3

Such Things

On the night of July 21st, the residents of Lynnview, California were very wary, and understandably so.

At some time during the previous night, two members of their community had been horribly slaughtered by a savage killer who had already earned the ugly title of “Animal Man” in the evening edition newspapers. What had seemed so deliciously terrifying in the protection of daylight became shadowed and too literally terrifying when the darkness came. Maniacs were seldom predictable, and this meant that any one of those who had listened intently to the details of the deaths of Stanley and Victoria Gretler might well be joining the unlucky couple as the objects of startled discussion by the next afternoon.

In spite of the real fears of the citizens of Lynnview (and the edgy readiness of two police departments), midnight came and went without a recurrence of the brutal attacks; Friday, July 22nd, evolved into just another hot summer day, and equally uneventful days soon followed. This period of normalcy allowed the intriguing and bone-chilling memories of the biggest event to hit town in forty years to fade toward history and future dissection. Though the murders weren’t moved a step toward solution during the following month, even the official investigators began to replace the facts of the case in their minds with more immediate concerns.

In Los Angeles, Chronicle columnist Douglas Morgan largely dismissed the incident from his thoughts as soon as the detailed death reports of the strangely murdered yachtsmen reached him from back East (the unfortunate people had been the victims of an elaborate revenge scheme enacted by a pair of former employees); since nothing other than the unusual viciousness of the crimes seemed to be out of the ordinary, he eliminated the Gretlers from his future investigations within a week. Murders as such did not automatically fall into his chosen field of research.

In fact, though Morgan had turned up a lot of unexplainable facts during his career, he had not produced anything solid enough to convince his colleagues that he was engaged in work more important than the newspaper’s resident satirist.

Blake Corbett tried to wash the images that he had seen in the Gretler home from his mind—since they definitely did not represent anything that he wished to incorporate (sick pun) into his work. He decided to leave that stuff to the type of men’s magazines that monthly appeared with semi-nude, bound ladies decorating their covers. But the act of wiping out the grisly, painful memories was more difficult than he had anticipated.

At the oddest moments, visions of the darkened interior of the hot room flashed before his eyes, and the very casual way in which the dismembered bodies of two human beings had been strewn about it never failed to freeze the full extent of his spine. It reminded him of a celebration of perversion. He had never before seriously questioned his mental health, despite the fact that he had made a career out of presenting horror and death in a commercial form, but the Gretler murders changed even this. After all, he had paid to be tipped to this display of the depths of savagery.

His years of publication aside, Corbett was still something of an introvert at heart, and this occasionally directed him into bouts of rather morbid self-inspection.

But his stark memories—and his guilt—slowly dissolved as the days passed, and he swung out of his mild depression. Part of this success was attributable to the realization that, while he had been interested in the subject due to his profession, Louis Angelini (who had called him sick) had his feelers out for similar examples out of greed, pure and simple.

By the time a month had passed, the awful creature who had invaded the home of Stanley and Victoria Gretler was practically forgotten. Forgotten, too, by nearly everyone who had been connected with the incident was the fact that the night of July 20 had featured a sharply-etched and vivid full moon.

She was crazy, just as everyone was telling her all the time.

If it had been twenty-five years earlier, Meg Tally would have explained her theory to friends and waited to have it proven or tossed aside; never would she have considered personally following up in this crazy (and yet entirely logical) fashion, because nice nineteen year old girls just didn’t drive alone on unpaved country roads in the middle of the night (and the ones who had done so with nineteen year old boys were not encouraged to do so by respectable society).

But this was now, today, and even if science and popular opinion were again proclaiming evidence of some basic differences between men and women despite the indignant denials of the more dedicated feminists, courage had yet to be proven to be the property of men alone. Meg Talley believed in equality, and she eagerly accepted the helpful aspects of liberation; so, hey, why shouldn’t she go looking for the Lynnview Animal Man on her own?

Besides, there was a loaded .22 caliber pistol in the glove compartment. She only wished that she had fired it at least once in her life.

It was eleven-fifty p.m., August 18th.

