Gremlins (18 page)

“C’mon, boy,” Hanson urged, moving the candy bar closer to its mouth, “there’s nothin’ to be afraid of.”

Well into the darkened area, Hanson continued his line of patter, perhaps as much for his own benefit as the animal’s.

“See the candy bar?” he crooned. “Doesn’t it look good? C’mon, you better eat something, fella.”

Putting his hand on the edge of the tub, Roy noticed a bit of movement at the base of the animal’s nose. It had obviously gotten its first good sniff of the candy bar and was interested. Moving the bar forward, Roy released it barely a split second before a giant paw reached out to grab the delicacy.

“Good,” Roy laughed, partly in relief that he had escaped with his hand intact. “You’ll like it.”

Slurping noisily, the Gremlin began devouring the bar in a bite and a half. Hanson wished he had bought several more to keep it busy while he tried to get a blood sample.

“I think you trust me now, so we’ll trade. Candy for blood, O.K.?”

Reaching gingerly into the cart, he slowly brought out a hypodermic needle and took a couple of more steps closer to the animal. It continued to munch happily, and soon Roy was in a position to reach out and get his sample.

Lifting the needle from where he had hidden it alongside his leg, he made a quick movement forward.

Fast as Roy was, the Gremlin was quicker. At first sight of the syringe, its eyes narrowed and the pupils glowed a fierce purple.

My God, Hanson thought. It remembers.

He did not have time to think further. With a loud snarl, the Gremlin hurled itself out of the tub in Roy’s direction. One set of claws dug into the man’s shoulder while the other reached clear around his torso to enter his chest like giant staples.

As he fell screaming to the floor, Roy Hanson saw that he was a good five feet from the lighted area.

Gizmo’s temperature rose every minute Lynn was on the telephone. Didn’t she realize he needed to communicate with her? To tell her that the creatures upstairs must be destroyed? It was a terrible thing to consider, their destruction, but once a Mogwai entered the pod stage, Gizmo’s loyalty to it—and its to him—ended abruptly.

He had seen it happen before, as had the three other minority Mogwai on this planet, and the results were nearly always disastrous. The most recent episode, not caused by a spawn of Gizmo, had occurred late in 1983, when a single Mogwai somehow got aboard an American space shuttle craft,
Columbia.
Because of strict government secrecy, details were never published concerning exactly how the Mogwai was allowed to reproduce, feed after midnight, and turn into a Gremlin. In any event, the Gremlin eluded capture by the six-man crew long enough to shut down the computer handling the craft’s guidance and navigation systems. When the scientists switched to the number two computer, the Gremlin found a way to cause an overload. It then got into the system that senses the ship’s acceleration, position, and angle of attack. Over the Indian Ocean,
Columbia
actually started falling out of orbit and was out of contact with Mission Control for forty-five minutes. During that hectic time the pilots and scientists managed to pursue the Gremlin into a storage compartment and kill it. Returning to earth eight hours late as a result of the Gremlin’s meddling, the crewmen were debriefed by government officials, who warned them not to describe what had actually happened on the mission.

Before that . . . a montage of Gremlin-created or -influenced events, some major and some trivial, rushed through Gizmo’s mind . . . There was . . . the Memphis runaway escalators of 1972 . . . the 1969 Super Bowl . . . the East Coast power failure of November 1965 . . . a lesser-known power failure a month later in Texas, New Mexico, and Juarez, Mexico . . . the closing in 1963 of the New York
Mirror
, a newspaper that simply could not get the Gremlins out of its machinery . . . the 1962 collision of a runaway train, jet plane, and seagoing tanker at Danzig, Poland, the largest sea-air-land disaster in history . . . the Bay of Pigs paramilitary fiasco of 1961 . . . the hilarious but potentially dangerous three-day episode at the Onawa, Iowa, buttonhole factory in 1957 . . . the myriad antics of World War II all the way back to the complete disappearance of Vansk, until 1936 the largest city in Siberia . . .

Now it was Kingston Falls’s turn. Or so it seemed. But it did not have to be—yet. If Gizmo could somehow convince the Peltzers that locked doors and careful listening were not enough to—

He heard a click . . . then a sliding sound, which seemed to come from Billy’s bedroom upstairs. Crouched at the foot of the foyer stairway, he listened intently for nearly a minute, but except for Lynn’s chattering on the telephone, the house was quiet. He had just about convinced himself his imagination was playing tricks when a popping sound came from upstairs.

