Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

That one woke him.

He sat straight up on the sofa and pinched off the cry before it left his throat, An instant later he became aware that he was not alone in the unlighted living room. He heard something move in front of him, and he moved simultaneously, snatching his .38 revolver from the holster, which he had taken off and laid beside the sofa.

It was Moose.

“Hey, boy.”

The dog chuffed softly.

Sam reached out to pat the dark head, but already the Labrador was moving away. Because the night outside was marginally less black than the interior of the house, the windows were visible as fuzzy-gray rectangles. Moose went to one at the side of the house, putting his paws on the sill and his nose to the glass.

“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… .”