hissed at her.
Thunder smashed the porcelain night, and the lights in the trailer
blinked once, blinked twice, and lightning coruscated through the brief
spell of blackness before the lamps came on again.
Please, God, she thought desperately, don’t leave me in the dark with
this thing.
Its bulging, green eyes seemed to radiate a peculiar light, a
phosphorescent glow that appeared, impossibly, to come from within
them.
The thing screeched and writhed.
It urinated.
Ellen’s heart jackhammered.
The thing tore at her hands, scratching, drawing blood. It gouged the
soft flesh of her palms, and it ripped off one of her thumbnails.
She heard an eerie, high-pitched ululation quite unlike anything she
had heard before, and she didn’t realize for several seconds that she
was listening to her own shrill, panicked screaming.
If she could have thrown the creature down, if she could have turned
away from it and run, she would have done just that, but suddenly she
found that she was unable to release it. The thing had a fierce grip
on her arms, and it wouldn’t let go.
She struggled with the inhumanly ferocious child, and the bassinet
almost tipped over. Her shadow swayed wildly across the nearby bed and
up the wall, bobbing against the rounded ceiling. Cursing, straining,
trying to keep the creature at arm’s length, she managed to shift her
left hand to its throat, and then her right hand, and she squeezed
hard, bearing down, gritting her teeth, repelled by the savagery she
felt rising within herself, frightened by her own newly discovered
capacity for violence, but determined to choke the life out of the
thing.
It wasn’t going to die easily. Ellen was surprised by the rigid,
resistant muscles in its neck. It crabbed its claws higher on her arms
and dug its nails into her again, making ten fresh puncture wounds in
her skin, and the pain prevented Ellen from putting all of her strength
into the frantic attempt to strangle the thing.
It rolled its eyes, then refocused on her with even more evident hatred
than before.
A silvery stream of thick drool oozed out of one corner of its mouth
and down its pebbled chin.
The twisted mouth opened wide, the dark, leathery lips writhed. A
snaky, pale, pointed tongue curled and uncurled obscenely.
The child pulled Ellen toward it with improbable strength. She could
not keep it safely at arm’s length as she wanted. It drew her
relentlessly down toward the bassinet, and at the same time it pulled
itself up.
Die, damn you! Die!
She was bent over the bassinet now. Leaning into it. Her grip on the
child’s throat was weakened by her new position. Her face was only
eight or ten inches from the creature’s repugnant countenance. Its
rank breath washed over her. It spat in her face again.
Something brushed her belly.
She gasped, jerked.
Fabric ripped. Her blouse.
The child was kicking out with its long-toed, clawed feet. It was
trying to gouge her breasts and stomach. She attempted to draw back,
but the thing held her close, held her with demonic power and
perseverance.
Ellen felt dizzy, fuzzy, whiskey-sick, terror-sick, and her vision
blurred, and her ears were filled with the roaring suction of her own
breath, but she couldn’t seem to breathe fast enough, she was
light-headed. Sweat flew off her brow and spattered the child as she
wrestled with it.
The thing grinned as if it sensed triumph.
I’m losing, she thought desperately. How can that be? My God, it’s
going to kill me.
Thunder pounded the sky, and lightning burst from the broken night. A
mallet of wind struck the trailer broadside.
The lights went out.
And stayed out.
The child fought with renewed fury.
It was not weak like a human infant. It had weighed almost eleven
pounds at birth, and it had gained, phenomenally, more than twelve
pounds in the past six weeks. Almost twenty-three pounds now. And no
fat. Just muscle. A hard, sinewy, gristly infant, like a young
gorilla. It was as strong and energetic as the six-month-old
chimpanzee that performed in one of the carnival’s more popular
sideshows.
The bassinet toppled with a crash, and Ellen stumbled over it.