Meg was driving along the backroads of rural Lynnview, an exercise that she felt to be necessary to the testing of her theory. The only signs of life that she had encountered so far in the extremely dark night were the occasional owl and cat, whose eyes glittered at her like the ghosts of terribly wronged forest spirits whenever the car’s headlights stabbed them among the trees that lined the roads. The claustrophobic trees that made the narrow roads all the more dark were no help, either.

With the windows tightly up, the air conditioner on fan level two, and low music whispering to her from the radio, she might just as well have been an astronaut inside a capsule exploring one of those mysterious alien worlds that populated her favorite films.

Driving around this way might attract the A.M. killer, all right, but it could just as easily frighten him away, since a victim in a moving car is quite a bit more difficult to corner than someone snatched from a bed and the depths of sleep. Then again, she didn’t actually want the madman in a position to get his claws on her; she only needed to catch a look at him to confirm a theory that seemed overtly ludicrous in the logical radiance of daylight but which was entirely acceptable now, out here.

Face it, girl, Meg told herself, you’re going to have to stop somewhere, switch off the lights, roll down the windows so you can hear—and breathe—and get that camera ready to flash as soon as the bloody anachronism creeps out of the woods looking for another throat to rip out. She eased up on the gas pedal, allowing the car to roll slowly ahead on its own impetus, and the boarded front facing of the empty Gretler house suddenly leaped into the headlights. You’ve got to stop somewhere, she repeated, but it certainly doesn’t have to be here.

Meg drove for another five minutes at a low rate of speed before she located a convenient bare spot between the road and the curtain of trees. She didn’t think that the black car would be distinguishable from the general darkness here, and it would be a nice place to carry on her vigil for a couple of hours. If she remained on her “date” much past two in the morning, her parents would begin to worry.

She knew what had brought her to this spot: movies.

Her eyes continued to sweep the empty ribbon of road on one side of the car and the unreadable forest on the other, but her mind wandered back to the times of her earliest memories. Ever since she had been old enough to follow the plotline of a non-animated television program, she had, for some reason hidden in the depths of her psyche, gravitated toward the macabre and horrific in both films and network shows.

Even now, she could recall peeking through trembling fingers at the blue-tinted images of the “Friday Nite Frights” while Claude Rains unraveled the bandages from about his head to reveal … nothing! … in The Invisible Man … or the thrill that coursed through her as she watched little Sandy Descher stumble dazedly through a New Mexican desert clutching a doll and later shrieking cryptically of “Them! Them!”; … or the ever-marvelous Karloff himself communicating through only his eyes the unspeakable knowledge that he had learned while on the other side of death, executed for another’s crime in The Walking Dead.

But on an equal footing with the films were the television programs, generally less elaborate, sometimes imitative, invariably short-lived in the sugary world that was TV Land, but nearly always gloriously effective in scaring the soup out of her. Rod Serling, who could magically paint the most chilling pictures with nothing other than his voice; the “bears”, the weekly monsters who invaded her home from The Outer Limits; the brief and delightfully twisted visions of Roald Dahl on Way Out; and, of course, an encore from that all-time great and terribly underrated actor, Boris Karloff, sounding almost grandfatherly as he froze her blood with tales from Thriller.

Her mother and father had been somewhat worried about her back then. It would have been bad enough to have had a son addicted to stories of supernatural destruction and alien visitations; but when an angelic-appearing little girl proudly announced that her favorite films were not standards like National Velvet or Gone With the Wind, but epics with titles such as Black Sabbath, Curse of the Demon, The Wasp Woman, and The Thing, it was not hard to understand why some parents were tempted to think that they had failed in some aspect of raising their daughter.

Meg’s Mother and Dad hadn’t responded to the situation quite that strongly, but they had been uneasy about her ongoing social development until her early school years proved that their daughter was capable of relating well to her peer group. They did urge her to keep her fascination with the grotesque to herself, however.

Meg was certain that her wonderful, long-suffering parents would have been horrified to discover the reason why their now young adult, college-enrolled offspring was out in the forest, alone, in an area near where an incredibly savage murderer had already taken two lives less than a month before. That’s why she had invented the story about her “date”. It was the movie world, though, that had shown her what kind of creature struck in swift, animalistic fury on the nights of the full moon. July 20 had been such a night, and so was August 18, tonight.

