band room. Then
a second blast from the same location.

Just like in the band room, two more doors led out of the chamber, but
the first one she tried was a dead end; it led into the chorus
director's office.

They dashed to the other exit, beyond which they found a door
illuminated only by a red, twenty-four-hour-a-day emergency


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sign-STAIRS-immediately to their right. NOt EXIT, Tommy Shaddack heard
another shotgun, but he didn't think much about that because, after all,
they were in a war now. You could hear what a war it was by just
stepping out in the street and listening to the shrieks of the
combatants echoing down through the hills to the sea. He was more
focused on gettingShaddack hideous and powerful urge to shed his human
form, Loman went inside to find out.

Booker, the woman, and the girl he'd seen in the hall, because, he knew
the woman must be the Lockland bitch and the girl must be Chrissie
Foster, though he couldn't figure how they had joined up.

War. So he handled it the way soldiers did in the good movies kicking
the door open, firing a round into the room before entering. No one
screamed. He guessed he hadn't hit anyone he fired again, and still no
one screamed, so he figured they were already gone from there. He
crossed the threshold, fumbled for the light switch, found it, and
discovered he was in the deserted band room.

Evidently they had left by one of the two other doors, when he saw that,
he was angry, really angry. The only time in his life that he had fired
a gun was in Phoenix, when he shot the Indian with his father's
revolver, and that had been close-up, where he could not miss. But
still he had expected he would be good with a gun. After all, Jeez, he
had watched a lot of war movies, cowboy movies, cop shows on television,
it didn't look hard, not hard at all, you just pointed and pulled the
trigger. But it hadn't been that easy, Tommy was angry, furious,
because they shouldn't 21 jUSt STAIRS, which meant this was an interior
well with no ac to the outside.

"Take her up," Sam urged Tessa.

" But- Up! They're probably coming in the ground floor by level
entrance, anyway.

"What're you-Gonna make a little stand here," he said.

A door crashed open and a shotgun exploded back in the chorus room.

"Go!"   Sam whispered.

23 Harry heard the closet door open in the bedroom below.

The attic was cold, but he was streaming sweat as if in a sauna. Maybe
he hadn't needed the second sweater.

Go away, he thought.         Go away.

Then he thought, Hell, no, come on, come and get it.

think I want to live forever?

24 Sam went down on one knee in the hall outside the chorus room, taking
a stable position to compensate somewhat for his right wrist. He held
the swinging door open six inches - 435 the gun thrust through the gap,
the .38 gripped in his right hand, his left hand clamped around his
right wrist.

He could see the guy across the room, silhouetted in the lights from the
band-room corridor behind him. He was Tall. Sam Couldn't see his face,
But something about him struck a chord of familiarity.

The gunman didn't see Sam.            He was only being cautious, laying down a


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spray of pellets before he entered. He pulled open the door. The click
was loud in the silent room. He pumped the gun. Clackety-clack. No
ammo.

That meant a change in Sam's plans. He surged to his feet through the
swinging door, back into the chorus room, no longer able to wait for the
guy to switch on the overhead lights or step farther across the
threshold, because now was the time to get him, before he reloaded.
Firing as he went, Sam squeezed off the four remaining rounds in the
.38, trying his damnedest to make every slug count. On the second or
third shot, the guy in the doorway squealed, God, he squealed like a
kid, his voice high-pitched and quaverous, as he threw himself back into
the chorus-room corridor, out of sight.

Sam kept moving, fumbling in his jacket pocket with his left hand,
grabbing at the spare cartridges, while with his right hand he snapped
open the revolver's cylinder and shook out the expended brass casings.
When he reached the closed door to the inner hall that connected chorus
room to band room, the door through which the tall man had vanished, he
pressed his back to the wall and jammed fresh rounds into the Smith &
Wesson, snapped the cylinder shut.

He kicked the door open and looked into the hall, where the overhead
fluorescents were lit.

It was deserted.

No blood on the floor.

Damn. His right hand was half numb. He could feel his wrist swelling
tight under the bandage, which was now soaked with fresh blood. At the
rate his shooting was deteriorating, he was going to have to walk right
up to the bastard and ask him to bite On the muzzle in order to make the
shot count.

The doors to the ten practice rooms, five on each side, were closed. The
door at the far end, where the hall led into the band room, was open,
and the lights were on there. The tall guy could be there or in any of
the ten practice rooms. But wherever he was, he had probably slipped at
least a couple of shells into the shotgun, so the moment to pursue him
had passed.

Sam backed up, letting the door between the hall and chorus room slip
shut. Even as he let go of it, as it was swinging back into place, he
glimpsed the tall man stepping through the open door of the band room
about forty feet away.

It was Shaddack himself.

The shotgun boomed.

The soundproofed door, gliding shut at the crucial moment was thick
enough to stop the pellets.

Sam turned and ran across the chorus room, into the hall, and up the
stairs, where he had sent Tessa and Chrissie.

When he reached the top flight, he found them waiting on him in the
upper hall, in the soft red glow of another stair sign.

Below, Shaddack entered the stairwell.

Sam turned, stepped back onto the landing and descended the first step.


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He leaned over the railing, looked down, glimpsed part of his pursuer,
and squeezed off two shots.

Shaddack squealed like a boy again. He ducked back against the wall,
away from the open center of the well, where he could not be seen.

Sam didn't know whether he'd scored a hit or not.                     Maybe, What he did
know was that Shaddack wasn't mortally wounded.

he was still coming, easing up step by step, st, outer wall. And when
that geek reached the landing he would take the turn suddenly, firing
the shots at whoever waited above.

Silently Sam retreated from the upper landing, into the hall once more.
The scarlet light of the STAIRS sign fell on Chrissie and Tessa's faces
. . . an illusion of blood.

25 O&k.    A scraping sound.

-,Clink-scrape.       Clink-scrape.

Harry knew what he was hearing.              Clothes hangers sliding on the rod.

could they have known? Hell, maybe they had smelled him here. He was
sweating like a horse, after all. Maybe the conversion improved their
senses.

The clinking and scraping stopped.

A moment later he heard them lifting the closet rod out of its braces so
they could lower the trap.

26 The fading flashlight kept winking out, and Tessa had to shake it,
jiggling the batteries together, to get a few more seconds of weak and
fluttery light from it.

They had stepped out of the hall, into what proved to be a chemistry lab
with black marble lab tables and steel sinks and stools. Nowhere to
hide.

