The patrol car's tires hissed on the warm asphalt as it pulled to the curb beside Lome. "What you up to, snake?" asked the square-bodied policeman. The car's rumbling idle and the whirr of its air conditioner through the open window filled the evening.
Lome smiled and nodded the lighted tip of his cigarette. "Sitting on a stump in my yard, watching cops park on the wrong side of the street. What're you up to, Ben?"
Instead of answering, the policeman looked hard at his friend. They were both in their late twenties; the man in the car stocky and dark with a close-cropped mustache; Lome slender, his hair sand-colored and falling across his neck brace. "Hurting, snake?" Ben asked softly.
"Shit, four years is enough to get used to anything," the thinner man said. Though Lome's eyes were on the chime tower of the abandoned Baptist church a block down Rankin Street, his mind was lost in the far past. "You know, some nights I sit out here for a while instead of going to bed."
Three cars in quick succession threw waves of light and sound against the rows of aging houses. One blinked its high beams at the patrol car briefly, blindingly. "Bastard," Ben grumbled without real anger. "Well, back to the war against crime." His smile quirked. "Better than the last war they had us fighting, hey?"
Lome finished his cigarette with a long drag. "Hell, I don't know, sarge. How many jobs give you a full pension after two years?"
"See you, snake."
"See you, sarge."
The big cruiser snarled as Ben pulled back into the traffic lane and turned at the first corner. The city was on a system of neighborhood police patrols, an attempt to avoid the anonymous patrolling that turned each car into a miniature search and destroy mission. The first night he sat on the stump beside his apartment, Lome had sworn in surprise to see that the face peering from the curious patrol car was that of Ben Gresham, his squad leader during the ten months and nineteen days he had carried an M60 in War Zone C.
And that was the only past remaining to Lome.
The back door of Jenkins' house banged shut on its spring. A few moments later heavy boots began scratching up the gravel of the common drive. Lome's seat was an oak stump, three feet in diameter. Instead of trying to turn his head, he shifted his whole body around on the wood. Jenkins, a plumpish, half-bald man in his late sixties, lifted a pair of canned Budweisers. "Must get thirsty out here, warm as it is."
"It's always thirsty enough to drink good beer," Lome smiled. "I'll share my stump with you." They sipped for a time without speaking. Mrs. Purefoy, Jenkins' widowed sister and a matronly Baptist, kept house for him. Lome gathered that while she did not forbid her brother to drink an occasional beer, neither did she provide an encouragingly social atmosphere.
"I've seen you out here at 3 am," the older man said. "What'll you do when the weather turns cold?"
"Freeze my butt for a while," Lome answered. He gestured his beer toward his dark apartment on the second floor of a house much like Jenkins'. "Sit up there with the light on. Hell, there's lots of VA hospitals, I've been in lots of them. If North Carolina isn't warm enough, maybe they'd find me one in Florida." He took another swallow and said, "I just sleep better in the daytime, is all. Too many ghosts around at night."
Jenkins turned quickly to make sure of the smile on the younger man's face. It flashed at his motion. "Not quite that sort of ghost," Lome explained. "The ones I bring with me. . . ." And he kept his smile despite the sizzle of faces in the white fire sudden in his mind. The noise of popping, boiling flesh faded and he went on, "There was something weird going on last night, though"—he glanced at his big Japanese wristwatch—"well, damn early this morning."
"A Halloween ghost with a white sheet?" Jenkins suggested.
"Umm, no, down at the church," said Lome, fumbling his cigarettes out. Jenkins shrugged refusal and the dart of butane flame ignited only one. "The tower there was—I don't know, I looked at it and it seemed to be vibrating. No sound, though, and then a big red flash without any sound either. I though sure it'd caught fire, but it was just a flash and everything was back to normal. Funny. You know how you hold your fingers over a flashlight and it comes through, kind of? Well, the flash was like that, only through a stone wall."
"I never saw anything like that," Jenkins agreed. "Old church doesn't seem the worse for it, though. It'll be ready to fall down itself before the courts get all settled about who owns it, you know."
"Umm?"
"Fellowship Baptist built a new church half a mile north of here, more parking and anyhow, it was going to cost more to repair that old firetrap than it would to build a new one." Jenkins grinned. "Mable hasn't missed a Sunday in forty years, so I heard all about it. The city bought the old lot for a boys' club or some such fool thing—I want to spit every time I think of my property taxes, I do—but it turns out the Rankins, that's who the street's named after too, they'd given the land way back before the Kaiser's War. Damn if some of them weren't still around to sue to get the lot back if it wasn't going to be a church any more. So that was last year, and it's like to be a few more before anybody puts money into tearing the old place down."
