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  THE ATTACK

  He crouched in the alleyway, listening with all his senses to the night as it surrounded him. Once more he was picking up those hideous thoughts, the chanting of a thousand condemned souls crying out in desperate supplication.

  And so they came for him.

  There was a clanking sound, like a manhole lid being forced open from below. There were no other sounds save the pounding of Philip’s heart. There were no cars, no pedestrians.

  Only Philip and that thing from the sewer.

  It waited there, its glaring red eyes searching, searching. It had an odor, both foul and sweet, like perfume-covered excrement. Then it moved down the street toward the alley.

  The thing that had been stalking him lunged out. He felt a claw rake his shin. Then came sharp pain, the warmth of dripping blood. He continued to run. Another thrust—the claw dug into his back, scraping away nuggets of flesh. Philip cried out, his screams high as those of the thing that was attacking him. He could feel the breath of the creature as its mouth found his neck, the hungry teeth digging into his skin.

  For the first time, he saw clearly what it was . . .

  Also by William Schoell:

  SPAWN OF HELL

  A LEISURE BOOK

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 6 East 39th Street New York, NY 10016

  Copyright©1985 by William Schoell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the United States of America

  PROLOGUE

  IN A SMALL room in an old hotel, an elderly man wrote feverishly. Sitting at a desk and scribbling in a notebook, he would stop now and then to pull his sweater more tightly around his shoulders. Cold. He was cold.

  Mr. Peterson got up and crossed to the window. Sighing heavily, shivering, he closed the window and shut out the draft. No good—his weary old bones were still chilled. He was still shivering. He knew what that implied. So little time, he thought, so little time. He went back to his desk and continued writing:

  The change was slow at first, subtle. We didn’t even realize it was happening. A few of us seemed to act . . . peculiar. But then the oddest thing—after awhile we thought their behavior was perfectly normal, because we were behaving that way too.

  Something shuffled out in the hall. There was a knock on the door. “Peterson—you in?”

  It was another tenant, Mr. Baloos. Mr. Blues, they called him. Not now, Peterson groaned. He dared not be disturbed before this was finished. He didn’t know how long he might have left.

  The knocking was more insistent. Blues wanted to chat, play poker, or borrow money. It was always one or the other. “Go away!” Peterson yelled. “Not now! I must have my rest.”

  Offended, Mr. Baloos didn’t answer. The shuffling resumed, fading away down the hall. Peterson, eagerly embracing the quiet, concentrated and began writing again.

  At first they thought it was primeval in origin. Primeval, ha!—Prime Evil is more like it. They discovered the capsule by chance, while building the foundation for a new chemical plant. No one could have guessed what they’d find inside. Instead of something to study and dissect and probe, it studied and probed and dissected them. It took over their minds. It took over our minds. God help me, it took over mine.

  It wasn’t long before everyone was under its spell, under the control of our “visitor. “And we knew—for it had planted the information in our minds—that we dare not rebel against it. Those of us who had seen it, been . . . touched . . . by it, had been treated. If our actions, our thoughts, were in any way interpreted as being a threat to its survival, a threat to its mission, we would . . .

  Peterson was shaking now, his arms and legs trembling so badly it was all he could do to stay in his chair and hold on to the pen. He forced himself to Write.

  It’s happening. I’ve fought successfully against it for as long as I could, kept my thoughts from reaching it. But—I knew I could only do this for so long.

  He had to rest. Sweat poured down his face, mingling with tears. He must write, he had to get it all down—before . . . The world must know. The city must be warned. He knew what was going to happen. The creature’s control had a side effect—the minds of it and its victims were inextricably linked. It knew what they were doing and thinking, but they knew what it was doing and thinking too. They knew, Peterson knew, its monstrous plan.

  So little time.

  He struggled against the fear and the shivering and wielded his pen like a dagger, wedging words into paper. He saw spots in front of his eyes. The thing was making a last-ditch attempt to dissuade him from his task—soon the hallucinations would come. With the hallucinations would come death—unless he stopped, relaxed, let down his guard, and let his mind be taken once again.

  He wrote: On the surface everything seemed normal. It knew that we could not hurt it or stop it. When it came time for my retirement, I even got the de rigueur gold watch and reception. It let us go off on our vacations, have our sick days, and except for one of us—the most important one—carry on our lives as if nothing untoward had happened. Oh, how we wanted to scream and cry when we were with our friends and family. How we wanted to tell them what had happened. But it wouldn’t let us. And even when we were able for moments to wrest free of its control, the shivering would start—it would send us a warning—desist or die. Die horribly. The shivering would start, and we would stop.

  Those of us who retired, who left the firm, thought we’d gotten away. That we could forget the past and go on with our lives and never feel its influence again. But no one ever escaped. None of us ever went far. It saw to that. We all knew its influence could only extend so far, that it had limits, geographical limits. So it made sure that our desires were subtly altered, that we stayed close by. Only the most meek among us were allowed our distance.

