glowed and flickered like a white-hot fire-then blinked and was gone. In
its place, something dark appeared, shifted, pushed against the vent
plate for a moment, as if trying hard to dislodge it, then withdrew when
the plate held.
Jack couldn’t see enough of the creature to get a clear idea of its
general appearance.
Keith said, “Jack. The vent screw.”
Jack had already seen it. The screw was revolving, slowly coming out of
the edge of the vent plate. The creature inside the duct was turning
the screw, unfastening it from the other side of the flange to which the
plate was attached. The thing was muttering, hissing, and grumbling
softly while it worked.
“Let’s go,” Jack said, striving to keep his voice calm.
“Come on, come on. Let’s get out of here right now.”
The screw popped loose. The vent plate swung down, away from the
ventilation outlet, hanging from the one remaining screw.
Rebecca hustled the kids toward the door.
A nightmare crawled out of the duct. It hung there on the wall, with
utter disregard for gravity, as if there were suction pads on its feet,
although it didn’t seem equipped with anything of that sort.
“Jesus,” Keith said, stunned.
Jack shuddered at the thought of this repulsive little beast touching
Davey or Penny.
The creature was the size of a rat. In shape, at least, its body was
rather like that of a rat, too: low-slung, long in the flanks, with
shoulders and haunches that were large and muscular for an animal of its
size. But there the resemblance to a rat ended, and the nightmare
began. This thing was hairless. Its slippery skin was darkly mottled
gray-green-yellow and looked more like a slimy fungus than like flesh.
The tail was not at all similar to a rat’s tail; it was eight or ten
inches long, an inch wide at the base, segmented in the manner of a
scorpion’s tail, tapering and curling up into the air above the beast’s
hindquarters, like that of a scorpion, although it wasn’t equipped with
a stinger. The feet were far different from a rat’s feet: They were
oversize by comparison to the animal itself; the long toes were
triple-jointed, gnarly; the curving claws were much too big for the feet
to which they were fitted; a razor-sharp, multiply-barbed spur curved
out from each heel. The head was even more deadly in appearance and
design than were the feet; it was formed over a flattish skull that had
many unnaturally sharp angles, unnecessary convexities and concavities,
as if it had been molded by an inexpert sculptor. The snout was long
and pointed, a bizarre cross between the muzzle of a wolf and that of a
crocodile. The small monster opened its mouth and hissed, revealing too
many pointed teeth that were angled in various directions along its
jaws. A surprisingly long black tongue slithered out of the mouth,
glistening like a strip of raw liver; the end of it was forked, and it
fluttered continuously.
But the thing’s eyes were what frightened Jack the most. They appeared
not to be eyes at all; they had no pupils or irises, no solid tissue
that he could discern.
There were just empty sockets in the creature’s malformed skull, crude
holes from which radiated a harsh, cold, brilliant light. The intense
glow seemed to come from a fire within the beast’s own mutant cranium.
Which simply could not be. Yet was. And the thing wasn’t blind,
either, as it should have been; there wasn’t any question about its
ability to see, for it fixed those fire-filled “eyes” on Jack, and he
could feel its demonic gaze as surely as he would have felt a knife
rammed into his gut. That was the other thing that disturbed him, the
very worst aspect of those mad eyes: the death-cold, hate-hot,
soul-withering feeling they imparted when you dared to meet them.
Looking into the thing’s eyes, Jack felt both physically and spiritually
ill.
With insectile disregard for gravity, the beast slowly crept head-first
down the wall, away from the duct.
A second creature appeared at the opening in the ventilation system.
This one wasn’t anything like the first.