"Mother!" Noah Twilley shouted as he came in the front door. "We're going to the clinic!" He had left an oil lamp burning on a table in the foyer, and now he picked it up and headed toward the staircase, "Motheri" he called again. Ruth Twilley had remained in her white bedroom, the bedcovers pulled up to her chin while he'd gone with Tom Hammond to the clinic. He reached the stairs and started up.

They ended after six risers. Noah stood gripping the broken banister and peering into a dark chasm that had taken down the rest of the staircase. Below, in the depths of the hole, was a little flicker of fire. a broken lamp, Noah realized. Puddle of oil still burning.

"Motheri" he called; his voice cracked. His light ran along fissures in the walls. Ruth Twilley, the Mouth of the South, was silent. The ruined staircase swayed and moaned under Noah's weight, and he slowly retreated to the bottom of the steps.

Stood there, numbed and shaking. "Mother, where are youi" It came out like the wail of an abandoned child.

The lamplight gleamed off something on the floor. Footprints. Slimy footprints, coming down the stairs from that awful hole. Smears and splatters of a gray, snotlike substance trailed along the steps and through the hallway toward the rear of the house. Somebody needs a Kleenex, Noah thought. Oh, Mother's going to blow a gasket about this mess! She was upstairs in bed, with the sheet pulled to her chin. Wasn't shei

He followed the trail of slime drips into the kitchen. The floor was warped and crooked, as if something huge had destroyed the very foundations of the house. He shone the lamp around, and there she was. Standing in the corner by the refrigerator, her white silk gown wet and gleaming, strands of slime caught in her red hair and her face a pale gray mask.

"Who's the guardiani" she asked, and her eyes had no bottom.

He couldn't answer. He took a step back and hit the counter.

"The little girl. explain." Ruth Twilley drifted forward, the glint of silver needles between her fleshy scarlet lips.

"Mother. I... don't..." His hand spasmed and opened, and the oil lamp fell to the floor at his feet. The glass broke, and streamers of fire snaked across the linoleum.

She had almost reached him. "Who's the guardiani" she repeated, walking through the fire.

It was not his mother. He knew there was a monster behind Ruth Twilley's slick face and it was almost upon him. One arm came up, and a hand with metallic, saw-blade fingernails reached toward him. He watched it coming like the head of a sidewinder, and he pressed back against the counter but there was nowhere to go.

His arm brushed something that clattered on the Formica. He knew what it was, because he'd left it out to spray in the corners. You never knew what might creep in from the desert, after the lights were out.

She was a step away, and her face pressed toward his. a little thick rivulet of slime oozed from her chin.

Noah's hand closed around the can of Raid on the countertop, and as he picked it up he flicked the cap off and thrust the nozzle at her eyes. His index finger jabbed down on the spigot.

White bug-killing foam jetted out and covered the Ruth Twilley face like a grotesque beauty mask. It filled her eyes, shot up her nostrils, ran through the rows of needle teeth. She staggered back, whether hurt or just blinded he didn't know, and one of her hands swung at Noah's head; he lifted his arm to ward it off, was struck on the shoulder as if by a brick wrapped up in barbed wire. The shock of pain knocked the Raid can from his fingers, and as he was thrown against the kitchen wall he felt warm blood running down his hand.

She whirled like a windup toy gone berserk, crashing over the kitchen table and chairs, caroming off the refrigerator, her serrated nails digging at her own face and eyes. Noah saw gobbets of gray flesh fly, and he realized she was trying to strip the skin to the bone. She made a roaring sound that became the scream he had heard every day of his life, four or five times a day, like a regal command issued from the white bedroom: "Noooaaahhhhh!" Whether the thing in his mother's skin knew that was his name or not didn't matter. In that sound Noah Twilley heard the slam of a jail cell's door, forever locking him to a town he hated, in a job he hated, living in a hated house with a crazy woman who screamed for attention between soap operas and "Wheel of Fortune." He smelled his own blood, felt it crawling over his hand and heard it pattering to the floor, and as he watched the red-haired monster crashing around the kitchen he lost his mind as fast as a fingersnap.

"I'm here, Mother," he said, very calmly. His eyeglasses hung by one ear, and blood flecked the lenses. "Right here." He walked four steps to a drawer as the creature continued to flail its face away; he opened the drawer and pulled out a long butcher knife from amid the other sharp utensils. "Noah's right here," he said, and he lifted the knife and went to her.

He brought the knife down in the side of her throat. It slid into the false flesh about four inches before it met resistance. He pulled it out, struck again, and one of her hands caught him across the chest and hurled him off his feet against the counter. He sat up, his glasses gone but the bent-bladed knife still clenched in his hand, blood rising through the rips in his chest. His lungs gurgled, and he coughed up crimson. The monster's hands were swiping through the air, seeking him, and Noah could see that she had clawed her eyes and most of the facial flesh away. Metallic veins and raw red tissue jittered and twitched in the craters. Chemicals burned her, he thought. Good old Raid, works on all kinds of insects. He stood up, in no hurry, and walked toward her with the knife upraised and the merry shine of madness in his eyes.

and that was when the thing's spine bowed out and there was a crackling sound of bones popping. The back of her gown split open and from the dark, rising blister at the base of her backbone uncoiled a scaly, muscular tail that ended in a ball of spikes.

Noah stopped, staring in stupefied wonder as the burning oil flamed around his feet.

The tail whipped to the left, smashing through a cupboard and sending pieces of crockery flying like shrapnel. The monster was crouched over almost double, the network of muscles and connective tissues damp with oozing lubricants at the base of the tail. The ball of spikes made a tight circle, bashed a rain of plaster from the ceiling, and whirled past Noah's face with a deadly hiss.

"My God," he whispered, and dropped the knife.

Her eyeless face angled toward the noise. The half-human, half-insect body scuttled at him. The hands caught his sides, saw-blade nails winnowing into the flesh. The tail reared back, curving into a stately arc. Noah stared at it, realized that he was seeing the shape of his death. He thought of the scorpions in his collection, pierced with pins. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord, he thought. He gave a strangled laugh.

The tail jerked forward with the velocity of an industrial piston, and the ball of spikes smashed Noah Twilley's skull into a thousand fragments. Then the tail began whipping back and forth in quick, savage arcs, and in another moment the quivering mass gripped between alien hands no longer resembled anything human. The tail kept slashing away pieces until all movement had ceased, and then the hands hurled what was left against the wall like a sack of garbage.

The blind thing flailed its way out of the kitchen, following the odor of its spoor, returned to the broken staircase, and dropped into darkness.

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