but at other times it had no meaning for him.
However, regardless of whether or not he knew what He squirmed into a
corner and curled up, hugging himself. His breastbone cracked,
shuddered, swelled larger, and sought a new shape. His spine creaked,
and he felt it shifting within him to accommodate other alterations in
his form.
Only seconds later, he skittered out of the corner in a crablike crawl.
He stopped in the middle of the room and rose onto his knees.
Gasping, moaning deep in his throat, he knelt for a moment with his head
hung low, letting the dizziness flow out with his rancid sweat.
The changefire had finally cooled. For the moment, his form had
stabilized.
He stood, swaying.
“Rachael.
He opened his eyes and looked around the motel room, and he was not
surprised to discover that his vision was nearly as good in the dark as
it had ever been in full daylight. Furthermore, his field of vision had
dramatically increased, when he looked straight ahead, objects on both
his left and right sides were as cleir and as sharply detailed as those
things immediately in front of him.
He went to the door. Parts of his mutated body seemed ill formed and
dysfunctional, forcing him to hitch along like some hard-shelled
crustacean that had only recently developed the ability to stand upright
like a man. Yet he was not crippled, he could move quickly and
silently, and he had a sense of tremendous strength far greater than
anything he had ever known before.
Making a soft hissing noise that was lost in the sounds of wind and
drizzling rain, he opened the door and stepped into the night, which
welcomed him.
it meant, the name predictably engendered precisely the same response in
him each time he spoke it, mindless, icy fury.
“Rachael.
Caught helplessly in the tides of change, he groaned, hissed, gagged,
whimpered, and sometimes he laughed softly in the back of his throat.
He coughed and choked and gasped for breath. He lay on his back,
shaking and bucking as the changes surged through him, clawing at the
air with hands twice as large as his hands had been in his previous
life.
Buttons popped off his red plaid shirt. One of the shoulder seams split
as his body swelled and bent into a grotesque new form.
“Rachael…”
During the past several hours, as his feet had grown larger and smaller
and then larger again, his boots periodically pinched. Now they were
painfully confining, crippling, and he could not bear them any longer.
He literally tore them off, frenziedly ripped away the soles and heels,
wrenched with his powerful hands until the sturdily stitched seams
split, used his razored claws to puncture and shred the leather.
His unshod feet proved to have changed as completely as his hands had
done. They were broader, flatter, with an exceptionally gnarled and
bony bridge, the toes as long as fingers, terminating in claws as sharp
as those on his hands.
“Rachael..
Change smashed through him as if it were a bolt of lightning blasting
through a tree, the current entering at the highest point of the highest
limb and sizzling out through the hair-fine tips of the deepest roots.
He twitched and spasmed.
He drummed his heels against the floor.
Hot tears flooded from his eyes, and rivulets of thick saliva streamed
from his mouth.
Sweating copiously, being burned alive by the changefire within him, he
was nevertheless cold at the core.
There was ice in both his heart and mind.
She smiled thinly, grateful for his attempt to cheer her.
She nodded, bit her lower lip, but could not speak because, obviously,
she was still more than half convinced that she would never again see
Ben alive.
Whitney motioned her’ back from the threshold and pulled the door shut
between them. He waited until he heard her engage the dead-bolt lock.
Then he crossed the grease- and oil-stained concrete floor, passing the
front of the Mercedes, not bothering to put up the big rear door, but
heading toward the side entrance.
The three-car garage, illuminated by a single bare bulb dangling on a
cord from a crossbeam, was filthy and musty, a badly cluttered