"From the way it's boarded up and padlocked, I figured it must have been a reflection I saw," Lome admitted. "But it looked funny enough," he added sheepishly, "that I took a walk down there last night."
Jenkins shrugged and stood up. He had the fisherman's trick of dropping the pull tab into his beer before drinking any. Now it rattled in the bottom. "Well," he said, picking up Lome's can as well, "it's bed time for me, I suppose. You better get yourself off soon or the bugs'll carry you away."
"Thanks for the beer and the company," Lome said. "One of these nights I'll bring down an ice chest and we'll really tie one on."
Lome's ears followed the old man back, his boots a friendly, even sound in the warm April darkness. A touch of breeze caught the wisteria hedge across the street and spread its sweetness, diluted, over Lome. He ground out his cigarette and sat quietly, letting the vines breathe on him. Jenkins' garbage can scrunched open and one of the empties echoed into it. The other did not fall. "What the hell?" Lome wondered aloud. But there was something about the night, despite its urban innocence, that brought up memories from past years more strongly than ever before. In a little while Lome began walking. He was still walking when dawn washed the fiery pictures from his mind and he returned to his apartment to find three police cars parked in the street.
The two other tenants stored their cars in the side yard of the apartment house. Lome had stepped between them when he heard a woman scream, "That's him! Don't let him get away!"
Lome turned. White-haired Mrs. Purefoy and a pair of uniformed policemen faced him from the porch of Jenkins' house. The younger man had his revolver half drawn. A third uniformed man, Ben, stepped quickly around from the back of the house. "I'm not going anywhere but to bed," Lome said, spreading his empty hands. He began walking toward the others. "Look, what's the matter?"
The oldest, heaviest of the policemen took the porch steps in a leap and approached Lome at a barely-restrained trot. He had major's pips on his shoulder straps. "Where have you been, snake?" Ben asked, but the major was between them instantly, growling, "I'll handle this, Gresham. Mr. Charles Lome?"
"Yes," Lome whispered. His body flashed hot, as though the fat policeman were a fire, a towering sheet of orange rippling with the speckles of tracers cooking off. . . .
". . . and at any time during the questioning you may withdraw your consent and thereafter remain silent. Do you understand, Mr. Lome?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Mr. Jenkins tonight?"
"Uh-huh. He came out—when did you leave me, Ben? 10:30?" Lome paused to light another cigarette. His flame wavered like the blade of a kris. "We each drank a beer, shot the bull. That's all. What happened?"
"Where did you last see Mr. Jenkins?"
Lome gestured. "I was on the stump. He walked around the back of the house—his house. I guess I could see him. Anyway, I heard him throw the cans in the trash and . . . that's all."
"Both cans?" Ben broke in despite his commander's scowl.
"No, you're right—just one. And I didn't hear the door close. It's got a spring that slams it like a one-oh-five going off, usually. Look, what happened?"
There was a pause. Ben tugged at a corner of his mustache. Low sunlight sprayed Lome through the trees. Standing, he looked taller than his six feet, a knobbly staff of a man in wheat jeans and a green-dyed T-shirt. The shirt had begun to disintegrate in the years since it was issued to him on the way to the war zone. The brace was baby-flesh pink. It made him look incongruously bull-necked, alien.
"He could have changed clothes," suggested the young patrolman. He had holstered his weapon but continued to toy with the butt.
"He didn't," Ben snapped, the signs of his temper obvious to Lome if not to the other policemen. "He's wearing now what he had on when I left him."
"We'll take him around back," the major suddenly decided. In convoy, Ben and the other, nervous, patrolman to either side of Lome and the major bringing up the rear, they crossed into Jenkins' yard following the steep downslope. Mrs. Purefoy stared from the porch. Beneath her a hydrangea bush graded its blooms red on the left, blue on the right, with the carefully-tended acidity of the soil. It was a mirror for her face, ruddy toward the sun and gray with fear in shadow.
"What's the problem?" Lome wondered aloud as he viewed the back of the house. The trash can was open but upright, its lid lying on the smooth lawn beside it. Nearby was one of the Budweiser empties. The other lay alone on the bottom of the trash can. There was no sign of Jenkins himself.
Ben's square hand indicated an arc of spatters six to eight feet high, black against the white siding. "They promised us a lab team but hell, it's blood, snake. You and me've seen enough to recognize it. Mrs. Purefoy got up at four, didn't find her brother. I saw this when I checked and. . . ." He let his voice trail off.
