Shadowfires

by Dean Koontz

  Buttons popped off his red plaid shirt. One of the shoulder seams split as his body swelled and bent into a grotesque new form.

  “Rachael …”

  During the past several hours, as his feet had grown larger and smaller and then larger again, his boots periodically pinched. Now they were painfully confining, crippling, and he could not bear them any longer. He literally tore them off, frenziedly ripped away the soles and heels, wrenched with his powerful hands until the sturdily stitched seams split, used his razored claws to puncture and shred the leather.

  His unshod feet proved to have changed as completely as his hands had done. They were broader, flatter, with an exceptionally gnarled and bony bridge, the toes as long as fingers, terminating in claws as sharp as those on his hands.

  “Rachael …”

  Change smashed through him as if it were a bolt of lightning blasting through a tree, the current entering at the highest point of the highest limb and sizzling out through the hair-fine tips of the deepest roots.

  He twitched and spasmed.

  He drummed his heels against the floor.

  Hot tears flooded from his eyes, and rivulets of thick saliva streamed from his mouth.

  Sweating copiously, being burned alive by the changefire within him, he was nevertheless cold at the core. There was ice in both his heart and mind.

  He squirmed into a corner and curled up, hugging himself. His breastbone cracked, shuddered, swelled larger, and sought a new shape. His spine creaked, and he felt it shifting within him to accommodate other alterations in his form.

  Only seconds later, he skittered out of the corner in a crablike crawl. He stopped in the middle of the room and rose onto his knees. Gasping, moaning deep in his throat, he knelt for a moment with his head hung low, letting the dizziness flow out with his rancid sweat.

  The changefire had finally cooled. For the moment, his form had stabilized.

  He stood, swaying.

  “Rachael …”

  He opened his eyes and looked around the motel room, and he was not surprised to discover that his vision was nearly as good in the dark as it had ever been in full daylight. Furthermore, his field of vision had dramatically increased: when he looked straight ahead, objects on both his left and right sides were as clear and as sharply detailed as those things immediately in front of him.

  He went to the door. Parts of his mutated body seemed ill formed and dysfunctional, forcing him to hitch along like some hard-shelled crustacean that had only recently developed the ability to stand upright like a man. Yet he was not crippled; he could move quickly and silently, and he had a sense of tremendous strength far greater than anything he had ever known before.

  Making a soft hissing noise that was lost in the sounds of wind and drizzling rain, he opened the door and stepped into the night, which welcomed him.

  35

  SOMETHING THAT LOVES THE DARK

  Whitney left the manager’s apartment at the Golden Sand Inn by way of the rear door of the kitchen. It opened into a dusty garage where, earlier, they had put the black Mercedes. Now the 560 SEL stood in small puddles of rainwater that had dripped from it. His own car was outside, in the serviceway behind the motel.

  Turning to Rachael, who stood on the threshold between kitchen and garage, Whitney said, “You lock this door behind me and sit tight. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got to get the Wildcard file in order. That’ll keep me busy.”

  He had no trouble understanding why Ben had fallen so hard for her. Even as disheveled as she was, pale with exhaustion and worry, Rachael was gorgeous. But her beauty was not her only attribute. She was caring, perceptive, smart, and tough—not a common mix of qualities.

  “Ben will probably show up before I do,” he assured her.

  She smiled thinly, grateful for his attempt to cheer her. She nodded, bit her lower lip, but could not speak because, obviously, she was still more than half convinced that she would never again see Ben alive.

  Whitney motioned her back from the threshold and pulled the door shut between them. He waited until he heard her engage the dead-bolt lock. Then he crossed the grease- and oil-stained concrete floor, passing the front of the Mercedes, not bothering to put up the big rear door, but heading toward the side entrance.

