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FOR: LOMAN WATKINS

SOURCE: SHADDACK

JACK TUCKER HAS NOT REPORTED IN FROM THE FOSTER PLACE NO ONE ANSWERS RHONE THERE URGENT THAT SITUATION BE CLARIFIED AWAIT YOUR REPORT

Shaddack had direct entry to the police-department computer from his own computer in his house out on the north point of the cove He could leave es for Watkins or any of the other men, and no one could call them up except the intended recipient

The screen went blank

Loear, and set out for Foster Stables, though the place was actually outside the city lier cared about such things as jurisdictional boundaries and legal procedures He was still a cop only because it was the role he had to play until all of the town had undergone the Change None of the old rules applied to hiard for the laould have appalled hiance and his disdain for the rules of the Old People’s society did notmoved him any more Day by day, hour by hour, he was less emotional

Except for fear, which his new elevated state of consciousness still allowed: fear because it was a survival mechanism, useful in a way that love and joy and hope and affection were not He was afraid right now, in fact Afraid of the regressives Afraid that the Moonhawk Project would somehow be revealed to the outside world and be crushed--and him with it Afraid of his onlybleak moments, he was afraid of hi

24

Moose dozed in a corner of the unlighted bedroo bushy-tailed rabbits in a drea that he was, even in his dreams he probably ran errands for his master

Belted in his stool at the , Harry leaned to the eyepiece of the telescope and studied the back of Callan’s Funeral Home over on Juniper Lane, where the hearse had just pulled into the service drive He watched Victor Callan and the mortician’s assistant, Ned Ryedock, as they used a wheeled gurney to transfer a body fro and cre Zippered inside a half-collapsed, black plastic body bag, the corpse was so small that it must have been that of a child Then they closed the door behind them, and Harry could see no h, narros, and from his elevated position Harry was able to peer down into that roouttered table on which the dead were e On those occasions he could see ht, however, the blinds were lowered all the way to the sills

He gradually shifted his field of vision southward along the fog-swaddled alley that served Callan’s and ran between Conquistador and Juniper He was not looking for anything in particular, just slowly scanning, when he saw a pair of grotesque figures They were swift and dark, sprinting along the alley and into the large vacant lot adjacent to the funeral hoh closer to the foran to race

He’d seen their like before, three tih the first time he had not believed what he had seen They had been so shadowy and strange, so briefly gliination; therefore he naeyh his field of vision and vanished into the dark, vacant lot before he could overcome his surprise and follow them

Now he searched that property end to end, back to front, seeking therass Bushes offered concealed and held the fog as if it were cotton

He found thehtly less black than the night Featureless They crouched together in the dry grass in the middle of the lot, just to the north of the ih ones) like a canopy over half the property

Trehter on that section of the lot and adjusted the focus The Boogeyrew paler in contrast to the night around them He still could not see any details of theh it was quite expensive and tricky to obtain, he wished that through his military contacts he had acquired a TeleTron, which was a new version of the Star Tron night-vision device that had been used by ht--ue natural radiance of certain hty-five thousand tihtscape was transforrayness The Tele-Tron ened to be fitted to a telescope Ordinarily, available light was sufficient to Harry’s purposes, and hted rooeyures looked west toward Juniper Lane, then north toward Callan’s, then south toward the house that, with the funeral home, flanked that open piece of land Their heads turned with a quick, fluid h they were definitely not feline

One of thelanced back to the east Because the telescope put Harry right in the lot with the Boogeyold, palely radiant He had never seen their eyes before He shivered, but not just because they were so uncanny So that reached deeper than Harry’s conscious or subconsciousprienes

He was suddenly cold to thehe had known since Na, Moose was attuned nonetheless to his ot up, shook himself as if to cast off sleep, and ca, inquisitive sound

Through the telescope Harry glieymen He had no more than the briefest flash of it, at e was liht, so he saw little; in fact the inadequate lunar glow did less to reveal the thing than to deepen the ripped by it, stunned, frozen

Moose issued an interrogatory "Woof?"

For an instant, unable to look up from the eyepiece if his life had depended on it, Harry stared at an apelike countenance, though it was leaner and uglier and er than the face of an ape He was re even seeht he saw the enaht was poor, and he could not be certain how much of what he saas a trick of shadow or a distortion of fog Part of this hideous vision had to be attributed to his fevered is and one dead arination if he was to eyman looked toward him, it looked away At the same time both creatures moved with an animal fluidity and quickness that startled Harry They were nearly the size of big jungle cats and as fast He turned the scope to follow theh the darkness, south across the vacant lot, disappearing over a split-rail fence into the backyard of the Clayone with such alacrity that he could not hold them in his field of view

He continued to search for theh school on Rosh and the faeymen had vanished as abruptly as they always did in a shts were turned on