Midnight

better at this sort of thing."
    "Do you think …"
    "What is it, dear girl?"
    "Do you think there's any chance … well, any chance of getting my folks back? The way they were, I mean?"
    He put down a muffin that he had been raising to his mouth, and he reached across the table, between the plates and tins of food, to take her hand. His fingers were slightly greasy with butter, but she did not mind, for he was so reassuring and comforting; right now she needed a lot of reassuring and comforting.
    "You'll be reunited with your parents," Father Castelli said with great sympathy.
    "I absolutely guarantee that you will."
    She bit her lower lip, trying to hold back her tears.
    "I guarantee it," he repeated.
    Abruptly his face bulged . Not evenly like an inflating balloon. Rather, it bulged in some places and not others, rippled and pulsed, as if his skull had turned to mush and as if balls of worms were writhing and squirming just under the skin.
    "I guarantee it!"
    Chrissie was too terrified to scream. For a moment she could not move. She was paralyzed by fear, frozen in her chair, unable to summon even enough motor control to blink or draw a breath.
    She could hear his bones loudly crackling-crunching-popping as they splintered and dissolved and reshaped themselves with impossible speed. His flesh made a disgusting, wet, oozing sound as it flowed into new forms almost with the ease of hot wax.
    The priest's skull swelled upward and swept back in a bony crest, and his face was hardly human at all now but partly crustacean, partly insectile, vaguely wasplike, with something of the jackal in it, too, and with fiery hateful eyes.
    At last Chrissie cried out explosively, "No!" Her heart was pounding so hard that each beat was painful. "No, go away, let me alone, let me go!"
    His jaws lengthened, then split back nearly to his ears in a menacing grin defined by double rows of immense sharp teeth.
    "No, no!"
    She tried to get up.
    She realized that he was still holding her left hand.
    He spoke in a voice eerily reminiscent of those of her mother and Tucker when they had stalked her as far as the mouth of the culvert last night:
    "… need, need … want … give me … give me … need …"
    He didn't look like her parents had looked when transformed. Why wouldn't all the aliens look the same?
    He opened his mouth wide and hissed at her, and thick yellowish saliva was strung like threads of taffy from his upper to his lower teeth. Something stirred inside his mouth, a strange looking tongue; it thrust out at her like a jack-in-the-box popping forth on its spring, and it proved to be a mouth within his mouth, another set of smaller and even sharper teeth on a stalk, designed to get into tight places and bite prey that took refuge there.
    Father Castelli was becoming something startlingly familiar the creature from the movie Alien . Not exactly that monster in every detail but uncannily similar to it.
    She was trapped in a movie, just as the priest had said, a real-life horror flick no doubt one of his favorites. Was Father Castelli able to assume whatever shape he wanted, and was he becoming this beast only because it pleased him to do so and because it would best fulfill Chrissie's expectations of alien invaders?
    This was crazy.
    Beneath his clothes, the priest's body was changing too. His shirt sagged on him in some places, as if the substance of him had melted away beneath it, but in other places it strained at the seams as his body acquired new bony extrusions and inhuman excrescences. Shirt buttons popped. Fabric tore. His Roman collar came apart and fell askew on his hideously resculpted neck.
    Gasping, making a curious uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound in the back of her throat but unable to stop, she tried to pull free of him. She stood up, knocking her chair over, but she was still held fast. He was very strong. She could not tear loose.
    His hands also had begun to change. His fingers had lengthened. They were plated with a horn-like substance—smooth, hard, and shiny black—more like pincers with digits than like human hands.
    "… need … want, want … need …"
    She plucked up her breakfast knife, swung it high over her head, and drove it down with all her might, stabbing him in the forearm, just above the wrist, where his flesh still looked more human than not. She had hoped that the blade would pin him to the table, but she didn't feel it bite all the way through him to the wood beneath.
    His shriek was so shrill and