Twilight Eyes (50 page)

I unzipped my coat, quickly slipped my arms out of the sleeves, and let the garment fall softly to the floor. Its bulkiness would have inhibited my throwing arm.

An open archway and three closed doors—in addition to the outside door to the porch—led off the large kitchen. Through the archway I could see the downstairs hall that served the entire house. Of the three doors, one probably opened on the basement stairs, one on a pantry. The other might have been an entrance to the room in which we had seen the demon and the handcuffed woman. However, I did not want to start opening doors and making a lot of noise unless I was absolutely sure that on the first try I would find the right room beyond. Therefore we went silently across the kitchen, through the archway, into the hall, where the first door on the left, standing half open, was the door to the abattoir.

I was worried that the woman would see me if I eased into the doorway to reconnoiter and that her reaction would alert the goblin, so I plunged into the room without knowing where my target would be. The door crashed back against the wall as I flung it aside.

The goblin, looming over the woman, whirled to face me, letting out a fetid hiss in surprise.

With astounding suddenness its rampant phallus collapsed and withdrew into the scaly pouch, which itself seemed to lift into a protective body cavity.

Gripping the knife by the point of the weighted blade, I drew it back behind my head.

Still hissing, the goblin leapt toward me.

Simultaneously, my arm flicked forward. The knife flew.

In mid-leap, the goblin was hit in the throat. The blade sank deep, although it was not as well placed as I would have liked. The beast's glistening, quivering, hoglike nostrils fluttered with a snort of shock and rage, and hot blood streamed out of its snout.

It kept coming. It crashed into me. Hard.

We staggered, slammed thunderously into the wall. My back was pressed to the dried blood of God-knows-how-many innocents, and for an instant (before determinedly blocking it out of my mind) I could feel the pain and horror that had radiated from the victims in their death throes and had adhered to the paint and plaster of this place.

Our faces were only inches apart. The creature's breath stank of blood, dead meat, rotten flesh—as if feeding on the woman's terror had given it a carnivore's halitosis.

Teeth, huge teeth, hooked and gnashing, dripping saliva, flashed an inch from my eyes, an enameled promise of pain and death.

The dark, oily, demonic tongue curled toward me as if it were a questing snake.

I felt the goblin's gnarled arms curl around me, as if it would try to crush me against its chest. Or, at the extremity of the embrace, perhaps it would dig its terrible claws deep into my sides.

My hammering heart broke a latch bolt on the storage vault of adrenaline within me, and I was abruptly borne up on a chemical flood that made me feel like a god—though, admittedly, a frightened god.

My arms were more or less pinned across my breast, so I made fists of my hands and rammed my elbows outward with all my might, into the goblin's strong arms, breaking the hold it was trying to put on me. I felt its claws snag for an instant in my shirt as its grip was broken, and then I heard its bony knuckles stutter against the wall behind me as one of its arms flew up.

It screamed with rage, a strange cry made even stranger because the sound waves, rushing from voicebox to lips, vibrated against the blade of the knife that pierced its throat, acquiring a metallic tone before expulsion. With the goblin's squeal came a spray of blood that spattered my face; a few drops flew into my mouth.

Empowered now by disgust as well as by fear and fury, I thrust away from the wall, heaving the beast backward. We stumbled and fell, and I landed atop the thing, where at once I seized the handle of the knife protruding from its throat, twisted the blade brutally, jerked it free, stabbed down again, again, again, unable to stop myself even though the vermilion luminosity of its eyes was swiftly fading to a muddy red. Its heels drummed weakly on the floor, making a cold
clack-clack-clack
against the linoleum. Its arms flopped uselessly, and its long, horny claws tapped out meaningless codes on the slaughterhouse floor. Finally I drew the razored edge from left to right across the throat, severing muscle, veins, and arteries. Then I was done—and so was it.

Gasping, gagging, spitting copiously to expel every trace of demonic blood from my mouth, I rose onto my knees, straddling the dying goblin.

