twist in any direction, though at the moment it stood as tall and straight as pale bamboo. At the top of the stalk was a large bud which slowly blossomed to reveal five long petals. Each petal was a man-jointed finger tipped with a hard claw as shiny black as a beetle’s carapace. The fingers flexed wide to reveal a palm in the center of which gaped a hungry red mouth lined with dozens of needle-sharp teeth. One of the revenants took a tentative step toward the stalk and immediately the huge hand whipped around and closed with crushing force on the vampire’s face. Blood erupted between the multijointed fingers, but the vampire did not try to pull away. Instead he pushed forward to increase the contact with the hand and the hungry palm, helping the hand crush him and bleed him. The trapped vampire tore at his own flesh, opening dozens of cuts that bled freely, and the others around him flocked forward, feeding off him even as the hand drained him dry.
A second hand punched upward through the mud and closed around the throat of another vampire, lifting her wriggling into the air. The stalk of the arm twisted around her like an anaconda, crushing her bones and splattering everyone around her with her blood. She screamed and screamed until there was nothing left of her but pulverized bone in a shapeless envelope of desiccated skin. A third hand came up, and a fourth, and the slaughter began in earnest.
Ruger felt the pull, felt the need to throw himself into the press, felt the command deep in his mind that compelled him to die so that Griswold could live, but he stayed rooted to the ground at the edge of the clearing. Whether the power that held him there was some higher command by Griswold or his own powerful need to survive, he could not tell. Lois stood with him, and Ruger could see the look of naked hunger in her glazed eyes, saw drool hanging in streamers from her lips. Her grip on Sarah Wolfe was so tight that Ruger could hear the woman’s forearm bones grind together and then snap.
Up on the hill, Val, Mike and LaMastra watched the spectacle with minds frozen by horror. Even Mike, who had peered into the darkest parts of his
“My…God!” LaMastra was clutching his shotgun to his chest as if it afforded some sacred protection. “What are those things?”
“They’re…that’s all part of him.” Mike wanted to close his eyes, to look away, but he could not.
“What are you talking about? There must be twenty of those things! What is he? An octopus?”
Mike shook his head. “There are images in my head. I can…almost see him. He’s still changing. He’s changing all the time. I don’t know what he is, but he’s coming now. He’s about to return.”
“I just hope he keeps doing what he’s doing. He’s butchering the whole lot of them.”
“No,” Mike said. “He won’t kill them all. He still needs an army. He just needs to get strong enough, and he’s almost there. I can feel it. But there’s one more thing he needs. Innocent blood. That means that down there is a human who—oh no!” His scanning eyes had fixed on the three figures standing by the edge of the clearing. Val looked to where Mike pointed with a trembling hand. “I thought she tried to save me,” he murmured wretchedly. “I thought she was different than the others.”
“What is it?” LaMastra asked. “What do you see?”
Mike pointed. “The one on the right, that’s Karl Ruger.”
“Shit! You’re right.”
“The woman he’s holding, that’s Mrs. Wolfe—the mayor’s wife.”
Val had to clamp her hands over her mouth to keep from crying out. She pressed forward and stared, and even with the crazy movements and bad light she could make out the familiar lines of her friend’s face. “No…God, no!”
Mike’s voice was dead. “And the other woman, the one helping Ruger hold her…that’s my mom.”
LaMastra snapped his head around and gaped at Mike. “Oh, Jesus, kid, I’m so sorry…”
Mike shook his head and then raised his eyes to look at both of them. “I’m only fourteen,” he said softly, and that said it all.
Val wrapped her arm around him and LaMastra put his hand awkwardly on the boy’s shoulder and in the midst of the horror they shared his grief. Mike closed his eyes and tried not to be completely crushed by everything; then he winced as LaMastra’s hand tightened painfully. He looked up and saw what had jolted the detective. In the clearing things had suddenly changed. The murderous white arms were no longer slaughtering the vampires, and things had become still.
More than two-thirds of the vampires had been butchered and their crushed and lifeless bodies littered the swamp; but there were still scores more of the creatures scattered around, their faces suffused with joy even though their bodies were drenched in the blood of their own kind. One by one the towering articulated arms slipped back into the swamp until only the one that had first emerged remained. As they watched the arm seemed to swell, first at its base and then expanding upward as it struggled toward a greater uniform thickness, taking on more mass as if matter was being pumped into it from below. The stalk slowly took on color, too, displaying a mottled appearance like the skin of a slug. It stood hovering above the ground, the long fingers opening and closing spasmodically. With each outward flex the mouth in the center of the palm gaped with a snakelike tongue that flicked in and out.
Ruger and Lois were no longer standing idle at the edge of the clearing; they were moving slowly forward, dragging Sarah down to the edge of the swamp and dumping her unceremoniously in front of the stalk. Sarah had been unconscious before, but the nearness of such power must have roused her, because as the stalk drew close she shifted painfully on the ground and then slowly sat up. She was still dazed and seemed not to register the movement all around her. From where they were crouched, Val could see the exact moment when Sarah became aware, and it broke her heart.
Sarah must have heard something behind her and she turned slowly, blinking with confusion, then froze slack-jawed at the throng of wax-white figures clustered around her, their faces more terrifying than any Halloween mask. Sarah scrambled away from the vampires as they advanced on her, but they did not attack her, did not even touch her; they just wanted to be closer to the thing that was waiting for her. Sarah kept backing, sliding on mud, half-sinking in the muck as she fought to escape, and then her shoulder thumped against an obstruction and she glanced briefly back, saw that it was a sapling, and turned quickly back to face the advancing throng. Then Sarah froze and a quizzical expression came over her face and she turned again and looked more closely at the tree trunk, letting her eyes travel up its length. She saw the bloom at its crest, saw the long white petals, and frowned as the petals stretched wide and then clutched into a tight fist; and she watched in awful fascination as the petals opened again, turning toward her, revealing the whole hand. The red mouth in the mottled palm hissed at her.
Sarah’s scream shattered the stillness as the hand reached for her.
“NO!” Mike leapt to his feet and before either Val or LaMastra could grab him he was gone, running wildly down the hill, screaming and shouting. Below, all of the creatures in the Hollow jerked around and stared at the small figure racing through the shadows toward them. A few of them even laughed when they saw his size. As he burst into the clearing he opened up with the shotgun and two of the vampires went spinning away into death. Seeing their companions fall, a few of the others jumped forward to make the kill, but the white arm lunged at them and smashed them into the mud and then swept around to knock the others around like ten-pins.
Lois gripped Ruger’s sleeve. “That’s Mike!” she hissed, her face showing confusion and some fear. No compassion, not even a flicker of it, touched her face.
“The
“We have to do something. If he’s killed, then the Man could be destroyed! The others, they’ll tear him to pieces.”
She took a step forward to try and intervene, but Ruger snagged a handful of her hair and jerked her back. She whirled on him, spitting with rage. Ruger gave her a bland smile. “Think for a minute, you silly bitch.”
Lois slapped his hand away from her hair. “What are you talking about? We have to do something now.”
“Do we?” He grabbed her and pulled her close, whispering into her ear. “Let’s just watch and see what happens, ’cause either way we can come out of this higher up on the food chain.”
Her red-black eyes searched his for a moment, and then Lois’s full, red mouth blossomed into a smile as dark and as wicked as Ruger’s.
Mike fired his shotgun empty and the ground was littered with the dead. A huge figure rushed at him and Mike realized with horror that it was Chief Bernhardt, his grossly fat body moving with inhuman speed, his mouth
