Midnight (23 page)

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 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 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.

53

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 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.”

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?”

54

“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, retreat from the too-complex life of the intellect to an existence based strictly on feelings, on physical 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 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.

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 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:

… blood …

… freedom …

—no. Mind, knowledge—

… hunt …

… kill …

—no. Explore, learn—

… eat …

… run …

… hunt …

… fuck …

… 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 arm. “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 room, away from the two dead regressives, along the hallway into the living room.

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
.”