You are crazy, Meg Talley, she told herself as the night crept ever further into the small car.

“Hey!”

The sound of that one word from just outside the open window to her left gave sudden life to all of the terrors Meg had been reviewing in her mind. She gasped out a short cry and scrambled frantically for both the expensive camera in the seat beside her and the gun in the glove compartment.

“Damn, girl, what’s the matter with you?” the voice demanded in an even louder tone.

Meg froze as she realized that a man—a man enough in control of himself to still be able to speak—and not the Animal was standing by her window. She managed to switch on a flashlight that had been lying next to the camera, and its glow allowed her to see that the speaker was a tall, spare, elderly-appearing man with a distinctly angry expression on his face and a shotgun in his hands. Beside him stood a younger, but still middle-aged man who looked more amused than upset.

“What?” she said. Actually, that was all that she could say at that moment.

The older man snorted in disgust. “Are you hard of hearing, gal? I said what are you doing on my land in the middle of the night?”

“Goldern, Pap, I believe we made the poor kid swallow her heart,” laughed the younger man.

“Hell, scaring my family half to death,” grunted the first. He thrust his head through the open window and glared about at the interior. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“Who?” Meg asked, her breath only beginning to return to her.

“Girl, I know you kids come out here to the sticks to smooch around, and I don’t give a damn about that, so long as you don’t do it on my property. Now, where is he?”

“Nowhere,” she answered, sitting up again. “I mean, I’m alone.”

“Alone, huh?” repeated the younger man with evident interest. “What would a cute kid like you be doing out in the woods alone?”

The owner of the property hadn’t yet dropped the barrel of his shotgun toward the ground, so Meg decided that she could put up with a little obvious lusting from a hillbilly in midlife crisis as long as both of them stayed on the outside of the car. “I was waiting for someone,” she said.

“Boyfriend,” agreed the younger man.

“No, actually, I thought that maybe the man who murdered the Gretlers would show up around this area again tonight.”

Neither of the men replied to that statement, though their expressions momentarily reflected their uneasiness. Meg was almost pleased at the reaction.

The older man began to mutter to himself in a low tone but said nothing to her for nearly a full minute. When he did speak, the anger that had filled his voice before had practically disappeared. “You one of them woman cops or something?” he asked.

“No,” she said. And immediately she realized that it was the wrong time for truth.

“Then just what in the hell are you doing on my land?” the man demanded in full dudgeon. “My daughter-in-law saw you drive up a while ago and cut off your lights, and I don’t mind telling you, lady, you have mortally scared the shit out of her and my granddaughter! We knew the Gretlers, and it ain’t no stupid joke to us!”

For the first time, Meg realized what her “mission” meant to the people who lived in this community. She hadn’t noticed a house nearby when she parked, but now, searching for one above the treeline, she was able to pick out a darker silhouette rising over the branches to a height that indicated about a three-story house back there, around a hundred yards off the road. It had probably been among the first mansion-like farm dwellings to be built in this part of the country eighty years ago, when, for a time, it had seemed that Lynnview would outgrow its slower-developing neighbor to the immediate west.

“Sorry, uh, I didn’t know anyone lived here,” Meg said. “I didn’t see the house because of the clouds over the moon …”

“Full moon,” noted the younger man, who was himself at least forty-five. His interest (and his lust) had quickly reasserted itself when he discovered that Meg was not connected with the police. “Crazies’ moon.”

“Well, the damage is done now, so just move yourself on down the road. My people got to get their sleep,” the other man said.

“Sure. I’m sorry I bothered you.” Meg twisted the ignition key, and the car started swiftly. Suddenly thankful for electric windows, she touched a button and both of the glasses hummed upward. Before she could pull into the road, the younger man rapped sharply on the window just inches from her left cheek. Though it was against her better judgement (if she could be said to have any better judgement), she buzzed the glass down a couple of inches. “Yes?” she asked.

