WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

hoping to spot the yellow eyes.

Nothing.

He went through the door, bold with rage, and sidled to the light switches on

the north wall. Even when the lights came on, he could not see The Outsider.

Fighting off dizziness, clenching his teeth in pain, he moved past the empty

space where the truck belonged, past the back of the Toyota, slowly along the

side of the car.

The loft.

He would be moving out from under the loft in a couple of steps. If the thing

was up there, it could leap down on him— That speculation proved a dead end, for

The Outsider was at the back of the barn, beyond the front end of the Toyota,

crouched on the concrete floor, whimpering and hugging itself with both long,

powerful arms. The floor around it was smeared with its blood.

He stood beside the car for almost a minute, fifteen feet from the creature,

Studying it with disgust, fear, horror, and a weird fascination. He believed he

could see the body structure of an ape, maybe a baboon—something in the simian

family, anyway. But it was neither mostly one species nor merely a patchwork of

the recognizable parts of many animals. It was, instead, a thing unto itself.

With its oversized and lumpish face, immense yellow eyes,

steam-shovel jaw, and long curved teeth, with its hunched back and matted coat

and too-long arms, it attained a frightful individuality.

it was staring at him, waiting.

He took two steps forward, bringing up the gun.

Lifting its head, working its jaws, it issued a raspy, cracked, slurred, but

still intelligible word that he could hear even above the sounds of the storm:

“Hurt.”

Travis was more horrified than amazed. The creature had not been designed to be

capable of speech, yet it had the intelligence to learn language and to desire

communication. Evidently, during the months it pursued Einstein, that desire had

grown great enough to allow it to conquer, to some extent, its physical

limitations. It had practiced speech, finding ways to wring a few tortured words

from its fibrous voice box and malformed mouth. Travis was horrified not at the

sight of a demon speaking but at the thought of how desperately the thing must

have wanted to communicate with someone, anyone. He did not want to pity it, did

not dare pity it, because he wanted to feel good about blowing it off the face

of the earth.

“Come far. Now done,” it said with tremendous effort, as if each word had to be

torn from its throat.

Its eyes were too alien ever to inspire empathy, and every limb was unmistakably

an instrument of murder.

Unwrapping one long arm from around its body, it picked up something that had

been on the floor beside it but that Travis had not noticed until now:

one of the Mickey Mouse tapes Einstein had gotten for Christmas. The famous

mouse was pictured on the cassette holder, wearing the same outfit he always

wore, smiling that familiar smile, waving.

“Mickey,” The Outsider said, and as wretched and strange and barely intelligible

as its voice was, it somehow conveyed a sense of terrible loss and loneliness.

“Mickey.”

Then it dropped the cassette and clutched itself and rocked back and forth in

agony.

Travis took another step forward.

The Outsider’s hideous face was so repulsive that there was almost something

exquisite about it. In its unique ugliness, it was darkly, strangely seductive.

This time, when the thunder crashed, the barn lights flickered and nearly went

out.

Raising its head again, speaking in that same scratchy voice but with cold,

insane glee, it said, “Kill dog, kill dog, kill dog,” and it made a sound that

might have been laughter.

He almost shot it to pieces. But before he could pull the trigger, The

Outsider’s laughter gave way to what seemed to be sobbing. Travis watched,’

mesmerized.

Fixing Travis with its lantern eyes, it again said, “Kill dog, kill dog, kill

dog,” but this time it seemed racked with grief, as if it grasped the magnitude

of the crime that it had been genetically compelled to commit.

It looked at the cartoon of Mickey Mouse on the cassette holder.

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