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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 54