“Ma’am, there’s no reason to go too far away from the house,” he told her with that leering grin. “And if you decide to have a little car trouble, don’t worry about coming back and knocking on our door. I’m a flying whiz at mechanics, among other things. Ask for Clarence.”

Meg stared at him coldly, and the older man chucked his shoulder hard and grunted, “Get back to the house, boy, and get your wife to sleep again.” Then the pair moved with surprising silence out of the funnels of her headlights and were lost in the blackness of the night.

Meg drove a couple of miles away from the huge old house, checked for other irate residents in the immediate vicinity, and parked in what once had been a one-lane trail leading into a field that had been a meadow. It was twelve-thirty by then, officially Friday morning, and the entire plan was growing more and more ridiculous by the moment.

What had she allowed her overactive imagination to do with her that night, other than anger an old backwoodsman with a shotgun and excite the adolescent libido of his son? The thing that she was seeking simply didn’t exist outside of the filmed fantasies and luridly composed paperback novels. So the Animal Man had attacked for apparently the first time on the night of a full moon, so what? Didn’t police records show that irrational behavior regularly peaked during the nights graced by that powerful white orb? And, to be honest, the murders could have been committed by an actual animal of some kind—bear, wolf, or the like—and discovered by the man who had left the bloody footprints.

Meg laughed to herself. Sure, they had been discovered by a man walking barefoot in the woods in the middle of the night, and that same man had taken a woman’s severed leg, lovingly gnawed it, and then skipped out without even anonymously informing the police of any of this. That makes perfect sense, Margret Talley.

There is actually only one full moon per month, and this was the first since that strange night. She had nowhere special to go in the morning, since she was on hiatus from college, so what could it hurt her to hang around in the healthy night air for another hour or so?

Turning the ignition to power, she dialed the radio to provide some shallow background noise to help pass the time. As soon as her fingers left the knob, the classical music ended and the smooth, educated, and thoroughly terrifying voice of E.G. Marshall calmly began introducing another episode of “Mystery Theatre.”

The shots came almost together, five of them: bam! bam-bam-bam! bam!

Meg’s head snapped forward as if attached to a puppeteer’s strings, and she banged one knee painfully hard against the steering wheel. It was still nighttime out—one-fifty-eight, according to the glowing dash clock—and somehow she had fallen asleep while waiting to capture evidence of the existence of the most ferocious killing machine ever imagined. Her heart was pounding so loudly in her ears that, for an instant, she couldn’t hear above the deafening rush of blood. After she had forced herself to become calm again, however, she picked up the last ghosts of the shots’ echoes fleeing through the mountains to the east of her. Shots? Was that what those quick explosions had been?

Meg abruptly remembered the small gun that she had secretly smuggled out of her mother’s closet and hidden in the car. She hurriedly opened the glove compartment, half-convinced that Clarence or his elderly father had stolen the pistol while she slept and was committing a mass murder that would obscure the memories of the Animal Man’s spree.

It was still there: small, black, and to her eye, deadly. “A woman’s gun,” her father had called it and expressed his doubt that a .22 caliber shell would dent a soap bubble.

She closed the compartment, but left the gun comfortingly beside her on the seat. Now the problem was to rewind her fuzzy memory and replay the sounds to find out where they had originated. If they had been gunshots, they probably wouldn’t have anything to do with a man who killed with his teeth and nails, but they had to mean something.

After a moment, she decided that they had come from behind her, in the direction of Clarence’s home, and this didn’t really surprise her. The older man had seemed very at ease with his shotgun, so it was a good bet that he or some other family member wouldn’t hesitate to use the middle of the night for target practice at owls, crickets, or shadows.

Or at a crazed, half-human beast attempting to break into the house in search of more flesh.

Two o’clock, the digital chronometer said. The expiration of the time she had allotted herself, time to be home and safely in bed, where dreams were just that and never real or deadly.

Meg tried to force herself to crank the car and leave, knowing that this would be a logical step, not cowardice. But she found herself sitting and listening. If there was trouble of some sort at the big house, she just couldn’t drive away without so much as phoning the police.

A minute crawled by in silence. What was happening back there? Something innocuous? Or more murders?

