Sam waited.
Nothing more.
He had the queer feeling that something was listening for his movements as tensely as he was listening for it.
He considered returning to Harry’s to think of some other way to send a message to the Bureau, because Mexican food and Guinness Stout and Goldie Hawn movies—even Swing Shift, now seemed precious beyond value, not pathetic reasons to live, but pleasures so exquisite that no words existed to adequately describe them.
The only thing that kept him from getting the hell out of there was Chrissie Foster. The memory of her bright eyes. Her innocent face. The enthusiasm and animation with which she had, recounted her adventures. Perhaps he had failed Scott, and perhaps it was too late for the boy to be hauled back from the brink. But Chrissie was still alive in every vital sense of the word—physically, intellectually, emotionally—and she was dependent on him. No one else could save her from conversion.
Midnight was little more than twelve hours away.
He edged through the living room and quietly crossed the, foyer. He stood with his back against the wall beside the half-open door to the room from which the weird sounds had come.
Something clicked in there.
He stiffened.
Low, soft clicks. Not the tick-tick-tick of claws like those he had heard tapping on the window last night. More like a long series of relays being tripped, scores of switches being closed dominoes falling against one another: click-click-click-clickety-clickety-click-click-clickety… .
Silence once more.
Holding the revolver in both hands, Sam stood in front of the door and pushed it open with one foot. He crossed the threshold and assumed a shooter’s stance just inside the room.
The windows were covered by interior shutters, and the only light was from two computer screens. Both were fitted with monitors that resulted in black text on an amber background. Everything in the room not wrapped in shadows was touched by that golden radiance.
Two people sat before the terminals, one on the right side of the room, the other on the left, their backs to each other.
“Don’t move,” Sam said sharply.
They neither moved nor spoke. They were so still that at first he thought they were dead.
The peculiar light was brighter yet curiously less revealing from the half-burnt-out daylight that vaguely illuminated the other rooms. As his eyes adjusted, Sam saw that the two people at the computers were not only unnaturally still but were not really people any more. He was drawn forward by the icy grip of horror.
Oblivious of Sam, a naked man, probably Harley Coltrane, sat in a wheeled, swivel-based chair at the computer to the right of the door, against the west wall He was connected to the VDT by a pair of inch-thick cables that looked less metallic than organic, glistening wetly in the amber glow. They extended from within the bowels of the data-processing unit—from which the cover plate had been removed—and into the man’s bare torso below his rib cage, melding bloodlessly with the flesh. They throbbed.
“Dear God,” Sam whispered.
Coltrane’s lower arms were utterly fleshless, just golden bones. The meat of his upper arms ended smoothly two inches above the elbows; from those stumps, bones thrust out as cleanly as robotic extrusions from a metal casing. The skeletal hands were locked tightly around the cables, as if they were merely a pair of clamps.
When Sam stepped nearer to Coltrane and looked closer, he saw the bones were not as well differentiated as they should have been but had half melted together. Furthermore, they were veined with metal. As he watched, the cables pulsed with such vigor that they began to vibrate wildly. If not held fast by the clamping hands, they might have torn loose either from the man or the machine.
Get out.
A voice spoke within him, telling him to flee, and it was his own voice, though not that of the adult Sam Booker. It was the voice of the child he had once been and to which his fear was encouraging him to revert. Extreme terror is a time machine thousand times more efficient than nostalgia, hurtling us backward through the years, into that forgotten and intolerable condition of helplessness in which so much of childhood is spent.