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.