Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

By four-thirty Tuesday afternoon, she was halfway through the novel, though she paused at the end of each chapter to look out at the rain. She liked rain. She liked whatever weather God chose to throw at the world—storms, hail, wind, cold, heat—because the variety and extremes of creation were what made it so beautiful.

While looking at the rain, which earlier had declined from a fierce downpour to a drizzle but was once more falling furiously, she saw three large, dark, and utterly fantastic creatures appear out of the stand of trees at the rear of her property, fifty feet from the window at which she sat. They halted for a moment as a thin mist eddied around their feet, as if they were dream monsters that had taken shape from those scraps of fog and might melt away as suddenly as they had arisen. But then they raced toward her back porch.

As they drew swiftly nearer, Meg’s first impression of them was reinforced. They were like nothing on this earth … unless perhaps gargoyles could come alive and climb down from cathedral roofs.

She knew at once that she must be in the early stages of a truly massive stroke, because that was what she had always feared would at last claim her. But she was surprised that it would begin like this, with such a weird hallucination.

That was all it could be, of course—hallucination preceding the bursting of a cerebral blood vessel that must be already swelling and pressing on her brain. She waited for a painful exploding sensation inside her head, waited for her face and body to twist to the left or right as one side or the other was paralyzed.

Even when the first of the gargoyles crashed through the window, showering the table with glass, spilling the chenin blanc, knocking Meg off her chair, and falling to the floor atop her, all teeth and claws, she marveled that a stroke could produce such vivid, convincing illusions, though she was not surprised by the intensity of the pain. She’d always known that death would hurt.

* * *

Dora Hankins, the receptionist in the main lobby at New Wave, was accustomed to seeing people leave work as early as four-thirty. Though the official quitting time was five o’clock, a lot of workers put in hours at home, on their own PCs, so no one strictly enforced the eight-hour office day. Since they’d been converted, there had been no need for rules, anyway, because they were all working for the same goal, for the new world that was coming, and the only discipline they needed was their fear of Shaddack, of which they had plenty.

By 4:55, when no one at all had passed through the lobby, Dora was apprehensive. The building was oddly silent, though hundreds of people were working there in offices and labs farther back on the ground floor and in the two floors overhead. In fact the place seemed deserted.

At five o’clock no one had yet left for the day, and Dora had decided to see what was going on. She abandoned her post at the main reception desk, walked to the end of the large marble lobby, through a brass door, into a less grand corridor floored with vinyl tile. Offices lay on both sides. She went into the first room on the left, where eight women served as a secretarial pool for minor department heads who had no personal secretaries of their own.

The eight were at their VDTs. In the fluorescent light, Dora had no trouble seeing how intimately flesh and machine had joined.

Fear was the only emotion Dora had felt in weeks. She thought she had known it in all its shades and degrees. But now it fell over her with greater force, darker and more intense, than anything she had experienced before.

A glistening probe erupted from the wall to Dora’s right. It was more metallic than not, yet it dripped what appeared to be yellowish mucus. The thing shot straight to one of the secretaries and bloodlessly pierced the back of her head. From the top one of the other women’s heads, another probe erupted, like a snake to the music of a charmer’s flute, hesitated, then with tremendous speed snapped to the ceiling, piercing the acoustic tile without disturbing it, and vanished toward the room above.