Ghouls

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Vicky sat on the passenger side. She was remarkably staunch considering that his request for her to come along had caused her to miss the end of Dynasty (which Kurt, in his loathing for television, preferred to think of as Vaginasty). Vicky was all the “extra muscle” he could drum up on such short notice. She would have to do.

He’d picked up three 9-volt batteries at the Jiffy, for the walkie-talkies; and at the house, he’d scrounged some old gardening gloves and several working flashlights. Lastly, a quick stop at Worden’s Hardware for one hundred feet of half-inch sisal rope, at eighteen cents per foot.

Vicky opened the new batteries for the G.E. walkie-talkies. She glanced up at him now and again, her lips turned to the suggestion of a smile. “How come you’re not saying anything?” she asked.

“Thinking. I’m not sure I like this.”

She popped in another battery, deftly snapped on the plastic cover. “What exactly are we going to do?”

“I don’t know for sure. I think he found something in one of the mines at Belleau Wood.”

“That would explain the rope. What do you suppose he found?”

Probably a body, Kurt thought, minding the wheel. “Who knows? But whatever it is, he sounded pretty keyed up about it.”

“Gee, an adventure,” she said. “This could be fun.”

Kurt didn’t comment. His mind assembled a vivid picture of Harley Fitzwater’s broken, scalpless body lying disjointedly at the bottom of some dank shaft.

Without signaling, he guided the car left, past the sentinel-like posts at the entrance lane. Instinct urged him to keep the speed down. Tightly risen trees on either side goaded the image of being siphoned through a long, dark tunnel. The road narrowed, progressing, roughening. Several stones kicked up into the fender wells; dust followed the Ford like a vaporous banner.

The cruiser appeared round the next bend. It was parked cockeyed, as if abandoned, and Higgins rushed forward as they pulled to a halt. He greeted Vicky without even looking at her, and was right on top of Kurt the instant he stepped from the Ford.

“Did you get the rope?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Kurt said, and dropped the heavy coil into his partner’s arms. “You owe me eighteen bucks.”

“Kurt says you found something in the mine,” Vicky volunteered.

Higgins looked puzzled. “How’d you know?”

“It wasn’t hard to guess,” Kurt said. “I didn’t think you wanted all this to swing from trees.” He threw the third walkie-talkie into the cruiser; then he and Vicky collected the rest of their things and followed Higgins toward the row of mines. Here the cricket calls grew to a fever of throbbing, pulsing madness. The sound crowded Kurt’s thoughts as they stumbled up the moonlit path.

“After I found the chain down, I decided to poke around,” Higgins said, molding fast shapes with his hands as he spoke. “There was nothing happening on the radio, and I’d never seen the mines up close before. Anyway, they’re all caved in, except for one.”

“Big deal,” Kurt sputtered, but it was more like gasping. Vicky’s hair swayed in front of her face as she trotted along, arms full of flashlights.

“And I’m sure there’re footprints leading in and out of it. Lots of them.”

“Kids go in there to drink all the time” was Kurt’s exerted reply. He was losing his breath, years of cigarettes finally taking their toll. “If you dragged us down here just because of some footprints… Slow down, will you. I’m not the goddamned Marathon Man.”

Higgins strode on, his eyes bright with whatever fascination it was that lay waiting for them.

The path flattened to a wide lifeless expanse nearly the length of a football field, which cut into a great, thrusting ridge. Judging by the remnants, this particular mining operation had never developed into anything productive, a far cry from the immense projects Kurt, as a child, had seen in Garret and Allegany counties when his father had dredged coal. The first five manway portals were collapsed, some only trace etchings of what they’d been.

“Here it is,” Higgins said, stopping at the last portal. Winded, Kurt looked up. In the fading sunlight, the mouth of the manway was a solid black aperture bored into the ridge. It looked much larger than the last time he’d seen it.

“We’re crazy to go in there,” Kurt said. He withdrew his Kel-lite from the ring on his belt. “That sucker’s ready to fall.”

Higgins shook his head obliviously. “You think after all these years that mine’s gonna collapse at the same time we decide to go in it? The chances aren’t even worth thinking about.”

“Are we going, or aren’t we?” Vicky insisted. “Let’s not stand around like a bunch of dopes.”

Their flashlights clicked on. Lances of glare preceded them as they entered the mine, squarely lighting up the walls and pushing back the clammy darkness. Something dripped far ahead. The manway grew cooler as it descended; the darkness thickened like mist. Every few yards, they passed heavy timber stulls erected to keep the manway from falling in on itself. Toothpicks, Kurt thought. Many of the stulls were vermiculated, swollen with rot.

In the bobbing auras cast by their lights, Kurt picked out glimpses of the ghosts of this place, and again he thought of his father. Cable pitons studded walls of dense rock, some still ringing slack tails of power lines threaded through their eyelets. Lengths of trolley rails lay uprooted all around, stained black and eaten by rust. An old, rusted-out carbide lamp collapsed under Kurt’s shoe; it crunched crisply, like crab shells.

Nailed to an overhead stull, a warped sign read: KEEP LEFT, HAULAGE LINE. And another, CAUTION: MAIN SHAFT AHEAD.

The manway opened into a low-ceilinged cavern pillared by a maze of stulls, a ghost town within the earth. This type of mine was known as an “open stope”; the main shaft was just a narrow, wedge-shaped pit cut triangularly down into the rock, its walls paired with several horizontal corridors similar to the manway. A much narrower shaft continued at the bottom of the pit to collect seepage.

“My father worked in a mine like this for twenty years,” Kurt said, just now realizing what back-breaking work it must have been. He glanced around sullenly with his light, as if expecting to see skeletons. “No wonder he tipped the bottle so much.”

“Wait’ll you see the shaft,” Higgins said.

Warily, they stepped up onto the wooden causewalk which surrounded the pit. Then they peered boldly over the side and down. The pit was huge. Kurt stared in awed silence, a tremor in his gut. It was like staring over the edge of the world.

Groovelike winzes fitted with metal ladders and lift cables cut down past each row of stope entries. The erratic dripping sound echoed up, much louder than before. Pointing his light, Kurt combed further and saw more ladders and bilge lines leading straight down. He could not see their end.

“I figure the pit’s seventy, eighty feet deep at least,” Higgins said.

Vicky seemed dizzied by the shaft’s utter vastness. “What are all those holes?”

“They’re called stopes,” Kurt said. His voice was hollow, drained of tone. “That’s where they dig out the ore. They’re actually shaped like horseshoes inside.” He looked to Higgins. “So what’s the big find, Mark?”

“Look at the bottom. The very bottom.”

They kneeled on the causewalk, targeting their flashlights. At first Kurt saw nothing of detail, just the overall wedge shape of the pit tapering down and down. Sheer depth drew his flashlight beam out to a thread of light; his eyes began to hurt.

“See it?” Higgins said.

Slow shock fused on Vicky’s face. “I don’t believe it.”

As Kurt steadied his eyes, forms appeared just ahead of the seepage shaft. Piles of rubble, rock chunks, demolished trollies. Heavy layers of dust and earth evenly dulled everything at the bottom. But soon a small, square shape became visible. It seemed tilted forward and gave off a faint blue tint. He moved the flashlight. Something red glinted up. He was looking at the top of an automobile.

“See what I mean?” Higgins said. “Don’t ask me how I was able to spot it.”

“Hasn’t been there long, by the looks of it,” Kurt said. “It’s still shiny, no rust.”

Higgins pointed left, to a section of causewalk that was crushed in. “Somebody pushed it over the side. You can still see the tire tracks.”

“You’re not going down there?” Vicky said, a suspicious bend to the question.

Kurt stood up, hunting for the walkie-talkie. “We’ve got to. We might be able to run the plates. For all we know, there could be a body in it.”

