Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

Looking toward the stables, Loman called out “Tucker! Foster! Is anyone here?”

An echo of his voice rolled back to him. It was a cold and lonely sound.

No one answered him.

“Tucker? Foster?”

Lights were on at one of the long stables, and a door was open at the nearest end. He supposed he should go have a look.

Loman was halfway to that building when an ululant cry, like the wavering note of a distant horn, came from far to the south, faint but unmistakable. It was shrill yet guttural, filled with anger, longing, excitement, and need. The shriek of a regressive in mid-hunt.

He stopped and listened, hoping that he had misheard.

The sound came again. This time he could discern at least two voices, perhaps three. They were a long way off, more than a mile, so their eerie keening could not be in reply to Loman’s shouts.

Their cries chilled him.

And filled him with a strange yearning.

No.

He made such tight fists of his hands that his fingernails dug into his palms, and he fought back the darkness that threatened to well up within him. He tried to concentrate on police work, the problem at hand.

If those cries came from Alex Foster, Sharon Foster, and Jack Tucker—as was most likely the case—where was the girl, Christine?

Maybe she escaped as they were preparing her for conversion. The overturned kitchen chair, Tucker’s abandoned black bag, and the open front door seemed to support that unsettling explanation. In pursuit of the girl, caught up in the excitement of the chase, the Fosters and Tucker might have surrendered to a latent urge to regress. Perhaps not so latent. They might have regressed on other occasions, so this time they had slipped quickly and eagerly into that altered state. And now they were stalking her in the wildlands to the south—or had long ago run her down, torn her to pieces, and were still regressed because they got a dark thrill from being in that debased condition.

The night was cool, but suddenly Loman was sweating.

He wanted … needed… .

No!

Earlier in the day, Shaddack had told Loman that the Foster girl had missed her school bus and, returning home from the bus stop at the county road, had walked in on her parents as they were experimenting with their new abilities. So the girl had to be conducted through the Change slightly sooner than planned, the first child to be elevated. But maybe “experimenting” was a lie that the Fosters had used to cover their asses. Maybe they had been in deep regression when the girl had come upon them, which they could not reveal to Shaddack without marking themselves as degenerates among the New People.

The Change was meant to elevate mankind; it was forced evolution.

Willful regression, however, was a sick perversion of the power bestowed by the Change. Those who regressed were outcasts. And those regressives who killed for the primal thrill of blood sport were the worst of all psychotics who had chosen devolution over evolution.

The distant cries came again.

A shiver crackled the length of Loman’s spine. It was a pleasant shiver. He was seized by a powerful longing to shed his clothes, drop closer to the ground, and race nude and unrestrained through the night in long, graceful strides, across the broad meadow and into the woods, where all was wild and beautiful, where prey waited to be found and run down and broken and torn …

No.

Control.

Self-control.

The faraway cries pierced him.

He must exhibit self-control.

His heart pounded.

The cries. The sweet, eager, wild cries …

Loman began to tremble, then to shake violently, as in his mind’s eye he saw himself freed from the rigid posture of Homo erectus freed from the constraints of civilized form and behavior. If the primal man within him could be set loose at long last and allowed to live in a natural state—

No. Unthinkable.

His legs became weak, and he fell to the ground, though not onto all fours, no, because that posture would encourage him to surrender to these unspeakable urges; instead he curled into the fetal position, on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, and struggled against the swelling desire to regress. His flesh grew as hot as if he had been lying for hours in midday summer sun, but he realized that the heat was coming not from any external source but from deep within him; the fire arose not merely from vital organs or the marrow of his bones, but from the material within the walls of his cells, from the billions of nuclei that harbored the genetic material that made him what he was. Alone in the dark and fog in front of the Foster house, seduced by the echoey cry of the regressives, he longed to exercise the control of his physical being that the Change had granted him. But he knew if once he succumbed to that temptation, he would never be Loman Watkins again; he would be a degenerate masquerading as Loman Watkins, Mr. Hyde in a body from which he had banished Dr. Jekyll forever.