"No body?" Lome asked. He had lighted a fresh cigarette. The gushing flames surrounded him.
"No."
"And Jenkins weighs what? 220?" He laughed, a sound as thin as his wrists. "You'd play hell proving a man with a broken neck ran off with him, wouldn't you?"
"Broke? Sure, we'll believe that!" gibed the nervous patrolman.
"You'll believe me, meatball!" Ben snarled. "He broke it and he carried me out of a fucking burning shithook while our ammo cooked off. And by God—"
"Easy, sarge," Lome said quietly. "If anybody needs shooting, I'll borrow a gun and do it myself."
The major flashed his scowl from one man to the other. His sudden uncertainty was as obvious as the flag pin in his lapel: Lome was now a veteran, not an aging hippy.
"I'm an outpatient at the VA hospital," Lome said, seeing his chance to damp the fire. "Something's fucking up some nerves and they're trying to do something about it there. Wish to hell they'd do it soon."
"Gresham," the major said, motioning Ben aside for a low-voiced exchange. The third policeman had gone red when Ben snapped at him. Now he was white, realizing his mortality for the first time in his twenty-two years.
Lome grinned at him. "Hang loose, turtle. Neither Ben or me ever killed anybody who didn't need it worse than you do."
The boy began to tremble.
"Mr. Lome," the major said, his tone judicious but not hostile, "we'll be getting in touch with you later. And if you recall anything, anything at all that may have bearing on Mr. Jenkins' disappearance, call us at once."
Lome's hands nodded agreement. Ben winked as the lab van arrived, then turned away with the others.
Lome's pain was less than usual, but his dreams awakened him in a sweat each time he dropped off to sleep. When at last he switched on the radio, the headline news was that three people besides Jenkins had disappeared during the night, all of them within five blocks of Lome's apartment.
The air was very close, muffling the brilliance of the stars. It was Friday night and the roar of southbound traffic sounded from Donovan Avenue a block to the east. The three northbound lanes of Jones Street, the next one west of Rankin, were not yet as clotted with cars as they would be later at night, but headlights there were a nervous darting through the houses and trees whenever Lome turned on his stump to look. Rankin Street lay quietly between, lighted at alternate blocks by blue globes of mercury vapor. It was narrow, so that cars could not pass those parked along the curb without slowing, easing; a placid island surrounded by modern pressures.
But no one had disappeared to the east of Donovan or the west of Jones.
Lome stubbed out his cigarette in the punky wood of the stump. It was riddled with termites and sometimes he pictured them, scrabbling through the darkness. He hated insects, hated especially the grubs and hidden things, the corpse-white termites . . . but he sat on the stump above them. A perversely objective part of Lome's mind knew that if he could have sat in the heart of a furnace like the companions of Daniel, he would have done so.
From the blocky shade of the porch next door came the creak of springs: Mrs. Purefoy, shifting her weight on the cushions of the old wing-back chair. In the early evening Lome had caught her face staring at a parlor window, her muscles flat as wax. As the deeper darkness blurred and pooled, she had slipped out into its cover. Lome felt her burning eyes, knowing that she would never forgive him for her brother's disappearance, not if it were proven that Jenkins had left by his own decision. Lome had always been a sinner to her; innocence would not change that.
Another cigarette. Someone else was watching. A passing car threw Lome's angled shadow forward and across Jenkins' house. Lome's guts clenched and his fingers crushed the unlit cigarette. Light. Twelve men in a rice paddy when the captured flare bursts above them. The pop-pop-pop of a gun far off, and the splashes columning around Lt. Burnes—
"Christ!" Lome shouted, standing with an immediacy that laced pain through his body. Something was terribly wrong in the night. The lights brought back memories, but they quenched the real threat that hid in the darkness. Lome knew what he was feeling, knew that any instant a brown face would peer out of a spider hole behind an AK-47 or a mine would rip steel pellets down the trail. . . .
He stopped, forcing himself to sit down again. If it was his time, there was nothing he could do for it. A fresh cigarette fitted between his lips automatically and the needle-bright lighter focused his eyes.
And the watcher was gone.
Something had poised to kill Lome, and had then passed on without striking. It was as unnatural as if a wall collapsing on him had separated in mid-air to leave him unharmed. Lome's arms were trembling, his cigarette tip an orange blur. When Ben's cruiser pulled in beside him, Lome was at first unable to answer the other man's, "Hey, snake."
"Jesus, sarge," Lome whispered, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils. "There's somebody out here and he's a bad fucker."
