Tick Tock

mistress demanded of him.
    Maybe the dog could outrun the creature. Although the thing posing as the portly Samaritan apparently was a supernatural entity, immortal and ultimately unstoppable, it too seemed bound by some of the laws of physics, which was why the hard impact of high-calibre ammunition could halt it, knock it down, delay it; consequently, there was no reason to assume that it could move as fast as Scootie, who was smaller, lower to the ground, and designed by nature for speed.
    “But the thing won't be lured away by the dog,” Tommy whispered. “Del, it isn't interested in the dog. It only wants me… and maybe you now.”
    “Hush,” she said.
    In the wintry light from the frosted globes on the nearest lamp, the falling rain appeared to be sleet. The concrete walkway glistened as though coated with ice.
    Beyond the light, the rain darkened to tarnished silver and then to ash grey, and out of the greyness came the fat man, walking slowly along the centre of the deserted promenade.
    At Tommy's side, Scootie twitched but made no sound. Holding the shotgun in both hands, Tommy hunched lower behind the carousel stallion. In the windless night, he stared out at the promenade past the perpetually wind-tossed tail of the carved horse.
    At the other end of the leaping stallion, Del shrank herself too, watching the Samaritan from under the horse's neck.
    Like a dirigible easing along the ground toward its berth, the fat man advanced as if he were drifting rather than walking, making no splashing sounds on the puddled pavement.
    Tommy felt the night grow chillier, as though the demon moved in clouds of cold sufficiently powerful to damp the effect of the harbour's slow release of the day's stored heat.
    At first the Samaritan-thing was only a grey mass in the grey static of the rain, but then its image cleared as it came forth into the lamplight. It was slightly larger than before, but not as large as it should have been if, indeed, it had devoured two men, every scrap of flesh and splinter of bone.
    Realizing how absurd it was to try to rationalize the biology of a supernatural entity, Tommy wondered again if his sanity had fled sometime earlier in the night.
    The Samaritan-thing still wore the raincoat, though that garment was punctured and torn, apparently by gunfire. The hood lay rumpled at the back of its neck, and its head was exposed.
    The thing's face was human but inhumanly hard and perhaps no longer capable of gentler expressions, and at a distance the eyes seemed to be human, as well. Most likely this was the moon-round face of the fat man who had stopped to lend assistance at the scene of the Corvette crash. The mind and soul of the fat man were long gone, however, and the thing wearing his form was an entity of such pure hatred and savagery that it could not prevent its true nature from darkling through even the soft features of a face well suited to smiles and laughter.
    As the thing moved more directly into the December-pale light, no more than forty feet away, Tommy saw that it cast three distinct shadows, when he might have expected that, like a vampire, it would cast none. For a moment he thought that the shadows were a freakish effect of the three globes on the old streetlamp, but then he noted that they stretched across the wet pavement at angles unrelated to the source of illumination.
    When he returned his attention to the creature's face, he saw its pudgy features change. A far leaner and utterly different face metamorphosed on the rotund body; the nose became more hawkish, the jawline jutted, and the ears flattened tighter to the skull. The rain-soaked mop of thick black hair crinkled into lank blond curls. Then a third countenance replaced the second: that of a slightly older man with brush-cut, iron-grey hair and the square features of the quintessential army drill sergeant.
    As he watched the Samaritan's moon-round visage reappear, Tommy suspected that the other two faces were those of the unlucky men whom the creature had slaughtered a short while ago on the patio behind that Harbour side house. He shuddered—and feared that the demon would hear the chattering of his teeth even at a distance of forty feet, even through the screening tattoo of the rain.
    The beast stepped to the centre of the light fall from the lamp, where it stopped. Its eyes were dark and human one moment, radiant green and unearthly the next.
    Because Scootie's flank was against Tommy's left leg, he felt the dog