Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“Please call me Tessa.”

Apparently Chrissie was unaccustomed to addressing adults by their Christian names. She frowned and was silent for a moment, evidently struggling with the invitation to informality. She decided it would be rude not to use first names when asked to do so. “Okay … Tessa. Well, anyway, I can’t decide what the aliens are most likely to do if they catch us. Maybe eat our kidneys? Or don’t they eat us at all? Maybe they just shove alien bugs in our ears, and the bugs crawl into our brains and take over. Either way, I figure it’s worth falling off a roof to avoid them.”

Having finished pinning the toga, Tessa led Chrissie down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet for something with which to treat the scraped palm. She found a bottle of iodine with a faded label, a half-empty roll of adhesive tape, and a package of gauze pads so old that the paper wrapper around each bandage square was yellow with age. The gauze itself looked fresh and white, and the iodine was undiluted by time, still strong enough to sting.

Barefoot, toga-clad, with her blond hair frizzing and curling as it dried, Chrissie sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat and submitted stoically to the treatment of her wound. She didn’t protest in any way, didn’t cry out—or even hiss—in pain.

But she did talk: “That’s the second time I’ve fallen off a roof, so I guess I must have a guardian angel looking over me. About a year and a half ago, in the spring, I think these birds—starlings I think they were—built a nest on the roof of one of our stables at home, and I just had to see what baby birds looked like in the nest, so when my folks weren’t around, I got a ladder and waited for the mama bird to fly off for more food, and then I real quick climbed up there to have a peek. Let me tell you, before they get their feathers, baby birds are just about the ugliest things you’d want to see—except for aliens, of course. They’re withered little wrinkled things, all beaks and eyes, and stumpy little wings like deformed arms. If human babies looked that bad when they were born, the first people back a few million years ago would’ve flushed their newborns down the toilet—if they’d had toilets—and wouldn’t have dared have any more of them, and the whole race would’ve died out before it even really got started.”

Still painting the wound with iodine, trying without success to repress a grin, Tessa looked up and saw that Chrissie was squeezing her eyes tightly shut, wrinkling her nose, struggling very hard to be brave.

“Then the mama and papa bird came back,” the girl said, “and saw me at the nest and flew at my face, shrieking. I was so startled that I slipped and fell off the roof. Didn’t hurt myself at all that time—though I did land in some horse manure. Which isn’t a thrill, let me tell you. I love horses, but they’d be ever so much more lovable if you could teach them to use a litterbox like a cat.”

Tessa was crazy about this kid.

20

Sam leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table and listened attentively to Chrissie Foster. Though Tessa had heard the Boogeymen in the middle of a kill at Cove Lodge and had glimpsed one of them under the door of her room, and though Harry had watched them at a distance in night and fog, and though Sam had spied two of them last night through a window in Harry’s living room, the girl was the only one present who had seen them close up and more than once.

But it was not solely her singular experience that held Sam’s attention. He also was captivated by her sprightly manner, good humor, and articulateness. She obviously had considerable inner strength, real toughness, for otherwise she would not have survived the previous night and the events of this morning. Yet she remained charmingly innocent, tough but not hard. She was one of those kids who gave you hope for the whole damn human race.