Finally, she could stay where she was no longer and, with all of her senses stimulated to almost telepathic levels by knife-like excitement, the young woman cranked the car, turned it around, and began to drive toward the large, old, frightening house.

On high-beam, the headlights created a dead brown, asteroidal surface out of the rutted road, and Meg focused her entire mind on that alien landscape as it rolled beneath her. It seemed to her that to glance to either side would leave her open to sudden attack, just as, when viewing her beloved horror films as a child, her slightly spread fingers had protected her from the things on the screen. This intense concentration betrayed her, though, as her right foot unconsciously pressed harder on the gas pedal until she was travelling near fifty miles an hour on the rough, winding road.

A featureless bolt shot into her world from the depths of the night to her left side, bounced across her tight field of vision barely touching the road at all, and tumbled into the ditch on the right side the way a sack of wet sand would have dropped had it been thrown by some Soviet weight-lifter.

Reacting purely on instinct, Meg hit the brakes with enough force to lock them and send the speeding vehicle into an angry spin of ninety degrees to the left. This placed it in the form of the cross in the “T” that the road became … and it was stalled out.

Meg sat in the dead car and took several fortifying deep breaths before she could bring herself to look toward the right ditch, which was now behind her due to the position of the automobile. There definitely was something back there, a huddled, motionless shape lying in the bloody radiance of the brake lights (her right foot was still jabbed painfully onto the pedal), and it did seem to be human. But that was all that she could tell about the figure, hidden as it was by the fall of the ditch. Was it killer or victim? What was she supposed to do in a situation like this?

“Hello?” she shouted at the top of her voice. She hoped that the call would carry through the closed windows and draw some response from the figure. “Can you hear me?” If her words travelled as far as the ditch, the person there was either unconscious or dead, it seemed; for whatever reason, there was no reaction to her call.

Oh, god, god, god, god, what am I going to do? Meg demanded of herself frantically.

Crank the car and get back to town as quickly as you can, one part of her replied.

I can’t leave whoever that is alone at the mercy of this thing, especially if it’s what I think it is! another portion countered.

And so she sat there, in a dead car with the lights draining the battery by the second, shouting almost hysterically at the body in the ditch and receiving not so much as a moan in answer.

Meg made the hardest decision of her life during that frozen moment, and her damp right hand closed almost numbly about the butt of the gun while her left timidly pulled at the door handle.

When the door swung out into the night, the heavy heat of the August air rushed in to clash with the coolness of the air-conditioned car. Meg’s spinning brain applied all sorts of inane allegories to the contrasts of temperatures, including one which dealt with flooding evils from Hell inundating little girls who stayed up late to watch monster movies. But there was no time for Mr. Freud to analyze that particular nightmare.

Almost before she realized that she was moving, she found herself standing in the dusty road that was so keenly real, here and now, even though the rest of this experience seemed to be detached fragments of a dream. Slowly, she directed the barrel of the small gun at the shadowed forest beyond the still figure in the ditch and asked, more softly than before, “Can you hear me?”

The answering silence was more innervating than any shriek of agony ever could have been. All of the instincts that she possessed begged her to stay next to the car, but, instead, she took a step away from the door and toward the side of the road. After that, she took another, again calling to the motionless form. She continued to speak to the supposed person over there, maybe just to hear her own voice against the unnatural silence of the night, and when she finally reached the ditch, she understood why she had drawn no response.

The figure was a body, the body of a man. The body of Clarence, who had been so hungry for her a couple of hours earlier. But now he had no arms or legs and only half a face.

Instantly, Meg slipped into one of those states where the human thought processes—stunned beyond all form of acceptance—retreat deeply into the core of the brain, where not even speech exists. Her lips parted, and the vocal organs in her throat tried to function, but not so much as a scream could be summoned out of the well in which her mind had been imprisoned. Not a gasp rushed past her lips.

Then she heard the sound. Primitive reactions burst through the emotional barriers that had held her paralyzed and incited her instinct for self-preservation. The sound had not been a human one, but a totally malignant and confident sneer from the mouth of some large beast. The low snarl contained the power of an animal that was the master of its own life and of all of those about it. It had come—oh lord!—it had come from behind her!