  The one who suffered the most was Everson. He was the strongest—psychologically, physically, in every way—and hence the one who most needed to be watched.

  And now, poor Everson . . . the creature has gone too far.

  He underlined the words with a stroke so deep and bold that it literally tore into the paper.

  He was getting tired. He was getting weak. The spots were getting bigger. He could no longer see the paper. He could no longer hold the pen. He sobbed, miserably. He lifted his hands to his head and tried to keep himself from screaming.

  What does it matter? part of him asked. What was he but a dried-up old man struggling by on a pension, a brilliant scientist reduced to a pitiful existence in a dreadful hotel. He had never known the value of a dollar, never saved his money, never seen the warning signs—when you’re old and without money, you might just as well be dead. Why hadn’t he seen the warnings?

  But the rents had been so high. And he’d had gambling debts to pay, debts which wiped out his savings. Everything he and his late wife Doris had worked so hard for. What does it matter? he asked himself again. Doris never lived to take that trip we’d planned anyway.

  He only hoped that somebody would find his memoirs. Writing them would literally be the death of him. Had he gotten it all down? Could they piece the rest together?

  Would they believe what he had written?

  He was still shivering, only it was worse than before. Much worse.

  For a moment he almost screamed that he was sorry and would never do it again, he almost screamed that he would burn the notebook and spend the rest of his miserable life in atonement if only he’d be spared. Anything, he’d do anything to save himself from that. But it
was too late. This time he had gone too far. The process was irreversible and he knew it. He was shaking like a junkie undergoing withdrawal. He was sweating like a pig, trembling and jerking like a palsied epileptic. He managed to get up from his chair, knocking it to the floor. He took one step.

  “No!”

  With horror he realized it had regained complete control of his mind. Something compelled him to grab the notebook in his hand, to tear it into shreds.

  No. My sacrifice will have been worthless. “Damn you!” he screamed.

  He was jerked over to the window like a puppet on strings. The pages were in crumpled pieces. His hands shot out and crashed bloodily through the glass. He did not cry out. He felt no pain. His mind was filled with utter despair as the papers flew out of his hands to trickle away with the breeze, floating down down into the alleyway to mingle with the trash. Now there really was no hope. Everyone was doomed. All was lost. Lost in a sea of refuse.

  The walls were coming closer. The damned thing had picked his brain and discovered his deadliest fear. Claustrophobia. The room was closing in. Peterson, still shivering with maniacal fury, reached out his arms to push the walls away.

  No! Keep away. Help me!

  His heart was pounding wildly. The four walls were pressing against him and his arms were too weak to keep them away. The spots before his eyes were bigger. His arms flailed in every direction, helplessly, as the room became the size of a closet, a trunk, a suitcase.

  The size of a shoebox.

  With disbelief, Peterson saw the stuff of his body crumbling, dissolving, running down his legs. Blood and flesh intermingling. Even his clothes were beginning to burn, shred, drip into the stream of gore. How could hallucination have done this to him, have squashed him? No, it was not the hallucination that was killing him. He was suffering the fate he’d been warned against.

  Peterson tottered, slipped, fell back against the wall beside the shattered window. Somehow from his shoebox he saw his blood still sticking to the cracked glass, until it too began to sizzle and dissolve, dropping to nothingness on the floor. As Peterson lay against the wall, his arms raised up in the air, and his legs spread outward, his entire body melted.

  Until he was a mere smear upon the wall.

  PART I

  Wednesday, October 16th

  ONE

  “MY BROTHER IS missing.”

  Steven Everson sat on a bench in the police station, waiting to speak to someone in the Department of Missing Persons. He was unshaven, and his clothes were disheveled. He had not slept for hours. Though normally a good-looking man of thirty-one, he now looked unattractive and on the verge of forty-five. He kept rubbing his eyes, trying to clear away the persistent cloudiness. He sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Thirty minutes later a young woman ushered him into an office for his appointment with one of the detectives on the Missing Persons Squad. He sat down in a chair next to a cluttered desk. The desk was full of papers and .the remains of a half-eaten breakfast. The big man at the desk introduced himself as Detective John Albright. He looked like he drank too much beer and ate too much pasta. He was broad-shouldered and big-boned, so his excess weight didn’t look quite as bad on him as it could have. During the conversation he kept scratching his crewcut and rubbing his puffy cheeks with his fingers.

  The whole thing seemed unreal to Steven. Thinking back on it later, he would hardly remember what either of them had said. He simply explained what had happened, and asked what could be done to locate his brother Joey. The officer listened to him patiently, now and then asking a pertinent question.

  “How old is your brother?” the detective asked.

  His brother had disappeared on October 15th, sometime between two-thirty and three-thirty in the afternoon. He had gone out jogging, like he did every day, wearing red shorts and a white T-shirt. He had been in his usual good humor. He’d refused a cup of coffee from the pot Steven had just made. Rushing out the door, he’d promised to return within the hour.

  He had never come back.

