Midnight

thrown her into the pantry—red and swollen with anger, his eyes darkly ringed, nostrils flared, lips drawn back from his teeth in a feral snarl, every feature contorted with rage. "I'll be back for you," he had said, spraying spittle as he spoke. "I'll be back."
    He slammed the door and braced it shut with a straight-backed kitchen chair that he wedged under the knob. Later, when the house fell silent and her parents seemed to have gone away, Chrissie had tried the door, pushing on it with all her might, but the tilted chair was an immovable barricade.
    I'll be back for you. I'll be back.
    His twisted face and bloodshot eyes had made her think of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's description of the murderous Hyde in the story of Dr. Jekyll, which she had read a few months ago. There was madness in her father; he was not the same man that he once had been.
    More unsettling was the memory of what she had seen in the upstairs hall when she had returned home after missing the school bus and had surprised her parents. No. They were not really her parents any more. They were … something else.
    She shuddered.
    She clutched the can of WD-40.
    Suddenly, for the first time in hours, she heard noise in the kitchen. The back door of the house opened. Footsteps. At least two, maybe three or four people.
    "She's in there," her father said.
    Chrissie's heart stuttered, then found a new and faster beat.
    "This isn't going to be quick," said another man. Chrissie did not recognize his deep, slightly raspy voice.
    "You see, it's more complicated with a child. Shaddack's not sure we're even ready for the children yet. It's risky. She's got to be converted, Tucker." That was Chrissie's mother, Sharon, though she did not sound like herself. It was her voice, all right, but without its usual softness, without the natural, musical quality that had made it such a perfect voice for reading fairy tales.
    "Of course, yes, she's got to be done," said the stranger, whose name was evidently Tucker.
    "I know that. Shaddack knows it too. He sent me here, didn't he? I'm just saying it might take more time than usual. We need a place where we can restrain her and watch over her during the conversion."
    "Right here. Her bedroom upstairs."
    Conversion?
    Trembling, Chrissie got to her feet and stood facing the door.
    With a scrape and clatter, the tilted chair was removed from under the knob.
    She held the spray can in her right hand, down at her side and half behind her, with her forefinger on top of the nozzle.
    The door opened, and her father looked in at her.
    Alex Foster. Chrissie tried to think of him as Alex Foster, not as her father, just Alex Foster, but it was difficult to deny that in some ways he was still her dad. Besides, "Alex Foster" was no more accurate than "father" because he was someone altogether new.
    His face was no longer warped with rage. He appeared more like himself thick blond hair; a broad, pleasant face with bold features; a smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. Nevertheless, she could see a terrible difference in his eyes. He seemed to be filled with a strange urgency, an edgy tension. Hungry. Yes, that was it: Daddy seemed hungry … consumed by hunger, frantic with hunger, starving … but for something other than food. She did not understand his hunger but she sensed it, a fierce need that engendered a constant tension in his muscles, a need of such tremendous power, so hot, that waves of it seemed to rise from him like steam from boiling water.
    He said, "Come out of there, Christine."
    Chrissie let her shoulders sag, blinked as if repressing tears, exaggerated the shivers that swept through her, and tried to look small, frightened, defeated. Reluctantly she edged forward.
    "Come on, come on," he said impatiently, motioning her out of the pantry.
    Chrissie stepped through the doorway and saw her mother, who was beside and slightly behind Alex. Sharon was pretty—auburn hair, green eyes—but there was no softness or motherliness about her any more. She was hard looking and changed and full of the same barely contained nervous energy that filled her husband.
    By the kitchen table stood a stranger in jeans and plaid hunting jacket. He was evidently the Tucker to whom her mother had spoken: tall, lean, all sharp edges and angles. His closecropped black hair bristled. His dark eyes were set under a deep, bony brow; his sharply ridged nose was like a stone wedge driven into the center of his face; his mouth was