Spinning about, Meg ran as if on fire for the one spot that represented salvation to her: the open driver’s door of the car. She darted by the rear of the car, around its black side, and to the yawning opening of the doorway, where she practically dived into its safety. The second that she slammed and locked the door, separating herself from the madness in the night, something launched itself from the concealment of the trees on the left side of the road directly at the front of the car.

The apparition was caught in the dimming radiance of the headlights for no longer than the beat of Meg’s heart, but that was long enough to allow her to receive the impression of a lean, ape-like creature with long and sinewy limbs and no clothing at all. This was an impression only, however, and one that was seen through the corner of her right eye and vanished before she could turn her head. A loud thumping noise from above her told her that the thing, whatever it really was, had landed on the roof of the auto and was waiting there in its deadly fury.

She screamed this time, as she had been unable to do at the sight of Clarence’s mutilated body, and the gun fell to the floor while she fumbled wildly for the ignition key. The car had been a faithful servant throughout the years that her family had owned it, responding every time that it was called upon, but now, when she needed it the most, it failed her. While she twisted the key so violently that it seemed ready to snap, the starter ground in slow, moaning pain and the headlights dimmed correspondingly. A few crazy seconds flashed by before her confused mind made the connection and she punched off the draining lights.

“Oh, Jesus, please start, please!’ she whispered.

The starter spun even slower, but as if her desperate prayer had reached the ears of some benevolent agency, it exhausted its reserve of energy with a final turn and the motor caught with a roar that sent life flooding back into her frozen heart. Without thinking, she shifted into reverse and dug a set of parallel ruts in the dirt road for more than a yard before the rear of the vehicle dropped into the ditch next to poor, dead Clarence.

“God, no!” Meg cried.

The sudden motion of the car dislodged the creature from the roof and knocked it to the ground somewhere on the opposite side of the vehicle; but the rear bumper had plowed so deeply into the bank of the ditch that the back wheels were suspended just far enough above the bottom to prevent their gaining traction. She gunned the engine and shifted gears madly, but nothing helped. The tires spun with a high-pitched squeal that sounded to her like screaming.

She had to get the gun! Throwing herself into the dark floor, her hands batted about blindly in a futile effort to locate it.

A face appeared in the passenger window like some shadowy imperfection in the glass, and a pair of white-rimmed, black eyes gazed down at the terrified woman. Before she looked up into those hate-filled pits, the creature’s right arm struck the window and shot all the way through it with no more difficulty than if the glass had been thin crystal.

Meg screamed piercingly as five knife blades punctured the flesh of her back and closed together, ripping away most of her blouse as they did so. Meg thrust herself backwards, so that she could scramble beneath the safety of the steering column, and the clawed hand was left to clutch at the air.

“I’ll kill you!” she shouted. Though filled with hot panic and pain, she was still enough in control of herself to bluff. “Get away from me or I’ll shoot you!”

The arm withdrew through the window with its shredded trophy, but only long enough to discard the blouse and return from the blackness to grope just inches from her face. Her cry was a sustained, throat-rending wail now, and she wasn’t able to twist about enough to open the door pressing against her bleeding back and run. The dark, heavy night hid her assailant’s face from her, but she could see the clawed hand as it stopped stretching toward her face and grasped the upper panel of the door through which it extended, disregarding the jagged remnants of the window. Suddenly the screeching of tortured metal overrode her own cries.

“Stop it!” she screamed.

In an instant, the chunk of protection that had been the right-hand door was ripped from the shell of the car and tossed aside with a disdainful casualness. This left Meg more painfully and fearfully vulnerable than she had ever been in her life. With a last desperate lunge, her right hand found the gun and turned it toward the hulking shadow that was growling in a low, lusting voice.

“Leave me alone!” she demanded again.

The black figure leaned into the car.

The gun erupted as rapidly as had the shots that had awakened her, only minutes before. The shells were expelled too quickly to count, nearly as fast as an automatic rifle could have fired them. One hit the roof of the car and whanged about the interior before crashing through the rear window; none of the rest missed their target.

