Midnight

A kitchen clock ticked.

Rain drummed on the patio cover.

His soaked hair was pasted to his forehead. He pushed it aside, out of his eyes.

When he moved, his wet shoes squished.

He went directly to the phone, which was mounted on the wall above a corner secretary. When he picked it up, he got no dial tone, but the line was not dead, either. It was filled with strange sounds clicking, low beeping, soft oscillations — all of which blended into mournful and alien music, an electro threnody.

The back of Sam's neck went cold.

Carefully, silently, he returned the handset to its cradle.

He wondered what sounds could be heard on a telephone that was being used as a link between two computers, with a modem. Was one of the Coltranes at work elsewhere in the house, tied in by a home computer to New Wave?

Somehow he sensed that what he had heard on the line was not as simply explained as that. It had been damned eerie.

A dining room lay beyond the kitchen. The two large windows were covered with gauzy sheers, which further filtered the ashen daylight. A hutch, buffet, table, and chairs were revealed as blocks of black and slate-gray shadows.

Again he stopped to listen. Again he heard nothing unusual.

The house was laid out in a classic California design, with no downstairs hall. Each room led directly to the next in an open and airy floorplan. Through an archway he entered the large living room, grateful that the house had wall-to-wall carpeting, on which his wet shoes made no sound.

The living room was less shadowy than any other part of the house that he had seen thus far, yet the brightest color was a pearly gray. The west windows were sheltered by the front porch, but rain streamed over those facing north. Leaden daylight, passing through the panes, speckled the room with the watery-gray shadows of the hundreds of beads that tracked down the glass, and Sam was so edgy that he could almost feel those small ameboid phantoms crawling over him.

Between the lighting and his mood, he felt as if he were in an old black-and-white movie. One of those bleak exercises in film noir.

The living room was deserted, but abruptly a sound came from the last room downstairs. At the southwest corner. Beyond the foyer. The den, most likely. It was a piercing trill that made his teeth ache, followed by a forlorn cry that was neither the voice of a man nor that of a machine but something in between, a semi-metallic voice wrenched by fear and twisted with despair. That was followed by low electronic pulsing, like a massive heartbeat.

Then silence.

He had brought up his revolver, holding it straight out in front of him, ready to shoot anything that moved. But everything was as still as it was silent.

The trill, the eerie cry, and the base throbbing surely could not be associated with the Boogeymen that he'd seen last night outside of Harry's house, or with the other shape-changers Chrissie described. Until now, an encounter with one of them had been the thing he feared most. But suddenly the unknown entity in the den was more frightening.

Sam waited.

Nothing more.

He had the queer feeling that something was listening for his movements as tensely as he was listening for it.

He considered returning to Harry's to think of some other way to send a message to the Bureau, because Mexican food and Guinness Stout and Goldie Hawn movies — even Swing Shift, now seemed precious beyond value, not pathetic reasons to live, but pleasures so exquisite that no words existed to adequately describe them.

The only thing that kept him from getting the hell out of there was Chrissie Foster. The memory of her bright eyes. Her innocent face. The enthusiasm and animation with which she had, recounted her adventures. Perhaps he had failed Scott, and perhaps it was too late for the boy to be hauled back from the brink. But Chrissie was still alive in every vital sense of the word — physically, intellectually, emotionally — and she was dependent on him. No one else could save her from conversion.

Midnight was little more than twelve hours away.

He edged through the living room and quietly crossed the, foyer. He stood with his back against the wall beside the half-open door to the room from which the weird sounds had come.

Something clicked in there.

He stiffened.

Low, soft clicks. Not the tick-tick-tick of claws like those he had heard tapping on the window last night. More like a long series of relays being tripped, scores of switches being closed dominoes falling against one another: click-click-click-clickety-clickety-click-click-clickety….

Silence once more.

Holding the revolver in both hands, Sam stood in front of the door and pushed it open with one foot. He crossed the threshold and assumed a shooter's stance just inside the room.

The windows were covered by interior shutters, and the only light was from two computer screens. Both were fitted with monitors that resulted in black text on an amber background. Everything in the room not wrapped in shadows was touched by that golden radiance.

Two people sat before the terminals, one on the right side of the room, the other on the left, their backs to each other.

'Don't move,' Sam said sharply.

They neither moved nor spoke. They were so still that at first he thought they were dead.

The peculiar light was brighter yet curiously less revealing from the half-burnt-out daylight that vaguely illuminated the other rooms. As his eyes adjusted, Sam saw that the two people at the computers were not only unnaturally still but were not really people any more. He was drawn forward by the icy grip of horror.

Oblivious of Sam, a naked man, probably Harley Coltrane, sat in a wheeled, swivel-based chair at the computer to the right of the door, against the west wall He was connected to the VDT by a pair of inch-thick cables that looked less metallic than organic, glistening wetly in the amber glow. They extended from within the bowels of the data-processing unit — from which the cover plate had been removed — and into the man's bare torso below his rib cage, melding bloodlessly with the flesh. They throbbed.

'Dear God,' Sam whispered.

Coltrane's lower arms were utterly fleshless, just golden bones. The meat of his upper arms ended smoothly two inches above the elbows; from those stumps, bones thrust out as cleanly as robotic extrusions from a metal casing. The skeletal hands were locked tightly around the cables, as if they were merely a pair of clamps.

When Sam stepped nearer to Coltrane and looked closer, he saw the bones were not as well differentiated as they should have been but had half melted together. Furthermore, they were veined with metal. As he watched, the cables pulsed with such vigor that they began to vibrate wildly. If not held fast by the clamping hands, they might have torn loose either from the man or the machine.

Get out.

A voice spoke within him, telling him to flee, and it was his own voice, though not that of the adult Sam Booker. It was the voice of the child he had once been and to which his fear was encouraging him to revert. Extreme terror is a time machine thousand times more efficient than nostalgia, hurtling us backward through the years, into that forgotten and intolerable condition of helplessness in which so much of childhood is spent.

Get out, run, run, get out!

Sam resisted the urge to bolt.

He wanted to understand. What was happening? What had, these people become? Why? What did this have to do with the Boogeymen who prowled the night? Evidently through microtechnology Thomas Shaddack had found a way to alter, radically and forever, human biology. That much was clear to Sam, but knowing just that and nothing else was like sensing that something lived within the sea without ever having seen a fish. so much more lay beneath the surface, mysterious.