  The three-car garage, illuminated by a single bare bulb dangling on a cord from a crossbeam, was filthy and musty, a badly cluttered repository of old and poorly maintained maintenance equipment plus a lot of stuff that was just plain junk: rusting buckets; tattered brooms; ragged, motheaten mops; a broken outdoor vacuum cleaner; several motel-room chairs with broken legs or torn upholstery, which the previous owners had intended to repair and put back into service; scraps of lumber; coils of wire and coiled hoses; a bathroom sink; spare brass sprinkler heads spilling from an overturned cardboard box; one cotton gardening glove lying palm up like a severed hand; cans of paint and lacquer, their contents almost surely thickened and dried beyond usefulness. This trash was piled along the walls, scattered over portions of the floor, and stacked precariously in the loft.

  Just as he unlocked the dead bolt on the side door of the garage, before he actually opened the door, Whitney heard a rattling in the garage behind him. The noise was short-lived; in fact, it stopped even as he turned to see what it was.

  Frowning, he let his gaze travel over the piles of junk, the Mercedes, the gas furnace in the far corner, the sagging workbench, and the hot-water heater. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  He listened.

  The only sounds were the many voices of the wind in the eaves and the rain on the roof.

  He turned away from the door, walked slowly to the car, circled it, but found nothing that could have caused the noise.

  Maybe one of the piles of junk had shifted under its own weight—or had been disturbed by a rat. He would not be surprised to discover that the moldering old building was rat-infested, though he had not previously seen evidence of such an infestation. The trash was piled so haphazardly that he could not discern if it was all in the same position as it had been a moment ago.

  He returned to the door again, took one last look around, then went out into the storm.

  Even as the wind-harried rain slashed at him, he belatedly realized what he had heard in the garage: someone trying to pull open the big rear door from outside. But it was an electric door that could not be operated manually while in its automatic mode, and was therefore secure against prowlers. Whoever had tried it must have realized, at once, that he could not get in that way, which explained why the rattling had lasted only a moment.

  Whitney limped warily toward the corner of the garage and the serviceway beyond it to see if anyone was still there. The rain was falling hard, making a crisp sound on the walk, a sloppier sound on the earth, spilling off the corner of the roof where the downspout was missing. All that wet noise effectively masked his own footsteps, as it would mask the activities of anyone behind the garage, and though he listened intently to the night, he did not at first hear anything unusual. He took six or eight steps, pausing twice to listen, before the patter and susurration of the rain was cut by a frightening noise. Behind him. It was partly a hiss like escaping steam, partly a thin catlike whine, partly a thick and menacing growl, and it put the hair up on the back of his neck.

  He turned quickly, cried out, and stumbled backward when he saw the thing looming over him in the gloom. Incomprehensibly strange eyes looked down at him from a height of six and a half feet or more. They were bulging, mismatched eyes, each as large as an egg, one pale green and the other orange, iridescent like the eyes of some animals, one rather like the eye of a hyperthyroid cat, the other featuring a mean slit-shaped iris reminiscent of a serpent, both beveled and many-faceted, for God’s sake, like the eyes of an insect.

  For a moment Whit stood transfixed. Suddenly a powerful arm lashed out at him, backhanded him across the face, and knocked him down. He
fell onto the concrete walk, hurting his tailbone, and rolled into mud and weeds.

  The creature’s arm—Leben’s arm, Whit knew that it had to be Eric Leben transformed beyond understanding—had appeared not to be hinged like a human arm. It seemed to be segmented, equipped with three or four smaller, elbowlike joints that could lock in any combination and that gave it tremendous flexibility. Now, stunned by the vicious blow he had taken, half paralyzed by terror, looking up at the beast as it approached him, he saw that it was slump-shouldered and hunchbacked yet possessed a queer sort of grace, perhaps because its legs, mostly concealed by tattered jeans, were similar in design to the powerful, segmented arms.

  Whit realized he was screaming. He had screamed—really screamed—only once before in his life, in Nam, when the antipersonnel mine had blown up beneath him, when he had lain on the jungle floor and had seen the bottom half of his own leg lying five yards away, the bloody mangled toes poking through burnt and blasted boot leather. Now he screamed again and could not stop.

  Over his own screams, he heard a shrill keening sound from his adversary, what might have been a cry of triumph.

