gilded lions as the cross supports that connect the legs. Silverfish skitter across the green-felt playing surface, disappearing into the ball pockets.
Even in the most disturbing environments, in the presence of deeply corrupt people who want nothing less than to kill me, I tend to find a vein of fun in either the rock or the hard place between which I’m trapped. Not this time. The atmosphere in this house is pestilential, poisonous, so unwholesome that I feel as if the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done is breathe the air herein.
At one end of the pool table lies an object that is no less enigmatical upon close inspection than from a distance. Round but not perfectly so, about five feet in diameter, it resembles nothing so much as a giant version of the medicine ball that men used to throw to one another for exercise before health clubs became high-tech. The object is mottled several shades of gray and is grained like leather, but it has no seams or stitching, and the lacquered sheen is unlike any leather finish I have ever seen. Some of the bulbs are burned out in the chandelier above the pool table, but what light there is glimmers in the surface of this unfathomable construction much the way that moonlight plays on dark water.
My perception of the object’s nature changes from one instant to the next when the surface proves to be not lacquered but wet. A bead of moisture swells out of it and trickles down the curved form to the carpet. Then something within the great ball writhes.
As I back hurriedly away, the surface of the thing is revealed to be rather like a cloak but not of cloth, of skin, which now peels up with a slick slithering sound, revealing a crouched form that in this unveiling rises with alarming alacrity to a height of almost seven feet. The limbs are jointed in ways that suggest machinery rather than bone, but this is no robot. It seems both reptilian and insectile, its flesh so tightly strung on its legs and arms that it appears withered but nonetheless strong. In the torso, in the set of the shoulders, it seems less reptilian and less insectile than human, and of course it stands erect. The gray cloaklike mass of skin falls in folds around it, less like a coat than like a cape, and its flesh is otherwise pale with muddy-yellow striations.
I would run, but I know that to turn my back will be to invite attack. Besides, everything about it speaks of speed, and it will have me before I’ve gone a dozen steps.
Because of my disturbed mother and her resort to threats with firearms as a primary child-raising technique, I have all my life disliked guns, though at this moment I
The creature lifts its hung head, the cowl peels away to settle around its neck like a rolled collar, and the face appears more human than not. Female. Greasy coils of dark hair. Features that might have been lovely before the skull elongated and the bones thickened during whatever transformation she endured at Hiskott’s hand.
Here is one of the motor-court guests who was so alone in the world that she would not be missed, now a human-alien hybrid that perhaps exists for no reason but to protect and serve her master. If any of her former personality remains, any slightest degree of self-awareness and memory, what a horror her current existence must be, and how insane that kernel of her true self must have become in this monstrous prison of strange flesh and bone.
Although the beast’s eyes are milky as if with cataracts, I am sure that it can see, perhaps as well in the dark as in the light. I can’t look away from those eyes, and suddenly I know intuitively what the thing is about to do.
I drop and roll and spring up as, in a slithery scissoring of long and knuckled limbs, the creature crosses the distance that I have put between us and lands in the precise spot that I vacated, quicker than a cat.
As it turns to face me, I see that something extraordinary has happened to its forehead. Protruding from the center of its brow is what appears to be a tapered horn about four inches long, half an inch wide at the base but as pointed as a nail. No, not a horn, but a hollow probe of some kind from which depends a single drop of fluid as red as blood. The droplet falls, and the segmented horn collapses into itself, backward into the skull. At the point where it retracted is a small puckered pouch of skin that I had not previously noticed.
The creature doesn’t mean to kill me. I am to be converted, as was the woman, into a servant and defender of whatever Norris Hiskott has become.
TWENTY-FIVE
Again I
I continue moving, circling the pool table, keeping it between us, as the few remaining moths take flight again and caper about the chandelier, their distorted shadows chasing silverfish across the green felt.
Following his hybrid rebirth, Hiskott has become arguably psychic, in the sense that he can have out-of-body experiences and invade the minds of others; therefore, this beast that serves him may have some such ability to a lesser degree. In fact, the compulsion that I feel to stare into those milky eyes suggests that an attempt is being made to cast a sort of spell and render me incapable of flight or self-defense.
Because of my gifts, this creature has no more power over me than does Norris Hiskott. But maybe its attempt to fix me in place with a psychic skewer, like a lepidopterist pinning a butterfly to a specimen board, opens a channel between us that transmits the beast’s intentions to me.
Then I realize that I’ve missed more than one opportunity to kill the thing. Worse, I no longer have the pistol in a two-hand grip. I’ve allowed the muzzle to drift off target. To a degree, I’m susceptible to the creature’s unspoken suggestions, after all.
Bringing the gun up, both hands on the grip, I fail to move when my adversary does, and abruptly it looms over me, seizing my head in both bony hands, to hold me steady for the sting. It stinks of burnt matches, rotting roses. The milky eyes are two chalices of steaming anesthetic and bitter venom. A strong supple scaly tail, previously unnoticed, whips around my legs. The capelike mass of loose skin billows out and then forward to enwrap my body, as if I am soon to be a monk of its satanic order, robed and cowled and moon-eyed alike to it.
The first shot takes the beast point-blank in the chest.
Its grip on my skull only tightens. The dripping hornlike probe extrudes from its brow. It rears back its Gorgon head, the better to slam the horn through my skull, linking brain to brain.
Trapped between us, angled upward, the gun discharges, gouging a gout of flesh and splintered wedge of jawbone from the fiend’s face, instantly collapsing its grin of triumph.
The hideous cape of skin slips away from me, the tail unwinds from my legs, one calloused clammy hand slides along my face, but yet the creature’s head darts down to gore my brow.
Fired into that red-toothed and howling mouth, the third bullet spares me by coring the brain, shattering through the back of the head, and drilling into the ceiling. The curiously articulated legs fold this way and that, the hooked hands seem to seek a grip upon the air, and the beast drops, falls back, faceup, no luster any longer in its eyes, the cape of skin, like a mortuary shroud, draping its body.
It lies still except for the rolled collar of excess skin around its neck. Perhaps in some postmortem reflex, that dark-gray rouleau unspools, insinuates itself between the carpet and the broken skull, and creeps across the top of the head, over the brow, and down the face, whereupon it quivers and becomes as lifeless as the visage that it covers, as though the creature had been given license to walk the Earth on the condition that in both life and death it recognize the shame of its appearance and its purpose.
From the cellar rises an inhuman cry that might be an expression of rage, although to me it is more like a lamentation, a sorrowing, woven through with bright threads of sharp anxiety. This is a cry of madness, as well, of melancholy alienation from all that might give comfort.
I could pity what mourns and cowers in the darkness below, if I didn’t expect that it was another like the one I just killed and that, given the chance, it would induct me into their hive.
As the plaintive cries subside, I consider sitting and waiting for Hiskott and the third of his guards to come looking for me rather than risk searching further, when behind every closed door might wait a thief of minds and a collector of souls. But the insect-infested furniture isn’t appealing, and the deeply unwholesome atmosphere will corrode courage if I linger too long.