“I don’t trust those ladders,” Higgins said. “That’s why I wanted the rope. Climbing down’ll be a cinch.”

Kurt extended the antennas of the two radios and handed them to Vicky. He lifted up the rope. “I’ll go, I’m lighter than you.”

“No way, Jose,” Higgins said back, already pulling on the gloves. “I’m the one who found it. I’ll be the one who goes down.”

“All right,” Kurt said. “Just take it slow.”

A few feet behind them sat an abandoned electric dredge. The motor panel bore stenciled letters: RANDOLPH CARTER EXCAVATORS, INC. Kurt securely tied one end of the rope through a rear idler arm. Higgins dropped the other end over the side, watching it unravel.

“You’re nuts,” Vicky said to Higgins. “What if the rope breaks?”

“It won’t break.” He slipped his flashlight through his belt, took one of the radios from Vicky. “That rope’s strong enough to hold ten men. Hell, it’d probably even hold Bard.”

Kurt took the other radio. They made a quick commo check, then Higgins grabbed hold of the rope and swung his legs over the side.

“And for God’s sake, be careful,” Kurt said.

Higgins grinned up at them. “If Batman can do it, I sure as hell can.”

He started to lower himself down.

“Batman, my ass,” Kurt remarked. He and Vicky lay side by side on the causewalk. A vague, foul odor wafted up. They watched without speaking as Higgins made his way past the first pair of stopes, their flashlights following him like little halos. When he’d gotten past the third pair, Vicky said, “I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

“He doesn’t,” Kurt answered. “But it’s not a very steep incline. It’s not like he’s going straight down. I just hope he doesn’t break his fool neck on all that junk once he gets to the bottom.”

Higgins grew tinier as they watched; he moved almost gracefully and with speed that seemed careless. The sound of his feet scuffling against rock reverberated up through the black air. Soon he was just a blue dot against the gorge.

Kurt’s walkie-talkie keyed, a crisp electric spark. “You hear me, Kurt?”

“Loud and clear.”

“I’m at the bottom now. It’s not as deep as we thought, lots of rope left over. Looks a lot bigger from up there.”

Below, Higgins’s flashlight winked on, but they could still barely see him. It was like following the course of a firefly.

Higgins inched onward, over a mass of rubble. Kurt could tell by his progress that the bottom of the shaft was really rather small. Higgins was at the car in less than a minute.

“Stay away from that water shaft,” Kurt warned into his walkie-talkie.

“Don’t worry, hoss. My mummy didn’t raise no dumbbell.” Then a pause followed Higgins’s transmission. The fleck of his light didn’t move. “You’ll never believe this, Kurt.”

“What have you got?”

“Ford Pinto, blue, ’79, I think… Looks like—”

“Glen Rodz’s car,” Kurt said quietly. He was more saddened than appalled; he felt responsible, as though he should have expected something like this all along. Glen just running off with his lover was too easy.

Vicky’s grief shone blankly in her eyes. “We could be wrong,” she said. “He’s not the only one in the world who drives a blue Pinto.”

Kurt just looked at her. “Check the inside,” he said into the radio.

“Empty,” Higgins answered.

“Trunk?”

“It’s a hatchback.”

“Read me the plates. We’ll run them when we get back outside.”

Kurt didn’t like the long, unearthly pause that followed. He could guess what was coming as he tracked the dot of Higgins’s flashlight from one end of the car to the other.

“No plates,” Higgins said.

“Shit.”

“No registration in the glove compartment, either.”

“You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

“No, all the glass is broken. Glove compartment was hanging open.”

The list was getting shorter. “Check for a VIN number,” Kurt told him.

“Where is it?”

“Far left corner of the dashboard. There’s a seal that whitens if it’s tampered with.”

Another grim pause. Then Higgins said, “It’s not here. There’s just a hole.”

Ripped out, Kurt thought. The only other accessible VIN number would be etched on the engine block, but Kurt didn’t know exactly where, and he doubted that it mattered. Whoever ditched this car obviously knew what he was doing. “Take a quick look around,” he told Higgins, “then come on back up.”

“What happens now?” Vicky asked.

“We call the county lab. Somebody gave that car the works, so it’s probably wiped clean, too. But most American cars have VIN numbers all over the place, they’re just hard to get to. Even a pro wouldn’t be able to get all the VIN’s without taking most of the engine, trans, and drive-train apart. Unless this guy happens to work for Ford, the chances of him getting all the VIN’s are slim. If it’s Glen’s car, the county’ll be able to find out. It just might take a while.”

The rope pulled taut against the dredge idler. Higgins was climbing up.

“And if it is Glen’s car,” Vicky said, “then I guess it’s realistic to assume that he’s—”

Kurt only nodded.

The sound of Higgins clambering back up grew louder. But abruptly the sound stopped. All they heard was the unsteady dripping from below. Kurt looked over the edge of the cause-walk, trailing the rope with his light. Higgins was angling himself into one of the stopes.

“Mark, what the hell are you doing?” Kurt said into the radio.

Reception was weaker now. “I’m in the second…what did you call it?”

“Stope. What are you doing there?”

“I thought I…”

“What?”

“I’m sure I heard something.”

“Don’t go in there. It could cave in.”

Higgins wouldn’t hear of it. Reception worsened as he went deeper into the stope, his voice warbling in and out of waves of static. “Goddamn flashlight’s starting to poop out… Can’t see much—Christ, it stinks, you wouldn’t believe it.” Higgins began to cough violently, like someone who’d just stepped into a draft of riot gas.

“Forget it, Mark. Come on, back up. We’ll punt the dirty work to the county.”

Now Higgins’s voice was nearly indistinguishable through the blurring, crackling transmission; he was coughing asthmatically. “Jesus, that smell…worse than a fucking slaughterhouse. “I—holy shit, holy fucking shit…”

“Mark, what is it?”

“The walls, my God, the walls—they’re…” But then Higgins’s voice withered off into a staccato of electric jibberish.

“I’m not reading you, Mark. The stope’s blocking our reception—you’ve gone in too far.”

There was a break, a few bursts of static.

Futilely, Kurt continued to key his walkie-talkie. “Damn it, I can barely hear you. Come out of there.”

The words that followed were faint and eroded, but Kurt was able to decipher most of them. It sounded like: “There’s someone down here, Kurt. Someone’s coming down the—”

“Get out of there, Mark! Get out of there right now!”

A shriek exploded up the shaft and wound around them in an endless echo. Kurt knew only one thing—that the sound couldn’t possibly be human.

Pistol shots rang out, six of them, all thunderingly amplified.

And after that came a second scream, mindless, ripping, insane. It was a man’s scream. It was Higgins.

Vicky was stepping back, hands pressed against her ears. Kurt reached for the rope, but then it jerked tight. The scream drew on, spiraling out of the pit. Kurt watched in consternation, watched the rope pull tighter and tighter until it snapped and burned out of his hands.

“Get out of here!” Kurt shouted at Vicky. He stuffed his light into his belt and kneeled at the causewalk, looking down. A rusted ring ladder pointed up.

“You’re out of your mind!” Vicky screamed, pulling his collar.

He shoved her back. “Get out!”

“That ladder’ll never hold you! The bolts are rusted!”

Kurt swung himself over, tested the first step with his foot. “I’ve got to try. Go to the cruiser and take the radio out of the slot. Hold the button in and say 207 signal 13. Say it over and over till you get an acknowledgment. Then give the dispatcher our location and wait for them.”

The ladder ground out an inch under his full weight. Vicky continued to scream at him. The bolts of the third step snapped like a shot. He could feel the ladder shaking now, the pitons grinding out of their seats in the rock. Looks like school’s out for me, he thought, and his fingers hooked back onto the edge of the causewalk just as the ladder fell out from under him. It toppled down the incline with a deafening crash.