Carrier noise blatted before the car radio rapped a series of numbers and street names. Ben knuckled his mustache until he was sure his own cruiser was not mentioned. "Yeah, he's a bad one. Another one gone tonight, a little girl from three blocks down. Went to the store to trade six empties and a dime on a coke. Christ, I saw her two hours ago, snake. The bottles we found, the kid we didn't. . . . Seen any little girls?"
There was an upright shadow in front of Ben's radio: a riot gun, clipped to the dashboard. "Haven't seen anything but cars, sarge. Lots of police cars."
"They've got an extra ten men on," Ben agreed with a nod. "We went over the old Baptist church a few minutes ago. Great TAC Squad work. Nothing. Damn locks were rusted shut."
"Think the Baptists've taken up with baby sacrifice?" Lome chuckled.
"Shit, there's five bodies somewhere. If the bastard's loading them in the back of a truck, you'd think he'd spread his pickups over a bit more of an area, wouldn't you?"
. "Look, baby, anybody who packed Jenkins around on his back—I sure don't want to meet him."
"Don't guess Jenkins did either," Ben grunted. "Or the others."
"PD to D-5," the radio interrupted.
Ben keyed his microphone. "Go ahead."
"10-25 Lt Cooper at Rankin and Duke."
"10-4, 10-76," Ben replied, starting to return the mike to its holder.
"D-5, acknowledge," the receiver ordered testily.
"Goddam fucker!" Ben snarled, banging the instrument down. "Sends just about half the fucking time!"
"Keep a low profile, sarge," Lome murmured, but even had he screamed his words would have been lost in the boom of exhaust as Ben cramped the car around in the street, the left wheels bumping over the far curb. Then the accelerator flattened and the big car shot toward the rendezvous.
In Viet Nam, Lome had kept his death wish under control during shelling by digging in and keeping his head down. Now he stood and went inside to his room. After a time, he slept. If his dreams were bright and tortured, then they always were. . . .
"Sure, you knew Jackson," Ben explained, the poom-poom-poom of his engine a live thing in the night. "He's the blond shit who . . . didn't believe you'd broken your neck. Yesterday morning."
"Small loss, then," Lome grinned. "But you watch your own ass, hear? If there's nobody out but cops, there's going to be more cops than just Jackson disappearing."
"Cops and damned fools," Ben grumbled. "When I didn't see you out here on my first pass, I thought maybe you'd gotten sense enough to stay inside."
"I was going to. Decided . . . oh, hell. What's the box score now?"
"Seven gone. Seven for sure," the patrolman corrected himself. "One got grabbed in the time he took to walk from his girl's front porch back to his car. That bastard's lucky, but he's crazy as hell if he thinks he'll stay that lucky."
"He's crazy as hell," Lome agreed. A spring whispered from Jenkins' porch and Lome bobbed the tip of his cigarette at the noise. "She's not doing so good either. All last night she was staring at me, and now she's at it again."
"Christ," Ben muttered. "Yeah, Major Hooseman talked to her this morning. You're about the baddest man ever, leading po' George into smoking and drinking and late hours before you killed him."
"Never did get him to smoke," Lome said, lighting Ben's cigarette and another for himself. "Say, did Jackson smoke?"
"Huh? No." Ben frowned, staring at the closed passenger-side windows and their reflections of his instruments. "Yeah, come to think, he did. But never in uniform, he had some sort of thing about that."
"He sheered off last night when I lit a cigarette," Lome said. "No, not Jackson—the other one. I just wondered. . . ."
"You saw him?" Ben's voice was suddenly sharp, the hunter scenting prey.
Lome shook his head. "I just felt him. But he was there, baby."
"Just like before they shot us down," the policeman said quietly. "You squeezing my arm and shouting over the damn engines 'They're waiting for us, they're waiting for us!' And not a fucking thing I could do—I didn't order the assault and the Captain sure wasn't going to call it off because my machinegunner said to. But you were right, snake."
"The flames . . ." Lome whispered, his eyes unfocused.
"And you're a dumb bastard to have done it, but you carried me out of them. It never helped us a bit that you knew when the shit was about to hit the fan. But you're a damn good man to have along when it does."
Lome's muscles trembled with memory. Then he stood and laughed into the night. "You know, sarge, in twenty-seven years I've only found one job I was any good at. I didn't much like that one, and anyhow—the world doesn't seem to need killers."
"They'll always need us, snake," Ben said quietly. "Some times they won't admit it." Then, "Well, I think I'll waste some more gas."
"Sarge—" The word hung in the empty darkness. There was engine noise and the tires hissing in the near distance and—nothing else. "Sarge, Mrs. Purefoy was on her porch a minute ago and she didn't go inside. But she's not there now."