  Steven hadn’t started to worry until after a quarter to five. Unable to concentrate on his latest mangled manuscript, he had turned on the television to watch a couple of mindless game shows and sitcom reruns, finally switching to an old science-fiction film at four-thirty. He got up at the first commercial and went to raid the refrigerator. He had glanced up at the wall clock in the kitchen. Joey was only about an hour late, but he was usually so punctual that Steven couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy. After all, everyone knew that Central Park wasn’t the safest place in New York City, even in the daytime.

  “My brother is twenty-one.”

  “Does he have any friends in the city?”

  “Not really. He’s only been living with me a few weeks. He graduated from UVM—that’s University of Vermont—last June, spent the summer bumming around with some classmates.”

  At six o’clock he’d finally gone out to look for Joey. He’d followed in the boy’s footsteps; he knew which path his brother took. He had walked down along Central Park West until he reached the entrance to the Park at 72nd Street. He had stood across from it, on the other side of the road, watching as cars passed by, looking absently at the pedestrians gliding through the shadowy dusk. The park had nearly been deserted at that hour.

  Briskly, he made his way toward the jogging path that Joey liked to use. To his left there had been a big, wide-open field that stretched almost all the way to the east side of the city. Only one of the several baseball diamonds had been in use —by a small group of teenagers who seemed oblivious to the darkening sky. Steven had seen the skyline of the East Side buildings. They’d been all lit up, as mysterious and beautiful as a city of the gods. Monuments of loneliness.

  “There is a woman,” Steven said.

  Albright raised his eyebrows.

  “Nothing too serious. Someone he met in a singles bar one night.” He saw a funny look on the detective’s face and added: “Joey didn’t spend all his time in bars. He spent most of his time looking for work, going out on interviews—”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Something in the sociopolitical field. He had a BA in—” he stopped short. “He was something of an activist.”

  “Tell me about this woman.”

  “I never met her. He saw her two, three nights a week. Name’s Vivian.” Steven scrunched up his face trying to remember the last name. “Vivian something—I forget. He told me very little about her. She was really the only person Joey knew in the city—aside from me, of course.”

  Albright leaned back in his chair, took a sip of coffee, and said: “Mr. Everson, there are some things I have to be very blunt about. Your brother is the—let’s see,” he checked some papers in front of him, “the 315th person to disappear this week.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard right. I said the 315th person to be reported missing this week. So far.”

  “That’s unbelievable.”

  “Nobody ever realizes. But in a city this size, well, you can imagine.” He took anther sip of coffee. “Most of the cases are solved pretty quickly. Kids run away from home. Fathers chuck it all and leave the family. Stuff like that. In fact, you might get a phone call, or find your brother waiting for you, when you go back to your apartment.”

  “You mean, there’s nothing else we can do?”

  “About 15,000 people a year disappear, Mr. Everson. There’s not much more we can do. When some people still don’t turn up after a long absence, the family often hires a private detective who can give his whole attention to a case. We can’t do that. We haven’t got the manpower. We circulate pictures, ask around, the usual. But that’s all we can do.”

  “But . . . my brother. What about him?”

  “Don’t start worrying yet, Mr. Everson. Believe me. We got people like you who have been waiting years for their loved ones to come home. For you it’s barely been over a day. I’m sure your brother will turn
up if you give it time. He did the singles bars? He might just have wound up at somebody’s place last night. You ask me, he’s shackin’ up with this girlfriend of his. You get in touch with her?”

  “I don’t have her number. Can’t remember her name, as I said. He would have called me by now, in any case.”

  Albright sighed. “Mr. Everson, we’ll do the best we can. Let’s see. You’ve given us a picture, right? We’ll check with hospitals and morgues. Give it time. He’ll show up.”

  “What if he shows up dead?”

  Albright just looked at him. “Have faith, Mr. Everson. Kids—young guys on the make on the loose in the big city—you know how they are.”

  Steven tried to control his anger, his frustration. “He was wearing jogging shorts. He never came home to change. How can I make you understand? He never did a thing without telling me! He went into Central Park and never came back.”

  “Mr. Everson, if something happened to your brother in the park, we’d know about it by now.”

  A thought flashed through Steven’s mind. The acres of woods and grass and rocks in Central Park—no-man’s-land. Bodies that could be buried, hidden, lost without a trace if no one was looking for them.

  “You remember the last name of this Vivian gal, you tell us. Or call her yourself. That’s where your brother is, you can bet. Kids aren’t very responsible to their elders these days.”

  “But—” What was the use?

  Albright’s demeanor seemed to soften a bit. He was studying the picture of Joey—fair-haired, a lightly freckled face, blue eyes, a handsome boy—staring at it as if some secret place inside him had been touched and a vague memory stirred. “Good-looking kid.” He looked up, all business again. “He’ll be all right.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “Please, Mr. Everson. Keep in mind the enormous workload we have. If we were to spend so much time and effort on every individual case, especially in this instance, when a boy has only been missing a little over a day—well, you can imagine how much work we’d get done. We’ll just have to wait.”