Itley checked the windows, hoping there might be a roof just under them.
No. A two-story drop to a concrete walk.

At the end of the chemistry lab was a door, through which they Passed
into a ten-foot-square storage room full of chemicals in scaled tins and
bottles, some labeled with skulls and crossbones, some with DANGER in
bright red letters. She supposed there were ways to use the contents of
that closet as a weapon but they didn't have time to inventory the
contents, looking for interesting substances to mix together. Besides,
she'd never been a great science student, recalled nothing whatsoever of
chemistry classes, and would probably blow herself up with the first
bottle she opened. From the expression on Sam's face, Tessa knew that
he saw no more hope there than she did.

A rear door in the storage closet opened into a second room that seemed
to double as a biology classroom. Anatomy clu hung on one wall. The
room offered no better place to hide than had the previous lab.

Holding Chrissie close against her side, Tessa looked at it and
whispered, "Now what? Wait here and hope he can't find us . .                          .   or
keep moving?"

"I think it's safer to keep moving," Sam said.



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"Easier to be cornered if we sit still."

She nodded agreement.

He eased past her and Chrissie, leading the way between the lab benches,
toward the door to the hall.

From behind them, either in the dark chemical-storage annex or in the
unlighted chemistry lab beyond it, came a soft but distinct clink.

Sam halted, motioned Tessa and Chrissie ahead of him, and turned to
cover the exit from the storage room.

With Chrissie at her side, Tessa stepped to the hall dol turned the knob
slowly, quietly, and eased the door outward.

Shaddack came from the darkness in the corridor, into the pale and
inconstant pulse of light from her flash, and rammed the barrel of his
shotgun into her stomach.

"You're gonna be sorry now," he said excitedly.

27 They pulled the trapdoor down. A shaft of light from the closet
struck the rafters, but it didn't illuminate the far corner in which
Harry sat with his useless legs splayed out in front of him. His bad
hand was curled in his lap, while his good hand clasped the pistol.

His heart was hammering harder and faster than it had in twenty years,
since the battlefields of Southeast Asia. His stomach was churning. His
throat was so tight he could barely swallow. He was dizzy with fear.
But, God in heaven, he sure felt alive.

With a squeak and clatter, they unfolded the ladder.

28 Shaddack shoved the muzzle into her belly and almost blew her guts
out, almost wasted her, before he realized how beautiful she was, and
then he didn't want to kill her any more, not right away, not until he'd
made her do some things with things to him. She'd have to do whatever
he he told her to do, or he could just the wall, yeah, she was his, and
she better that, or she'd be sorry, he'd make her sorry.


Then he saw the girl beside her, a              pretty little girl, only or twelve,
and she excited him even more. He               could have her first, and then the
older one, have them any which way              he wanted them, make them do things,
all sorts of things, and then kill              them, that was his right, they
couldn't deny him, not him.

Because all the power was in his hands now, he had seen the moonhawk
three times.

He pushed through the open door, into the room, keeping the gun in the
woman's belly, and she backed up to accommodate him, pulling the girl
with her. Booker was behind them, a SI tled expression on his face.
Tommy Shaddack said, "Drop the gun and back away from it, or I'll make
raspberry jelly out of this bitch, I swear I will, you can't move fast
enough to stop me." Booker hesitated.

"Drop it!"     Tommy Shaddack insisted.

The agent let go of the revolver and sidestepped away from it.

Keeping the muzzle of the Remington hard against the woman's belly, he


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made her edge around until she could reach the light switch and click on
the fluorescents. The room leap of shadows.

"Okay, now, all of you," Tommy Shaddack said, "sit on those three
stools, by that lab bench, yeah, there, and don't do anything funny."

He stepped back from the woman and covered them all with the shotgun.
They looked scared, and that made him laugh.

Tommy was getting excited now, really excited, because he had decided he
would kill Booker in front of the woman and the girl, not swift and
clean but slowly, the first shot in the legs, letting him lie on the
floor and wriggle a while, the second shot in the gut but not from such
a close range that it finished him instead, make him hurt, make the
woman and the girl watch, show what a tough customer they had in Tommy
Shaddack, what a bad tough customer, make them grateful for being st
they'd get on their knees and let him do thing the things he had wanted
to do for thirty years denied himself, let off thirty years of steam
right here, right tonight. . . .

6 29 beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the
eaves came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo n then
chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been open, letting
denizens of the pit pour forth into moon 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 de*es 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, "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.

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


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distance-about twenty-five feet-and at that angle, shooting from the
floor, he couldn't hit anything. He hesitated with 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 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
unhuman cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar imm of longing,
visible even in the dim wash of light from the stairway 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 Harry
remembered what Sam had said about how the cOI.W'Soed, and teeth
flashed.

I.    .    .   need, " Vanner said, need, need, want, need.

"No!"     Worthy shouted.

to 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, 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 at all, Harry. Especially for you. You'll walk again, Harry,
as well as anyone. You'll be whole again. Because of this Change,
you'll be able to heal yourself. You'll be free from your paraysis.

"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 des 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.



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"Vanner, are all right?"

Vanner's hands . . . changed. His wrists swelled and twitched, he
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 he 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 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 he 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 d 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 jacket and 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 used to toss a playing card at a
hat. The loid sailed low across the floor, toward the window 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


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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, she hoped they
would be out of the line of fire.

Sam had come up under the shotgun before Shaddack could come back from
the distraction. He grabbed the barrel with his left hand and
Shaddack's wrist with his weakened right hand, he 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."


The thing that had been Vanner moved toward Harry, grown low in its
throat, drooling yellowish saliva. Harry struck it both times, but
failed to kill it. The gap 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 he wanted to make himself something more murderous and el
ciently destructive than anything nature had contemplated.

When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to him, Harry
pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, "Hell, and shot the damn
thing in the head. It toppled back, 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


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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
loose 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 BOW 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 Picked 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 p inadequate description of
something he had just seen, for in a moment he fell down dead from no
cause that Sam could see. 34 When they stepped out through the back The
thing that had been Vanner moved toward Harry, grown low in its throat,
drooling yellowish saliva. Harry struck it both times, but failed to
kill it. The gap 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 he wanted to make himself something more murderous and el
ciently destructive than anything nature had contemplated.

When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to him, Harry
pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, "Hell, and shot the damn
thing in the head. It toppled back, with a crash, and stayed down.