Ben's five-cell flashlight slid its narrow beam across the porch: the glider, the wing-back chair. On the far railing, a row of potted violets with a gap for the one now spilled on the boards as if by someone vaulting the rail but dragging one heel. . . .
"Didn't hear it fall," the policeman muttered, clacking open the car door. The dome light spilled a startling yellow pool across the two men. As it did so, white motion trembled half a block down Rankin Street.
"Fucker!" Ben said. "He couldn't jump across the street, he threw something so it flashed." Ben was back in the car.
Lome squinted, furious at being blinded at the critical instant. "Sarge, I'll swear to God he headed for the church." Lome strode stiffly around the front of the vehicle and got in on the passenger side.
"Mother-fuck!" the stocky policeman snarled, dropping the microphone that had three times failed to get him a response. He reached for the shift lever, looked suddenly at Lome as the slender man unclipped the shotgun. "Where d'ye think you're going?"
"With you."
Ben slipped the transmission into Drive and hung a shrieking U-turn in the empty street. "The first one's birdshot, the next four are double-ought buck," he said flatly.
Lome jacked the slide twice, chambering the first round and then shucking it out the ejector. It gleamed palely in the instrument light. "Don't think we're going after birds," he explained.
Ben twisted across the street and bounced over the driveway cut. The car slammed to a halt in the small lot behind and shielded by the bulk of the old church. It was a high, narrow building with two levels of boarded windows the length of the east and west sides; the square tower stood at the south end. At some time after its construction, the church had been faced with artificial stone. It was dingy, a gray mass in the night with a darkness about it that the night alone did not explain.
Ben slid out of the car. His flash touched the small door to the right of the tower. "Nothing wrong with the padlock," Lome said. It was a formidable one, set in a patinaed hasp to close the church against vandals and derelicts.
"They were all locked tight yesterday, too," the patrolman said. "He could still be getting in one of those windows. We'll see." He turned to the trunk of the car and opened it, holding his flashlight in the crook of his arm so his right hand could be free for his drawn revolver.
Lome's quick eyes scanned the wall above them. He bent back at the waist instead of tilting his head alone. "Got the key?" he asked.
The stocky man chuckled, raising a pair of folding shovels, army surplus entrenching tools. "Keep that corn-sheller ready," he directed, holstering his own weapon. He locked the blade of one shovel at 90 degrees to the shaft and set it on top of the padlock. The other, still folded, cracked loudly against the head of the first and popped the lock open neatly. "Field expedients, snake," Ben laughed. "If we don't find anything, we can just shut the place up again and nobody'll know the difference."
He tossed the shovels aside and swung open the door. The air that puffed out had the expected mustiness of a long-closed structure with a sweetish overtone that neither man could have identified. Lome glanced around the outside once more, then followed the patrolman within. The flames in his mind were very close.
"Looks about like it did last night," Ben said.
"And last year, I'd guess." The wavering oval of the flashlight picked over the floor. The hardwood was warping, pocked at frequent intervals by holes.
"They unbolted the old pews when they moved," Ben explained. "Took the stained glass too, since the place was going to be torn down."
The nave was a single narrow room running from the chancel in the north to the tower which had held the organ pipes and, above, the chimes. The main entrance was by a side aisle, through double doors in the middle of the west wall. The interior looked a gutted ruin.
"You checked the whole building?" Lome asked. The pulpit had been ripped away. The chancel rail remained though half-splintered, apparently to pass the organ and altar. Fragments of wood, crumpled boxes, and glass littered the big room.
"The main part. We didn't have the key to the tower and the major didn't want to bust in." Ben took another step into the nave and kicked at a stack of old bulletins.
White heat, white fire— "Ben, did you check the ceiling when you were here last night?"
"Huh?" The narrow Gothic vault was blackness forty feet above the ground. Ben's flashlight knifed upward across painted plaster to the ribbed and paneled ceiling that sloped to the main beam. And—"Jesus!"
A large cocoon was tight against the roof peak. It shimmered palely azure, but the powerful light thrust through to the human outline within. Long shadows quivered on the wood, magnifying the trembling of the policeman's wrist as the beam moved from the cocoon to another beside it, to the third—
"Seven of the fuckers!" Ben cried, taking another step and slashing the light to the near end of the room where the south wall closed the inverted V of the ceiling. Above the door to the tower was the baize screen of the pipe loft. The cloth fluttered behind Mrs. Purefoy, who stood stiffly upright twenty feet in the air. Her face was locked in horror, framed by her tousled white hair. Both arms were slightly extended but were stone-rigid within the lace-fringed sleeves of her dress.
