“Is that you again?” he asked, already knowing the answer. “Where are you?”
In that instant, a sonic search beam probed Voorhees to depths he failed to understand. He felt naked, and alone, and revealed. The unnatural sense of peace was suddenly in conflict with the new vibrations that were reaching through him, as if both sensations were born of a subtle clumsiness—and which in one awkward moment produced a sense of alarm. His eyes ticked back and forth, up and down, looking from walls to ceiling and down to the floor. No one and nothing was there.
The refreshing feeling of a soft, inner touch washed over him again, as if in sudden response to the aberrant wave of uneasiness.
GENTLE
Voorhees could not resist. Though he heard voices he knew could not exist, the overmastering calm refused to leave him. And finally, it became the voice of his mother, creeping into his skull.
He was suddenly more tired than he thought possible, and more nauseous than he had been since his dressing down from Wolff two days earlier. He put a gloved hand to his stomach, and started to relent.
The voice in his head was changing, now—not his mother any longer, but Lisl.
GENTLE
“Dear God,” he whispered. The beast tried to push deeper, tried to keep him under control, but all Voorhees could visualize now was Lisl as he had last seen her: naked white ribs and scraps of spine that were never meant to be seen by a loved one.
“No!” he shouted, and moved his hand toward the helium pressure valve. He glanced down. The . . . thing had been barely more than a meter away the whole time. Four slender limbs, two of them bound in black membranes, anchored the creature to the underside of Voorhees’s workbench.
Then he looked into the blut kinder’s eyes. They were not expressionless, like the eyes of a snake, or a shark. Quite the opposite: This was the face of a sentient being, one who was simultaneously gazing into him with curiosity, as if asking questions of its own. It craned its little head upward and nearer.
You’re smaller than I thought you would be, Voorhees told himself, and he began to believe it looked far too thin and tame to be dangerous.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—
His hand hit the valve, jetting a microburst of helium laced with a red misting of propellant across his glove and across the table, and near the creature’s face. It managed to shield itself with a wing before the burst could brush over its eyes.
Initially, Voorhees had cursed his carelessness for somehow letting the beast creep literally under his nose without notice. But now he could understand how he had failed to detect its approach. It was impossibly fast, and just as impossibly silent. Only during a panicked pivot and a dash to the far side of the shed did its claws make any scratching sounds at all.
Voorhees coughed and bolted toward the front door, which he kicked open.
The creature managed to cover the same distance at least three times faster than the scientist and flitted through the same door. The beast ran with such astonishing fluidity that Voorhees’s eyes and mind were unable to truly follow it.
The guards outside, unfortunately, had the same problem. In that moment, they could never have aimed and fired at the intruder with any hope of clipping it. In the end, the men never saw the creature, taking aim at Voorhees instead. And it would have ended there for him, as he burst through the door into open air, if one of the more observant and agile sentries had not slapped his partner’s gun away from the engineer’s direction, causing it to fire harmlessly into the sky.
Only moth dust fluttered down. Silent.
CHAPTER 21
And You Shall Fight Legends
No use wasting your bullets, Martin. They cannot harm that bat.
—Dracula (THE MOTION PICTURE), 1931
R. J. MacCready had long suspected that the Europeans’ first encounters with vampire bats in the New World must have contributed to vampire lore in general, and to the vampire’s mythical association with bats in particular.