Go for the data-processor.

Elation swept through Harry, but it was short-lived.                       Worthy had


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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
loose 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 BOW 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 Picked 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 p inadequate description of
something he had just seen, for in a moment he fell down dead from no
cause that Sam could see. 34 When they stepped out through the back
door by which they entered, the first thing Sam noticed was that the


town was silent. The shrill cries of the shape-changers no longer
carried 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 in 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



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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
an women but-as their headlights revealed beyond a doubt creatures out
of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, twisted 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, also evidently felled by the same unseen force that had
dropped the policeman back at Central.

Shaddack's dead. His heartbeat isn't being broadcast Any more, so Sun
is even now putting the final program into effect. . . .

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

telling himself that the fallen creatures were phantasms Sam kept
telling himself 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.

Amid all that horror and ugliness, he could not believe do he nau ucen
so foolish as to pass years of precious life in unwilling to see the
beauty of the world. He'd been a fool. When the dawn came he would
always thereafter be able to look upon a flower and appreciate the
wonder of it, the unity 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 amother 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?"



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"Yes.That we live again?"

"Yes. Because I found life so bleak, you see, just a series of lies,
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, 35 Harry heard
noises downstairs-the elevator, then someone in

the third-floor bedroom. He tensed, figuring two miracles would be one
too many to hope for, but then he heard Sam calling to him from the
bottom of the ladder.

"Here, Sam!      Safe!     I'm okay."

A moment later Sam climbed into the attic.

"Tessa?    Chrissie?"       Harry asked anxiously.

"They're downstairs.         They're both all right."

"Thank God." Harry let out a long breath, as if it had be pent up in
him for hours.

"Look at these brutes, Sam."

"Rather not."

"Maybe Chrissie was right about alien invaders after all."

"Something stranger," Sam said.

"What?" Harry said as Sam knelt beside him and pushed Worthy's mutated
body off his legs.

"Damned if I know," Sam said.

"Not even sure I want to know.

"We're entering an age when we make our own reality, are we? Science is
giving us that ability, bit by bit. Used to be only madmen could do
that."

Sam said nothing.

- 451 Sam said, "Maybe making our own reality isn't wise. Maybe natural
order is the best one."

maybe. On the other hand, the natural order could do with some
perfecting here and there. I guess we've got to try. We just have to
hope to God that the men who do the tinkering aren't Shaddack - You
okay, Harry?"



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Pretty good, thanks."          He smiled.

"Except, of course, I'm a cripple. See this hulking thing that was
Worthy? He was trying in to rip my throat out, I had no more bullets,
he had his claws at my neck, and then he just fell dead, bang. Is that
a miracle or what?"

"There's Been a miracle all over town," Sam said.

"They all seemed to have died when Shaddack died . . . linked
somehow. Come on, let's get you down from here, out of this mess."

"They killed Moose, Sam."

"The hell they did.         Who do you think Chrissie and Tessa are fussing
over downstairs?"

"He was stunned.

"But I heard-Looks like maybe somebody kicked him in the head.                        He's got
this bloody, skinned-up spot along one side of his skull.

He's been knocked unconscious, but he doesn't seem to've suffered a
concussion."

36 Chrissie rode in the back of the van with Harry and Moose, with Sam's
good arm around her and Moose's head in her lap. Slowly she began to
feel better. She was not herself, no, and maybe she never would feel
like her old self again, but she was better.

They went to the park at the head of Ocean Avenue, at the end of town.
Tessa drove right up over the curb, bouncing around, and parked on the
grass.

Sam opened the rear doors of the van so Chrissie and Harry could sit
side by side in their blankets and watch him and Tessa at work.

Braver than Chrissie would have been, Sam went into nearby residential
areas, stepping over and around the things, and jump-started cars that
were parked along the street. One by one, he and Tessa drove them into
the park and arranged them in a huge ring, with the engines running and
the headlights pointing in toward the middle of the circle.

Sam said that people would be coming in helicopters, even in the fog,
and that the circle of light would mark a pro pad for them. With twenty
cars, their headlights all on high beam, the inside of that ring was as
bright as day and Chrissie liked the brightness.

Even before the landing pad was fully outlined, a few people began to
appear in the streets, live people, and not weird loo4 altogether
normal, judging by appearances. Of course, Chrissie had learned that
you could never confidently judge anyone by appearances because they
could be anything inside; they could be something inside that would
astonish even the editors of National Enquirer. You couldn't even be
sure of your own parents.

But she couldn't think about that.

She didn't dare think about what had happened She knew that what little
hope she still held for them was probably false hope, but she wanted to
hold it a while longer, anyway.

The few people who appeared in the streets began to gravitate toward the


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park while Tessa and Sam finished pulling the few cars into the ring.
They all looked dazed. The closer t approached, the more uneasy
Chrissie became.

"They're all right," Harry assured her, cuddling her with his one good
arm.

"How can you be sure?"

"You can see they're scared shitless.                Oops.     Maybe I shouldn't say
shitless,' teach you bad language."

" 'Shitless' is okay," she said.

Moose made a mewling sound and shifted in her lap.

He probably had the kind of headache that only karate experts really got
from smashing bricks with their heads.

- 453 Harry said, "look at them-they're scared plenty which probably
tags them as our kind. You never saw one of the others acting scared,
did you?"

Chrissie thought about it a moment.

"Yeah. I did. That cop who killed Shaddack at the school.                         He was
scared. He had more fear in his eyes,

a lot more, than I've ever seen in anybody or in these people are all
right,

anyway," Harry told her as the dazed stragglers approached the van.

"They're some of the people who were scheduled to be converted before
midnight, but they never got around to them. Must be others in their
houses, baracaded in there, afraid to come out, think the whole world's
crazy, probably think aliens are on the loose, like you Besides, if
these people were more of those shape-changers, they wouldn't be
staggering up to us so hesitantly. They'd at all, without fangs and
stingers and claws, standing fully er"W.. We loped right up the hill,
leaped in here, and eaten our noses, plus whatever other parts of us
they consider to be delicacies."

That explanation appealed to her, even made her smile thinly, - she
relaxed a little.

But just a second later, Moose jerked his burly head off her lap,
yapped, and scrambled to his feet.

Outside, the people approaching the van cried out in surprise and fear,
and Chrissie heard Sam say, "What the blazing hell?"