"She—" Lome began, but as he spoke and Ben's hand fell to the butt of his revolver, Mrs. Purefoy began to fall, tilting a little in a rustle of skirts. Beneath the crumpled edge of the baize curtain, spiked on the beam of Ben's flashlight, gleamed the head and fore-claws of what had been clutching the woman.
The eyes glared like six-inch opals, fierce and hot in a dead white exoskeleton. The foreclaws clicked sideways. As though they had cocked a spring, the whole flat torso shot down at Ben.
An inch long and scuttling under a rock it might have passed for a scorpion, but this lunging monster was six feet long without counting the length of the tail arced back across its body. Flashing legs, flashing body armor, and the fluid-jeweled sting that winked as Lome's finger twitched in its killer's reflex—
Lome's body screamed at the recoil of the heavy charge. The creature spun as if kicked in mid-air, smashing into the floor a yard from Ben instead of on top of the policeman. The revolver blasted, a huge yellow bottle-shape flaring from the muzzle. The bullet ripped away a window shutter because a six-inch pincer had locked Ben's wrist. The creature reared onto the back two pairs of its eight jointed legs. Lome stepped sideways for a clear shot, the slide of his weapon slick-snacking another round into the chamber. On the creature's white belly was a smeared, multi-brancate star—the load of buckshot had ricochetted off, leaving a trail like wax on glass.
Ben clubbed his flashlight. It cracked harmlessly between the glowing eyes and sprang from his hand. The other claw flashed to Ben's face and trapped it, not crushingly but hard enough to immobilize and start blood-trails down both cheeks. The blades of the pincer ran from nose to hairline on each side.
Lome thrust his shotgun over Ben's right shoulder and fired point blank. The creature rocked back, jerking a scream from the policeman as the claws tightened. The lead struck the huge left eye and splashed away, dulling the opal shine. The flashlight still glaring from the floor behind the creature silhouetted its sectioned tail as it arched above the policeman's head. The armed tip plunged into the base of his neck. Ben stiffened.
Lome shouted and emptied his shotgun. The second dense red bloom caught like a strobe light the dotted line of blood droplets joining Ben's neck to the withdrawn injector. A claw seized Lome's waist in the rolling echo of the shotgun blasts. His gunbutt cracked on the creature's armor, steel sparking as it slid off. The extending pincer brushed the shotgun aside and clamped over Lome's face, half-shielding from him the sight of the rising sting.
Then it smashed on Lome's neck brace, and darkness exploded over him in a flare of coruscant pain.
The oozing ruin of Mrs. Purefoy's face stared at Lome through its remaining eye when he awoke. Everything swam in blue darkness except for one bright blur. He blinked and the blur suddenly resolved into a streetlight glaring up through a shattered board. Lome's lungs burned and his stiffness seemed more than even unconsciousness and the pain skidding through his nerve paths could explain. He moved his arm and something clung to its surface; the world quivered.
Lome was hanging from the roof of the church in a thin, transparent sheath. Mrs. Purefoy was a yard away, multiple wrappings shrouding her corpse more completely. With a strength not far from panic, Lome forced his right fist into the bubble around him. The material, extruded in broad swathes by the creature rather than as a loom of threads, sagged but did not tear. The clear azure turned milky under stress and sucked in around Lome's wrist.
He withdrew his hand. The membrane passed some oxygen but not enough for an active man. Lome's hands patted the outside of his pockets finding, as he had expected, nothing with a sharp edge. He had not recently bitten off his thumbnails. Thrusting against the fire in his chest, he brought his left hand in front of his body. With a fold of the cocoon between each thumb and index finger, he thrust his hands apart. A rip started in the white opacity beneath his right thumb. Air, clean and cool, jetted in.
"Oh, Jesus," Lome muttered, even the pain in his body forgotten as he widened the tear upwards to his face. The cocoon was bobbing on a short lead, rotating as the rip changed its balance. Lome could see that he had become ninth in the line of hanging bodies, saved from their paralysis by the chance of his neck brace. Ben, his face blurred by the membrane holding him next to Lome, had been less fortunate.
Ten yards from where Lome hung and twenty feet below the roof beam, the baize curtain of the pipe loft twitched. Lome froze in fearful immobility.
The creature had been able to leap the width of a street carrying the weight of an adult; its strength must be as awesome as was the rigidity of its armor. Whether or not it could drive its sting through Lome's brace, it could assuredly rip him to collops if it realized he was awake.
The curtain moved again, the narrow ivory tip of a pincer lifting it slightly. The creature was watching Lome.