His biceps cramped as he hung. He glanced over his shoulder into oblivion. Vicky helped pull him up by the seat of his pants.

Beside them, one of the stulls fell over and hit the ground with a vibrating thud. Dust sifted out of the ceiling like snow. Kurt grabbed Vicky’s hand and together they raced stumblingly out toward the vague square of dying sunlight, at the end of the manway.

Outside, he bent over the hood of the cruiser. Skirting death so narrowly had bleached him white. Vicky sat on the ground, angled against the grill. They were both smudged and sweating, taking in ravenous breaths. Kurt’s ears throbbed numbly from the previous avalanche of sound.

There was no time to even contemplate what had happened; Higgins was still down there, dying or dead.

“Got to call a thirteen in to the county,” Kurt muttered, but when he opened the cruiser door, he felt himself shrink. The recharge socket for the portable radio was empty. Higgins still had the police radio on his belt.

“Get in!” he yelled. “The goddamn radio’s not here.” He started the engine; Vicky hauled her door closed and they wheeled out of the clearing, accelerating back down the road.

“What about these?” Vicky asked, holding up a walkie-talkie.

“They’re useless. They’re only two-way.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Stop at the first house with a phone,” he said, and then the image of Willard’s mansion blinked in his mind. He turned reckless into the next access, and in what seemed moments later, he was jamming the brakes in Willard’s cul-de-sac. “Wait here,” he told her.

He jumped out and raced up the porch steps. He pounded on the door, yelling into the intercom, only then noticing the red light on the alarm jack. Don’t tell me he’s not home. He looked behind him; Willard’s car was not in the court.

He’d have to kick the door in, which was never an easy thing, he knew firsthand. He might need tools to break a door as solid as this. But just as he backed up for the first try, a block of light swung across the porch. He turned and looked into a wave of dazzle. Willard had just pulled up next to the garage.

“Life or death emergency,” Kurt called as Willard got out of his black Chrysler. “I need to use your phone.”

Willard read Kurt’s urgency. He jogged up the steps, thrust a bag of Chinese carry-out into Kurt’s arms, then turned off the alarm system and unlocked the front door. They both rushed in. “To your left, in my study,” Willard directed, turning on a floor lamp. “The phone’s on the desk.”

Kurt picked up the receiver and punched in 911. “We found Glen Rodz’s car in one of the mines,” he said quickly to Willard. “Something happened to the dayshift officer.”

Willard approached the desk, strangely aghast at Kurt’s brief explanation. “You mean you were in the mine? At this hour?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said. “It was awful. I think someone—” but then the line was answered. Kurt spoke very carefully, “Officers in need of assistance at—”

Willard’s hand shot down and hit one of the extension buttons, severing Kurt’s connection. Then he snatched the receiver away and hung it up.

“What the hell are you doing!” Kurt snapped. “I gotta call the county!”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t allow that,” Willard said, and raised a small black automatic pistol with a sound suppressor screwed into the barrel. He aimed for the center of Kurt’s chest.

“You fucking nut,” Kurt said. “Higgins could be dead back there.”

“I’m afraid there are no could be’s about it. You’re very lucky to have gotten out alive yourself.”

Kurt was waylaid, infuriated by this challenge. He felt his gun hand open at his side.

Willard said, “Please do not make any sudden movements. I can pull this trigger much faster than you can draw. Now listen carefully. I want you to place your right hand on the top of the desk.”

“Suck my dick,” Kurt said.

Willard fired one shot a few inches over Kurt’s head.

Kurt placed his right hand on the top of the desk.

“Now with your left hand I want you to reach around and unsnap your holster.”

Kurt did it, thinking, Son of a bitch, son of a stupid fucking bitch!

“With your left index finger and thumb I want you to remove your service revolver by the tip of the hammer and place it on the desk.”

Kurt’s gun clunked on the blotter.

He pleaded with Willard, “Listen, Doctor, I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t really care. My partner’s back there in that mine, and I have to get help. You have to let me call the county police. I’m begging you.”

Willard dropped Kurt’s gun into his pocket. He’d been relaxed through the entire ordeal. “I already told you, your partner is dead, rest assured. If you only knew how close you came to death yourself… Less than the width of a particularly fine hair, I’d say.” His voice thickened very subtly. “Death beyond anything you could imagine.”

Kurt felt stripped, an impotent failure, having been disarmed by this eloquent wiseass twice his age. A pain spurred his chest when he remembered Higgins’s screams.

“So it was you who pushed Glen’s car into the shaft.”

“Of course,” Willard admitted, a coy lift to his brow. “Unlike yourself, though, I went into the mine during the day, when it’s much safer. And please know that it gives me no pleasure in telling you that Glen, too, is quite dead. There were no alternatives.”

“You murdered him.”

“More or less.” Willard removed cartons from the bag. “Help yourself, there’s plenty for both of us. Sha Cha beef, Szechuan vegetables in hot sauce, and the best shrimp toast you’ve ever had in your life.”

“You can blow it all up your ass with a funnel and shit it out your mouth. You’ve just confessed to murdering my best friend. Aren’t you going to tell me why?”

“Yes, you are due an explanation.” Willard munched pieces of shrimp toast as he spoke. “I couldn’t quite call it murder; I was merely preserving something far more important than a single human life. Look at it all as in the best interests of science. Glen nearly ruined my plans. I should have done away with him weeks ago.”

Willard ordered Kurt to a chair in the corner, while he himself remained standing. He kept the pistol homed on Kurt’s chest. “After I’d killed him, I logically needed to dispose of his car, quickly and effectively.” Willard shook his head, as though overly displeased with himself. “Things went awry too fast, I suppose; another miscalculation on my part. I thought sure the car would never be noticed at the bottom of the shaft.”

Kurt sat upright in the chair, overpowered by Willard’s unctuous sense of observation. Here was a man who thought of murder in the same light as stepping on ants.

Kurt’s words came out like the whisper of sandpaper. “All those people. Swaggert, the Fitzwaters, those two high school girls. You murdered them all.”

“Good heavens, no,” Willard roused to object. “Glen, yes, and of course Nancy—but only to save my…investment. My pot at the end of the rainbow, if you will. I had no hand in the deaths of all those others.”

“Then who did?”

“The ghala.”

“The what?”

Willard paused to light one of his rank, filterless cigarettes. The lines deepened in his face, as though he were looking for a way to express something immensely abstract.

Then he said, “Even in his most ignorant moments, man has never stopped seeking answers to the questions in life which have bewildered him. Hypnosis, for example, was in use a full century before anyone came close to accurately defining its basis as a psychological phenomenon. Originally it was believed that the hypnotic state was triggered by altering the flow of magnetic fluids in the body—fluids which, we now know, don’t exist. Early Norse and Portuguese seafarers depicted large fish and newfound mammalian life forms as serpents and monsters. The first settlers in New England for years upheld the conviction that lobsters were demonian mascots which crept up from hell through the crevices in the earth. Ignorant? Yes. Superstitious, ludicrous? Certainly. But you see they were only trying to expound a cause of existence for something strange to them, something they’d never before seen. They were only trying to explain something they didn’t understand. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

“Well,” Kurt said, “I understand that lobsters don’t come from hell. But other than that, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Willard smiled. “Then let me reroute my approach. Today more than ever man excels in explaining the inexplicable. Just look at all the things once thought to defy the capabilities of scientific classification. Black holes, quasars, Easter Island, the Mayans, Kirlian photography, Stonehenge—the list goes on forever. You can scarcely name a major nation that isn’t now undergoing studies in psychic phenomena. The Defense Department allots two to six million dollars per year for research into remote-viewing and controlled out-of-body projection, while the Soviets have documentably succeeded with preliminary experiments in particle-phase teleportation and point-to-point thought transduction. Hence, nothing defies science in the long run; science simply needs more time to catch up with its endeavors.”