Beneath me, with much quicksilver rippling and shimmering, it underwent a final convulsive transformation, expending its meager remaining life energy to return to the human form, as its kind had been genetically programmed to do in the lost era of their creation. Bones crunched, bones popped, bones snapped, bones melted and bubbled and resolidified in frenzied reformation; tendons and cartilage tore but immediately reknit in different patterns of warp and woof; the softer tissues made a wet sucking-spluttering-oozing sound as they frantically sought and found new configurations.

The handcuffed woman, Rya, and I were so transfixed by the lycanthropic reversion that we were not aware of the second goblin until it exploded into the room, taking us by surprise just as we had taken the first beast.

Perhaps at that moment Rya's own—and lesser—psychic ability was functioning better than mine, for as I whipped my head up and saw the oncoming goblin, Rya was already swinging the tire iron that she had brought with her. The blow was so furiously swung and so solidly placed that I could see Rya was having difficulty holding on to the weapon with hands numbed by the impact; the powerful shock nearly wrenched the iron from her hands. The lantern-eyed attacker pitched backward with a howl of pain, surely damaged but not sufficiently injured to go down.

It screeched and spat as if its spittle were acutely poisonous to us. Rebounding from the blow even as Rya was still struggling to keep a firm grip on the tire iron, it rushed her with terrifying speed and agility. Seized her with both its huge hands. All ten talons. Got mostly her heavy winter coat. Thank God. Mostly her coat.

Before it could tear one hand free from the coat to slash off her face, I was up. Moving. Two steps, a jump. I was on its scaly back. Sandwiched it between Rya and me. Drove the knife down. Hard.
Rammed
it down. Down between the bony and malformed shoulders. Hilt-deep. Deep into gristle. I couldn't wrench it loose.

Suddenly the beast shrugged with inhuman power. Like a rodeo horse. Flung me away. I crashed to the floor. Pain shot up my spine. My head hit the wall.

Things blurred. Then cleared.

But for a moment I was too stunned to get up.

I saw my knife still protruding from the goblin's back.

Rya had been flung away from the monster, too, but now it went after her again. However, she had used the moment to regroup, and having devised a plan, she stepped into her assailant instead of away from it, using the tire iron once more, not as a club this time, and not the lug-wrench end, either, but the crowbar end, wielding it as if it was a spear, thrusting it forward as the enemy leapt toward her, driving the thick iron tool into the goblin's belly, eliciting no howl this time but rather a horrid rattling wheeze of shock and pain.

The beast clasped both of its large four-knuckled hands around the spear that had pierced its middle, and Rya let go. As the goblin staggered backward and collided with the wall, trying to wrench the shaft out of its guts, I recovered enough to get to my feet. I went after the hateful thing.

I put both hands on the gore-slicked lug-wrench end of the bar. The ancient adversary looked its age now as blood gushed from it in torrents. It raised murderous but dimming eyes to me and tried to slash at my hands with its well-honed claws. I tore the crowbar end loose before it could cut me, stepped back, and began methodically to club the creature into submission. I hammered it until it went to its knees, hammered some more until it collapsed facedown on the floor. I did not stop even then, but pounded and pounded until its skull crumpled, until its shoulders were pulverized, until its elbows were smashed, until its hips and knees were broken, until I was pouring sweat that washed the blood off my face and hands, and until I could not lift the tire iron to deliver one more blow.

My stentorian breathing echoed off the walls.

With a couple of Kleenex, Rya was trying to wipe the goblin blood off her hands.

The first beast—now dead—had regained its naked, battered human form even as the battle with the second had begun. Now I saw that it was, in fact, the cop that we had seen earlier.

The second goblin, transformed, was a woman of approximately the same age as the cop.

Perhaps his wife. Or mate.

Did they really think in terms of husbands and wives—or even mates? How did they perceive each other when at night they thrashed in cold, reptilian passion? And did they usually go two-by-two in the world—and was that arrangement by preference, as it was with most of our kind? Or was pair-bonding only a convenient cover that assisted them in their efforts to pass for ordinary men and women?

Rya retched, seemed in danger of vomiting, but choked down the urge and threw aside the blood-soaked tissues.

