Part 19 (1/2)

Wargle wasn't the only one screaming. The others cried out and fell back in surprise. The moth was squealing, too, making a high-pitched, keening sound.

In the moon's silvery beams, the impossible insect's huge pale velvety wings flapped and folded and spread with horrible grace and beauty, buffeting Wargle's head and shoulders.

Wargle staggered away, veering downhill, moving blindly, clawing at the outrageous thing that clung to his face. His screams quickly grew m.u.f.fled; within a couple of seconds, they were silenced altogether.

Bryce, like the others, was paralyzed by disgust and disbelief.

Wargle began to run, but he only went a few yards before coming to an abrupt halt. His hands dropped away from the thing on his face. His knees were buckling.

Snapping out of his brief trance, Bryce dropped his useless shotgun and ran toward Stu.

Wargle didn't crumple to the ground, after all. Instead, his shaky knees locked, and he snapped erect. His shoulders jerked back. His body twitched and shuddered as if an electric current had flashed through him.

Bryce tried to grab the moth and tear it away from Wargle. But the deputy began to weave and thrash in a St. Vitus dance of pain and suffocation, and Bryce's hands closed on empty air. Wargle moved erratically across the street, jerked this way and that, heaved and writhed and spun, as if he were attached to strings that were being manipulated by a drunken puppeteer. His hands hung slackly at his sides, which made his frantic and spasmodic capering seem especially eerie. His hands flopped and fluttered weakly, but they did not rise to tear at his a.s.sailant. It was almost as if, now, he were in the grip of ecstasy rather than the clutch of pain. Bryce followed him, tried to move in on him, but couldn't get close.

Then Wargle collapsed.

In that same instant, the moth rose and turned, suspended in the air, hovering on rapidly beating wings, eyes night-black and hateful. It swooped at Bryce.

He stumbled backwards and threw his arms across his face. He fell.

The moth sailed over his head.

Bryce twisted around, looked up.

The kite-size insect glided soundlessly across the street, toward the buildings on the other side.

Tal Whitman raised his shotgun. The blast was like cannonfire in the silent town.

The moth pitched sideways in midair. It tumbled in a loop, dropped almost to the ground, then it swooped up again and flew on, disappearing over a rooftop.

Stu Wargle was sprawled on the pavement, flat on his back. Unmoving.

Bryce scrambled to his feet and went to Wargle. The deputy lay in the middle of the street, where there was just enough light to see that his face was gone. Jesus. Gone. As if it had been torn off. His hair and ragged ribbons of his scalp bristled over the white bone of his forehead. A skull peered up at Bryce.

17.

The Hour Before Midnight Tal, Gordy, Frank, and Lisa sat in red leatherette armchairs in a corner of the lobby of the Hilltop Inn. The inn had been closed since the end of the past skiing season, and they had removed the dusty white dropcloths from the chairs before collapsing into them, numb with shock. The oval coffee table was still covered by a dropcloth; they stared at that shrouded object, unable to look at one another.

At the far end of the room, Bryce and Jenny were standing over the body of Stu Wargle, which lay on a long, low sideboard against the wall. No one in the armchairs could bring himself to look over that way.

Staring at the covered coffee table, Tal said, ”I shot the d.a.m.ned thing. I hit it. I know I did.”

”We all saw it take the buckshot,” Frank agreed.

”So why wasn't it blown apart?” Tal demanded. ”Hit dead-on by a blast from a 20-gauge. It should've been torn to pieces, d.a.m.n it.”

”Guns aren't going to save us,” Lisa said.

In a distant, haunted voice, Gordy said, ”It could've been any of us. That thing could've gotten me. I was right behind Stu. If he had ducked or jumped out of the way...

”No,” Lisa said. ”No. It wanted Officer Wargle. n.o.body else. Just Officer Wargle.”

Tal stared at the girl. ”What do you mean?”

Her flesh had taken paleness from her bones. ”Officer Wargle refused to admit he'd seen it when it was battering against the window. He insisted it was just a bird.”

”So?”

”So it wanted him. Him especially,” she said. ”To teach him a lesson. But mostly to teach us a lesson.”

”It couldn't have heard what Stu said.”

”It did. It heard.”

”But it couldn't have understood.”

”It did.”

”I think you're crediting it with too much intelligence,” Tal said. ”It was big, yes, and like nothing any of us has ever seen before. But it was still only an insect. A moth. Right?”

The girl said nothing.

”It's not omniscient,” Tal said, trying to convince himself more than anyone else. ”It's not all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing.”

The girl stared silently at the covered coffee table.

Suppressing nausea, Jenny examined Wargle's hideous wound. The lobby lights were not quite bright enough, so she used a flashlight to inspect the edges of the injury and to peer into the skull. The center of the dead man's demolished face was eaten away clear to the bone; all the skin, flesh, and cartilage were gone. Even the bone itself appeared to be partially dissolved in places, pitted, as if it had been splashed with acid. The eyes were gone. There was, however, normal flesh on all sides of the wound; smooth untouched flesh lay along both sides of the face, from the outer points of the jawbones to the cheekbones, and there was unmarked skin from the midpoint of the chin on down, and from the midpoint of the forehead on up. It was as if some torture artist had designed a frame of healthy skin to set off the gruesome exhibition of bone on display in the center of the face.

Having seen enough, Jenny switched off the flashlight. Earlier, they had covered the body with a dropcloth from one of the chairs. Now Jenny drew the sheet over the dead man's face, relieved to be covering that skeletal grin.

”Well?” Bryce asked.

”No teeth marks,” she said.

”Would a thing like that have teeth?”

”I know it had a mouth, a small chitinous beak. I saw its mandibles working when it bashed itself against the substation windows.”

”Yeah. I saw them, too.”

”A mouth like that would mark the flesh. There'd be slashes. Bite marks. Indications of chewing and tearing.”

”But there were none?”

”No. The flesh doesn't look as if it was ripped off. It seems to've been... dissolved. Along the edges of the wound, the remaining flesh is even sort of cauterized, as if it has been seared by something.”