Midnight

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 became an icy-cold, crawling sensation that worked through his entire body and up his face.
    He tried to scream again. No sound escaped him.
    The tentacles shrank back into the wall, pulling him with them, until his back was pinned tightly against 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 warm wool slacks and a sweatshirt and a cardigan over the sweatshirt because she found it hard to stay warm these days, Meg Henderson sat at the kitchen table by the window, with 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 them. Returning to old novels was comforting because the people in them never changed. Wolfe was still a genius and gourmet. Archie was still a man of action. Fritz still ran the best private kitchen in the world. None of them had aged since last she'd met them, either, which was a trick she wished she had learned.
    Meg 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 major complaints, thank God. She still lived in her bungalow on Concord Circle, an odd little half-moon street that began and ended from Serra Avenue on the east end of town. She and Frank had bought the place forty years ago, when they had both been teachers at Thomas Jefferson School, in the days when it had been a combined school for all grades. Moonlight 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 more grateful for her mental acuity. More than physical infirmity, she dreaded senility or a stroke that, while leaving her physically functional, would steal her memory an alter her personality. She tried to keep her mind flexible by reading a lot of books of all different kinds, by renting a variety of videos for her VCR, and by avoiding at all costs the mind-numbing slop 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 were what made it so beautiful.
    While looking at the rain, which earlier had declined from a fierce downpour to a drizzle but was once more falling 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 window at which she sat. They halted for a moment as a thin mist eddied around their feet, as if they were dream monsters that had taken shape from those scraps of fog and might melt away as suddenly as they had arisen. But then they raced toward her back porch.
    As they drew swiftly nearer, Meg's first impression of them was reinforced. They were like nothing on this earth … unless perhaps gargoyles could come alive and climb down from cathedral roofs.
    She knew at once that she must be in the early stages of a truly massive stroke, because that was what she had always feared would at last claim her. But she was surprised that it would begin like this, with such a weird hallucination.
    That was all it could be, of course—hallucination preceding the bursting of a cerebral blood vessel that must be already swelling and pressing on her brain. She waited for a painful exploding sensation inside her head, waited for