I planted both feet on the back of the second dead beast, gripped my knife with both hands, and worked it free of the creature's gristly shoulders.

I wiped the blade on my jeans.

The naked woman in the chair was trembling violently. Her eyes were full of horror, confusion, and fear—fear not only of the dead goblins but of me and Rya. Understandable.

“Friends,” I rasped. “We're not . . . like
them
.”

She stared at me and could not speak.

“Take care . . . of her,” I told Rya.

I turned toward the door.

Rya said, “Where—”

“To see if there're any more of them.”

“There aren't. They'd be here by now.”

“Still have to look.”

I left the room, hoping Rya would understand that I wanted her to calm and dress the redhead during my absence. I wanted the woman to regain at least some of her wits, strength, dignity, and self-respect before I returned to explain to her about the goblins.

In the dining room, wind alternately whispered conspiratorially, and moaned mournfully at the window.

In the living room the mantel clock ticked hollowly.

Upstairs, I found three bedrooms and a bath. In each I could hear the arthritic creaking of the attic rafters as the wind pushed at the gables and pounded on the roof and pried at the eaves.

No more goblins.

In the chilly bathroom I stripped off my blood-soaked clothes and washed quickly at the sink. I did not look in the mirror above the basin; I did not dare. Killing goblins was justified. I had no doubt about the sinlessness of it, and I did not avoid my reflection out of any fear of seeing guilt in my eyes. However, each time I slaughtered the demonkind, it seemed as if they were harder to kill; more was required of me, worse violence than before, greater savagery. So after every bloody session there seemed to be a new coldness in my gaze, a steeliness that disconcerted and dismayed me.

The cop had been about my size, and in the master bedroom closet I selected one of his shirts and a pair of his Levi's. They fit as well as my own.

I went downstairs and found Rya and the redhead waiting for me in the living room. They were by the front windows in comfortable-looking armchairs, looking thoroughly
un
comfortable. From their position they could see the driveway and could give an alarm at the first sign of an approaching car.

Outside, wind-driven ghosts of snow rose up from the ground and hurried away into the darkness, vague phosphorescent forms that seemed to have been dispatched on mysterious missions.

The woman was dressed. Her experience had not left her deranged, though she sat with her shoulders hunched and her pale hands working nervously in her lap.

I pulled up a smaller chair with a needlepoint cushion and sat beside Rya, taking her hand. She was trembling.

“What have you told her?” I asked Rya.

“Some of it . . . about the goblins . . . what they are, where they came from. But she doesn't know who we are or how we can see them when she can't. I've left that for you.”

The redhead's name was Cathy Osborn. She was thirty-one, an associate professor of literature at Barnard in New York City. She had been raised in a small Pennsylvania town eighty miles west of Yontsdown. Recently, her father had been admitted to the hospital, suffering from a moderate heart attack, and Cathy had taken time from her duties at Barnard to be with him. He was recovering well, and now she was returning to New York. Considering the dreadful condition of some mountain roads in winter, she'd been making excellent time—until she reached the eastern edge of Yontsdown. As a student and teacher and lover of literature, she was (she said) an imaginative person, an open-minded person, and she even had a taste for the outré in fiction, had read her share of fantasy and horror—“
Dracula, Frankenstein,
some Algernon Blackwood, a little bit of H. P. Lovecraft, a story by someone named Sturgeon about a teddy bear that sucked blood”—so she was not, she said, entirely unprepared for the fantastic or macabre. Nevertheless, in spite of her taste for fantasy and in spite of the nightmare creatures she had seen, she had to struggle valiantly to assimilate what Rya had told her about these genetically engineered soldiers from an era lost to history. She said, “I know I'm not mad, yet I keep wondering if I
am,
and I know I saw those hideous things change from human form and then back again, but I keep wondering if I imagined it or hallucinated the whole thing, even though I'm quite sure I
didn't,
and all this stuff about a previous civilization destroyed in a great war . . . it's too much, just too much, and now I'm babbling—aren't I?—yes, I know I am, but I feel as if I'm on the edge of brain burnout, you know?”