Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

Although he was not afraid, he was beginning to feel foolish. How had he gotten himself into this predicament? He was a grown man, an FBI agent trained in a variety of self-defense techniques, carrying a revolver with which he possessed considerable expertise, yet he was hiding in a garage from four kids. He had gotten there because he had acted instinctively, and he usually trusted instinct implicitly but this was—

He heard furtive movement along the outer wall of the garage. He tensed. Scraping footsteps. Approaching the small door at which he stood. As far as Sam could tell, he was hearing only one of the kids.

Leaning back, holding the knob in both hands, Sam pulled the door tight against the jamb.

The footsteps stopped in front of him.

He held his breath.

A second ticked by, two seconds, three.

Try the damn lock and move on, Sam thought irritably.

He was feeling more foolish by the second and was on the verge of confronting the kid. He could pop out of the garage as if he were a jack-in-the-box, probably scare the hell out of the punk, and send him screaming into the night.

Then he heard a voice on the other side of the door, inches from him, and although he did not know what in God’s name he was hearing, he knew at once that he had been wise to trust to instinct, wise to go to ground and hide. The voice was thin, raspy, utterly chilling, and the urgent cadences of the speech were those of a frenzied psychotic or a junkie long over-due for a fix:

“Burning, need, need…”

He seemed to be talking to himself and was perhaps unconscious of speaking, as a man in a fever might babble deliriously.

A hard object scraped down the outside of the wooden door. Sam tried to imagine what it was.

“Feed the fire, fire, feed it, feed,” the kid said in a thin, frantic voice that was partly a whisper and partly a whine and partly a low and menacing growl. It was not much like the voice of any teenager Sam had ever heard—or any adult, for that matter.

In spite of the cold air, his brow was covered with sweat.

The unknown object scraped down the door again.

Was the kid armed? Was it a gun barrel being drawn along the wood? The blade of a knife? Just a stick?

“… burning, burning …”

A claw?

That was a crazy idea. Yet he could not shake it. In his mind was the clear image of a sharp and hornlike claw—a talon-gouging splinters from the door as it carved a line in the wood.

Sam held tightly to the knob. Sweat trickled down his temples.

At last the kid tried the door. The knob twisted in Sam’s grip, but he would not let it move much.

“… oh, God, it burns, hurts, oh God …”

Sam was finally afraid. The kid sounded so damned weird. Like a PCP junkie flying out past the orbit of Mars somewhere, only worse than that, far stranger and more dangerous than any angel-dust freak. Sam was scared because he didn’t know what the hell he was up against.

The kid tried to pull the door open.

Sam held it tight against the jamb.

Quick, frenetic words “… feed the fire, feed the fire …”

I wonder if he can smell me in here? Sam thought, and under the circumstances that bizarre idea seemed no crazier than the image of the kid with claws.

Sam’s heart was hammering. Stinging perspiration seeped into the corners of his eyes. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms ached fiercely; he was straining much harder than necessary to keep the door shut.

After a moment, apparently deciding that his quarry was not in the garage after all, the kid gave up. He ran along the side of the building, back toward the alley. As he hurried away, a barely audible keening issued from him; it was a sound of pain, need … and animal excitement. He was struggling to contain that low cry, but it escaped him anyway.

Sam heard cat-soft footsteps approaching from several directions. The other three would-be muggers rejoined the kid in the alley, and their whispery voices were filled with the same frenzy that had marked his, though they were too far away now for Sam to hear what they were saying. Abruptly, they fell silent and, a moment later, as if they were members of a wolfpack responding instinctively to the scent of game or danger, they ran as one along the alleyway, heading north. Soon their sly footsteps faded, and again the night was grave-still.