“Is there a point to all this, or are you just plain out of your fucking mind?”

“I’ll put it as plainly as I can,” Willard said, still wearing his pedant’s smile. “Since the beginning of time, mankind has been marked with its lore. There’s so much to dissimulate, you know? Legends, myths, superstitions…” Smoke rose up and blurred his face. “Some of them are true.”

Kurt frowned, reminded of Melissa’s theory. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that werewolves have been killing all these people.”

Willard laughed gustily. “Oh, no, Kurt. Not werewolves. It’s something worse than werewolves, something much worse—”

I knew it, Kurt thought. Poor bastard’s elevator doesn’t quite make it to the top.

“—because werewolves don’t exist in any legendary sense,” Willard went right on saying. “There are no men who change into wolves on nights of the full moon, just men who think they do, and that is where you separate the superstition from the fact, where science shines. Lupinic hebephrenia, a simple and not terribly uncommon psychiatric disorder, explains the roots of the werewolf legend, just as an array of phlebotomanic psychoses explain vampirism. There’s an answer for everything, a logical, scientific answer. All myths and legends evolved from some web of truth. Bigfoot, UFO’s, spontaneous combustion— in time, science will have an answer for them all.”

Kurt began to care less and less about what Willard had to say. The pistol seemed rather large now, a miniature cannon.

There was fire in Willard’s eyes, the madness of too much knowledge, too much thinking. He was looking over Kurt now, and up, as if addressing some huge vigilant entity in the air. “Imagine the excitement, the triumph, of true discovery,” he said. “Imagine what must have been felt by Fleming, Bell, Van de Graaff, Peary… I’m an inch away from such triumph.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re about to discover the North Pole.”

But Willard ignored Kurt’s sarcasm. His eyes grew even more refulgent. “When I was in the Army, my final permanent duty station was Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That’s where it began.”

“We don’t have any military bases in Saudi Arabia,” Kurt said.

“Bases and combat units, no. But there are quite a few United States casernes which house American military personnel, mostly Air Force trainers and technical advisers, Marines for the embassy. Logistics and medical support are handled mainly by the Army. In 1978, I was the commanding officer of one of the Army garrisons.”

“Why don’t you command this garrison?” Kurt suggested, pointing to his crotch.

“Do you want your explanation, or don’t you?”

“My apologies, Doc. There’s something about having a gun in my face that brings out the comedian in me.”

“And it was near this garrison,” Willard drew on, “that I first encountered the ghala.”

Kurt yielded to a smirk. “What is this ghala shit?”

“The ghala,” Willard said, his voice hanging in the air like an incantation. “Mythological ravagers of graveyards, eaters of the dead. Ghala, or ghül, are Arabic derivatives of the word ghoul, which today takes on many confusing connotations, everything from Hollywood zombies to human beings obsessed with death. Comprehensive analysis, though, unveils even more indeterminate denotations; it seems that the transposition of the initial myth becomes less accurate with the more updated sources. Some surprisingly reputable mythologists insist that the ghala are shape-shifting creatures which lie dormant by day in the graves they’ve invaded, and at night transform themselves into the living identities of the corpses they’ve consumed. Other texts claim that the ghala are corporeal composites of the djinn, another better known Arabic myth; in this depiction, the ghala are female semihuman demons that pose as harlots and lure men off to eat them alive; while still more sources affirm that the ghala are sexless spirits with no substance at all. These modern transliterations are endless as well as useless—Europeanized codswallop, not at all honest renditions of the original myth.”

“So what’s the original myth?” Kurt egged.

There seemed no end to Willard’s willingness to run on at the mouth. “The earliest Moslem mythology abounds with references of the ghala, and these references are quite specific: the ghala are vicious, manlike things, whose only priorities are to terrorize the living and consume the dead. But little attention has been paid to this particular facet of Eastern lore, which accounts for the unrefined definitions of Western comprehension. Most Arabic folklore was brought to Europe at the same time, the early 1700s, and translated almost entirely by one man, a French archaeologist named Antoine Galland. Galland’s translations, which include the Thousand and One Nights, were hugely successful in Europe; they were also immediately pirated, bootlegged, and revised. Experts agree that these translations were made faultily; even without considering the bootlegged copies, Galland had a reputation for suiting his translations to Western taste—it’s even likely that segments of the original manuscripts weren’t translated by Galland at all, but by hacks. And for those reasons, the ghala legends were dismissed as fabrications, simply inept reworkings of European werewolf lore…”

Kurt wasn’t listening. Sweat began to run down the inside of his shirt. He knew Willard intended to kill him.

“I accepted these conclusions myself,” Willard continued, “but gradually things started to bother me, things that I had heard, and things I saw myself.”

Keep him talking, Kurt thought desperately. Let him jack his jaws. “What kind of things?”

“For one, an unbelievable number of incidents of missing persons. I actually had AFSS personnel look into it, and although the Saudis tend to maintain crude crime statistics, that much is more than obvious. Innumerable reports of missing persons, unsolved, unexplained. And all of these disappearances seem to occur after dark.”

“Most people are abducted after dark. That’s not what I would call proof of the existence of these things.”

“True, but that’s not all. It seems that many of the smaller and more remote Arabic villages, especially those along the mountainous western edge of the peninsula, practice the same bizarre burial customs. There are no conventional cemeteries. Graves are uniformly unmarked and scattered. And worse, throughout the centuries, similar towns and villages reflect a staggering history of grave robbing, despite the deliberate efforts of the populace to hide their dead. All of this, even today, is blamed ridiculously on the Bedouin tribesmen, sheep- and camel-herding nomads. But I know better now.”

“Ghouls, huh?”

Willard’s smile grew dull. “You’d be advised to take me seriously.”

“Whatever you say, Doc.”

“You’ll see,” Willard said, a jocose warning. “The proof is closer than you think; the ghala exist. Most of them were killed off by the Wahabis in the first part of the century. Until then it had been strictly a technical problem—the ghala are fast enough to dodge low-velocity bullets. But in 1902, in preparation for the wars which eventually unified Saudi Arabia, King Ibn Saud armed his forces with European-made long rifles, Mausers, I think. These were what brought the ghala to near extinction.”

Does he really believe this? “How come I’ve never heard anything about this legend?”

“Obscurity, distance, time. But chiefly the reluctance on the part of the Islam people,” Willard replied. “The reality of the ghala is long-since forgotten, but the legend will remain forever. Ask any Arab about his county’s history of graveyard vandalism, and he will answer you with silence, as though smitten. Much in the same as asking a German about the death camps, or a Mexican about dysentery.”

Kurt’s inside seized up; he’d forgotten about Vicky. Willard must not have noticed her when he’d come in.

The third walkie-talkie was on the cruiser’s front seat. The second was still on his hip. If Vicky had the foresight to turn hers on…

And there was a shotgun in the car.

“Then the rest of the legend is true?” Kurt asked. He let his hand slide down very slowly, very naturally, and he depressed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie. He knew he must continue to humor Willard and his madness. “These things actually rob graves and eat dead bodies?”

“It’s true, yes, but you’ve still too much a bent toward the superstitious treatment. When you separate the gothic shock value from the biological standpoint, you’ll find nothing all that unusual. There are multitudes of life forms, from every phylum and sub-phylum, that extract their nutritional needs entirely from dead animal material, that exist as scavengers. So look at it in that light. In my own order of observation, the ghala eat nothing that hasn’t been dead for at least twenty-four hours, unless critically famished. I’m not sure as to the actual biological reason for this; perhaps their food source must first undergo a certain amount of putrefaction before it can be properly broken down by their digestive systems. They also seem to exhibit an accelerated olfactory function, which might account for the legendary aptitude of locating unmarked graves. Maybe you have noticed the recent decline in dead roadside animals along Route 154.”

