CHAPTER I

It started during the program. The little noises were there but I didn't pay any attention to them, and I don't know now whether I thought they were the wind and the rain or maybe some realistic sound effects on tv. Of course they were the small sounds made by the two things that wanted to get into my house. They tried the doors, turning the knobs and pressing their bodies against the panels, and then they prowled around testing the windows. They were as silent as cobras but windows pushed or doors shoved will make some noise and so the little creaks were there but I paid no attention to them.

Then I got the feeling that someone was looking at me.

Nuts. My background as a fiction writer was getting under my skin. Someone watching me, my God, from where? The French windows behind me? Who'd be out in this downpour? I was glad my wife Nessa was asleep upstairs. With a baby on the way she needed her rest. Just to ease my rippling spine, I'd give a quick glance over my shoulder.

I did.

I saw a face like a gigantic mask. Enormous skull, low brow, small chin and thick-lipped mouth; wide cheeks and a mass of tumbled gray hair crowning the hatless head. Suggestion of a body like a gorilla's clad in dark broadcloth. Hands pressed flat on the glass, short thumbs and long fingers thick as country sausages. Worst of all the ghastly thing, two thinned eyes that caught the light of the tv lamp and shot it back at me as glowing crimson oblongs of animal hate. This creature, standing rock-steady beyond the full-length windows that were streamed and blurry with the driving rain, this beast, this—

I closed my eyes tight and then opened them. It was gone into the rain, an optical illusion! It had really spooked me there for an instant, the old marrow was still cold from the first grisly shock.

I turned and started watching the set again. I started to chuckle to myself. I heard the French windows snap and groan a little with the wind. Then I heard the fretful sound of a strained and snapping bolt.
That
wasn't the wind! I jumped to my feet and whirled around. I froze where I stood. A hulking brute with a mask for a face was coming for me and then I saw the face was a face and not a mask at all.

Another man behind the horror said sharply, "Don't touch him, Old One!" and those paws with the sausage fingers fell reluctantly. I backed up two steps and the tv set held me from going any further. The second intruder passed the horror and thrust out his hand, which was about as big as a hand can be without becoming an outsize foot; it took me a moment to realize that he meant me to shake it. When I didn't move, he grinned and said in his deep voice, "Don't know me, Ray?" and then I did know him. I was happier not remembering him, I wished I could stop knowing who he was, but now I did and I knew I was likely going to be dead before sunup, because he was Bill Cuff.

I did shake hands with him. I'm five-feet-ten and weigh one-sixty and I'm about as rugged as the average guy, or more so, because I play handball and used to be a pro footballer before I got married; but if I'd angered Bill Cuff he might have picked me up and torn me into little scraps like a piece of bond paper. He was the strongest man I ever knew. And for a couple of years he'd been badly wanted by the police, because he had murdered at least a dozen people. I shook hands with him. I didn't like it but I wasn't going to pander to my preferences just then.

"Sit down, Ray," Bill said, as if it had been his house. "Sit down, Old One." This to his companion.

The thing with the face sat on the floor, folding down without effort till his hams rested on his heels. I sat on the couch. Bill Cuff walked up and down the room. He kept his voice pitched low as he talked and I knew that Nessa wouldn't hear a thing if she happened to be awake. I watched Cuff. He moved back and forth like a great panther brooding in its cage and planning an escape. There was something so easy in those movements of leg and body that the effect wasn't altogether human. Which wasn't surprising, in view of what he proceeded to tell me....