“Who’s there?” he asked. “Who are you? What do you want?”
At the same time that the voices seemed to press close to him, they lacked the clarity of intimate speech, and he could imagine as easily that these were utterances carried to him from other rooms, through an intervening wall or door.
Moving to where he thought the center of the living room should be, finding no furniture in his way, Julian spoke louder than before: “Where are you? What do you want?”
In his first year or two of blindness, he had felt vulnerable and had worried unduly about the many things that might happen to him because of his disability. But you couldn’t spend your life expecting a calamitous fall or an assault at any moment; fear soon exhausts itself. After forty years of successful sightless living, he felt not invulnerable but safe enough, and he came to believe the worst that would ever happen to him had already happened when he was eleven.
Suddenly his scalp prickled and the back of his neck went cold as fear proved to be as on-call as ever it had been. The quarrelsome nature of the voices darkened into threatening tones, and again he felt that they were shockingly near, the speakers close enough to touch. When he reached out, he found that he had shuffled out of the center of the room without realizing it, for he touched a wall.
The plaster vibrated in time with the speech waves of the angry chorus, as if the voices came from within the wall.
Free of all emotions, she was still lying on her kitchen floor, disconnected images from a fading identity blooming in the mostly lightless and drowned landscape of her mind. She seemed to be looking up from the bottom of a pond, through water toward a night sky, and the images were formed from fat drops of light falling like fitful rain, each drop spreading into colors and scenes as it struck and melded with the surface of the pond; and every scene shimmered for a moment like reverse paintings on glass, before bleeding away into darkness. Faces that she knew but to which she could no longer affix names, places she recognized but was unable to identify, moments out of a lost time that might have been an hour or a week or ten years in the past floated one after another across this drowning pool, colorful at first but then in black-and-white and shades of gray.
As she seemed to sink into the silt and the scum of her final resting place, as the now colorless moments of a fading consciousness grew ever dimmer, a sudden excruciatingly tender yearning overcame her, a keen nostalgia for what she could not remember, for what she felt slipping away from her forever, and there came also a piercing love for light, for life, for sounds and scents and tastes and sights and textures whether rough or smooth. These fervent feelings swelled until she seemed sure to burst with them—but then they passed.
She felt no further emotion. All grew dark in her, without want or meaning, and after a while she developed one desire but one only: to kill. She was not she anymore, she was a creature now without a past or gender, transformed by the sleek gray attacker into one of its kind, with one name only:
From the threshold of Silas Kinsley’s bathroom, Bailey watched the serpentine organisms throb with something Kirby Ignis said was “like peristalsis.” In the flashlight beam, as those pulsations occurred more rapidly, the clusters of bell-shaped mushrooms became active as well. The puckered formation at the crown of each, which Bailey had likened to the mouths of drawstring purses, began to open and to peel back from the caps, whereupon those growths looked less like mushrooms than like engorged phalluses straining through their foreskins toward passionate release.
Simultaneously Bailey and Kirby recognized the implications of this unveiling. Bailey said, “Get back,” Kirby said, “It’s sporing,” and they retreated quickly from the bathroom threshold, across the bedroom, to the open door, where they paused to see if the thing might be peeling itself off the walls to follow them. It either didn’t possess the power of locomotion or was not in a mood to hunt them down, because it neither slithered nor crawled out of the dimly lighted bathroom.
In the public hallway, outside the apartment, Bailey closed the door and wished that he could lock it or had a chair with which to brace it shut. The empty chambers of the Pendleton, evidently stripped bare long ago for reasons unknowable, were not likely to provide them with hammers and nails or with any other tools they might use to seal off rooms either to contain the things in them or to create a refuge into which nothing deadly could intrude.
Pulsing with a bleak and sour inner light, the thing was like some massive mutant tuber that had grown underground, in radioactive soil, developing many spongy lobes of malignant flesh, initially feeding on minerals in the ground but then on insects and worms, incorporating their DNA into its structure, eventually extruding that segmented wormlike part of it, sprouting legs and nasty pincers and a pair of horny mandibles with which to bite and rend. Maybe it was some alien life form, fallen to Earth in a seed pod, in a meteorite, self-aware from the start. Or maybe it gradually became self-aware as it lived below the surface like a trapdoor spider, pulling down unwary rats and rabbits and dogs and maybe even children, especially children, its lair a mass grave, feeding on them, gaining from their DNA a series of increasingly sophisticated brain designs, and at last burrowing to the surface with God alone knew what purpose.
It squealed again in that angry-child, tortured-child voice. And there was no way to read accurately its intention in its three radiant silvery eyes, though Tom saw in them the same hunger that he heard in the keening voice.
The beast’s asymmetrical structure and its weird hodgepodge of features, seemingly derived from multiple species, suggested that it must be semifunctional at best, clumsy by nature, awkward in action. He considered rushing toward it, dodging past it, off the path and through the tangled plants and away to the east gate. He was a boy again and as fast as a highland wind, for fear had returned him to the helplessness of childhood when he had compensated for his size and weakness by being fleet and clever and inexhaustible. Before Tom could move, however, the thing jittered forward, hissing and venting, closing from thirty feet to fifteen, quicker than a scuttling crab. But there it halted, studying him as if he might be as strange a sight to it as it was to him.
He didn’t hear the deadbolt retract behind him, didn’t hear the door open. He cried out in alarm when something seized him by the arm, less inclined to believe that he had any chance of being saved than that at his back was something no less freakish and no less vicious than the monster on the footpath. The rapid mortar fire of his heart
Padmini slammed the heavy door and with the thumb-turn shot home the deadbolt.