  Its head rolled and bobbled strangely, and for a moment Whit had a glimpse of terrible hooked teeth.

  He tried to scoot backward across the sodden earth, propelling himself with his good right arm and the stump of the other, but he was unable to move fast. He did not have time to get his legs under him. He managed to retreat only a couple of yards before Leben reached him and bent down and grabbed him by the foot of his left leg, fortunately the artificial leg, and began to drag him toward the open door of the garage.

  Even in the night shadows and rain, Whit could see enough of the man-thing’s hand to know that it was as thoroughly inhuman as the rest of the beast. And huge. And powerful.

  Frantically Whit Gavis kicked out with his good foot, putting all the force he had into the blow, and connected solidly with Leben’s leg. The man-thing shrieked, though apparently not in pain as much as in anger. In response, it wrenched his artificial leg so hard that the securing straps tore loose of their buckles. With a brief agony that robbed Whit of breath, the prosthetic limb came loose, leaving him at an even greater disadvantage.

  In the cramped kitchen of the motel manager’s apartment, Rachael had just opened the plastic garbage bag and had removed one handful of rumpled, soiled Xeroxes from the disorganized Wildcard file when she heard the first scream. She knew immediately that it was Whitney, and she also knew instinctively that there could be only one cause of it: Eric.

  She threw the papers aside and plucked the thirty-two pistol off the table. She went to the rear door, hesitated, then unlocked it.

  Stepping into the dank garage, she paused again, for there was movement on all sides of her. A strong draft swept in through the open side door from the raging night beyond, swinging the single dirty light bulb on its cord. The motion of the light made shadows leap up and fall back and leap up again in every corner. She looked around warily at the stacks of eerily illuminated trash and old furniture, all of which seemed alive amidst the animated shadows.

  Whitney’s screaming was coming from outside, so she figured that Eric was out there, too, rather than in the garage. She abandoned caution and hurried past the black Mercedes, stepping over a couple of paint cans and around a pile of coiled garden hoses.

  A piercing, blood-freezing shriek cut through Whitney’s screams, and Rachael knew without doubt that it was Eric, for that shrill cry was similar to the one he’d made while pursuing her across the desert earlier in the day. But it was more fierce and furious than she remembered, more powerful, and even less human and more alien than it had been before. Hearing that monstrous voice, she almost turned and ran. Almost. But, after all, she was not capable of abandoning Whitney Gavis.

  She plunged through the open door, into the night and tempest, the pistol held out in front of her. The Eric-thing was only a few yards away, its back to her. She cried out in shock because she saw that it was holding Whitney’s leg, which it seemed to have torn from him.

  An instant later, she realized that it was the artificial leg, but by then she had drawn the beast’s attention. It threw the fake limb aside and turned toward her, its impossible eyes gleaming.

  Its appearance was so numbingly horrific that she, unlike Whitney, was unable to scream; she tried, but her voice failed her. The darkness and rain mercifully concealed many details of the mutant form, but she had an impression of a massive and misshapen head, jaws that resembled a cross between those of a wolf and a crocodile, and an abundance of deadly teeth. Shirtless and shoeless, clad only in jeans, it was a few inches taller than Eric had been, and its spine curved up into hunched and deformed shoulders. There was an immense expanse of breastbone that looked as if it might be covered with horns or spines of some sort, and with rounded knobby excrescences. Long and strangely jointed arms hung almost to its knees. The hands were surely just like the hands of demons who, in the fiery depths of hell, cracked open human souls and ate the meat of them.

  “Rachael … Rachael … come for you … Rachael,” the Eric-thing said in a vile and whispery voice, slowly forming each word with care, as if the knowledge and use of language were nearly forgotten. The creature’s throat and mouth and tongue and lips were no longer designed for the production of human speech; the formation of each syllable obviously required tremendous effort and perhaps some pain. “Come … for … you …”

  It took a step toward her, its arms swinging against its sides with a scraping, clicking, chitinous sound.

  It.