Ben carried three armor-piercing rounds in his .357 Magnum for punching through car doors. Lome tried to remember whether the revolver had remained in Ben's hand as he fell. There was no image of that in Lome's mind, only the torchlike muzzle blasts of his own shotgun. Slim as it was, his only hope was that the jacketed bullets would penetrate the creature's exoskeleton though the soft buckshot had not.
Lome twisted his upper torso out of the hole for a closer look at Ben, making his own cocoon rock angrily. The baize lifted further. The street light lay across it in a pale band. Why didn't the creature scuttle out to finish the business?
Brief motion waked a flash of scintillant color from the pipe loft. The curtain flapped closed as if a volley of shots had ripped through it. Lome recognized the reflex: the panic of a spider when a stick thrusts through its web. Not an object, though; the light itself, weak as it was, had slapped the creature back. Ben's bright flashlight had not stopped it when necessity drove, but the monster must have felt pain at human levels of illumination. Its eyes were adapted to starlight or the glow of a sun immeasurably fainter than that of Earth. "Where did you come from, you bastard?" Lome whispered.
Light. It gave him an idea and he fumbled out his butane lighter, adjusting it to a maximum flame. The sheathes were relatively thin over the victims' faces to aid transpiration. At the waist, though, where a bulge showed Ben's arm locked to his torso, the membrane was thick enough to be opaque in the dim light. Lome bent dangerously over, cursing the stiffness of his neck brace. Holding the inch-high jet close, he tried to peer through Ben's cocoon. Unexpectedly the fabric gave a little and Lome bobbed forward, bringing the flame in contact with the material sheathing Ben.
The membrane sputtered, kissing Lome's hand painfully. He jerked back and the lighter flicked away. It dropped, cold and silent until it cracked on the floor forty feet below. Despite the pattern of light over it, the curtain to the loft was shifting again. Lome cursed in terror.
A line of green fire sizzled up the side of Ben's cocoon from the point at which the flame had touched it. The material across his face flared. The policeman gave no sign of feeling his skin curl away. The revolver in his hand winked green.
Lome screamed. His own flexible prison lurched and sagged like heated polyethylene. Ben was wrapped in a cancerous hell that roared and heaved against the roofbeams as a live thing. Green tongues licked yellow-orange flames from the dry wood as well. Lome's cocoon and that to the other side of Ben were deforming in the furnace heat. Another lurch and Lome had slipped twenty feet, still gripped around the waist in a sack of blue membrane. He was gyrating like a top. The loft curtain had twitched higher each time it spun past his vision.
The bottom of Ben's cocoon burned away and he plunged past Lome, face upward and still afire. Bone crunched as he hit. The body rebounded a few inches to fall again on its face. The roar of the flames muffled Lome's wail of rage. His own elongated capsule began to flow. Flames grasped at Lome's support. Before they could touch the sheathing, the membrane pulled a last few inches and snapped like an overstretched rubber band. The impact of the floor smashed Lome's jaw against his neck brace, grinding each tortured vertebra against the next. He did not lose consciousness, but the shock paralyzed him momentarily as thoroughly as the creature's sting could have done.
Bathed in green light and the orange of the blazing roof panels, the scorpion-thing thrust its thorax into the nave. It walking legs gripped the flat surface, dimpling the plaster. The creature turned upward toward the fire, three more cocoons alight and their hungry flames lapping across the beams. Then, particolored by the illumination, its legs shifted and the opal eyes trained on Lome. The light must be torture to it, muffling in indecision its responses, but it was about to act.
A small form wrapped in a flaming shroud dropped to thump the floor beside Lome. His arms would move again. He used them to strip the remaining sheathing from his legs. It clung as the heat of the burning corpse began to melt the material. Something writhed from a crackling tumor on the child's neck. The thing was finger-long and seemed to paw the air with a score of tiny legs; its opalescent eyes proved its parentage. The creature brought more than paralysis to its victims: it was a gravid female.
Green flame touched the larva. It burst in a pustulent smear.
The adult went mad. Its legs shot it almost the length of the nave to rebound from a sidewall in a cloud of plaster. The creature's horizontally-flattened tail ruddered it instinctively short of the fire as it leapt upward to the roof peak. It clung there in pale horror against the wood, eyes on the advancing flames. Three more bodies fell, splashing like ginko fruits.
Lome staggered upright. The fire hammered down at him without bringing pain. His body had no feeling whatever. Ben's hair had burned. His neck and scalp were black where skin remained, red where it had cracked open to the muscle beneath. The marbled background showed clearly the tiny, pallid hatchling trying to twist across it.