Kurt skeptically pursed his lips. That much he did realize. He remembered his talk with the county workman from Animal Control.

Still coy, Willard went on. “And I should think that the recent exhumation at Beall Cemetery might make my claims more convincing to you.”

“Cody Drucker’s corpse was mauled. It wasn’t eaten.”

“Of course not. The body was embalmed.”

Kurt thought back to the day of Glen’s appalling discovery. Drucker’s arm had been ripped from its socket. There’d been but a single bitemark in the flesh. Though of course he did not believe Willard’s story, he felt a growing nervous twitch in his stomach. “You still haven’t explained how these ghala got here.”

“I would think you’d have figured that much out by now.” Willard lit another cigarette, relishing the first smooth inhalation. “In their natural habitat, the ghala live in packs of about twenty. A few months before my separation from military service, I was able to locate one of their dens just outside Riyadh, in the hill country. According to legend, the ghala are nocturnal and feed at night. Generally, during these feeding excursions, they leave their lair unguarded, since there is nothing of value inside. But every sixth or seventh winter the ghala spawn, and it is during this brief incubation period that several ghala will remain in the den to guard their larvae. I hired two Marines and an Army E-7 to go into the den one night, and they retrieved for me eight healthy larvae, which I then brought back to the States. Unfortunately, two of the larvae were damaged during transport and died.”

“What about the other six?”

Willard upturned his hand, a gesture of the obvious. “They hatched.”

Kurt prayed Vicky would come. He needed more time. He had to keep Willard talking. “So you just let these things wander off into the great outdoors?”

“Oh, for God’s sake no,” Willard said, as though the suggestion were insulting. “I constructed pens and divided the ghala into three groups of two. One control group, to be maintained under ideal conditions; the second group to serve as research subjects; and the third group to be dissected, each at a different stage of physical development. I’ve been conducting my research for years, quite successfully…” But then Willard stalled. Suddenly he looked awash in pallor, his features thinned by dread. “Last week the control group escaped.”

Kurt knew there was too much space between them to make a go for the gun. He was trapped, pinned into the chair. Vicky was his only hope, but where the hell was she?

“I had grates installed to cover the ends of the air shafts, but apparently the welds didn’t hold. They crawled out through the ventilator.”

Another nervous coincidence. Kurt remembered the pair of odd aluminum cones in Willard’s side yard. Like ventilator lids.

No, no, it can’t be true. He’s pure-ass crazy.

“But anyway,” Willard said, “there’s your explanation, which you’re free to accept or reject. It doesn’t matter. I’ve no choice but to kill you.” He grinned smoke. “A convenient situation for a murderer, you must admit. At least I don’t have to get rid of the bodies—the ghala are all too eager to see to that.”

Willard aimed the pistol at Kurt’s head.

“Before you introduce me to my maker, answer me one more question,” Kurt requested. Sweat broke on his forehead, cold trickling beads. He wasn’t going to go down this easy. But he needed more time.

“No more questions,” Willard said. “As I’ve already said, it doesn’t matter. What was that old movie called? A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die? Terrible script, but I’ve always been fond of the saying. And you’ve already had your minute.”

“What does the TTX have to do with all of this?”

Willard lowered the pistol. He turned limp with astonishment. “How on earth—”

“Loose lips sink ships, Doc. I overheard you and your wife talking about it a few days ago; too bad you didn’t have your motion detectors on then. I listened in for quite a while. And don’t bother explaining what TTX is. I already found out.”

“My compliments. You’re a very industrious young man… When it became clear to us that we wouldn’t be able to recapture the two escaped ghala, we realized we had to kill them. Poison seemed the safest method, and TTX seemed the easiest to obtain. We decided to lay out portions of meat contaminated with the TTX. It was my wife’s idea, in fact, and delightfully ironic, since she turned out to be the meat. I killed her and injected massive amounts of it into her, and then left her body where the ghala were sure to find it.”

“Did they?”

“Oh, yes. The body vanished overnight. Regrettably, though, the TTX didn’t work. But that came as no tremendous surprise, since my research had already identified the ghala’s extraordinary resistance to a variety of toxic substances.”

“What now?”

“Try another poison, I suppose; I was thinking about guanethidine or prussic acid. A heavy chelator might also work; the ghala have a very odd iron-to-copper ratio in the blood. There are several good possibilities. But in a moment, of course, it will be the very least of your worries.” He raised the pistol again, lining his right eye up behind the sights.

Kurt squirmed in the chair. Got to try something. Jesus Christ, Vicky, are you gonna sit in the car all goddamned night? “Look, instead of punching my ticket out, why not let me help you get rid of the things?”

“Oh, but you will,” Willard said through a spreading, impudent grin. “I’ll be using your body to deliver the next toxin. We’ve bantered long enough, I’m afraid. I hate to spoil your day like this, but surely you understand.”

Willard’s eye narrowed behind the tiny black sights.

Kurt felt his heart skip beats. He leapt sideways out of the chair, offering Willard the least amount of target area. He tried to flip the chair over on him as he went, but the chair only landed on its side. Dead meat, he thought. Quack, quack, I’m a sitting duck.

At this point, Kurt expected to die.

A sharp white flare blossomed to his left, like a flashbulb, not quite synchronized with the rifle shot which then ripped a seam through the room’s graven silence. Kurt hit the floor and rolled, shoved by a violent explosion of adrenaline. Chaotically, he scampered to the corner, not knowing what had happened, but when he peered around the desk, he saw Willard on the floor cringing in pain. The pistol lay in the opposite corner; it had been shot out of Willard’s hand.

Kurt drew in a parched breath, and he reached over and reclaimed his revolver from Willard’s pocket. “Good shooting, Vicky,” he said, but then realized it couldn’t have been Vicky who’d fired the shot; he’d heard a rifle, not a shotgun.

Kurt and Willard looked up at the same time. In the study entrance, a figure stood just out of the light, warped through a shift of smoke and settling dust.

“Who the hell are you?” Kurt blurted.

Willard squinted ahead myopically. Blood eddied from his hand, but he seemed not to notice.

The figure then stepped dreamily into the light, a long, black rifle propped on one hip. “Good evening, Colonel Willard,” the figure said.

“My God,” Willard croaked.

Amazedly Kurt remembered the figure as the man he’d met at the Anvil. John, he thought his name was. The man with the scarred face.

Willard seemed horrified in his own recognition. “You can’t be alive. I emptied half a machine-gun clip in you.”

“Hard as nails,” Sanders replied, and tapped his chest with his palm. “Next to dogs, a ballistic vest is a man’s best friend.” He offered Kurt a snide, cocky smile.

“Thanks, man” was all Kurt could think to say.

“Don’t mention it. You can buy me one at the Anvil.”

Kurt laughed. “Hell, I’ll buy you the whole goddamned place.”

“How did you get into the house?” Willard demanded.

Sanders held up his set of picks. “When you went out about an hour ago, I took the liberty of letting myself in.”

“But the alarm system—”

“I picked that, too; tubular keyways are my specialty. Anyway, while you were out getting your Chinese food, I took a good look around. Real nice place you got here, Colonel. Great basement… I’ve been standing in the foyer the whole time, listening to you two.”

“Then I guess there’s no need to explain.”

Sanders shook his head. “I was pretty sure what was going on anyway; it was easy to fill in the blanks once I read the local papers. Missing girls, cops disappearing, graves dug up. What an asshole.”

Just then, Vicky edged into the room, the shotgun barrel poking in front of her.

“Just in the nick of time,” Kurt said.

Incredulous, she looked to Willard, then to Sanders, then to Kurt. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Don’t ask me,” Kurt said. “There’s the man with all the answers.”

