In that same instant, the moth rose and turned, suspended in the air, hovering on rapidly beating wings, night-black and hateful. It swooped at Bryce.
He stumbled backwards and threw his arms across his face. He fell.
The moth sailed over his head.
Bryce twisted around, looked up.
The kite-size insect glided soundlessly across the street, toward the buildings on the other side.
Tal Whitman raised his shotgun. The blast was like cannon fire in the silent town.
The moth pitched sideways in midair. It tumbled in a loop, dropped almost to the ground, then it swooped up again and flew on, disappearing over a rooftop.
Stu Wargle was sprawled on the pavement, flat on his back. Unmoving.
Bryce scrambled to his feet and went to Wargle. The deputy lay in the middle of the street, where there was just enough light to see that his face was gone. Jesus.
Chapter 17
The Hour Before Midnight
Tal, Gordy, Frank, and Lisa sat in red leatherette armchairs in a corner of the lobby of the Hilltop Inn. The inn had been closed since the end of the past skiing season, and they had removed the dusty white drop cloths from the chairs before collapsing into them, numb with shock. The oval coffee table was still covered by a dropcloth; they stared at that shrouded object, unable to look at one another.
At the far end of the room, Bryce and Jenny were standing over the body of Stu Wargle, which lay on a long, low sideboard against the wall. No one in the armchairs could bring himself to look over that way.
Staring at the covered coffee table, Tal said, “I shot the damned thing. I hit it. I know I did.”
“We all saw it take the buckshot,” Frank agreed.
“So why wasn't it blown apart?” Tal demanded, “Hit dead on by a blast from a 20-gauge. It should've been torn to pieces, damn it.”
“Guns aren't going to save us,” Lisa said.
In a distant, haunted voice, Gordy said, “It could've been any of us. That thing could've gotten me. I was right behind Stu. If he had ducked or jumped out of the way…”
“No,” Lisa said, “No. It wanted Officer Wargle. Nobody else. Just Officer Wargle.”
Tal stared at the girl. “What do you mean?”
Her flesh had taken paleness from her bones. “Officer Wargle refused to admit he'd seen it when it was battering against the window. He insisted it was just a bird.”
“So?”
“So it wanted him. Him especially,” she said, “To teach him a lesson. But mostly to teach
“It couldn't have heard what Stu said.”
“It did. It heard.”
“But it couldn't have understood.”
“It did.”
“I think you're crediting it with too much intelligence,” Tal said, “It was big, yes, and like nothing any of us has ever seen before. But it was still only an insect. A moth. Right?”
The girl said nothing.
“It's not omniscient,” Tal said, trying to convince himself more than anyone else. “It's not all-seeing, all- hearing, all knowing.”
The girl stared silently at the covered coffee table.
Suppressing nausea, Jenny examined Wargle's hideous wound. The lobby lights were not quite bright enough, so she used a flashlight to inspect the edges of the injury and to peer into the skull. The center of the dead man's demolished face was eaten away clear to the bone; all the skin, flesh, and cartilage were gone. Even the bone itself appeared to be partially dissolved in places, pitted, as if it had been splashed with acid. The eyes were gone. There was, however, normal flesh on all sides of the wound; smooth untouched flesh lay along both sides of the face, from the outer points of the jawbones to the cheekbones, and there was unmarked skin from the midpoint of the chin on down, and from the midpoint of the forehead on up. It was as if some torture artist had designed a frame of healthy skin to set off the gruesome exhibition of bone on display in the center of the face.
Having seen enough, Jenny switched off the flashlight. Earlier, they had covered the body with a dropcloth from one of the chairs. Now Jenny drew the sheet over the dead man's face, relieved to be covering that skeletal grin.
“Well?” Bryce asked.
“No teeth marks,” she said.
“Would a thing like that have teeth?”
“I know it had a mouth, a small chitinous beak. I saw its mandibles working when it bashed itself against the substation windows.”
“Yeah. I saw them, too.”
“A mouth like that would mark the flesh. There'd be slashes. Bite marks. Indications of chewing and tearing.”
“But there were none?”
“No. The flesh doesn't look as if it was ripped off. It seems to've been… dissolved. Along the edges of the wound, the remaining flesh is even sort of cauterized, as if it has been scared by something.”
“You think that… that insect… secreted an acid?”
She nodded.
“And dissolved Stu Wargle's face?”
“And sucked up the liquefied flesh,” she said.
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Yes.”
Bryce was as pale as an untinted deathmask, and his freckles seemed, by contrast, to burn and shimmer on his face. “That explains how it could've done so much damage in only a few seconds.”
Jenny tried not to think of the bony face peering out of the flesh — like a monstrous visage that had removed a mask of normality.
“I think the blood is gone,” she said, “All of it.”
“What?”
“Was the body lying in a pool of blood?”
“No.”
“There's no blood on the uniform, either.”
“I noticed that.”
“There should be blood. He should've spouted like a fountain. The eye sockets should be pooled with it. But there's not a drop.”
Bryce wiped one hand across his face. He wiped so hard, in fact, that some color rose in his cheeks.
“Take a look at his neck,” she said. “The jugular.”
He didn't move toward the corpse.
She said, “And look at the insides of his arms and the backs of his hands. There's no blueness of veins anywhere, no tracery.”
“Collapsed blood vessels?”
“Yeah. I think all the blood is drained out of him.”
Bryce took a deep breath. He said, “I killed him. I'm responsible. We should have waited for reinforcements before leaving the substation — just like you said.”