She threw aside her warm blankets and scrambled out of the back of the
van to see what was happening.

Behind her, alarmed in spite of the reassurances that he had just given
her, Harry said, "What is it? What's wrong?"

For a moment she wasn't sure what had startled everyone, but then she
saw the animals. They swarmed through the park scores of mice, a few
grungy rats, cats of all descriptions, half a dozen dogs, and maybe a
couple of dozen squirrels that had scampered down from the trees. More
mice and rats and cats were racing out of the mouths of the streets that



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intersected Ocean Avenue, pouring up that main drag, running pell-mell,
frenzied, cutting through the park and angling over to the county road.
They reminded her of something she'd read about once, she only had to
stand there for a few seconds, watching them Pour by her, before she
remembered lemmings. periodically, when the lemming population became
too great in a particular area, the little creatures ran and ran,
straight toward the sea, into the surf, and drowned themselves. All
these animals were acting like lemmings, tearing off in the same
direction letting nothing stand in their way, drawn by nothing apparel
and therefore evidently following an inner compulsion.

Moose jumped out of the van and joined the fleeing multitudes.

"Moose, no!"      she shouted.

He stumbled, as if he had tripped over the cry that she flung after him.
He looked back, then snapped his head toward the county road again, as
if he had been jerked by an invisible chain. He took off at top speed.

"Moose!"

He stumbled once more and actually fell this time, rolled,

and scrambled onto his feet.

Somehow Chrissie knew that the image of lemmings was appropriate and
that these animals were rushing to their graves, though away from the
sea, toward some other and more hideous death that was part of all the
rest that had happened in Moonlight Cove If she did not stop Moose, they
would never see him again.

The dog ran.

She sprinted after him.

She was bone weary, burnt out, aching in every muscle and joint, and
afraid, but she found the strength and will to follow the Labrador
because no one else seemed to understand and the other animals were
running toward death. Tes. Sam, smart as they were, didn't get it.
They were just staring gaping at the spectacle. So Chrissie tucked her
arms against her sides, pumped her legs, and ran for all she was worth,
picturing herself as Chrissie Foster, World's Youngest Olympic marathon
Champion, pounding around the course, with thousands cheering her from
the sidelines. ("Chrissie, Chrissie, Chrissie, Chrissie And as she ran,
she screamed at Moose to stop because every time he heard his name, he
faltered, hesitated and she gained a little ground on him. Then they we
the park, and she nearly fell in the deep ditch along the county road,
leaped it at the last instant, not because she was in time but because
she had her eye on Moose and saw something. She landed perfectly, not
losing a stride. The next time Moose faltered in response to his name,
she was on him, grabbing at him, seizing his collar. He growled and
nipped 1 - 455 and she said, "Moose," in such a way as to shame him.

It was the only time he tried to bite her but, Lord, he strained
mightily to pull loose. Hanging on to him took everything she had and
he even dragged her, big as she was, about fifty or more feet along the
road. His big paws scrabbled at the blacktop he struggled to follow the
wave of small animals that wasof the night and fog.

ing int By the time the dog calmed down enough to be willing to go back
toward the park, Tessa and Sam joined Chrissie.

"What's happening?"         Sam asked.


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"They're all running to their deaths," Chrissie said.

"I just couldn't let Moose go with them.

"To their deaths?        How do you know?"

"I don't know.       But .     .   .   what else?"

They stood on the dark and foggy road for a moment, looking after the
animals, which had vanished into the blackness.

Tessa said, "What else indeed?"

37 the fog was thinning, but visibility was still no more than about a
quarter of a mile.

Standing with Tessa in the middle of the circle of cars, Sam heard the
choppers shortly after ten o'clock, before he saw their lights. Because
the mist distorted sound, he could not tell from which direction they
were approaching, but he figured they were coming in from the south,
along the coast, staying a couple of hundred yards out to sea, where
there were no hills to worry about in the fog. Packed with the most
sophisticated instruments, they could virtually fly blind. The pilots
would be wearing night-vision goggles, coming in under five hundred feet
in MPect of the poor weather.

Because the FBI maintained tight relationships with the armed services,
especially the Marines, Sam pretty much knew what to expect. This would
be a Marine Reconnaissance force composed of the standard elements
required by such a situation.

men detached from a Marine Assault Unit-accompanied by Cobra gunships.
turning around, looking in every direction Tessa said, "I don't see
them."

"You won't, " Sam said.

"Not until they're almost on top of US.

"They fly without lights?"

"No. They're equipped with blue lights, which can't be seen well from
the ground, but which give them a damned good view, through their
night-vision goggles."

Ordinarily, when responding to a terrorist threat, the CH-46 called the
"Sea Knight," officially, but referred to as "The Frog" by grunts-would
have gone, with its Cobra escorts, to the north end of town. Three fire
teams, composed of four men each, would have disembarked and swept
through Moonlight Cove from north to south, checking out the situation,
rendezvousing at the other end for evacuation as necessary.

But because of the message Sam had sent to the Bureau before Sun's links
to the outside world had been cut off, and because the situation did not
involve terrorists and was, in fact, singularly strange, SOP was
discarded for a bolder approach. The choppers overflew the town
repeatedly, descending to within twenty of thirty feet of the treetops.
At times their strange bluish-green lights were visible, but nothing
whatsoever could be seen of their shape or size; because of their
Fiberglas blades, which were much quieter than the old metal blades that
once had been used, the choppers at times seemed to glide silently in
the distanced, and might have been alien craft from a far world even


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stranger than this one.

At last they hovered near the circle of light in the park.

They did not put down at once. With the powerful rotors, flinging the
fog away, they played a searchlight over the people, in the park who
stood outside the illuminated landing pad, and they spent minutes
examining the grotesque bodies in the street.

Finally, while the Cobras remained aloft, the CH-46 settled down almost
reluctantly in the ring of cars. The men who poured from - 457 the
chopper were toting automatic weapons, but otherwise didn't look like
soldiers because, thanks to Sam's message, they were dressed in
biologically secure white suits, carrying CH-46 helicopter carrying the
recon team itself-probably their'- own own air-supply tanks on their
backs. They might have been astronauts instead of Marines.

Lieutenant Ross Dalgood, who looked baby-faced behind the faceplate of
his helmet, came straight to Sam and Tessa, gave his name and rank, and
greeted Sam by name, evidently because he'd been shown a photograph
before his mission had gotten off the ground.

