Midnight

You can't see me, Chrissie thought-prayed. I'm invisible.

The radiance of the stalker's eyes had faded to twin spots of finished silver.

Chrissie held her breath.

Tucker said, 'Got to eat, eat, want eat.'

The creature that had been her mother said, 'Find girl, girl, find her first, then eat, then.'

They sounded as if they were wild animals magically gifted with crude speech.

'Now, now, burning it up, eat now, now, burning,' Tucker said urgently, insistently.

Chrissie was shaking so badly that she was half afraid they would hear the shudders that rattled her.

Tucker said, 'Burning it up, little animals in meadow, hear them, smell them, track, eat, eat, now.'

Chrissie held her breath.

'Nothing here,' the mother-thing said. 'Only maggots, stink, go, eat, then find her, eat, eat, then find her, go.'

Both stalkers retreated from the culvert and vanished.

Chrissie dared to breathe.

After waiting a minute to be sure they were really gone, she turned and troll-walked deeper into the upsloping culvert, blindly feeling the walls as she went, hunting a side passage. She must have gone two hundred yards before she found what she wanted a tributary drain, half the size of the main line. She slid into it, feetfirst and on her back, then squirmed onto her belly and faced out toward the bigger tunnel. That was where she would spend the night. If they returned to the culvert to see if they could detect her scent in the cleaner air beyond the decomposing raccoon, she would be out of the downdraught that swept the main line, and they might not smell her.

She was heartened because their failure to probe deeper into the culvert was proof that they were not possessed of supernatural powers, neither all-seeing nor all-knowing. They were abnormally strong and quick, strange and terrifying, but they could make mistakes too. She began to think that when daylight came she had a fifty-fifty chance of getting out of the woods and finding help before she was caught.

14

In the lights outside of the Perez Family Restaurant, Sam Booker checked his watch. Only 7:10.

He went for a walk along Ocean Avenue, building up the courage to call Scott in Los Angeles. The prospect of that conversation with his son soon preoccupied him and drove all thoughts of the mannerless, gluttonous diners out of his mind.

At 7:30, he stopped at a telephone booth near a Shell service station at the corner of Juniper Lane and Ocean Avenue. He used his credit card to make a long-distance call to his house in Sherman Oaks.

At sixteen Scott thought he was mature enough to be home alone when his father was away on an assignment. Sam did not entirely agree and preferred that the boy stay with his Aunt Edna. But Scott won his way by making life pure hell for Edna, so Sam was reluctant to put her through that ordeal.

He had repeatedly drilled the boy in safety procedures — keep all doors and windows locked; know where the fire extinguishers are; know how to get out of the house from any room in an earthquake or other emergency — and had taught him how to use a handgun. In Sam's judgment Scott was still too immature to be home alone for days at a time; but at least the boy was well prepared for every contingency.

The number rang nine times. Sam was about to hang up, guiltily relieved that he'd failed to get through, when Scott finally answered.

'Hello. It's me, Scott. Dad.'

'Yeah?'

Heavy-metal rock was playing at high volume in the background. He was probably in his room, his stereo cranked up so loud that the windows shook.

Sam said, 'Could you turn the music down?'

'I can hear you,' Scott mumbled.

'Maybe so, but I'm having trouble hearing you.'

'I don't have anything to say, anyway.'

'Please turn it down,' Sam said, with emphasis on the 'Please.'

Scott dropped the receiver, which clattered on his nightstand. The sharp sound hurt Sam's ear. The boy lowered the volume on the stereo but only slightly. He picked up the phone and said, 'Yeah?'

'How're you doing?'

'Okay.'

'Everything all right there?'

'Why shouldn't it be?'

'I just asked.'

Sullenly 'If you called to see if I'm having a party, don't worry. I'm not.'

Sam counted to three, giving himself time to keep his voice under control. Thickening fog swirled past the glass-walled phone booth. 'How was school today?'

'You think I didn't go?'

'I know you went.'

'You don't trust me.'

'I trust you,' Sam lied.

'You think I didn't go.'

'Did you?'

'Yeah. So how was it?'

'Ridiculous. The same old shit.'

'Scott, please, you know I've asked you not to use that kind of language when you're talking to me,' Sam said, realizing that he was being forced into a confrontation against his will.

'So sorry. Same old poop,' Scott said in such a way that he might have been referring either to the day at school or to Sam.

'It's pretty country up here,' Sam said.

The boy did not reply.

'Wooded hillsides slope right down to the ocean.'

'So?'

Following the advice of the family counselor whom he and Scott had been seeing both together and separately, Sam clenched his teeth, counted to three again, and tried another approach. 'Did you have dinner yet?'

'Yeah.'

'Do your homework?'

'Don't have any.'

Sam hesitated, then decided to let it pass. The counselor, Dr. Adamski, would have been proud of such tolerance and cool self-control.

Beyond the phone booth, the Shell station's lights acquired multiple halos, and the town faded into the slowly congealing mist. At last Sam said, 'What're you doing this evening?'

'I was listening to music.'

Sometimes it seemed to Sam that the music was part of what had turned the boy sour. That pounding, frenetic, unmelodic heavy-metal rock was a collection of monotonous chords and even more monotonous atonal rims, so soul-less and mind-numbing that it might have been the music produced by a civilization of intelligent machines long after man had passed from the face of the earth. After a while Scott had lost interest in most heavy-metal bands and switched allegiance to U2, but their simplistic social consciousness was no match for