“Miss Newell,” Khalil said, “I saw you at the meeting at Mrs. McGowan’s house, so I know you have heard this and not believed it, but it is the truth. That thing is not your father. It has killed him and taken his place. And now, it has begun to do the same to you, I think. When it kissed you, did it not feel peculiar?”
“Well, yeah,” the younger one admitted, looking uneasily at her sister.
“Maddie,” the elder said, “What are you talking about?”
“Well, it did, Alice,” Maddie said, “It felt really weird. Daddy never kissed me like that before. I mean, on the mouth, and then he opened his mouth, and at first I thought, you know, he was giving me the tongue, and that was pretty weird, I mean Daddy, doing that? But then it wasn’t his tongue at all, it felt like something else, and it sort of crawled into my mouth and I could tell it wasn’t Daddy at all, it was something he’d had in his mouth, and it tried to slide down my throat and I almost choked on it, and swallowed it without meaning to.”
Alice was staring at her.
“Really?” she asked.
Maddie nodded.
“Why didn’t you say something?” Alice demanded.
“Well, I thought maybe I’d just imagined it all, and besides, we were so busy, helping Mr. Smith and everything, I hadn’t had a chance.” She looked as if she might cry. “And besides, it was Daddy who did it.”
The doctor had listened to all this, and looked utterly baffled. Smith was too weak to argue; he just lay back and watched. It was Khalil who said, “We should pump her stomach, yes?”
Alice started to protest, but stopped when she saw Maddie nodding.
Dr. Frauenthal agreed.
6.
There were two things in Maddie Newell’s digestive tract that had no business there.
One was a significant quantity of blood, apparently her own, and all still fresh. It was as if she had suddenly acquired a severe bleeding ulcer, sometime in the past hour or two.
The other was a black thing about five inches long and an inch or so in diameter, slick and moist, with four tiny sets of razor-sharp, hook-shaped claws, two at the narrower end – what Khalil thought of as the tail – and two about two inches back from the “head.”
It also had a mouth in the head end, a narrow opening perhaps an inch long and lined with tiny needle teeth.
It was quite obvious what was responsible for the blood; the thing’s claws and teeth were smeared with bright red.
It was also obvious that the thing was still alive.
The little group in the examining room stared at it in horror as it squirmed vigorously in the plastic bottle that Dr. Frauenthal had sealed it in.
“That was inside me?” Maddie asked.
Dr. Frauenthal nodded.
“It’s out now,” he said, in a vain attempt to sound comforting.
Maddie sat down, feeling faint.
“Kill it,” Alice said through clenched teeth.
Dr. Frauenthal shook his head. “It should already be dead,” he said. “I don’t know how to kill it.”
“Cut it up!” Alice said.
Frauenthal grimaced. “Ever see a flatworm cut in half?” he asked.
“Well, do something,” Alice insisted.
“What I’m going to do,” Frauenthal said, “is try and find out what it is.”
Alice and Maddie both turned to look at Khalil; Dr. Frauenthal followed their gaze.
“Sir,” he said, “I take it these two think you know something about that thing in the bottle. And as it was your suggestion that it was in there, in her stomach, I assume they’re right.”
Reluctantly, Khalil nodded. He looked at Smith, but Smith was obviously in no shape to comment.
He sighed, and started explaining.
The thing in the bottle squirmed helplessly as Khalil talked.
7.
Annie McGowan sat in front of the TV, her feet tucked up on the couch beside her, knitting nervously and paying no attention to NBC’s special on gangs, cops, and drugs.
Somehow, awful as gangs and drugs were, they didn’t have the same immediacy they had had two weeks before.
She had been alone in the house for hours, ever since Smith and Khalil had left to observe the results of their handiwork, and she had been getting more and more nervous.
For over a week, she had been expecting her phony sister-in-law to drop by, and it hadn’t. She had been ready for it, and it hadn’t come. She had lived with that. Somehow, though, the full moon, and her incomplete knowledge of what was happening seven blocks away, seemed to make it worse. She almost expected to see faces at the windows, or hear strange howling outside, like a scene from one of those awful late-night horror movies on TV that she never meant to watch but sometimes did anyway.
The sirens that had sounded for so long, over on Barrett Road, had all died away now; she wasn’t sure what that meant. Was it just that all the emergency vehicles had reached the apartment complex, or had something gone wrong and kept more from coming?
She pulled too hard at the yarn, trying to loosen a tangle, and instead it knotted hard. She hissed in annoyance.
She was trying to pick the knot apart when the doorbell rang.
She looked up, startled.
Someone knocked, hard.
She dropped the knitting on the endtable, got slowly to her feet, and turned off the TV. Neither Smith nor Khalil would knock like that; Maggie wouldn’t knock at all. That dreadful imitation Kate ought to know better than to knock that way.
Lieutenant Buckley, perhaps?
Or someone else?
Or something else? “Who is it?” she called, as she made her way slowly toward the front door.
No one answered.
She hesitated at the door and called again, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” someone said, in a familiar voice.
Ed Smith’s voice.
But he wouldn’t have knocked and rung like that. He had a key now, after all.
She threw a glance up the stairs at the bathroom door. It stood open a crack, the room beyond dark.
“Just a minute,” she called.
She hurried up the steps, almost running, pushed the door open and turned on the light, to have it ready. She didn’t want to fumble in the dark.
She didn’t have time to check everything, not without arousing suspicion, but a quick glance around spotted nothing wrong. She turned and headed back down.
“Come on, Annie, open the door,” Smith’s voice was calling.
She paused to catch her breath, then reached out and turned the knob.
Immediately, the door was pushed open, and she found herself facing not Ed Smith, but a big, fat man in a greasy T-shirt and old Levis.
He grinned at her.
She stepped back, startled.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Joe Samaan, at the moment,” he said, still in Ed Smith’s voice. “May I come in?”
She backed up onto the bottom step of the staircase. “Well, I…” she began.
“You don’t really have a choice,” the thing said, still grinning.
She stepped back, up another step.
The creature stepped in in a rush of warm, fetid air, and behind it came another man, another stranger, also grinning. She could see a third, a woman, out on the porch.
Simple nervousness turned to real fright. She hadn’t expected a whole group of them.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
The thing that called itself Joe Samaan wiggled a finger at her. “Can’t you guess, Annie?” it asked. “Tsk, tsk, I thought you’d figure it out right away.”
“Well, I didn’t, mister,” Annie snapped defiantly. “What do you and your friends think you’re doing?”
“What are we doing?” It grinned, and silvery teeth glittered. “Well, we’re planning a little welcome home party for your friends, Ed Smith and Khalil Saad, when they get here.” It stepped closer, and she backed farther up the stairs; she was halfway up and it was at the foot, now, and the other two had crowded into the foyer behind it.