"Biological hazard, Agent Booker?"

"I don't think so," Sam said, as the chopper blades cycled down from a
hard rhythmic cracking to a softer, wheezing chug.

"But you don't know?"

"I don't know," he admitted.

"We're the advance," Dalgood said.

"Lots more on the way-regular Army and your Bureau people are coming in
by highway. Be here soon."

The three of them-Dalgood, Sam, and Tessa-moved between two of the
encircling cars, to one of the dead things that lay on a sidewalk
bordering the park.

"I didn't believe what I saw from the air," Dalgood said.

"Believe it," Tessa said.

"What the hell?"        Dalgood said.

Sam said, "Boogeymen."

38 Tessa was worried about Sam. She and Chrissie and Harry returned to
Harry's house at one in the morning, after being debriefed three times
by men in decontamination suits. Although they had terrible nightmares,
they managed to get a few hours' sleep. But Sam was gone all night. He
had not returned by the time they finished breakfast at eleven o'clock
Wednesday morning.


"He may think he's indestructible "You care about him," Harry said.

"Of course I care about him."

"I mean care about him."

,Well .    .   .    I don't know."



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"I know."

"I know too," Chrissie said.

Sam returned at one o'clock, grimy and gray-faced. She'd made up the
spare bed with fresh sheets, and he tumbled into it still half dressed.

She sat in a chair by the bed, watching him sleep. occasionally he
groaned and thrashed. He called her name and Chrisie's-and sometimes
Scott's-as if he had lost them and was wandering in search of them
through a dangerous and desolate place.

Bureau men in decontamination suits came for him at six o'clock,
Wednesday evening, after he'd slept less than five hours, He went away
for the rest of that night.

By then all the bodies, in their multitudinous biologies, had been
collected from where they had fallen, tagged, sealed in plastic bags,
and put into cold storage for the attention of the pathologists.

That night Tessa and Chrissie shared the same bed. Lying -in the
half-dark room, where a towel had been thrown over a lamp to make a
night-light, the girl said, "They're gone."

"Who?"

'My mom and dad."

'I think they are."

"Dead.    I'm sorry, Chrissie."

I Oh, I know. I know you are.              You're very nice."          Then for while she
cried in Tessa's arms.

Much later, nearer sleep, she said, "You talked to Sam little. Did he
say if they figured out . . . about those animals last night . . .
where they were all running to?"

'No," Tessa said.

"They haven't gouctantly in the ring of cars. The men who poured from -
457 the chopper were toting automatic weapons, but otherwise didn't look
like soldiers because, thanks to Sam's message, they were dressed in
biologically secure white suits, carrying CH-46 helicopter carrying the
recon team itself-probably their'- own own air-supply tanks on their
backs. They might have been astronauts instead of Marines.

Lieutenant Ross Dalgood, who looked baby-faced behind the faceplate of
his helmet, came straight to Sam and Tessa, gave his name and rank, and
greeted Sam by name, evidently because he'd been shown a photograph
before his mission had gotten off the ground.

"Biological hazard, Agent Booker?"

"I don't think so," Sam said, as the chopper blades cycled down from a
hard rhythmic cracking to a softer, wheezing chug.

"But you don't know?"

"I don't know," he admitted.

"We're the advance," Dalgood said.



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"Lots more on the way-regular Army and your Bureau people are coming in
by highway. Be here soon."

The three of them-Dalgood, Sam, and Tessa-moved between two of the
encircling cars, to one of the dead things that lay on a sidewalk
bordering the park.

"I didn't believe what I saw from the air," Dalgood said.

"Believe it," Tessa said.

"What the hell?"        Dalgood said.

Sam said, "Boogeymen."

38 Tessa was worried about Sam. She and Chrissie and Harry returned to
Harry's house at one in the morning, after being debriefed three times
by men in decontamination suits. Although they had terrible nightmares,
they managed to get a few hours' sleep. But Sam was gone all night. He
had not returned by the time they finished breakfast at eleven o'clock
Wednesday morning.


"He may think he's indestructible "You care about him," Harry said.

"Of course I care about him."

"I mean care about him."

,Well .    .   .    I don't know."

"I know."

"I know too," Chrissie said.

Sam returned at one o'clock, grimy and gray-faced. She'd made up the
spare bed with fresh sheets, and he tumbled into it still half dressed.

She sat in a chair by the bed, watching him sleep. occasionally he
groaned and thrashed. He called her name and Chrisie's-and sometimes
Scott's-as if he had lost them and was wandering in search of them
through a dangerous and desolate place.

Bureau men in decontamination suits came for him at six o'clock,
Wednesday evening, after he'd slept less than five hours, He went away
for the rest of that night.

By then all the bodies, in their multitudinous biologies, had been
collected from where they had fallen, tagged, sealed in plastic bags,
and put into cold storage for the attention of the pathologists.

That night Tessa and Chrissie shared the same bed. Lying -in the
half-dark room, where a towel had been thrown over a lamp to make a
night-light, the girl said, "They're gone."

"Who?"

'My mom and dad."

'I think they are."

"Dead.    I'm sorry, Chrissie."

I Oh, I know.       I know you are.        You're very nice."          Then for while she



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cried in Tessa's arms.

Much later, nearer sleep, she said, "You talked to Sam little. Did he
say if they figured out . . . about those animals last night . . .
where they were all running to?"

'No," Tessa said.

"They haven't got a clue yet."

'That spooks me."

"Me too."

'l mean, that they haven't got a clue."

'I know," Tessa said.

"That's what I mean too."

A she said, "but he's not$ 39 By Thursday morning, teams of Bureau
technicians and outside consultants from the private sector had pored
through enough of die Moonhawk data in Sun to determine that the project
had dealt strictly with the implantation of a nonbiological control
mechanism that had resulted in profound physiological changes in the
victims. No one yet had the glimmer of an idea as to how it worked, as
to how the microspheres could have resulted in such radical
metamorphoses, but they were certain no bacteria, virus, or other
engineered organism had been involved. It was purely a matter of
machines.

.The Ariny troops, enforcing the quarantine against newsmedia
interlopers and civilian curiosity-seekers, still had their work to do,
but they were grateful to be able to strip out of their hot and clumsy
decon suits. So were the hundreds of scientists and Bureau agents who
were bivouacked throughout town.