Lome's toe brushed the larva onto the floor. His boot heel struck it, struck again and twisted. Purulent ichor spurted between the leather and the boards. Lome knelt. In one motion he swung Ben across his shoulders and stood, just as he had after their helicopter had nosed into the trees and exploded. Logic had been burned out of Lome's mind, leaving only a memory of friendship. He did not look up. As his mechanical steps took him and his burden through the door they had entered, a shadow wavered across them. The creature had sprung back into the loft.
Lome stumbled to his knees in the parking lot. The church had been rotten and dry. Orange flames fluffed through the roof in several places, thrusting corkscrews of sparks into the night sky. Twelve feet of roof slates thundered into the nave. Flame spewed up like a secondary explosion. There were sirens in the night.
Without warning, the east facade of the tower collapsed into the parking lot. Head-sized chunks of Tennessee-stone smashed at the patrol car, one of them missing Lome by inches. He looked up, blank-eyed, his hands lightly touching the corpse of his friend. Of its own volition, the right hand traced down Ben's shoulder to the raw flesh of his elbow. The tower stairs spiraled out of the dust and rubble, laid bare to the steel framework when the wall fell. On the sagging floor of the pipe loft rested a machine like no other thing on Earth, and the creature was inside it. Tubes of silvery metal rose cradleform from a base of similar metal. The interstices were not filled with anything material, but the atmosphere seemed to shiver, blurring the creature's outline.
And Lome's hand was unwrapping Ben's stiff fingers from the grips of his revolver.
Lome stood again, his left hand locking his right on the butt of the big magnum. He was familiar with the weapon: it was the one Ben had carried in Nam, the same tool he had used for five of his thirteen kills. It would kill again tonight.
Even in the soaring holocaust the sharp crack of Lome's shot was audible. Lome's forearms rocked up as a unit with the recoiling handgun. The creature lurched sideways to touch the shimmering construct around it. A red surface discharge rippled across the exoskeleton from the point of contact. Lome fired again. He could see the armor dull at his point of aim in the center of the thorax. Again the creature jumped. Neither bullet had penetrated, but the splashing lead of the second cut an upright from the machine. The creature spun, extending previously-unglimpsed tendrils from the region of its mouth parts. They flickered over a control plate in the base. Machinery chimed in response.
The shivering quickened. The machine itself and the thing it enclosed seemed to fade. Lome thumb-cocked the magnum, lowered the red vertical of the front sight until it was even with the rear notch; the creature was a white blur beyond them. The gun bucked back hard when he squeezed; the muzzle blast was sharper, flatter, than before. The first of the armor-piercing bullets hit the creature between the paired tendrils. The exoskeleton surrounding them shattered like safety glass struck by a brick.
The creature straightened in silent agony, rising onto its hind legs with its tail lying rigidly against its back. Its ovipositor was fully extended, thumb-thick and six inches long.
"Was it fun to kill them, bug?" Lome screamed. "Was it as much fun as this is?" His fourth shot slammed, dimpling a belly plate which then burst outward in an ugly gush of fluids. The creature's members clamped tightly about its spasming thorax. The tail lashed the uprights in red spurts. The machine was fading and the torn panelling of the loft was beginning to show through the dying creature's body.
There was one shot left in the cylinder and Lome steadied his sights on the control plate. He had already begun taking up the last pressure when he stopped and lowered the muzzle. No, let it go home, whatever place or time that might be. Let its fellows see that Earth was not their hunting ground alone. And if they came back any way—if they only would!
There was a flash as penetrating as the first microsecond of a nuclear blast. The implosion dragged Lome off his feet and sucked in the flames so suddenly that all sound seemed frozen. Then both side-walls collapsed into the nave and the ruins of the tower twisted down on top of them. In the last instant, the pipe loft was empty of all but memory.
A fire truck picked its way through the rubble in the parking lot. Its headlights flooded across the figure of a sandy-haired man wearing scorched clothing and a neck brace. He was kneeling beside a body, and the tears were bright on his face.
I attended Duke Law School in 1967-9, and 1971-2, graduating in 1972. While I was at Duke my wife and I lived on Watts Street in Durham, NC, in a house which had been split into three furnished apartments.
The two year gap in my law school attendance was filled by the US Army, culminating with a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia. You could say this contributed to my education in other fashions.
In 1975 Ramsey Campbell asked me for a story for the horror anthology he was editing. I wrote "The Hunting Ground," setting it on Watts Street where I'd lived. Lorne isn't me. But he's not not me either, if you see what I mean.
The veterans will understand.