Penniworth made a low, strangled sound, as if he were sharing Peyser's anguish.
Loman glanced at his deputy. Penniworth's face glistened with a thin film of perspiration.
Loman realized he was perspiring too; he felt a bead trickle down his left temple. The bungalow was warm — an oil furnace kept clicking on and off — but not warm enough to wring moisture from them. This was a cold sweat of fear, but more than that. He also felt a tightness in his chest, a thickening in his throat that made it hard to swallow, and he was breathing fast, as if he'd sprinted up a hundred steps Letting out a thin, agonized cry, Peyser began to regress again with the brittle splintering noise of bones being remade, the oily-wet sound of flesh being rent and re-knit, the savage creature reasserted itself, and in moments Peyser was as he had been when they had first seen him a hellish beast.
Hellish, yes, and a beast, but enviably powerful and with an odd, terrible beauty of its own. The forward carriage of the large head was awkward by comparison to the set of the human head, and the thing lacked the sinuous inward curve of the human spine, yet it had a dark grace of its own.
They stood in silence for a moment.
Peyser huddled on the floor, head bowed.
From the doorway, Sholnick finally said, "My God, he is trapped. " Although Mike Peyser's problem could have been related to some glitch in the technology on which conversion from Old to New Person was based, Loman suspected that Peyser still possessed the power to reshape himself, that he could become a man if he wanted to badly enough, but that he lacked the desire to be fully human again. He had become a regressive because he found that altered state appealing, so maybe he found it so much more exciting and satisfying than the human condition that now he did not truly want to return to a higher state.
Peyser raised his head and looked at Loman, then at Penniworth, then at Sholnick, and finally at Loman again. His horror at his condition was no longer apparent. The anguish and terror were gone from his eyes. With his twisted muzzle he seemed to smile at them, and a new wildness — both disturbing and appealing — appeared in his eyes. He raised his hands before his face again and flexed the long fingers, clicked the claws together, studying himself with what might have been wonder.
"… hunt, hunt, chase, hunt, kill, blood, blood, need, need …"
"How the hell can we take him alive if he doesn't want to be taken?" Penniworth's voice was peculiar, thick and slightly slurred.
Peyser dropped one hand to his genitals and scratched lightly, absentmindedly. He looked at Loman again, then at the night pressing against the windows.
"I feel …" Sholnick left the sentence unfinished.
Penniworth was no more articulate "If we … well, we could …"
The pressure in Loman's chest had grown greater. His throat was tighter, too, and he was still sweating.
Peyser let out a soft, ululant cry as eerie as any sound Loman had ever heard, an expression of longing, yet also an animal challenge to the night, a statement of his power and his confidence in his own strength and cunning. The wail should have been harsh and unpleasant in the confines of that bedroom, but instead it stirred in Loman the same unspeakable yearning that had gripped him outside of the Fosters' house when he had heard the trio of regressives calling to one another far away in the darkness.
Clenching his teeth so hard that his jaws ached, Loman strove to resist that unholy urge.
Peyser loosed another cry, then said, "Run, hunt, free, free, need, free, need, come with me, come, come, need, need…"
Loman realized that he was relaxing his grip on the 12-gauge. The barrel was tilting down. The muzzle was pointing at the floor instead of at Peyser.
"… run, free, free, need …"
From behind Loman came an unnerving, orgasmic cry of release.
He glanced back at the bedroom doorway in time to see Sholnick drop his shotgun. Subtle transformations had occurred in the deputy's hands and face. He pulled off his quilted, black uniform jacket, cast it aside, and tore open his shirt. His cheekbones and jaws dissolved and flowed forward, and his brow retreated as he sought an altered state.
53
When Harry Talbot finished telling them about the Boogeymen, Sam leaned forward on the high stool to the telescope eyepiece. He swung the instrument to the left, until he focused on the vacant lot beside Callan's, where the creatures had most recently put in an appearance.
He was not sure what he was looking for. He didn't believe that the Boogeymen would have returned to that same place at precisely this time to give him a convenient look at them. And there were no clues in the shadows and trampled grass and shrubs, where they had crouched only a few hours ago, to tell him what they might have been or on what mission they had been embarked. Maybe he was just trying to anchor the fantastic image of ape-dog-reptilian Boogeymen in the real world, tie them in his mind to that vacant lot, and thereby make them more concrete, so he could deal with them.
In any event Harry had another story besides that one. As they sat in the darkened room, as if listening to ghost stories around a burnt-out campfire, he told them how he'd seen Denver Simpson, Doc Fitz, Reese Dorn, and Paul Hawthorne overpower Ella Simpson, take her upstairs to the bedroom, and prepare to inject her with an enormous syringeful of some golden fluid.
Operating the telescope at Harry's direction, Sam was able to find and draw in tight on the Simpsons' house, on the other side of Conquistador and just north of the Catholic cemetery. All was dark and motionless.
From the bed where she still had the dog's head in her lap, Tessa said, "All of it's got to be connected somehow: these 'accidental' deaths, whatever those men were doing to Ella Simpson, and these … Boogeymen."
"Yes, it's tied together," Sam agreed. "And the knot is new Wave Microtechnology."
He told them what he had uncovered while working with the VDT in the patrol car behind the municipal building.
"Moonhawk?" Tessa wondered. "Conversions? What on earth are they converting people into?"
"I don't know."
"Surely not into … these Boogeymen?"
"No, I don't see the purpose of that, and besides, from what I turned up, I gather almost two thousand people in town have been … given this treatment, put through this change, whatever the hell it is. If there were that many of Harry's Boogeymen running loose, they'd be everywhere; the town would be crawling with them, like a zoo in the Twilight Zone."
"Two thousand," Harry said. "That's two-thirds of the town."
"And the rest by midnight," Sam said. "Just under twenty-one hours from now."
"Me, too, I guess?" Harry asked.
"Yeah. I looked you up on their lists. You're scheduled for conversion in the final stage, between six o'clock this coming evening and midnight. So we've got about fourteen and a half hours before they come looking for you."
"This is nuts," Tessa said.
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "Totally nuts."
"It can't be happening," Harry said. "But if it isn't happening, then why's the hair standing up on the back of my neck?"
54
"Sholnick!"
Throwing aside his uniform shirt, kicking off his shoes, frantic to strip out of all his clothes and complete his regression, Barry Sholnick ignored Loman.
"Barry, stop, for God's sake, don't let this happen," Penniworth said urgently. He was pale and shaking. He glanced from Sholnick to Peyser and back again, and Loman suspected that Penniworth felt the same degenerate urge to which Sholnick had surrendered himself.