I told myself that this was no more real than my feverish vision of a
gigantic spider in the elevator shaft.
Bobby Halloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus.
Currently, I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants
dancing and clowns cartwheeling and tigers leaping through rings of
fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some
popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.
I was ashamed to realize that I didn’t have the guts to switch on the
flashlight. I was constrained by a fear of what might be eye-to-eye with
me.
Though part of me wanted to believe I was suffering a runaway chain
reaction of imagination, and though I probably was just jerking my own
chain, there was good reason to be afraid. Those aforementioned
experiments in genetic engineering some designed by my mother, who had
been a theoretical geneticist had ultimately not been controllable. In
spite of a high degree of biological security, a designer strain of
retrovirus had gotten out of the lab. Thanks to the remarkable talents
of this new bug, the residents of Moonlight Bay and, to a lesser extent,
people and animals in the wider world beyond have been … changing.
So far, the changes have been disturbing, sometimes terrifying, but,
with a few notable exceptions, they have been subtle enough that
authorities have successfully concealed the truth about the catastrophe.
Even in Moonlight Bay, at most a few hundred people know what is
happening.
I myself learned only a month before this April night, upon the death of
my father, who knew all the dreadful details, and who revealed things to
me that I now wish I didn’t know. The rest of the townspeople live in
happy ignorance, but they may not be out of the loop much longer,
because the mutations may not remain subtle.
This was the thought that had paralyzed me when, if instinct could be
trusted, I found myself facing some presence in the blind-dark
passageway.
Now my heart was racing.
I was disgusted. If I didn’t get control of myself, I would have to
spend the rest of my life sleeping under my bed, just to be sure the
boogeyman couldn’t slip beneath the box springs while I was dreaming.
Holding the unlit flashlight in a tight circlet of thumb and forefinger,
with my other three fingers extended, intending to prove to myself that
this superstitious dread enjoyed no basis in fact, I reached into the
tomb perfect darkness. And touched a face.
The side of a nose. The corner of a mouth. My little finger slid across
a rubbery lip, wet teeth.
I cried out and recoiled. As I stumbled backward, I managed to click on
the flashlight.
Although the beam was pointed at the floor, the backsplash of light
revealed the entity before me. It had no fangs, no eyes full of
crackling hellfire, but it was composed of a substance more solid than
ectoplasm. It wore chinos, what appeared to be a yellow polo-style
shirt, and a pecan brown sports jacket. Indeed, it wasn’t something from
beyond the grave but something from the Sears men’s department.
He was about thirty years old, maybe five feet eight, as stocky as a
bull standing on its hind feet in a pair of Nikes. With close-cropped
black hair, eyes as mad-yellow as those of a hyena, and thick red lips,
he seemed too formidable to have glided soundlessly through the seamless
dark. His teeth were as small as kernels of white corn, and his smile
was a cold side dish, which he served in a generous portion as he swung
the club that he was holding.
Fortunately, it was a length of two-by-four rather than an iron pipe,
and he was too close to execute a bone-shattering arc. Instead of
recoiling farther at the sight of the club, I stepped into the guy in an
attempt to minimize the impact, simultaneously trying to bring the Glock
to bear on him, figuring that the very sight of it would cause him to
retreat.
He swung the two-by-four not from overhead, not like a woodsman wielding
an ax, but low from his side, like a golfer teeing off.