As the four bullets slammed into the midsection of the damned figure, it doubled over, bellowing powerfully in its agony. Meg continued to squeeze the trigger of the now-empty weapon until she saw it stumble back into the road, still clutching itself in pain. Then she began to breathe again.

Then the beast leapt forward, roaring insanely.

The young woman struggled frenziedly from beneath the steering wheel, but before she could find the door handle, the creature had returned to the side of the car, grasped the frame below where the door had been ripped off, and begun straining upward with its long arms and sloping shoulders. As smoothly as if it had been on hydraulic jacks, the vehicle began to rise on that side so that it moved swiftly from the ground and above the creature’s head.

Meg had flash-memories of amusement park rides, though her terror was too great to allow her to understand the connection; as the car continued to roll, the door behind her suddenly became the floor, and then she fell roughly against the steering column, becoming entangled with it, before she dropped onto the roof, which now crunched hideously against the unpaved road. The windshield exploded outward from the pressure of the collapsing upper portion of the vehicle.

Somehow, Meg remained conscious throughout the roll. She lay inside the inverted mass and gazed hysterically at all of the avenues of entrance that were suddenly available to the beast. She expected to see the awful, dark blotch that was the thing’s head appearing through the smashed windshield at any moment … or maybe it would come through the missing doorway or the gaps where the windows had been. The face would draw nearer to her until the dark features developed into a gruesome parody of a human face, a face that she had seen before only in nightmares.

But rather than attacking immediately, the beast continued to vent its insane rage upon the twisted wreckage of the car by pushing savagely against its side until it rolled back to its wheels and then again onto its roof.

Inside the tumbling vehicle, Meg tried to keep from being crushed. She felt that she might have a minute of life left before the raging monster turned its attention from the car to its occupant or the gas tank exploded to burn both of them to ashes (what a horrible mystery that would leave for the investigators who found the remains). She was hurt all over, cut by the claws of that mad thing and the shards of broken glass, reeling from blows to her head, and aching from the ways in which her body had been twisted during the assault. In fact, she almost felt that death was another way out, an end, at least, to this protracted torture.

She felt like that mouse that had been placed in the snake’s cage in biology class, tired of running, terrified, but ready for the end, just like that mouse …

This thought flew throughout her being like a charge of electricity. She might die, but it wouldn’t be the way that damned mouse had died!

Strength burned in her arms and legs as she dry-swam through what was left of the windshield and into the road. More glass gouged at her, but once free of the upturned car, she didn’t take the time to check her injuries; leaping to her feet, she began to run for the cover offered by the trees on the other side of the road. Behind, the furious creature had jumped atop the belly of the auto and was ripping chunks of metal from it in an ecstasy of destruction that prevented it from witnessing her escape.

Meg was running so wildly that she didn’t realize that she had left the road, leaped across the ditch, and dashed into the undergrowth beyond it. Only when she began dodging trees and their limbs did she regain enough self-control to realize that she had escaped and the monster wasn’t following her. She stopped running, leaned against a tree trunk, and turned her eyes back toward the car just in time to see the ball of orange hell that was blasted toward the overhead cloud cover when the gas within its tank ignited. The blast became an audible wave just afterwards, bringing with it a furnace-like heat.

“It’s dead!” she gasped aloud. The hope was filled with equal portions of fear and revenge. The car became a gigantic torch, and she squinted into the radiance certain that nothing could have survived that explosion and fire; relief seeped into her chest.

All of Meg’s hopes and desires were frozen solid in a single instant when she saw the figure stagger erect in the road some thirty yards away from the fire, where it had been hurled by the explosion. It wasn’t even burning.

Meg held her breath as the man-like shape stepped toward the fire until it was just beyond the bright circle of light. She knew that if it realized that she had escaped, there was no way she could elude it in the forest, its world. But the furious fire seemed to fascinate the creature, and it stayed in place, watching the playing flames and growling in low, unconscious harmony with the rumble.