Although Sam would surely be returning in the days ahead, he and Tessa
and Chrissie were cleared for evacuation early Friday morning. A
sympathetic court, with the counsel of a host of federal and state
officials, had already granted Tessa temporary custody of the girl. The
three of them said see-you-soon to Harry, not goodbye, and were lifted
out by one of the Bureau's Bell Jeftnger executive helicopters.

To keep onsite researchers from having their views colored by
sensationalistic and inaccurate news accounts, a media blackout was in
force in Moonlight Cove, and Sam did not fully realize the impact of the
Moonhawk story until they flew over the Army roadblock near the
interstate. Hundreds of press vehicles were strewn along the road and
parked in fields. The pilot flew low enough for Sam to see all the
cameras turned upward to shoot as, they Passed over the mob.


"It's almost as bad on the county route, north of Holliwell Road," the
chopper pilot said, "where they set up the other block. Reporters from
all over the world, sleeping on the ground 'cause they don't want to go
away to some motel and wake up to find that Moonlight Cove was opened to
the press while they were snoozing."

"They don't have to worry," Sam said.

"It's not going to be opened to the press-or to anyone but
researchers-for weeks. The JetRanger transported them to San Francisco


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International Airport, where they had reservations for three seats on
PSA flight south to Los Angeles. In the terminal, scanning the news
racks, Sam read a couple of headlines ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BEHIND
COVE TRAGEDY SUPERCOMPUTER RUNS AMOK That was nonsense, of course. New
Wave's supercomputer, Sun, was not an artificial intelligence. No such
thing had yet been built anywhere on earth, though legions of scientists
were racing to be the first to father a true, thinking, electronic mind.
Sun had not run amok; it had only served, as all computers do.

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, Sam thought the fault lies not in.

our technology but in ourselves.

These days, however, people blamed screwups in the system on
computers-just as, centuries ago, members of less sophisticated cultures
had blamed the alignment of celestial bodies.

Tessa quietly pointed out another headline SECRET PENTAGON EXPERIMENT
BEHIND MYSTERIOUS DISASTER The Pentagon was a favorite Boogeyman in some
circles, al most beloved for its real and imagined evils because
believing it was the root of all malevolence made life simpler and
easier to understand. To those who felt that way, the Pentagon almost
the bumbling old Frankenstein monster in his clodhopper shoes and
too-small black suit, scary but understandable, verse and to be shunned
yet comfortably predictable and preferably to consideration of worse and
more complex villains.

Chrissie pulled from the rack a rare special edition of a - 461
sensational tabloid, filled with stories about Moonlight Cove. She
showed them the main headline ALIENS LAND ON CALIFORNIA COAST RAVENOUS
FLESH-EATERS SACK TOWN They looked at one another solemnly for a moment,
then nodded. For the first time in a couple of days, Chrissie laughed.
It was not a hearty laugh, just a chuckle, and there might have been a
touch of irony in it that was too sharp for an eleven-year-old girl. not
to mention a trace of melancholy, but it was a laugh.

hearing her laugh, Sam felt better.

40 Lowel Ganowicz, of United Press International, had been on the
perimeter of Moonlight Cove, at one roadblock or another, since early
Wednesday morning. He bunked in a sleeping bag on the ground, used the
woods as a toilet, and paid an unemployed waiter from Aberdeen Wells to
bring meals to him. Never in his career had he been so committed to a
story, willing to rough it to this extent. And he was not sure why.
Yes, certainly, it was the biggest story of the decade, maybe bigger
than that. But why did he feel this need to hang in there, to learn
every scrap of the truth? Why was he obsessed? His behavior was a
puzzle to him.

He wasn't the only one obsessed.

Though the story of Moonlight Cove had been leaked to the press in
piecemeal fashion over three days and had been explained in detail
during a four-hour press conference on Thursday g, and though reporters
had exhaustively interviewed many the two hundred survivors, no one had
had enough. The singular horror of the deaths of the victims-and the
number, nearly three thousand, many times the number at
Jonestown-stunned newspaper and TV audiences no matter how often they
heard the specifics. By Friday morning the story was hotter than Yet
Joel sensed that it wasn't even the grisliness of the deaths or the
spectacular statistics that gripped the public interest, it was
something deeper than that.


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At ten o'clock Friday morning, Joel was sitting on his bedroll in a
field alongside the county route, just ten yards away fror4 invitingly
warm October morning and thinking about that very thing He was starting
to believe that maybe this news hit home han because it was about not
just the relatively modern conflict of man and machine but about the
eternal human conflict, since time immemorial, between responsibility
and irresponsibility, between civilization and savagery, between
contradictory human impulses toward faith and nihilism.

Joel was still thinking about that when he got up and started to walk.
Somewhere along the way he stopped thinking about' much of anything, but
he started walking more briskly.

He was not alone. Others at the roadblock, fully half the two hundred
who had been waiting there, turned almost as one and walked east into
the fields with sudden deliberation, neither the l' hesitating along the
way nor wandering in parabolic paths, but cutting straight up across a
sloped meadow, over scrub-covered hills, and through a stand of trees.

The walkers startled those who had not felt the abrupt call to go for a
stroll, and some reporters tagged along for a while asking questions,
then shouting questions. None of the walkers answered.

Joel was possessed by a feeling that there was a place he had to go to,
a special place, where he would never again have to worry about
anything, a place where all would be provided, where he would have no
need to worry about the future. He didn't know what that magic place
looked like, but he knew he'd recognized it when he saw it. He hurried
forward excitedly, compelled, drawn.

Need.

The protean thing in the basement of the Icarus Colony was in the grip
of need. It had not died when the other children of Moonhawk had
perished, for the microsphere computer within it - 463 had dissolved
when it had first sought the freedom of utter mindlessness; it had not
been able to receive the microwaved death order from Sun. Even if the
command had been received, it would not have been acted upon, for the
cellular creature had no heart to stop.

Its need was so intense that it pulsed and writhed.                        This need D&.

'.   Need.

mouths had opened all over its surface. The thing called out to the
world around it in a voice that seemed silent but was not, it was a
voice that spoke not to the ears of its prey but to their minds. And
they were coming.

its needs would soon be fulfilled.

Colonel Lewis Tarker, commanding officer at the Army field headquarters
in the park at the eastern end of Ocean Avenue, received an urgent call
from Sergeant Sperlmont, who was in charge of the county-route
roadblock. Sperlmont reported losing six of his twelve men when they
just walked off like zombies, with maybe a hundred reporters who were in
the same strange condition.