Sanders seemed enlivened. He shifted his gaze again to Willard. “When I came to, that night in ’78, I started footing it back to the garrison, figured I’d head you off at Jidda in the morning. But then I ran into a little trouble along the way, and this happened.” He tilted the floor lamp to highlight his face.

Willard closed his eyes, shuddering.

“Guess they’ll never take me on Star Search, huh?” Sanders mocked. “The plastic surgeons at Reed said it was worth a shot, but it would mean several dozen operations and only moderate improvement at best. So I just said don’t bother.”

“But how could you have survived?” Willard asked. “You mean you actually killed one, single-handedly?”

“That’s right. I blew its lights out with my last willy-peter grenade. And got half my face torn off in the process. A couple of SP’s on perimeter patrol found me in the road just before I passed out again. A week later I was TDRL’d. When I told the doctors the truth, about you, about everything, they committed me to a VA psych wing.”

“And that’s where you’ve been all this time?”

Sanders nodded. “Seven years. They finally let me out last week, and I couldn’t resist stopping by for a visit.”

“To kill me,” Willard concluded.

“No, murder’s not my bag. I just wanted to see what you’d been up to since our last meeting. Almost wish I’d changed my mind, now that I’ve seen the basement.”

What’s all this about the basement? Kurt thought, but he didn’t really care about that or any of what they were talking about. Simply being alive right now was implausible enough. He owed Sanders his life.

Willard tied up his wound with a handkerchief, which quickly drenched red. He was pitiable now, a derelict in rich man’s clothes.

“You owe me money,” Sanders said. “I’ll take it now and be on my merry way.”

“I don’t have any significant amount of cash in the house,” Willard faltered. “Just what’s in my wallet.”

“Once a liar, always a liar. I’m no half-assed house-breaker, you know; carpet tiles in a study are a dead giveaway. Sixth from the wall and three up.” Sanders’s smile strained the edges of his broken face. “I don’t miss a thing.”

Willard cursed silently to himself; he went and lifted up the indicated tile. Recessed beneath lay a pyronox-insulated floor safe. Reluctantly, his fingers dialed in the three-digit combination, then slid back the double bolts.

Vicky gaped at them, cock-eyed. “Did I miss something, or is this armed robbery?”

“I’m not robbing him,” Sanders was quick to say. “He owes me money, and I’m collecting. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”

“Yes, yes,” Willard muttered. From the safe to the desktop, he transferred what looked to be tens of thousands of dollars in banded fifties and twenties. Sanders began to count it, keeping his rifle trained on Willard’s head.

Vicky scurried over to Kurt, whispering, “Would you please tell me what’s going on. I turned on the walkie-talkie a few minutes after you went in. What was all that crap he was talking about?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kurt said, his attention divided between her and the two men. “He’s crazy, that’s all. Willard’s crazy. He murdered everyone.”

“But I heard him say he only killed his wife and Glen.”

“He killed them all,” Kurt reiterated. “You heard his explanation; what more evidence of insanity do you need? Crazy people believe crazy things. The way I see it, Willard became obsessed with Muslem folklore when he was overseas. And now, on top of his obsession, he’s had some kind of psychotic episode, like a fragmented personality or something. He may not remember killing all those people, but he did just the same. He’s simply blaming it all on a delusion that’s been growing in his head for years—mythological monsters from the Middle East. He’ll spend the rest of his life in a nut shack.”

Kurt had never seen so much money in his life. It formed a virtual pile on the desk. From the pile Sanders took five sets of banded fifties. He skimmed the corner of each band with his thumb, listening to the flitter. “Squared away,” he said.

Willard’s eyes pinched, as if costive. “You mean you’re not going to take it all?”

“You owe me twenty-five grand, and that’s what I’m taking. No more, no less. You’ll need the rest, anyway. For a lawyer.” Sanders seemed satisfied now. He put the money into a dark green string bag. Then he flung the bag over his shoulder and said, “Adiós, all.”

“Wait a minute,” Kurt cut in. “Your friend Dr. Willard here just confessed to two counts of murder. You’re not leaving just yet.”

“I didn’t murder anybody,” Sanders exclaimed. “You can’t hold me.”

“I suppose you’ve paid your licensing fee for that automatic weapon. I kinda have a feeling that unlicensed machine guns are illegal in this state. Of course, I might be willing to look the other way if you should decide to maybe hang around a bit and do me a little favor.”

“A little favor?” Sanders looked back in dismay. “I don’t believe you, man. If it weren’t for me, your brains would be all over that wall.”

“Okay, you saved my neck, and I’m grateful, I really am. But I still got a job to do here, and there’re procedures I have to follow. This man just admitted to murder, and you overheard that admission. I’m going to need a statement from you, and you’ll have to testify as a witness against him.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Sanders said. “I’m getting out of here. She can be your witness. Why don’t I just leave, and we’ll call it even. We’ll pretend I was never here.”

“At least stick around for a few minutes,” Kurt asked. “Let me call the county and start to get things straightened out. Then you can take off.” He picked up the phone.

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” Sanders warned. “Better take care of things yourself, forget about the county.”

“Why?” Kurt said.

“The fewer people who know about the ghala, the better.”

Kurt paused a moment, thinking, Oh, no, not you, too. He looked at Sanders in a funky sideglance. “Dr. Willard is insane; I thought that was pretty obvious. Are you trying to tell me you believe all that cock-and-bull nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense,” Sanders said. “It’s true. Everything he told you is true. The ghala are here, and they’re out there now, tearing this neat little town of yours a new asshole.”

Vicky was shaking her head. “Kurt, don’t be an idiot. There’s something really wrong here. Arrest them both.”

“He saved my life!” Kurt snapped back. “I can’t just bust him and toss him in the can.”

Sanders appeared hard-pressed not to laugh at them both. “What’s to lose just looking into it? Believe me, your man in the mine is dead; he never stood a chance. So what’s the hurry?”

Kurt paused further, trying to rein his anger. He gave Sanders a long, hard stare, then broke, yelling, “You’re both fucking nuts—in fact, you’re nuttier than Willard! Go on, get out of here if that’s what you want! Take your money and your fucking illegal machine gun and leave!” He pushed his hair back, which was now shiny with sweat. Veins beat on his brow. “I’m going to call the county. I will not believe some bullshit tale about ghalas and grave-robbing.”

Sanders slung his rifle and shrugged. “Suit yourself. You wanna dig your own shit-ditch and jump in it, go ahead. Would it help if I told you I was the one who got the larvae for Willard in Saudi Arabia?”

“No!” Kurt began to punch in the county number.

“Look, before you call your precious county, at least take a look in the basement.”

It wasn’t what Sanders had said, it was the indifference with which he’d said it. Kurt teethed his lower lip, sweating. He hung up the phone.

“Now you’re starting to use your head,” Sanders said.

What a gullible jackass I am, Kurt thought, and he could tell by Vicky’s expression that she was thinking along the same lines. Sanders opened the oddly placed door in the corner, then led Willard down at gunpoint. Vicky went next, frowning.

Kurt stepped hesitantly into the doorway. The others’ footsteps clattered up through hollow darkness. A fetid draft blew into his face, and there was a faint, tarry stench. He placed his foot on the first step, the second, the third. As he went down, the stench thickened, and by the time he got to the bottom, it was making him sick. He’d noticed the same odor in the mine.

Directly overhead, fluorescent tubes buzzed gray, then flashed on all at once. Now white, brutalizing light filled a small room much like the latent lab at state police headquarters. There was a sink counter, a Beckman chromatograph, shelves stocked with glassware, chemicals, lab apparatus, and the like. There was also a shiny metal table encrusted with random shapes of what must be blood.

