"Need to go out?" Sam asked, though they had let him out for ten minutes just before they'd gone to bed.
The dog made no response but stood at the window with a peculiar rigidity.
"Something out there?" Sam wondered, and even as he asked the question, he knew the answer.
Quickly and gingerly he crossed the dark room. He bumped into furniture but didn't knock anything down, and joined the dog at the window.
The rain-battered night seemed at its blackest in this last hour before dawn, but Sam's eyes were adjusted to darkness. He could see the side of the neighboring house, just thirty feet away. The steeply sloping property between the two structures was not planted with grass but with a variety of shrubs and several starburst pines, all of which swayed and shuddered in the gusty wind.
He quickly spotted the two Boogeymen because their movement was in opposition to the direction of the wind and therefore in sharp contrast to the storm dance of the vegetation. They were about fifteen feet from the window, heading downslope toward Conquistador. Though Sam could discern no details of them, he could see by their hunchbacked movement and shambling yet queerly graceful gait that they were not ordinary men.
As they paused beside one of the larger pines, one of them looked toward the Talbot house, and Sam saw its softly radiant, utterly alien amber eyes. For a moment he was transfixed, frozen not by fear so much as by amazement. Then he realized that the creature seemed to be staring straight at the window, as if it could see him, and suddenly it loped straight toward him.
Sam dropped below the sill, pressing against the wall under the window, and pulled Moose down with him. The dog must have had some sense of the danger, for he didn't bark or whine or resist in any way, but lay with his belly to the floor and allowed himself to be held there, still and silent.
A fraction of a second later, over the sounds of wind and rain, Sam heard furtive movement on the other side of the wall against which he crouched. A soft scuttling sound. Scratching.
He held his.38 in his right hand, ready in case the thing was bold enough to smash through the window.
A few seconds passed in silence. A few more.
Sam kept his left hand on Moose's back. He could feel the dog shivering.
Tick-tick-tick.
After long seconds of silence, the sudden ticking startled Sam, for he had just about decided that the creature had gone away.
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
It was tapping the glass, as if testing the solidity of the pane or calling to the man it had seen standing there.
Tick-tick. Pause. Tick-tick-tick.
5
Tucker led his pack out of the mud and rain, onto the sagging porch of the decrepit house. The boards creaked under their weight. One loose shutter was banging in the wind; all the others had rotted and torn off long ago.
He struggled to speak of his intentions, but he found it very difficult to remember or produce the necessary words. Midst snarls and growls and low brute mutterings, he only managed to say, "… here … hide … here … safe …"
The other male seemed to have lost his speech entirely, for he could produce no words at all.
With considerable difficulty, the female said, "safe … here … home…."
Tucker studied his two companions for a moment and realized they had changed during their night adventures. Earlier, the female had possessed a feline quality-sleek, sinuous, with cat ears and sharply pointed teeth that she revealed when she hissed either in fear, anger, or sexual desire. Though something of the cat was still in her, she had become more like Tucker, wolfish, with a large head drawn forward into a muzzle more canine than feline. She had lupine haunches, as well, and feet that appeared to have resulted from the crossbreeding of man and wolf, not paws but not hands either, tipped with claws longer and more murderous than those of a real wolf. The other male, once unique in appearance, combining a few insectile features with the general form of a hyena, had now largely conformed to Tucker's appearance.
By unspoken mutual agreement, Tucker had become the leader of the pack. Upon submitting to his rule, his followers evidently had used his appearance as a model for their own. He realized that this was an important turn of events, maybe even an ominous one.
He did not know why it should spook him, and he no longer had the mental clarity to concentrate on it until understanding came to him. The more pressing concern of shelter demanded his attention.
… here … safe … here.
He led them through the broken, half-open door, into the front hall of the moldering house. The plaster was pocked and cracked, and in some places missing altogether, with lath showing through like the rib cage of a half-decomposed corpse. In the empty living room, long strips of wallpaper were peeling off, as if the place was shedding its skin in the process of a metamorphosis as dramatic as any that 'Tucker and his pack had undergone.
He followed scents through the house, and that was interesting, not exciting but definitely interesting. His companions followed as he investigated patches of mildew, toadstools growing in a dank corner of the dining room, colonies of vaguely luminescent fungus in a room on the other side of the hall, several deposits of rat feces, the mummified remains of a bird that had flown in through one of the glassless windows and broken a wing against a wall, and the still ripe carcass of a diseased coyote that had crawled into the kitchen to die.
During the course of that inspection, Tucker realized the house did not offer ideal shelter. The rooms were too large and drafty, especially with windows broken out. Though no human scent lingered on the air, he sensed that people still came here, not frequently but often enough to be troublesome.
In the kitchen, however, he found the entrance to the cellar, and he was excited by that subterranean retreat. He led the others down the creaking stairs into that deeper darkness, where cold drafts could not reach them, where the floor and walls were dry, and where the air had a clean, lime smell that came off the concrete-block walls.
He suspected that trespassers seldom ventured into the basement. And if they did … they would be walking into a lair from which they could not possibly escape.
It was a perfect, windowless den. Tucker prowled the perimeter of the room, his claws ticking and scraping on the floor. He sniffed in corners and examined the rusted furnace. He was satisfied they'd be safe. They could curl up secure in the knowledge that they would not be found and if, by some chance, they were found, they could cut off the only exit and dispense with an intruder quickly.
In such a deep, dark, secret place, they could become anything they wanted, and no one would see them.
That last thought startled Tucker. Become anything they wanted?
He was not sure where that thought originated or what it meant. He suddenly sensed that by regressing he had initiated some process that was now beyond his conscious control, that some more primitive part of his mind was permanently in charge. Panic seized him. He had shifted to an altered state many times before and had always been able to shift back again. But now … His fear was sharp only for a moment, because he could not concentrate on the problem, didn't even remember what he meant by "regressing," and was soon distracted by the female, who wanted to couple with him.
Soon the three of them were in a tangle, pawing at one another, thrusting and thrashing. Their shrill, excited cries rose through the abandoned house, like ghost voices in a haunted place.
6
Tick-tick-tick.