Read Odd Interlude Part Three for Free Online Page B

Then something within the great ball writhes.
    As I back hurriedly away, the surface of the thing is revealed to be rather like a cloak but not of cloth, of skin, which now peels up with a slick slithering sound, revealing a crouched form that in this unveiling rises with alarming alacrity to a height of almost seven feet. The limbs are jointed in ways that suggest machinery rather than bone, but this is no robot. It seems both reptilian and insectile, its flesh so tightly strung on its legs and arms that it appears withered but nonetheless strong. In the torso, in the set of the shoulders, it seems less reptilian and less insectile than human, and of course it stands erect. The gray cloaklike mass of skin falls in folds around it, less like a coat than like a cape, and its flesh is otherwise pale with muddy-yellow striations.
    I would run, but I know that to turn my back will be to invite attack. Besides, everything about it speaks of speed, and it will have me before I’ve gone a dozen steps.
    Because of my disturbed mother and her resort to threats with firearms as a primary child-raising technique, I have all my life disliked guns, though at this moment I
love
the one in my hands. I hesitate to use it only because I don’t yet know the full nature of my adversary, for its face remains concealed in the dark cowl that is part of its capelike garment of loose skin.
    The creature lifts its hung head, the cowl peels away to settle around its neck like a rolled collar, and the face appears more human than not. Female. Greasy coils of dark hair. Features that might have been lovely before the skull elongated and the bones thickened during whatever transformation she endured at Hiskott’s hand.
    Here is one of the motor-court guests who was so alone in the world that she would not be missed, now a human-alien hybrid that perhaps exists for no reason but to protect and serve hermaster. If any of her former personality remains, any slightest degree of self-awareness and memory, what a horror her current existence must be, and how insane that kernel of her true self must have become in this monstrous prison of strange flesh and bone.
    Although the beast’s eyes are milky as if with cataracts, I am sure that it can see, perhaps as well in the dark as in the light. I can’t look away from those eyes, and suddenly I know intuitively what the thing is about to do.
    I drop and roll and spring up as, in a slithery scissoring of long and knuckled limbs, the creature crosses the distance that I have put between us and lands in the precise spot that I vacated, quicker than a cat.
    As it turns to face me, I see that something extraordinary has happened to its forehead. Protruding from the center of its brow is what appears to be a tapered horn about four inches long, half an inch wide at the base but as pointed as a nail. No, not a horn, but a hollow probe of some kind from which depends a single drop of fluid as red as blood. The droplet falls, and the segmented horn collapses into itself, backward into the skull. At the point where it retracted is a small puckered pouch of skin that I had not previously noticed.
    The creature doesn’t mean to kill me. I am to be converted, as was the woman, into a servant and defender of whatever Norris Hiskott has become.

TWENTY-FIVE
     
    Again I
know
, I move, duck, clamber across a club chair, and the creature is where I was an instant earlier, turning toward me with a hiss of anger and frustration.
    I continue moving, circling the pool table, keeping it between us, as the few remaining moths take flight again and caper about the chandelier, their distorted shadows chasing silverfish across the green felt.
    Following his hybrid rebirth, Hiskott has become arguably psychic, in the sense that he can have out-of-body experiences and invade the minds of others; therefore, this beast that serves him may have some such ability to a lesser degree. In fact, the compulsion that I feel to stare into those