Scurrying into the kitchen, Gizmo was forced to pull up short, spinning like a top on one paw, when he reached the counter. He looked around nervously. Lynn had hung up the phone and was no longer in the kitchen. Nor was she in the pantry, basement, or anywhere else on the first floor. Was it possible she had gone upstairs without Gizmo seeing her?

Climbing onto the kitchen counter, he looked out the back window, shading his eyes carefully. He spotted her then, at the far end of the yard throwing bits of old bread to the birds. She was in the habit of doing this, especially when the ground was covered with snow, but didn’t she realize leaving the house today simply was not a good idea?

There’s not much I can do but wait, Gizmo thought, watching the ballet of stark black pecking forms against the white backdrop.

A moment later another sound came from upstairs, much louder than the first ones.

“Hurry, hurry,” Gizmo called to Lynn in Mogwai words. “We need you back here.”

Performing her task with infuriating slowness, Lynn showed no sign of coming back soon.

Gizmo gnashed his teeth, pounded on the window with his tiny paws. The light from outside caused him intense pain, even though it was late afternoon on a cloudy day, but he forced himself to continue rapping.

Sklurk. Wump.

More sounds from upstairs.

With a final angry glance at Lynn, Gizmo hopped down from the counter. Something had to be done. What, he knew not, but at the very least he had to know if the Gremlins had come out of the bedroom or were still in the post-metamorphosis stage. Moving quickly to the base of the stairs, he looked up into the hallway outside Billy’s bedroom. Was the door open a crack? Or was that just the way a shadow fell?

He waited, one ear cocked in the direction of upstairs, the other toward the kitchen so that he would not miss Lynn’s return.

The long silence continued.

As he waited, Gizmo considered methods of thwarting or at least delaying the Gremlins once they began their offensive of mischievous destruction, as experience told him they soon would. The key, in his estimate of the situation, was the bedroom door. Until it became very dark outside, the Gremlins would not attempt to escape via the windows. That left only the door, which, although locked, was by itself a slim reed against the storm. But if another obstacle could be placed outside the door . . . an obstacle such as . . .

Fire. Of course. But how could he make it happen? Gizmo’s brow furrowed as he thought furiously, trying to conjure up memories of how—And then he had it. Wasn’t there a container of something in the father’s workshop—?

Thinking no further, he headed for the basement, several times spinning at corners as his whirling paws slid on the kitchen tile floor. Momentarily, as he sat recovering from a nasty slide in the kitchen, he considered taking another look outside for Lynn, but he soon decided that could wait. The important thing at this moment was to locate the container and, as he recalled, something with which to ignite the liquid. If Lynn came in by the time he found what was needed, Gizmo would make her see what he had in mind.

If she remained outside, he would tackle the dangerous but necessary job alone.

Determined now and buttressed by a certain fatalism, he negotiated the basement stairs two at a time until he was five from the bottom, at which point he fell headfirst the rest of the way. Shaking himself, he got up, raced into the workroom, climbed onto Rand’s bench, and studied the array of cans, jars, and bottles stacked on the shelf above it.

Straining to remember the configuration of foreign letters and colors on the can, he finally found it and, without too much difficulty, got it down. It read:
LIGHTER FLUID
. The words meant nothing to him except the important fact that instant fire was produced when a match touched the liquid.

Easily locating a pack of matches, Gizmo began the ticklish task of trundling up the basement stairs with his cargo. Arriving at the kitchen counter, he dropped his load, climbed a stool, and peered outside once again. He did not see Lynn at first, which caused hope to rise in him that she was already at or near the door. A moment later, however, he spotted her, farther away than ever, talking with a neighbor.

Shaking his head angrily, Gizmo hopped off the stool, grabbed his weapons, and began the ascent to the upstairs hallway.

Two steps from the top of the stairs he paused, listened, and once again studied the door from this much more advantageous perspective. It did seem to be open a crack. Was it always that way in the locked position? Or—

Dismissing the thought from his mind lest it deter him from continuing his mission, Gizmo crawled onto the landing with his gear. Fortunately, the heavily carpeted stairs and hallway deadened any sounds he might have made under less favorable circumstances.

