Page 47 (1/2)

Shaddack had chosen his proving ground well Moonlight Cove was relatively isolated and therefore easier to control

Loman was of a mind to order the roadblocks dismantled, and to drive over to Aberdeen Wells, where he could spill their whole story to the county sheriff He wanted to blow the Moonhawk Project wide open

He was no longer afraid of Shaddack’s rage or of dying Well… not true He was afraid of Shaddack and of death, but they held less fear for hi like Denny had become He would have as soon entrusted himself to the mercies of the sheriff in Aberdeen and the federal authorities--even scientists hile cleaning up the ht be sorely tempted to dissect him--than stay in town and inevitably surrender the last few fraght of his body and mind with a computer

But if he ordered his officers to stand down, they would be suspicious, and their loyalty lay more with Shaddack than with him, for they were bound to Shaddack by terror They were stillelse, for they had not seen what Denny had becoht hold in store soe state Like Moreau’s beast--at least for now--to betray theirthe Moonhawk Project, and he ht wind up dead or, worse, locked in a jail cell

He couldn’t risk revealing his counterrevolutionary coht never have a chance to deal with Shaddack In his ed at the jail, with Shaddack sh the bars, as they wheeled in a computer hich they somehow intended to fuse him

Molten silver eyes …

He kept on the h the streaked windshield The wipers thu off ti nearer

He was the puma-le that was Moonlight Cove

31

Initially the protean creature was content to feed on the things it found when it extended thin tendrils of itself down the drain in the cellar floor or through fine cracks in the walls and into theearth Beetles Grubs Earthwors, but it avidly consumed them

Soon, however, it depleted the supply of insects and worms within ten yards of the house It needed ato marshal its amorphous tissues into a shape in which it could leave the cellar and seek prey But it had no memory of previous forms and no desire whatsoever to impose structural order on itself

The consciousness which inhabited that jellied er had more than the dimmest sense of self-awareness, yet it was still able to remake itself to an extent that would satisfy its needs Suddenly a score of lipless, toothless mouths opened in that fluid for, erupted fro structure above the shapeless beast, dozens of roo themselves They stopped, as one, when the call blared up from the cellar

The creature could sense theht of the flesh Food Fuel It wanted them It needed them

It attempted to express that need in the for summons

In every corner of the house, mice twitched They brushed at, their faces with forepaws, as if they’d scurried through cobwebs and were trying to scrape those clingy, gossaht bats lived in the attic, and they also reacted to the urgent call They dropped fro, and flew in frenzied, rando within a fraction of an inch of the walls and one another

But nothing cah the call had reached the small animals for which it had been intended, it did not have the desired effect

The shapeless thing fell silent

Its many mouths closed

One by one the bats returned to their perches in the attic

The mice sat as if in shock for a moment, then resumed their usual activities

A couple of ain with a different pattern of sounds, still pitched beyond hu theh the attic in such turht they nu of their wings was louder than the rush of rain on the roof

Everywhere,at attention, ears pricked Those in the lower reaches of the house, nearer the source of the suh they saw before the, the bats swooped through a hole in the attic floor, into an empty room on the second story, where they circled and soared and dove ceaselessly

Two an to creep toward the kitchen, where the door to the basement stood open But both stopped on the threshold of that roohtened and confused

Below, the shapeless entity tripled the power of its call

One of the mice in the kitchen suddenly bled froan to bounce off walls, their radar shot

The cellar dweller cut back somewhat on the force of its summons

The bats immediately swooped out of the upstairs rooround-floor hall As they went, they flew over a double score of scurrying mice

Below, the creature’s e orifice in the center of the pulsing apingtossed one at a ti protoplasestive acids

An arerly abandoned their nest inside the dining-roo over one another, squeaking excitedly They fed the entity

After that flurry of movement, the house was still

The creature stopped its siren song For the ned to patrol the northwest quadrant of Moonlight Cove He was alone in the car because even with the hundred New Wave eht, their ht now, he preferred to ithout a partner Since the episode at Peyser’s house, when the sht of Peyser’s altered forress, he had been afraid to be around other people He had avoided total degeneration last night … but only by the thinnest of ression, the urge ht stir within him, too, and this time he was not sure that he could successfully repress that dark yearning