Then the beast began to bellow and shriek, as if challenging the fire itself, and Meg was half-convinced that it would launch its apparently uninjured body into the inferno. She still couldn’t make out any features on the monster, however, so it was impossible to steal any clues as to its next move. When it loped easily around the perimeter of the blaze and dropped into the ditch, she had no idea at all what had captured its attention; when it stood once more, she understood clearly.

With Clarence’s half-charred trunk beneath one arm, the creature trotted with casual grace away from the road and the wreck to slip like a shadow into the woods on the other side. The side away from her.

At first, Meg couldn’t believe that she had been spared and the danger was really over. Because her worst childhood nightmare had just invaded her reality, she stayed where she was, crouched beneath a tree, for twenty minutes, and when she did return to the road and begin walking down it, her movements were limp, dull, and missing some vital essence that she had possessed as an ordinary human being.

There is a price to be paid when the unthinkable is experienced.

She had no destination, of course, but somewhere up ahead was a light that glowed steadily in her eyes, not like the flaring and slowly dying incandescence that she had left behind. Instinctively, she began walking toward that light.

It was less than a mile’s walk to the three-story house that awaited her with the yellowish radiance spilling through its open front door. Meg found the narrow path that served as a driveway from the road to the porch and followed it without thinking about her actions. Where else was there for her to go?

The boards creaked loudly and shrilly when she walked across them just as she had expected them to do in some isolated corner of her mind that had escaped brutalization. There was a punctured screen door waiting for her, and a long spring slammed it shut at her back, causing her to start nervously. Then she looked at what the single lamp revealed to her within the front room.

Meg stood for a long time in the doorway with her eyes tightly closed and her lungs mechanically circulating air through her body. The horror was here, with her again. Not in the form of the thing that had flipped her car like a stamped-metal toy, but in the hot remains of its victims littering the room. This had been Clarence and the old man’s house, and the creature had been here before her.

Meg opened her eyes and stepped into the house. They were all in this one large room … or at least four were. There was the old man, his face frozen into unmistakable testimony of what he had endured before the release of death, his back crushed like a dry reed and his right hand reaching out, forever, to a shotgun that he had not been able to touch. And there were women—two of them—quite literally scattered all about, the way that Meg had read that the Gretlers had been found. One woman appeared to be no more than a teenager … so young and pretty to have died this way, with her head twisted back between her shoulder blades …. And there were the pieces … the parts of Clarence that hadn’t been taken by the animal.

Meg didn’t scream or cry. She could do neither any more. She walked carefully to the white telephone that sat on the table with the one glowing lamp (how had the table escaped the chaos?) and began to dial. Surprisingly, the phone still worked. She had called her home number, but when the first ring began, she realized that she couldn’t expose her family to any of … this. So she depressed the button on the cradle and rang up a disgruntled operator, instead.

The operator attempted to deliver her programmed lecture about customer responsibility, but she was unable to get through to Meg, who simply repeated, “Police,” in a flat, quiet tone until the stark emotional quality seeped through the wires and dampened the other woman’s mild anger. The operator put her through to the Lynnview police department, and a sergeant answered within half a minute.

Meg told the man the entire story slowly and calmly, the way that she knew it had to be told to be believed to any degree: she had seen the killer … he had killed again … yes, at least four people … she was with the bodies now … yes, the address of the house was mounted on the doorsill … no, she would not leave until they arrived … she didn’t know if there was any further danger …

After hanging up, Meg gripped the shock that had overtaken her and wrapped it about her mind like a blanket. It was a vital protection, now, insulating her from the memories of the surroundings until someone could arrive and take her out of all of this. But even this rejection of ongoing reality couldn’t keep her from realizing that there were a lot of rooms in this part of the house, still and dark rooms to which that damned creature could have returned to sate itself on Clarence or search for more of the awful food that it craved. And there were two more floors above.

The shotgun was near, though, and while it might not hold the same great power against the monster that it did against normal men, it was still something. It was all that she had. Meg took the gun from just beyond the old man’s reach and pulled an aged rocking chair into a position opposite the front door. With a wall just at her back, she sat, rocking slowly, seldom blinking, and cradling the weapon like a lover.

And waited out the long torture that was the night.