Kurt ground his teeth at thoughts of what Willard must’ve done down here. It was a madman’s playroom, a torture chamber. On the counter, beside a large oil-immersion microscope, he saw bloody pliers and a hypodermic with a needle the size of a masonry nail. A heavy canvas blackout curtain hung at the far end of the room, from ceiling to floor.

“What’s behind there?” Kurt asked.

“The main attraction,” Sanders said. He leveled his rifle on Willard’s belly and reached across for the curtain.

Willard leaned against the counter, arms crossed, composure revived. “I’ll pay each of you thirty thousand dollars to let me go.”

“Shut up,” Kurt said.

“Fifty thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Sanders said. His hand wavered.

“Just open the curtain.”

Sanders hauled the canvas back on its rung, to reveal two cinderblock compartments built against the back wall. The access to each compartment was a hinge frame of steel bars, roughly six feet high and three wide, held shut by padlocks. They looked like crude jail cells.

The right compartment was empty. Through the hinge frame, Kurt could see the hole where the grate had been torn off—the channel which led to the ventilators outside.

Something moved in the left compartment.

Vicky leaned forward, staring vexedly past the bars. Her voice was broken, splintery. “Are those…men?”

Kurt stepped past her to see. This charade had gone on long enough.

“Don’t get too close.” Sanders said. “They have a good reach.”

Kurt stood entrenched, peering in. There were actually two shapes in the pen, one hunched in the corner, the other upright. He thought they must be shadows at first, just odd shadows— they had to be. But slowly details began to form, a semblance of limbs, heads, checked watchful movement, pale aberrations of figures not quite human. He looked at them for a long time, and he felt a sensation like snakes swimming in his gut when he realized they were looking back.

“It’s a trick,” Kurt murmured, but he knew it wasn’t. He knew he was face-to-face with something that couldn’t be. He felt dangerously unstable, like standing on skates; cold rushing numbness flowed through him as he continued to examine the stark horror before him.

Their skin was mottled, viscid-gray, sluglike in its exuding moistness. The first one stood raw and lean in the slanting light, the shadows of the bars thrown crookedly across its corded, sinuous torso. It breathed imperceptibly; its muscles slid, flexing, beneath tight, inhuman skin.

“How many did you say escaped?” Sanders asked.

“Two, my control group,” Willard lamented. “It was about a week ago. They chose the old mine for their lair, which is ideal for them, perhaps even better for them than their natural environs.”

“But why?” Vicky said, aghast. “Why bring those things here?”

Willard leaned forward, puppetlike in deep, reactive wonder. “Why?” he asked. “Why does any man venture a great question? To reveal before the world something unseen, unbelieved until now, to bring to life a thousand-year-old myth… I would have been credited with the discovery of a new bipedal life form.”

“And never mind how many get killed in the process,” Sanders remarked. “We were pawns to you, weren’t we? Mules who broke our backs for your great discovery.”

“Not mules. Pioneers, men of destiny. You should feel honored to have taken part.”

“Tell that to the two Marines.”

“Oh, really, Sergeant, a man of war as yourself must acknowledge the expendability of human life in crucial circumstances.”

“That’s easy for you to say. They were my friends, not yours. And you didn’t have to watch them die.”

The words never reached Kurt. He was still staring into the pen, entranced by revulsion. The faces, he thought. My God, the faces. Like incarnations of a medieval vision of hell, the faces leered back at him. They were narrow, snouted wedges, heinously lacking in detail. The thing forward stepped closer to the bars. Two rimmed holes for a nose quivered, sniffing. The jutting, long jaw lowered just a bit, stretching sleek lips over a razor row of teeth which glittered like tinsel. Worst of all, though, were the eyes, with no signs of pupil or iris—just huge black orbs widely spaced on the foreskull. They shone, unblinking and black as spheres of polished smoke glass.

The thing’s hand shot out between the bars. Shouting a prompt, “Jesus!” Kurt jumped back as the frame slammed loudly against its mortar bolts. A single inch closer and he would’ve been grabbed by the throat.

Before them all, the twisted, three-fingered hand opened and closed, talons clicking.

“I told you they have a good reach,” Sanders reminded, though unmoved by the momentary start. “And once they get hold of you—believe me—they don’t let go.”

The scare made Kurt’s chest want to burst. The thing’s face and shoulder pressed tight against the bars, its hand still reaching vainly out. For a churning, sickening moment, Kurt feared it might actually squeeze through the frame of bars.

“Ultimate killers,” Willard observed in a flat voice. “Perfect in their purpose. Ferocity is instinct for them; they kill without forethought.” A proud hush crept into his words. He pointed to the pen. “Look at them. They’re marvels, patterns of biological excellence. Their physical superiority is incontrovertible. What my research has revealed will split the world of natural science wide open.”

“Now’s your chance to impress us,” Sanders said. “Give us a rundown.”

Willard spoke in illusionary fragments. “Maximum scotopic vision. Auditory perceptibility in excess of 100,000 hertzes. Pulmonary volume, oxygen transport, and carbon-dioxide disposal close to twice that of men. Voluntary cardiac and catecholamic innervation; they can raise or lower their heart rates and certain hormonal levels at will. A completely hermaphroditic reproductive mode, full larva gestation in fifteen days. Hyperosmotic urine synthesis, specific gravity 1.08, absolute fluid retention—which all means they can live weeks without water. Their central and peripheral nervous systems alone surpass anything man has yet seen; conduction velocities and reaction times may triple or even quadruple those of human beings. They defy everything we’ve ever thought of as axiomatic in vertebrate life. There are organs in their bodies I haven’t even been able to identify yet. Most important of all, they possess an additional physical system that drastically reduces metabolic energy demands in extreme states of hypoxia—living proof of the theories of cellular hibernation, a self-contained mode to live for extended periods with little or no oxygen.”

For the whole time Willard talked, Kurt’s eyes remained riveted to the things in the pen. A block of shadow engulfed the back of the compartment, but soon he became aware of something only part in view near the farthest corner. It was an odd, ragged heap of some sort, and the one that crouched seemed to be guarding it.

Kurt looked demandingly to Willard. “What is that?”

“What is what?”

“That.” Kurt pointed, anger rising like steam. “That stuff in the corner of the cell.”

“You’d be better off not knowing.”

Kurt took Sanders’s flashlight and turned it on, this time keeping a safe distance from the frame. He then learned why Willard had made no reference to the exact nature of Glen’s murder.

The heap in the corner was a pile of bones, all gnawed clean and glistening in the shaft of light. The largest of the bones had been split and drained of marrow. The skull had been pried apart. A pair of jeans lay in shreds nearby, and also Glen’s old poplin jacket.

Vicky moaned wanly. She turned away.

“You fed him to those things,” Kurt said.

“I had no choice,” Willard countered. A definite crack could be detected in his voice: For the first time, he was beginning to lose control. “I already told you. Glen and my wife were conspiring against me. It was them or me, can’t you see that?”

“You’re insane,” Kurt said, though by now all he felt and thought had been tapped dry of emotion. A great chill filled his soul now, not shock, not horror; the reality was finalized at last. These things behind the bars were not men, but obscenely less. Willard had unleashed monsters.

Kurt reached for his handcuffs. His voice was like the drone of a machine. “Dr. Willard, I’m arresting you for the murder of Glen Rodz and Nancy Willard…”

“Don’t be a fool,” Willard exclaimed, straightening against the counter. “Can’t you comprehend the importance of my work? I’ll carve milestones of knowledge from what I learn of the ghala.”

“Please understand that from this moment on you have the right to remain silent—”

“No! Please, I—” Willard snapped his gaze to Sanders. “Sergeant, kill him, I’ll make you rich. If I’m taken into custody, the authorities will destroy the ghala. All my work will have been in vain; no one will benefit. Kill him and the girl, and you can name your price.”

