Scorpion Shards

at me again.”

By now the gears and casing of the telescope had begun to rattle and groan with the strange vibration. The three kids stood up, and looked around in terror. Something was very wrong here.

“Listen to me!” shouted Bayless, ripping open the drawers of his filing cabinet and pulling out piles of pa­ pers. “There are things I can tell you; things I’ve never published because until now they’ve never made sense. Things you have to know!”

The roar in the observatory was deafening now, an earsplitting shrieking that sounded almost like voices. But Bayless was too excited to care.

“I know what’s happening to you!” proclaimed Bay­less.

But before he could get any further, there was a blast of light, and they all began to scream.

Because the room was suddenly filled with monsters.

***

Michael did not hear their screams—he was far away, bolting aimlessly over the fields, cursing the stars that looked down on him, cursing the earth that supported him, until his wanderings brought him in a circle back to the buildings of the university.

A class was letting out, and he hunched in the shadows, watching every pretty girl that passed—and they were all pretty in one way or another to Michael. As the crowd thinned out, one girl was left by a bicycle rack.

Michael stepped out of the shadows. He thought he would just watch her as she rode away. That’s all. Just watch.

For days Michael had looked away from girls—he had fought that burning feeling by standing in the cold rain, by screaming into empty fields—but now his resistance was low. He was tired . . . and before he even knew it, he had turned on his peculiar magnetism like a tractor beam.

When the girl heard his footsteps stalking closer, she didn’t think anything of it at first. “Did you enjoy the class?” she asked.

Michael just stared at her, enjoying her every move. “I’m not a student,” he answered.

She began to get a bit apprehensive, glancing around to see if any of her friends were still there, but everyone was gone. They were alone.

“You’re very pretty.” Michael took a step closer, she glanced at him and in an instant she was caught.

Before Michael could pause for a moment’s thought, he was kissing her and she didn’t resist for a moment.

Michael broke away.

“No,” he said, fighting it, “that’s not what I meant to do . . . What I really need . . . I mean what I really want to do is just. . . talk. That’s all.”

But she didn’t hear him, she was staring into his eyes the way they always did. She spoke, almost giggling, as if this were all part of a dream. “My name’s Rebecca,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Michael.”

She smiled and leaned forward to kiss him again. “Why am I doing this?” she said.

“Full moon,” said Michael, although it wasn’t. He was burning inside now, the sweat beading on his face.

Rebecca glanced over her shoulder, to make sure that everyone was gone, then took his hand and led him off down a dim, tree-lined path.

As they ran, Rebecca looked to the right and left. Mi­chael knew she was searching for some hidden place where they could get back to what they had started—a place to match that dark hidden place in Rebecca’s mind that Michael had already found. She was already falling into that darkness with the thrill of a sky-diver.

They came to a windowless building—the school’s physical plant. Steam billowed from the roof, air whistled through vents, and inside a pump rang out a dull toll sending water, gas and electricity to the many buildings of the campus.

Rebecca pushed Michael up against the door, kissed him, then giggled. “You kiss good,” she said.

It was getting out of hand. He knew that he should never have looked at her, but now his worries were drowning in a stormy sea of Rebecca’s kisses. Going around the bases was not a good thing for Michael. He had only done it once—in Baltimore, and after what hap­pened there, he swore not to let it happen again. Since then, bunting his way to first had been the name of the game—but suddenly he realized that he was about to swing away.

“You really don’t want to do this,” said Michael feebly, but even as he said it, he gripped her tighter and felt his own sense of control slipping away.

They leaned into the door, and it squealed open into a cavern smelling brackish and damp, where a water pump pounded and rattled them from head to toe.

Maybe it will be different, thought Michael, maybe it will be all right, and he clung to that thought like a parachute, as he slipped into the darkness, like a man leaping from a plane.

***

Monsters!

The shadows Tory Smythe saw leaping around the ob­servatory became permanently carved into her mind. Al­though it all happened in just a few seconds, she knew ex­actly what she had seen.

Shadow-black tentacles wrapped around the cradle of the telescope. A clouded face that swarmed with a million hideous insects descended upon the astronomer’s desk and something with cold dark fur brushed past Tory, its breath sickly sweet.

In an instant the telescope was torn from its moorings and came crashing down. The primary focus lens broke free and spun on the ground like a coin, casting patterns of refracted light around the circular room. Bayless was screaming—everyone was screaming—then the crea­tures let out their own unearthly wail and a blinding ex­ plosion knocked them all to the ground. Something leapt at Tory. She opened her mouth to scream . . . and it was gone. The beasts were all gone. The light faded, and she just sat there, hands pressed against her ears, eyes shut tight, and her face contorted in a silent scream. She heard the others screaming, though—Winston and Lourdes— she heard them burst out of the observatory and race down the hill.

But Tory couldn’t move. She had heard old stories of how looking at some monsters could turn you to stone, and she wondered if that had happened to her. She cursed herself for having come here.

I don’t believe in monsters she told herself, but that didn’t make a bit of difference, because she knew what she had seen.

At last she was able to force her eyes open. The ruined observatory was silent and still. The only light in the room came from the fading fragments of the telescope lens, which had exploded and sent glass splintering in all direc­tions.

As she finally got to her feet, Tory realized that what­ever Dr. Bayless was going to tell them was going to re­main his secret. He would be viewing no more stars. He would be telling no more fortunes. Whatever these beasts were, they had not wanted Bayless to tell what he knew. They had caused the explosion—they had come to si­lence him.

She couldn’t help but feel responsible for what had happened to the astronomer. She felt pity for the man, but even more she felt fury that she was again left with more questions and riddles. It was that fury that overcame her fear, and she decided she wouldn’t run just yet—there were still things she had to do.

She grabbed whatever was left of the books and papers Bayless had pulled out and shoved them in her pack. She found the seven tarot cards scattered on the floor and took them as well, and then found a canvas tarp in the corner and brought it over to Bayless.

Around the room, the light was getting dimmer as the glowing splinters of the lens faded. The lens had shattered into half a dozen pieces. Five of those pieces were embed­ded in the walls like glass lightning bolts. The sixth had found a much more specific destination.

As Tory covered Bayless’s body, she knew what she had to do—she owed at least that much to the poor man. And so before drawing the canvas over his face, she reached toward the silent astronomer, then took a firm hold of that last shard of crystal and, biting back her ter­ror, pulled it from between Dr. Bayless’s eyes.

***

They found Michael at the edge of the campus, retch­ing his guts out in the middle of the street—and had to