Midnight

denied himself, let off thirty years of steam right here, right now, tonight….

29

Beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the eaves, came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo and then chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been thrown open, letting denizens of the pit pour forth into Moonlight 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 deputies 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, Harry?'

'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.

Harry remembered what Sam had said about how 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 distance—

about twenty-five feet — and at that angle, shooting up from the floor, he couldn't hit anything. He hesitated with only 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've 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 un-human cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar look of longing, visible even in the dim wash of light from the open 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 thing at all, Harry. Especially for you. You'll walk again, Harry, walk as well as anyone. You'll be whole again. Because after the Change, you'll be able to heal yourself. You'll be free of paralysis.'

'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 cries 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. 'Vanner, are you all right?'

Vanner's hands … changed. His wrists swelled and grew gnarly 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 snarled, and teeth flashed.

'… need,' Vanner said, '… need, need, want, need …'

'No!' Worthy shouted.

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, twitched, 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 Harry 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

Earlier, 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 the man 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 the 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 jack, 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