"Something's up," he told Tarker.

"This isn't over yet, sir.



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Tarker immediately got hold of Oren Westrom, the Bureau man who was
heading the investigation into Moonhawk and with whom all of the
military aspects of the operation had to be coordinated.

"it isn't over," Tarker told Westrom.

"I think those walkers are even weirder than Sperlmont described them,
weird in some way he can't quite convey. I know him, and he's more
spooked than he thinks he is. Westrom, in turn, ordered the Bureau's
JetRanger into the air. explained the situation to the pilot, Jim
Lobbow, and said, "Sperlmont's going to have some of his men track them
on the ground, see where the hell they're going-and why. But in case We
VU difficult, I want you spotting from the air."

.0" MY way," Lobbow said.

the police checkpoint north of Holliwell, basking in a surpdm world more
profound than mere desire, more terrible than any "You filled up on fuel
recently?"

"Tanks are brimming."

"Good.

Nothing worked for Jim Lobbow but flying a chopper.

He had been married three times, and every marriage had ended in
divorce. He'd lived with more women than he could count; even without
the pressure of marriage weighing him dow4 he could not sustain a
relationship. He had one child, a son, by his second marriage, but he
saw the boy no more than three times a year, never for longer than a day
at a time. Though he been brought up in the Catholic Church, and though
all his brothers and sisters were regulars at Mass, that did not work
for Jim. Sunday always seemed to be the only morning he could sleep in,
and when he considered going to a weekday service it seemed like too
much trouble. Though he dreamed of being an entrepeneur, every small
business he started seemed doomed to failure he was repeatedly startled
to find how much work went with a business, even one that seemed
designed for absentee management and sooner or later it always became
too much trouble.

But nobody was a better chopper pilot than Jim Lobbow. He could take
one up in weather that grounded everyone else, and he could set down or
pick up in any terrain, any conditions.

He took the JetRanger up at Westrom's orders and swung over the
county-route roadblock, getting there in no time b cause the day was
blue and clear, and the roadblock was just a mile and a quarter from the
park where he kept the chopper.

On the ground, a handful of regular Army troops, still at the ban
baracade, were waving him due east, up into the hills.

Lobbow went where they told him, and in less than a min he found the
walkers toiling busily up scrub-covered hills, scraping their shoes,
tearing their clothes, but scrambling forward in a frenzy. It was
definitely weird.

A funny buzzing filled his head. He thought something Was wrong with
his radio headphones, and he pulled them off for a moment, but that
wasn't it. The buzzing didn't stop. It actually wasn't a buzzing at
all, not a sound, but a feeling.



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And what do I mean by that?            he wondered.

He tried to shrug it off.

The walkers were circling east-southeast as they went, and - 465 Jim
went ahead of them, looking for some landmark, anything unusual toward
which they might be headed. He came almost at once to the decaying
Victorian house, the tumbledown barn, and collapsed outbuildings.

Something about the place drew him.               He circled it once, twice.

it was a complete dump, he suddenly had the crazy thought he would be
happy there, free, with no worries any Wore, no ex-wives nagging at him,
no child-support to pay.

Over the hills to the northwest, the walkers were coming, all hundred or
more of them, not walking any more but running. They stumbled and fell
but got up and ran again.

And Jim knew why they were coming. He circled over the scene again, and
it was the most appealing place he had ever been. The house was a
source

of surcease. He wanted that freedom, that release, more than he had
ever wanted anything in his life. He took the JetRanger up in a steep
climb, leveled out, swooped south, then west, then north, then east,
coming all the way around again, back toward the house, the wonderful
house, he had to be there, had to go there, had to go, and he took the
chopper straight in '.through the front porch, directly at the door that
hung open and half off its hinges, through the wall, plowing straight
into the heart of the house, burying the chopper in the heart Need.

The creature's many mouths sang of its need, and it knew that
momentarily its needs would be met. It throbbed with excitement.

Then vibrations.        Hard vibrations.         Then heat.

It did not recoil from the heat, for it had surrendered all the nerves
and complex biological structures required to register pain.

the heat had no meaning for the beast-except that heat was not food and
therefore did not fulfill its needs.

Burning, dwindling, it tried to sing the song that would draw what it
required, but the roaring flames filled its mouths and and silenced it.

Joel Ganowicz found himself standing two hundred feet from a ramshackle
house that had exploded in flames. It was a tremendous blaze, fire
shooting a hundred feet into the clear sky, black smoke beginning to
billow up, the old walls of the place colapsing in upon themselves with
alacrity, as if eager to give the pretense of usefulness. The heat
washed over him, forcing him to squint and back away, even though he was
not particularly close to it. He couldn't understand how a little dry
wood could burn that intensely.

He realized that he could not remember how the fire had started. He was
just suddenly there, in front of it.

He looked at his hands.           They were abraded and filthy.

The right knee was torn out of his corduroys, and his Rock.

ports were badly scuffed.



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He looked around and was startled to see scores of people in' his same
condition, tattered and dirty and dazed. He couldn't remember how he
had gotten there, and he definitely didn't recall setting out on a group
hike.

The house sure was burning, though. Wouldn't be a stick of it left,
just a cellarful of ashes and hot coals.

He frowned and rubbed his forehead.

Something had happened to him. Something . . . He was a reporter,
and his curiosity was gradually reasserting itself Something had
happened, and he ought to find out what. Something disturbing. Very
disturbing. But at least it was over now.

He shivered.

41 When they entered the house in Sherman Oaks, the music from Scott's
stereo, upstairs, was turned so loud that the windows were vibrating.

Sam climbed the steps to the second floor, motioning for Tessa and
Chrissie to follow. They were reluctant, probably embarrassed - 467
feeling out of place, but he was not certain he could do what had to be
done if he went up there alone.

The door to Scott's room was open.

The boy was lying on his bed, wearing black jeans and a black shirt. His
feet were toward the headboard, his head at the end of the mattress,
propped up on pillows, so he could stare it an of the posters on the
wall behind the bed black-metal oaers wearing leather and chains, some
of them with bloody jods, some with bloody lips as if they were vampires
who had all fed, others holding skulls, one of them french-kissing a
another holding out cupped hands filled with glistening swots- scott
didn't hear Sam enter. With the music at that volume, he wouldn't have
heard a thermonuclear blast in the adjacent room At the stereo Sam
hesitated, wondering if he was doing the right thing. Then he listened
to the bellowed words of the number on the machine, backed up by iron
slabs of guitar chords - It was about killing your parents, about
drinking their blood, it was a song then "taking the gas-pipe escape."
Nice. Oh, very nice stuff. That decided him. He punched a button and
cut off the CD in midplay.

