Strange Highways

even as he fell, he relinquished his spider-lizard form, reverted to his human shape, but sprouted batlike wings that carried him, with a cold leathery flapping sound, through the air, across the railing, and onto the metal-grid balcony only twenty feet from Frank. His clothes - even his shoes - having split at the seams during one change or another, had fallen away from him, and he was naked.
     Now the wings transformed into arms, one of which Skagg raised to point at Frank. "You can't escape me."
     "I know, I know," Frank said. "You're like a cocktail-party bore descended from a leech."
     The fingers of Skagg's right hand abruptly telescoped out to a length of ten inches and hardened from flesh into solid bone. They tapered into knifelike points with edges as sharp as razor blades. At the base of each murderous fingertip was a barbed spur, the better to rip and tear.
     Frank squeezed off the last three shots in the revolver.
     Hit, Karl Skagg stumbled and fell backward on the balcony floor.
     Frank reloaded. Even as he snapped shut the cylinder, he saw that Skagg already had risen.
     With an ugly burst of maniacal laughter, Karl Skagg came forward. Both hands now terminated in long, bony, barbed claws. Apparently for the sheer pleasure of frightening his prey, Skagg exhibited the startling control he possessed over the form and function of his flesh. Five eyes opened at random points on his chest, and all fixed unblinking on Frank. A gaping mouth full of rapier teeth cracked open in Skagg's belly, and a disgusting yellowish fluid dripped from the points of the upper fangs.
     Frank fired four shots that knocked Skagg down again, then fired the two remaining rounds into him as he lay on the balcony floor.
     While Frank reloaded with his last cartridges, Skagg rose again and approached.
     "Are you ready? Are you ready to die, you chickenshit cop?"
     "Not really. I only have one more car payment to make, and for once I'd sure like to know what it's like to really own one of the damn things." ,
     "In the end you'll bleed like all the others."
     "Will I?"
     "You'll scream like all the others."
     "If it's always the same, don't you get tired of it? Wouldn't you like me to bleed and scream differently, just for some variety?"
     Skagg scuttled forward.
     Frank emptied the gun into him.
     Skagg went down, got up, and spewed forth a noxious stream of shrill laughter.
     Frank threw aside the empty revolver.
     The eyes and mouth vanished from the shapechanger's chest and belly. In their place he sprouted four small, segmented, crablike arms with fingers that ended in pincers.
     Retreating along the metal-grid balcony, past glass office doors that flared with reflected lightning, Frank said, "You know what your trouble is, Skagg? You're too flamboyant. You might be a lot more frightening if you were more subtle. All these changes, this frenzied discarding of one form after another - it's just too dazzling. The mind has difficulty comprehending, so the result is more awesome than terrifying. Know what I mean?"
     If Skagg understood, he either disagreed or did not care, for he caused curved, bony spikes to burst forth from his chest, and he said, "I'll pull you close and impale you, then suck the eyes out of your skull." To fulfill the second half of his threat, he rearranged his face yet again, creating a protruding tubular orifice where his mouth had been; fine, sharp teeth rimmed the edge of it, and it made a disgustingly wet, vacuuming sound.
     "That's exactly what I mean by flamboyant," Frank said as he backed up against the railing at the end of the balcony.
     Skagg was only ten feet away now.
     Regretting that the game was over, Frank released his body from the human pattern that he had imposed upon it. His bones dissolved. Fingernails, hair, internal organs, fat, muscle, and all other forms of tissue became as one, undifferentiated. His body was entirely amorphous. The darksome, jellied, throbbing mass flowed out of his suit through the bottoms of his sleeves.
     With a rustle, his clothes collapsed in a soft heap on the metal-grid floor of the balcony.
     Beside his empty suit, Frank reassumed his human form, standing naked before his would-be assailant. "That is the way to transform yourself without destroying