bet you’re just crazy for it,” Linc grinned, then nodded. “I’ll be glad to have you along.” He headed for the door.
The side streets they traveled were deserted. The lamps lit the cement in little pools and thrust their radiance upward into the trees, making splotches of orange and yellow and red out of the fall-turned leaves. It was a beautiful time of year, the time Linc liked best; the time of crispness and new energy, wind, and wild leaves swirling; the time when a man could hear himself make a sound upon the earth as he walked through the crackle of leaves. But it was robbed of that feeling tonight. Because this was the time of something else—of monstrous things with unholy stares, sailing against the sky, hovering with the falling leaves.
This journey was incredible, too. People should all have been home, cowering, perhaps peering from their windows. Yet the reports said they were downtown—having come out of curiosity, out of fear and the need for the strength of numbers, and then finding too late that they were caught in traffic jams.
Linc pulled to the curb two blocks from the main street. As he got out of the car, he caught the sound of shouting and the blare of horns. Grand Street made a brightness ahead of them, and they strode toward it, shoulder to shoulder. All Linc could see of the thoroughfare was a tight-packed line of cars. Occasionally the figure of a man or woman hurried across the intersection. But there were no Eyes.
They took the last block at a slow lope. As they rounded the corner onto Grand, Linc thought, “Now we’ll see,” and drew in his breath to face the unexpected.
But it was too unexpected. He stopped in mid-stride and groped for the glass show window of the store nearest him, bumping into Wes, dragging the other man back with him. Ten feet away—ten feet away and two feet above the ground—hovered the hideous oval of an Eye. It had widened in startled surprise as he came into view, and now, as he skittered sideways, the blue iris followed him, rolling sideways between the lids until red appeared at the corners.
They stood, backs to the wall, huddled together. Linc couldn’t force his legs to move. His knees were limp and he feared he would fall. Something pulled at him that he didn’t understand. But it was compelling and powerful, and the urge of it revolted him until fear was a taste in his mouth, and the acid of it jolted him back to sense.
“Cross the street!” he hissed at Wes, and took off at a dead run. As he edged between the cars and climbed over the hoods of others, he cursed himself for a fool. He should have gone back around the corner, back to safety. Why had he chosen to stay?
He stopped in the shelter of a doorway and Wes panted up beside him. Wes was no longer a tanned, gentle giant of a man. His face was dead white and his lips gray. He pointed toward the center of town, and Linc stepped out of the shelter to see.
The street, itself, was a tangle of stalled cars, some climbing the backs of others, wrecked and abandoned. Glass gleamed broken on the cement, and water ran in streams into the gutters.
People sat in some of the cars, their heads visible in the street lights and the flash of neon signs. More people ran among them, or clamored up and down the sidewalks, or peered frozen from the shops.
And over the street, caught here and there in the light, were six Eyes. They glided back and forth with an even beat as though they were breathing. They sailed up and down the street, turning their whole enormous bulk, tilting downward to gaze into the cars and the stores. Their blinking was a vast closing and opening, their bodiless rolling was a horror against nature. They moved quickly, tipping, and coming low. The street lights caught them and were reflected in their depths and the glint was almost phosphorescent, alien and eerie.
The fantastic scene went on for blocks. The Eyes bobbed and sailed, flushing people out of hiding places. In the street, a man tried to gain the safety of a car, an Eye close behind him. A woman in the car struck his grasping hand with the steel spike of a shoe, rolled up the window and locked her door. The man ran on, but the Eye stayed over his head. As he came to a black sedan, a little girl cried and ran from her hiding place, another man behind her. The father caught the child but the Eye had fastened on him now. It swung low, its lashes brushing the child’s head. He pushed the child through the car window, reached in the back and pulled out an umbrella, and climbed to the roof of the sedan. The Eye rose up even with his face and he slashed at it with the umbrella; short, vicious stabs. The Eye recoiled, blinking rapidly. The man slashed again, and as the Eye turned away, its interest shifted to a group of four people creeping along behind its back, and went after them.
“Look down at the corner,” Wes said into Linc’s ear.
Collected in a side street at the intersection was a crowd—a large crowd of fifty or sixty people. And they didn’t seem frightened. Linc walked closer to get a better view until he was only a few stores away from them. They stood together, yet apart, their shoulders limp, their hands at their sides, and their eyes glazed over in a hard stare. He had seen them before, only then they were walking double file, and being run down by impatient cars. They belonged to the Eyes. And they, in turn, would walk into the fields and the woods until they came to that black thing down among the trees.
The six Eyes were still sailing up and down the street, passing from light to light, glowing red or blue or green from the neon. Here and there, he saw a person brought up short, go limp, and follow the glide of an Eye, to join the group at the corner.
“Have you seen enough?” he asked Wes.
“Too much.” Wes’ voice was hoarse. “Look out!”
Linc ducked just in time to miss being caught by the rushing lashes of one of the Eyes. As he regained his feet, the Eye stopped and swiveled to come back for him. Wes’ hand was strong on his arm, pulling him out into the street, and he broke away from the watery stare of the six-foot thing, dodging between the cars. They gained the other side. The Eye didn’t follow.
He ran around the corner, into the dimness of the side street. Wes’ feet sounded beside him, and he didn’t stop running until he reached his car. Underneath his revulsion and terror were the facts he had gathered, and in them somewhere had to be something to provide him with an answer.
* * * *
They reported to Iverson, then went down the corridor to a smaller office where they could have some privacy out of Collins’ line of fire. Linc gulped the coffee Wes heated and said nothing, trying to get his thoughts under control.
There was one thing on his mind that he could be rid of, and now. He said, “Wes, this afternoon at the game, and then at the house—all that arguing I did—I want to apologize.”
“There’s no need for that, and you know it. You have a crooked idea of friendship if you think that every little difference of opinion needs forgiveness.”
“Nevertheless, I felt like a fool when you overlooked it and came along with me. Nobody else offered to come.
You keep jolting me, you know? What I said this afternoon about friends and the obligations they create, I guess if I’m honest with myself, those are the easy ways I’ve used to soothe my own rejections. You’re the first man who has ever put up with me long enough to see if there is anything inside me to be friendly with.”
Wes was grinning. “I managed to get by your ugly face, if that’s what you mean.”
“Okay,” Linc surrendered, “I won’t say any more.”
“I think Kelly’s beginning to soften you up a bit.”
“Could