Sanders offered him a remiss grin. “Eat shit and die.”

“—anything you say can be used against you—”

Willard moved with stupefying quickness. Before anyone could react, he’d grabbed a bottle of ethyl chloride and sprayed it precisely across Sanders’s eyes, while at the same time flinging a tray of instruments at Kurt’s face. Sanders tottered back, firing several rounds into the ceiling. Blinded, he tripped and fell, and the rifle slid across the room.

Before Kurt could draw his gun, Willard was holding Vicky in front of him, using her as a shield. He held a #22-blade scalpel to her throat.

“I seem to have regained a few cards in the shuffle,” Willard said, tightening his arm around Vicky’s waist. The scalpel turned, glinting. “Shall we try the old routine one more time? Very carefully now, with your left index finger and thumb, I want you to remove your service revolver by the tip of the hammer and place it on the counter. You will then take one step back.”

Kurt stood as though his joints had fused. He couldn’t move, not even slightly. Vicky looked at him in squirming silence. Terror made her eyes seem large as cue balls.

“Please, Officer Morris. Do as I say, or I’ll cut her throat to the bone.”

“If you hurt her…”

“Not hurt, kill. And I will kill her unless you do exactly as I say. You’ll get to watch her bleed to death before your very eyes, and there’ll be nothing you can do to stop it.”

Kurt’s hand began to lower. He would have to give it to him.

“Jackass,” Sanders said, only now getting his sight back. He blinked painfully and leaned up off the floor. “Never surrender your weapon. Never.”

“He’ll kill her!”

“He’ll kill us all if you give him that gun.”

I could try for a head shot, Kurt thought perilously. Chances can’t be any worse than a million to one.

Willard was smiling. The scalpel edge gleamed like a thread of molten silver. “Officer Morris, if you don’t place that pistol on the counter by the time I count three, I will punch this blade right through her carotid artery.”

Shit.

“Don’t do it,” Sanders said.

“One,” Willard said.

A headshot was impossible. By the time he drew and lined up, it would be over. There had to be another way. But what?

“Two.”

Vicky whined, cheeks and forehead reddened to a blaze of panic. She rose up on her tiptoes, some visceral compulsion causing her back to arch. The scalpel began to push against her throat, soft flesh going white around the tip.

“Three—”

Kurt withdrew his revolver as instructed and set it on the counter. Sanders mouthed several hopeless obscenities, closing his eyes, shaking his head. Willard then laxed his grip, leaving an inch between the blade and Vicky’s throat. He reached across for the gun.

Go for it, Kurt’s mind flashed, and without conscious direction he sidearmed his handcuffs forward as hard as he could. It was perhaps the most reckless, imprudent thing he’d ever done. He’d thrown Vicky’s life away, and his own, with less calculation than a hand of twenty-one, for surely the handcuffs would miss by a country mile and Dr. Willard would laugh uproariously as he pumped them all full of bullets from Kurt’s own gun…

The handcuffs smacked solidly into the bridge of Willard’s nose. There was a delightful hard metal clack, a sound that hurt just to listen to. Willard’s head jerked back in pain and utter surprise. A star of blood broke between his eyes, and for one precious second his concentration fell apart.

Kurt bulled forward. He tore Vicky away and pushed her behind him, where she immediately tripped and fell over Sanders, who was just getting up.

The idea of rearranging Willard’s face was very illuminating. Kurt turned to do exactly that, but only in time to miss the first swipe of Willard’s sparkling scalpel. The doctor’s speed and precision was marveling; perhaps he had an additional degree in knife fighting. With a brute swoosh, the scalpel blazed by two more times before Kurt was backed against the counter.

Willard held the knife in his fist now. He plunged it down in a swift, silent arc. Kurt tried to catch Willard’s fist but instead caught the scalpel blade in the center of his palm and saw it punch through the other side of his hand between the second and third knuckles.

“Thanks for the stigmata,” Kurt said. Blood burned out of his palm like scalding water. “I’m gonna twirl that scalpel right up your crapper, you old piece of shit.”

“Oh?” Willard replied. Like a fencer, he lunged forward, stepping out and swiping the scalpel in a tight figure eight with each driving step. Kurt’s skin prickled from a mixture of terror and embarrassment; he scurried back like a frantic tightrope walker. The first two swipes missed. The third nicked his shoulder, and the fourth drew a perfect bleeding line across his chest. He felt the blade pass through a nipple.

“How’s that for an old piece of shit?” Willard said, poised for another strike.

“You ruined a perfectly good shirt, motherfucker. I’ll send you the bill after your arraignment.”

“Young man, by the time I’m through carving, there won’t be enough left of you to even wear a shirt. Ah, yes, yours will be a death of the most deliberate slowness.”

“Fuck you, and your mom and dad, too.”

“Don’t stand there and gab!” Sanders yelled. “Defend yourself! Get your feet apart, lean low! Stand like you’re ready to fight, you stupid schmuck!”

This was not one of Sanders’s more illustrious days. Just as he was about to get up again, Willard pulled down an entire wall shelf of glassware on him. A rich variety of bottles, flasks, and storage flagons clunked Sanders repeatedly in the head and back. Glass burst all around him like fireworks.

Grunting, Kurt hurled a big binocular microscope, but Willard ducked out of the way with little effort. The microscope clanged against the pen frame, then thudded to the floor. Within the pen, the two macabre figures remained inhumanly still and staring out with swollen, vitreous eyes.

“Crafty hands,” Willard said. “It will be my pleasure to cut them off.”

“You’re crazier than a rat in a shit heap, Willard. You make Henry Lee Lucas look like Bozo the Clown.” Kurt picked up a pair of retractors—the only thing he could get his hands on— and tried to hold them up threateningly. “What do you think you’re going to do, anyway? Kill us all and just continue with your ‘work’?”

“Yes. Precisely.”

This standoff wouldn’t last; Kurt knew he’d lose if he didn’t do something now. The pistol lay temptingly between them on the counter.

Kurt tried to edge in, but Willard made his move too fast, a graceful charge of swipes and sidesteps. Kurt said “Fuck!” very loudly four times in a row, as he was nicked by the scalpel four times in a row.

To beat Willard off the mark, Kurt needed just a second’s lead, and there was only one way to get. He switched the retractors to his left hand. No choice, he thought with relatively little fear. I’m gonna have to give Willard something to cut.

He stepped forward and jabbed the retractors at Willard’s ribs. Willard’s scalpel blazed down and up, punching hard into the undermuscle of Kurt’s forearm. The blade felt like a white-hot rivet; the rush of pain nearly dropped Kurt to his knees.

They both reached for the gun at the same time.

Kurt’s hand landed on it first. Willard’s scalpel then promptly nailed Kurt’s hand to the counter.

Blew it, Kurt thought. That’s all, folks.

Willard picked up the gun. He cocked the hammer in an even motion, keeping the barrel leveled. He aimed the gun at Kurt’s face—

—and froze, staring down.

Something green and round rolled across the floor, toward Willard. Sanders had quickly curled up into a fetal-like ball, sticking his fingers in his ears, and from the back of the room, Vicky screamed. Kurt detached his hand from the counter and dove aside—when he realized that the object on the floor was a hand grenade.

The grenade went off at Willard’s feet. The room erupted around a single white-green flash and a deafening pop! Shelves of glassware burst instantaneously, ceiling panels fragmented and fell in hundreds of pieces, and the whole house seemed to give off a spasmodic, tremulous shudder.

The force of the blast had blown Willard off his feet. He screamed as he was propelled backward and slammed against the pen frame. At once, the sleek corded arms snaked out and surrounded him, three-fingered hands fastening on to whatever they could grab.

Willard didn’t scream for long.

He was very quickly pulled into the pen through the bars, piece by piece by piece.

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