Startled, Scott sat straight up in bed.

"Hey!"

Sam took the CD out of the player, dropped it on the floor, and ground
it under his heel.

"Hey, Christ, what the hell are you doing?"

Forty or fifty CDs, mostly black-metal albums, were stored in open-front
cases on a shelf above the stereo. Sam swept them to the floor.

"Hey, come on," Scott said, "what're you, nuts?"

"Something I should've done long ago."

Noticing Tessa and Chrissie, who stood just outside the door, SCott
said, "Who the hell are they?"

Sam said, "They are the hell are friends."


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Really working himself into a rage, all lathered up, the boy U,W, "What
the fuck are they doing here, man?"

..SAM laughed. He was feeling almost giddy. He wasn't sure *why. Maybe
because he was finally doing something about this *Won" assuming
responsibility for it. He said, "They're the fuck With me." And he
laughed again.


He felt sorry that he had exposed Chrissie to this, but then looked at
her and saw that she was not only unshaken but giggling. He realized
that all the angry and bad words in t couldn't hurt her, not after what
she had endured. In fact, after what they'd all seen in Moonlight Cove,
Scott's teenage ninjas was funny and even sort of innocent, altogether
ridiculous.

Sam stood on the bed and began to tear the posters off the wall, and
Scott started screaming at him, opening up full volume, a real tantrum
this time. Sam finished with those he could reach only from the bed,
got down, and turned to those on another wall.

Scott grabbed him.

Gently, Sam pushed the boy aside and clawed at the other posters.

Scott struck him.

Sam took the blow, then looked at him.

Scott's face was brilliant red, his nostrils dilated, his eyes bulging
with hatred.

Smiling, Sam embraced him in a bear hug.

At first Scott clearly didn't understand what was happening .

He thought his father was just making a grab for him, to punish him, so
he tried to pull away. But suddenly it dawn on him-Sam could see it
dawn on him-he was being hugged. the old man was for God's sake
embracing him, and in front of people-strangers. When that realization
hit him, the boy began to struggle, twisting and thrashing, pushing hard
on Sam, desperate to escape, because this didn't fit into his being in a
loveless world, especially if he started to respond.

That was it, yes, damn, Sam understood now. That was the reason behind
Scott's alienation. A fear that he'd respond to love, respond and be
spurned . . . or find the responsibility and commitment too much to
bear.

In fact, for a moment, the boy met his father's love with love of his
own, hugged him tight. It was as if the real Scott, the one hidden
under the layers of hipness and cynicism, had peeked

through and smiled. Something good remained in him, good as pure,
something that could be salvaged.

But then the boy began to curse Sam in more explicit 2 colorful terms
than he had used previously. Sam only hugged him harder, closer, and
now Sam began to tell him that he - 469 desperately loved him, told him
not the way that he had told him he loved him on the telephone when he
had called him from Moonlight Cove on Monday night, not with any degree
of be tion occasioned by his own sense of hopelessness for he had no


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sense of hopelessness any more. This time, he told Scott that he loved
him, he spoke in a voice crackling with emotion, told him again and
again, demanded that his voice be heard.

Scott was crying now, and Sam was not surprised to find that he was
crying, too, but he didn't think they were crying for the right reason
yet, because the boy was still struggling to get away, his energy
depleted, but still struggling. So Sam held on to him and talked to him
"Listen, kid, you're going to care about me, one way or the other,
sooner or later. Oh, yes - You're hoping to know that I care about you,
and then you're going to care about me, and not just me, no, you're
going to care about yourself, too, and it's not going to stop there,
either, hell, no, you're going to find out you can care about a lot of
people, that it feels good to care. You're going to care about that
woman standing there in the doorway, and you're going to care about that
little girl, you're going to care about her like you'd care about a
sister, you're going to learn, you're going to get the damn machine out
of you and learn to be loved and to love.

There's's a guy going to come visit us, a guy who's got one good hand
and no good legs, and he believes life is worth living. Maybe he's
going to stay a while, see how he likes it, see how 'cause maybe he can
show you what I was too be feels about it, slow to show you-that it's
good, life's good. And this guy's got a dog, what a dog, you're going
to love that dog, probably the dog first." Sam laughed and held fast to
Scott- "You can't say 'Get outta my face' to a dog and expect him to
listen or care, he won't get out of your face, so you'll have to love
him first. But then you'll get around to loving me, because that's what
I'm going to be-a dog, just a smiling old dog, padding around the
-place, hanging on, impervious to insult, an old dog - " ted.

Scott had stopped struggling. He was probably just exhausted Sam was
sure that he had not really gotten through the boy's rage. Hadn't more
than scratched the surface. Sam had let an off into their lives, the
evil of self-indulgent despair, which he %admitted to the boy, and now
rooting it out would be a hard job. They had a long way to go, months
of struggle, maybe even, years, lots of hugging, lots of holding on
tight and not letting go.

Looking over Scott's shoulder, he saw that Tessa and Chrissie had
stepped into the room. They were crying too. In their eyes he saw an
awareness that matched his, a recognition that the battle for Scott had
only begun.

But it had begun.        That was the wonderful thing.               It had begun.

A NOTE TO MY READERS Moose, the Labrador who so ably serves Harry Talbot
in Midnight, is based upon actual service dogs trained by Canine
companions for Independence, a non-profit organization that provides
these big furry assistants at nominal cost to those who need them. All
dogs give us love and loyalty, but these splendid animals give even more
than usual; they literally transform the lives of the disabled people
with whom they are paired, serving as their arms of legs or eyes or
ears, and allowing them to venture into the world with confidence. The
bond that exists between these service dogs and their masters is
inspiring, ennobling, and deeply moving to anyone who loves humanity or
dogs-or both. If you set aside part of your income for charity, I urge
you to consider &donation to Canine Companions for Independence 4350
Occidental Road P.O. Box 446 Santa Rosa, California 95402-0446 This a
rare opportunity to make a real difference in the world.




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