Carefully unscrewing its top, Gizmo lay the lighter fluid can on its side, aimed the opening at the floor just below the door, and pushed. The wall of the container yielded to his weight, propelling a thin stream of liquid into the general vicinity he hoped to saturate. But immediately after, in flexing back to its original shape, the can made a hideously loud snapping noise.

His mouth agape, Gizmo stood frozen to the spot, his paws as unmovable as lead ingots.

Even when he heard heavy footsteps on the other side of the door coming toward him, he could not move.

And then the door opened, revealing a leering Gremlin face topped with a mane of coarse white fur and a gigantic three-taloned hand, which quickly and roughly encircled his tiny body.

C H A P T E R
FIFTEEN

B
illy roared up to the school, amazed at how few students he had passed on the way but relieved that he would not have to deal with the traffic bottleneck at the entrance circle. Pulling as close to the front entrance as possible, he got out of the car and trotted to the door.

It was locked.

Inside, past the cross-hatching of wired glass, he could see that the main hallway was in almost total darkness. The Christmas exodus seemed to be more complete this year than ever. There was a solitary figure in the hallway, however, so Billy pounded on the door with one hand and rapped his key against the glass with the other. Reluctantly the figure—who turned out to be veteran maintenance man Waldo Sodlaw—ambled up to the door and yelled the obvious thing.

“Closed,” he said.

“It’s an emergency,” Billy replied. “Please let me in, Mr. Sodlaw.”

Perhaps knowing the old gentleman’s name helped. In any event he grimaced one time, sighed, and finally opened the door.

“Thanks,” Billy said.

“What’s the emergency?”

“I’ve got to see Mr. Hanson.”

“He’s gone.”

“Are you sure? Did you see him leave?”

“No, but I made a pass through his class. He wasn’t there. Left the lights on in his lab, so I turned ’em off.”

“Well, I’d better check,” Billy said, starting to move down the hall.

Sodlaw followed. “I told you,” he said. “He’s gone. Now let me close up and get my work done so I can go home.”

“I’ll only be a minute,” Billy yelled over his shoulder.

Breaking into a trot, he left Sodlaw far behind but could hear his footsteps echoing through the deserted halls when he turned into Hanson’s lab and stopped.

The lights were off, shades drawn, and no one seemed to be about, but Billy felt a presence. For one thing, the room had a strange smell, completely unlike any of the dissecting smells he remembered from his days in biology lab. When he heard a sharp intake of air, he jumped, looked around, but could see no one. He stood, listening. Behind him, far down the hallway, Mr. Sodlaw was carrying on a semi-hysterical conversation with someone else outside the building, something about a book left behind. Billy tried to separate those voices from a new sound closer to him—much closer—which reminded him of young girls trying to suppress a giggle. But where was it coming from?

Billy had taken a step toward the light switch when he saw something that sent a chill up his spine.

A shoe, with the foot inside it turned at an odd, uncomfortable angle, as if . . .

Walking slowly toward it, he saw the rest of the body lying behind the lab table, the twisted form of Roy Hanson.

“Mr. Hanson!” Billy cried out. A wave of panic threatened to make him run from the lab, but he resisted. If the man was only injured or even in critical condition, Billy could do much more good by staying than rushing out. Breathing a silent prayer that Hanson was still conscious, he forced himself to move toward him.

One quick glance at the body told him that Hanson was indeed dead. The same glance indicated that the death was not of natural causes. With mounting horror, Billy gasped at the sight before him.

Three dozen hypodermic needles had been inserted into various parts of Mr. Hanson’s torso, making the unfortunate man into a grisly pincushion. In addition, there was a major gash, as if he had been knifed or clawed.

A high-pitched scream reverberated through the lab.

It was not uttered by Billy. Hearing the first echoes of it, he whirled to look into the shrieking jaws of what seemed to be something out of the dinosaur age. High in the air, at Billy’s eye level, the dark green, armor-plated thing had hurled itself toward the young man from its hiding spot on the top of the nearby cabinet. The combination scream-giggle ended just as the Gremlin struck Billy’s chest, knocking him backward and sideways. Tripping over Hanson’s body, Billy cringed away from the massive claws as they passed less than an inch from his face.