  She could no longer think of him as Eric, as her husband. Now, he was just a thing, an abomination, that by its very existence made a mockery of everything else in God’s creation.

  She fired point-blank at its chest.

  It did not even flinch at the impact of the slug. It emitted a high-pitched squeal that seemed more an expression of eagerness than pain, and it took another step.

  She fired again, then a third time, and a fourth.

  The multiple impacts of the slugs made the beast stagger slightly to one side, but it did not go down.

  “Rachael … Rachael …”

  Whitney shouted, “Shoot it, kill it!”

  The pistol’s clip held ten rounds. She squeezed off the last six as fast as she could, certain that she hit the thing every time in the gut and chest and even in the face.

  It finally roared in pain and collapsed onto its knees, then toppled facedown in the mud.

  “Thank God,” she said shakily, “thank God,” and she was suddenly so weak that she had to lean against the outside wall of the garage.

  The Eric-thing retched, gagged, twitched, and pushed up onto hands and knees.

  “No,” she said disbelievingly.

  It raised its grisly head and stared fiercely at her with cold, mismatched lantern eyes. Slowly lids slid down over the eyes, then slowly up, and when revealed again, those radiant ovals seemed brighter than before.

  Even if its altered genetic structure provided for incredibly rapid healing and for resurrection after death, surely it could not recover this fast. If it could repair and reanimate itself in seconds after succumbing to ten bullet wounds, it was not just a quick healer, and not just potentially immortal, but virtually invincible.

  “Die, damn you,” she said.

  It shuddered and spat something into the mud, then lurched up from the ground, all the way to its feet.

  “Run!” Whitney shouted. “For Christ’s sake, Rachael, run!”

  She had no hope of saving Whitney. There was no point in staying to be killed with him.

  “Rachael,” the creature said, and in its gravelly mucus-thick voice were anger and hunger and hatred and dark need.

  No more bullets in the gun. There were boxes of ammunition in the Mercedes, but she could never reach them in time to reload. She dropped the pistol.

  “Run!” Whit Gavis shouted again.

  Heart hammering, Rachael sprin
ted back into the garage, leaping over the paint cans and garden hoses. A twinge of pain shot through the ankle she had twisted earlier in the day, and the claw punctures in her thigh began to burn as if they were fresh wounds.

  The demon shrieked behind her.

  As she went, Rachael toppled a set of freestanding metal shelves laden with tools and boxes of nails, hoping to delay the thing if it pursued her immediately instead of finishing Whitney Gavis first. The shelves went over with a resounding crash, and by the time she reached the open kitchen door, she heard the beast clambering through the debris. It had, indeed, left Whitney alive, for it was in a frenzy to put its hands upon her.

  She bounded across the threshold, slammed the kitchen door, but before she could engage the dead-bolt latch, the door was thrown open with tremendous force. She was propelled across the kitchen, nearly fell, somehow stayed on her feet, but struck her hip against the edge of a counter and slammed backward into the refrigerator hard enough to send a brief though intense current of pain from the small of her back to the base of her neck.

  It came in from the garage. In the kitchen light, it appeared immense and was more hideous than she had wanted to believe.

  For a moment, it stood just inside the door, glaring across the small dusty kitchen. It lifted its head and expanded its chest as if giving her an opportunity to admire it. Its flesh was mottled brown-gray-green-black, with lighter patches that almost resembled human skin, though it was mostly pebbled like elephant hide and scaly in some places. The head was pear-shaped, set at a slant on the thick muscular neck, with the round end at the top and the slimmer end at the bottom of the face. The entire narrow part of the “pear” was composed of a snoutlike protrusion and jaws. When it opened its enormous mouth to hiss, the pointed teeth within were sharklike in their sharpness and profusion. The darting tongue was dark and quick and utterly inhuman. Its entire face was lumpy; in addition to a pair of hornlike knobs on its forehead, there were odd convexities and concavities that seemed to have no biological purpose, plus tumorous knots of bone or other tissue. On its brow and radiating downward from its eyes, throbbing arteries and swollen veins shone just beneath the skin.