Skagg took another step forward, and a mantis shadow rippled across his face.
Frank stepped backward.
"Your kind are born to die."
Always interested in the workings of a criminally insane mind, just as a surgeon is always interested in the nature of the cancers that he excises from his patients' bodies, Frank said, "My kind, huh? What kind is that exactly?"
"Humankind."
"Ah."
"Humankind," Skagg repeated, speaking the word as if it were the vilest epithet.
"You're not human? Is that it?"
"That's it," Skagg agreed.
"What are you then?"
Skagg's insane laughter was as affecting as hard arctic wind.
Feeling as if bits of ice had begun to form in his bloodstream, Frank shivered. "All right, enough of this. Drop to your knees, then flat on your face."
"You're so slow-witted," Skagg said.
"Now you're boring me. Lie down and spread your arms and legs, you son of a bitch."
Skagg reached out with his right hand in such a way that for one disconcerting moment it seemed to Frank that the killer was going to change tactics and begin pleading for his life.
Then the hand began to change. The palm grew longer, broader. The fingers lengthened by two inches. The knuckles became thicker, gnarled. The hand darkened until it was singularly unhealthy, mottled brown-black-yellow. Coarse hairs sprouted from the skin. The fingernails extended into wickedly sharp claws.
"So tough you were. Imitation Clint Eastwood. But you're afraid now, aren't you, little man? Afraid at last, aren't you?"
Only the hand changed. No alterations occurred in Skagg's face or body or even in his other hand. He obviously had complete control of his metamorphosis.
"Werewolf," Frank said in astonishment.
With another peal of lunatic laughter that rebounded tinnily from the warehouse walls, Skagg worked his new hand, curling and extending and recurling his monstrous fingers.
"No. Not a werewolf," he whispered fiercely. "Something far more adaptable. Something infinitely stranger and more interesting. Are you afraid now? Have you wet your pants yet, you chickenshit cop?"
Skagg's hand began to change again. Coarse hairs receded into the flesh that had sprouted them. The mottled skin grew darker still, the many colors blending into green-black, and scales appeared. The fingertips thickened and grew broader, and suction pads formed on them. Webs spun into existence between fingers. The claws subtly changed shape, but they were no shorter or less sharp than the lupine claws had been.
Skagg peered at Frank through those hideous spread fingers and over the half-moon curves of the opaque webs. Then he lowered his hand slightly and grinned. His mouth had also changed. His lips were thin, black, and pebbled. He revealed pointed teeth and two hooked fangs. A thin, glistening, fork-tipped tongue flickered across those teeth, licked the pebbled lips.
At the sight of Frank's horrified astonishment, Skagg laughed. His mouth once more assumed the appearance of a human mouth.
But the hand underwent yet another metamorphosis. The scales were transformed into a hard-looking, smooth, purple-black, chitinous substance, and the fingers, as if wax brought before a flame, melted together until Skagg's wrist terminated in a serrated, razor-sharp pincer.
"You see? No need of a knife for this Night Slasher," whispered Skagg. "Within my hands are an infinite variety of blades."
Frank kept his.38 revolver pointed at his adversary, though by now he knew that even a.357 Magnum loaded with magnum cartridges with Teflon tips would provide him with no protection.
Outside, the sky was split by an ax of lightning. The flash of the electric blade sliced through the narrow windows high above the warehouse floor. A flurry of rafter shadows fell upon Frank and Skagg.
As thunder crashed across the night, Frank said, "What the hell are you?"
Skagg did not answer right away. He stared at Frank for a long moment and seemed perplexed. When he spoke, his voice had a double-honed edge: curiosity and anger. "Your species is soft. Your kind has no nerve, no guts. Faced with the unknown, your kind react as sheep react to the scent of a wolf. I despise your weakling breed. The strongest men break after what I've revealed. They scream like children, flee in panic, or stand paralyzed and speechless with fear. But not you. What makes you different? What makes you so brave? Are you simply thickheaded? Don't you realize you're a dead man? Are you foolish enough to think you'll get out of this place alive? Look at you — your gun hand isn't even trembling."
"I've had more frightening experiences than this," Frank said tightly. "I've been through two tax audits."
Skagg did not laugh. He clearly needed a terrified reaction from an intended victim. Murder was not sufficiently satisfying; evidently he also required the complete humiliation and abasement of his prey.
Well, you bastard, you're not going to get what you need from me, Frank thought.
He repeated, "What the hell are you?"
Clacking the halves of his deadly pincers, slowly taking a step forward, Karl Skagg said, "Maybe I'm the spawn of Hell. Do you think that could be the explanation? Hmmmm?"
"Stay back," Frank warned.
Skagg took another step toward him. "Am I a demon perhaps, risen from some sulfurous pit? Do you feel a certain coldness in your soul; do you sense the nearness of something satanic?"
Frank bumped against one of the forklifts, stepped around the obstruction, and continued to retreat.
Advancing, Skagg said, "Or am I something from another world, a creature alien to this one, conceived under a different moon, born under another sun?"
As he spoke, his right eye receded into his skull, dwindled, vanished. The socket closed up as the surface of a pond would close around the hole made by a pebble; only smooth skin lay where the eye had been.
"Alien? Is that something of which you could conceive?" Skagg pressed. "Have you sufficient wit to accept that I came to this world across an immense sea of space, carried on galactic tides?"
Frank no longer wondered how Skagg had battered open the door of the warehouse; he would have made hornlike hammers of his hands — or ironlike pry bars. No doubt he had also slipped incredibly thin extensions of his fingertips into the alarm switch, deactivating it.
The skin of Skagg's left cheek dimpled, and a hole formed in it. The lost right eye flowered into existence within the hole, directly under his left eye. In two winks both eyes re-formed: They were no longer human but insectoid, bulging and multifaceted.
As if changes were taking place in his throat too, Skagg's voice lowered and became gravelly. "Demon, alien… or maybe I'm the result of some genetic experiment gone terribly wrong. Hmmmm? What do you think?"
That laugh again. Frank hated that laugh.
"What do you think?" Skagg insisted as he approached.
Retreating, Frank said, "You're probably none of those things. Like you said… you're stranger and more interesting than that."
Both of Skagg's hands had become pincers now. The metamorphosis continued up his muscular arms as his human form gave way to a more crustacean anatomy. The seams of his shirt sleeves split; then the shoulder seams also tore as the transformation continued into his upper body. Chitinous accretions altered the size and shape of his chest, and his shirt buttons popped loose.
Though Frank knew he was wasting ammunition, he fired three shots as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger. One round took Skagg in the stomach, one in the chest, one in the throat. Flesh tore, bones cracked, blood flew. The shapechanger staggered backward but did not go down.
Frank saw the bullet holes and knew that a man would die instantly of those wounds. Skagg merely swayed. Even as he regained his balance, his flesh began to knit up again. In half a minute the wounds had vanished.