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Pete and Marsha were sitting on opposite sides of the large table, where their computer ter there; they ired into the chairs and the corew out of them--or out of the machine; it was hard to tell which--and not only anchored them to their computers but to their chairs and, finally, to the floor, into which the cables disappeared Their faces were still vaguely recognizable, though wildly altered, half pale flesh and half htly melted look

Randy could not breathe

But abruptly he could move, and he scrambled backward

The door slaanic, half metallic--erupted from the wall The entire room seemed weirdly, malevolently alive, or maybe the walls were filled with alien machinery The tentacles were quick They lashed around hihly him, and turned him toward his parents

They were still in their chairs but were no longer facing their coreen eyes that appeared to be boiling in their sockets, bubbling and churning

Randy screamed He thrashed, but the tentacles held him

Pete opened his mouth, and half a dozen silvery spheres, like kill ball bearings, shot from him and struck Randy in the chest

Pain exploded through the boy But it didn’t last more than a couple of seconds Instead, the hot pain becah his entire body and up his face

He tried to screaain No sound escaped hi hiainst the plaster

The coldness was in his head now Crawling, crawling

Again, he tried to scream This time a sound came from him A thin, electronic oscillation

Thursday afternoon, wearing ool slacks and a sweatshirt and a cardigan over the sweatshirt because she found it hard to stay war Henderson sat at the kitchen table by the ith a glass of chenin blanc, a plate of onion crackers, a wedge of Gouda, and a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout She had read all of the Wolfe novels ages ago, but she was rereading the because the people in theourmet Archie was still a man of action Fritz still ran the best private kitchen in the world None of theed since last she’d met the was eighty years old, and she looked eighty, every minute of it; she didn’t kid herself Occasionally, when she saw herself in a mirror, she stared in amazement, as if she had not lived with that face for the better part of a century and wasn’t looking at a stranger Somehow she expected to see a reflection of her youth because inside she was still that girl Fortunately she didn’t feel eighty Her bones were creaky, and her muscles had about as much tone as those of Jabba the Hut in the Star Wars movie she’d watched on the VCR last week, but she was free of arthritis and other alow on Concord Circle, an odd little half-an and ended froht the place forty years ago, when they had both been teachers at Thomas Jefferson School, in the days when it had been a coht Cove had been much smaller then For fourteen years, since Frank died, she had lived in the bungalo alone She could get around, clean, and cook for herself, for which she was grateful

She was even rateful for her mental acuity More than physical infir her physically functional, would steal her memory an alter her personality She tried to keep hera lot of books of all different kinds, by renting a variety of videos for her VCR, and by avoiding at all costs theslop that passed for entertainment on television

By four-thirty Tuesday afternoon, she was halfway through the novel, though she paused at the end of each chapter to look out at the rain She liked rain She liked whatever weather God chose to throw at the world--storms, hail, wind, cold, heat--because the variety and extremes of creation hatat the rain, which earlier had declined fro furiously, she saw three large, dark, and utterly fantastic creatures appear out of the stand of trees at the rear of her property, fifty feet from the hich she sat They halted for a moment as a thin mist eddied around their feet, as if they were drea and ht melt away as suddenly as they had arisen But then they raced toward her back porch

As they dreiftly nearer, Meg’s first i on this earth … unless perhaps gargoyles could come alive and climb down from cathedral roofs

She knew at once that she es of a truly massive stroke, because that hat she had always feared would at last claiin like this, with such a weird hallucination

That was all it could be, of course--hallucination preceding the bursting of a cerebral blood vessel thaton her brain She waited for a painful exploding sensation inside her head, waited for her face and body to twist to the left or right as one side or the other was paralyzed

Even when the first of the gargoyles crashed through the , showering the table with glass, spilling the chenin blanc, knocking Meg off her chair, and falling to the floor atop her, all teeth and claws, sheillusions, though she was not surprised by the intensity of the pain She’d always known that death would hurt

Dora Hankins, the receptionist in thepeople leave work as early as four-thirty Though the official quitting time was five o’clock, a lot of workers put in hours at hoht-hour office day Since they’d been converted, there had been no need for rules, anyway, because they were all working for the sa, and the only discipline they needed was their fear of Shaddack, of which they had plenty

By 4:55, when no one at all had passed through the lobby, Dora was apprehensive The building was oddly silent, though hundreds of people orking there in offices and labs farther back on the ground floor and in the two floors overhead In fact the place seemed deserted

At five o’clock no one had yet left for the day, and Dora had decided to see as going on She abandoned her post at the e rand corridor floored with vinyl tile Offices lay on both sides She went into the first rooht women served as a secretarial pool for minor department heads who had no personal secretaries of their own

The eight were at their VDTs In the fluorescent light, Dora had no trouble seeing how intimately flesh and machine had joined

Fear was the only eht she had known it in all its shades and degrees But now it fell over her with greater force, darker and listening probe erupted froht It was more metallic than not, yet it dripped what appeared to be yellowish ht to one of the secretaries and bloodlessly pierced the back of her head From the top one of the other women’s heads, another probe erupted, like a snake to the music of a charmer’s flute, hesitated, then with tre the acoustic tile without disturbing it, and vanished toward the room above

Dora sensed that all of the cole entity and that the building itself iftly being incorporated into it She wanted to but couldn’t move--maybe because she knew any escape atteed her into the network

Betsy Soldonna was carefully taping up a sign on the wall behind the front desk at the Moonlight Cove Town Library It was part of Fascinating Fiction Week, a caet kids to read more fiction

She was the assistant librarian, but on Tuesdays, when her boss, Cora Danker, was off, Betsy worked alone She liked Cora, but Betsy also liked being by herself Cora was a talker, filling every freeobservations on the characters and plots of her favorite TV progra bibliophile obsessed with books, would have been delighted to talk endlessly about what she’d read, but Cora, though head librarian, hardly read at all

Betsy tore a fourth piece of Scotch tape off the dispenser and fixed the last corner of the poster to the wall She stepped back to admire her work