Gremlins Read online

  Pumping his arms to warm himself, he watched Father Bartlett stop at the corner mailbox and carefully drop in several stacks of greeting cards. Did he actually expect them to be delivered in time for Christmas? Of course not, Pete Senior chuckled. He knew that the cards, one and all, were addressed to those left off Father Bartlett’s mailing list who had surprised him with cards.

  Pete Senior wished he could be as busy as the bank across the way. A constant flow of people went in and out of that building, for if Christmas was the very life of the holiday season, the bank was the heart. Nearby, in their warm patrol car, Sheriff Reilly and Deputy Brent, guardians of the town square, sat and watched to make sure no one’s holiday was marred by a bank heist, a fistfight over a present, or a fender battle over a parking space.

  Inside the mercantile chamber, which pumped signatures on paper one way and cash the other, Billy and three other tellers worked as fast as they could. Nevertheless, the population of Kingston Falls had never seemed so large or single-minded; from the first minute after opening, a steady stream of customers, which snaked through a line marked by velvet cords, had been backed up nearly to the doorway.

  Billy didn’t mind the work. In fact, he preferred having something to occupy his mind instead of worrying about those pods in his home. Only the fact that his mother was a very sensible, strong person who had promised to leave at the first hint of trouble kept his nervousness to a minimum. During several very brief breaks in the banking action he had attempted to tell Kate what had happened, but he had probably sounded incoherent. Having Gerald Hopkins standing nearby, watching for the first error he made, didn’t help his composure.

  Nor did the appearance of Mrs. Deagle.

  Watching her pause a moment after entering the bank, Billy knew she was going to head straight for his window. And for a few seconds it appeared that was her destination. Then, veering away from him, she caused him to exhale with relief as she pushed her way past the next customer heading for Kate’s window.

  “Help you, Mrs. Deagle?” he heard Kate ask, ostensibly friendly but cold underneath.

  “Yes, dearie,” Mrs. Deagle crooned. “I understand you’ve been circulating a petition trying to prevent me from closing that saloon you work in.”

  “If this is a personal matter, it might be better to discuss it after business hours,” Kate replied.

  “This is a personal business matter,” Mrs. Deagle shot back. “I always mix business with pleasure. And now it gives me a great deal of pleasure to tell you that your petition is useless. As soon as the holidays are over, I’m selling a hundred and four properties to the Hitox Chemical Corporation.”

  “Just as I suspected.” Kate smiled.

  “Just as you suspected, but are powerless to prevent. As you no doubt realize as a result of your snooping, your own home is one of those properties and so is that saloon. After the first of the year, I’ll sign the deal and all of you will have ninety days to get out. What do you think of that?”

  “I guess there’s nothing I can say,” Kate murmured. “It’s just the kind of a Christmas present I can see you giving.”

  “I’ll thank you not to be impertinent, young lady.”

  Kate opened her mouth as if to respond but in a split second changed her mind. Instead, she spoke gently. “Mrs. Deagle, you’re going to hurt a lot of good people. My folks can afford to move, but some of the people you’re forcing out just don’t have the money to buy a new place. Isn’t there any way we can prevail upon you to change your mind?”

  “You have two chances,” Mrs. Deagle said, smiling wickedly. “None and less than none. And now if you’ll deposit this check, I’ll be on my way home.”

  Billy looked at Kate. For one of the few times since he had met her, she seemed truly hurt and at a loss for words. His next act was impulsive and certainly reckless. Spotting a broom tucked beneath the counter, he grabbed it and pushed it through the opening in front of him toward Mrs. Deagle.

  “What’s that?” she mumbled huffily, drawing back as if he meant to strike her.

  “It’s a broom,” Billy answered.

  “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “I thought you might need a ride home,” he said.

  Mrs. Deagle’s eyes widened as several customers in the near vicinity began to chuckle.

  Leaving her holding the broom, Billy took the deposit slip in front of him and began to work on it, all the while sneaking a glance at both Mrs. Deagle and Kate.

  The old woman was furious and seemed ready to explode. Kate, on the other hand, could not suppress a smile. Billy was not sure what was going to happen next, but he was certain that, whatever the outcome, brightening Kate’s day made it worth it.

  Preoccupied with the object in his laboratory and exhausted from his long hours of research, Roy Hanson was as anxious to get through the day as his students, who were already restless to get into the new snow. Despairing of getting their attention with unusual teaching methods or subject matter, too stubborn to just let them sit and study or talk, he had decided to review their study of the brain in the hope a little material would stick with someone. Before him on his desk was a colorful, electronic model of the human brain with various sections that flashed on and off. Weighing close to a hundred pounds, it was a splendid instructional tool—and a shame to waste on such a lost cause of a day. Hanson had little choice, however, so he plunged ahead.

  “Anybody know what we call this?” he asked, pointing to the lit portion of the brain.

  No one answered.

  “Chuckie?” Hanson said, nodding toward a chubby, oversized youth with prominent teeth.

  “Ah, the crouton?” Chuckie murmured.

  “The crouton,” Hanson repeated, rolling his eyes. “Get them in my Caesar salad all the time. Any other guesses?”

  Samantha Weaver, the smartest student in the class, caught his eye. “Thalamus,” she said confidently.

  “Close, but I’ll get another doctor to do my brain surgery,” he replied. “It’s the medulla oblongata.” Then, his irritation beginning to show, he said, “What is it with you kids? I mean, look at this thing. When I was your age, I was learning this stuff from old books. You people have something outa “Star Trek” and you still can’t learn it.”

  He glared at them. They in turn avoided his glance. And in the grim silence that followed, a wet pop, like a piece of ripe fruit splitting, could be heard very distinctly. It came from the lab.

  Hanson decided to ignore it, but when it happened again, he knew he would have to investigate.

  “Open your books to page one-thirty-seven and study the brain glossary. I want everybody to know it.”

  As he stood up to go to the lab, his gaze met that of Pete Fountaine.

  That’s right, Pete, he thought, I believe its time has come.

  Looking nervously at his watch, he strode smartly out of the classroom, breathing a silent prayer his chastised students would not hear their tough teacher scream for help a moment later.

  Gizmo put his ear against the bedroom door and listened carefully for the tenth time since he had left the knapsack’s safety in favor of keeping watch. Too bad Billy’s mother didn’t share his concern, he thought. Oh, she made periodic trips into the hallway to see if anything dramatic had happened, but otherwise she seemed to go about her business as usual, answering the telephone and chatting in a completely normal way. If she was worried, she managed to hide it quite well, clucking good-naturedly at Gizmo as he crouched near the flower stand just outside Billy’s room.

  There was no way she could have known what was likely to happen in a matter of minutes or hours; nevertheless, it maddened Gizmo to see how these Earthlings had adapted to living in the shadow of disaster. Blast Mogturmen! If he had made them able to communicate as well as most other animals, Gizmo would have been able to tell them that their best course of action was to burn the Peltzer house. Yes! It sounded terrible, but it was the only way. Bright fire, paralyzing with visual pain e
ven as it destroyed. Otherwise . . .

  “Oh, no . . .”

  The sound of her voice, low and plaintive, interrupted Gizmo’s fatalistic chain of thought. Yet the sadness in Lynn’s tone gave him hope that she had come to the realization that drastic action must be taken.

  Hurrying back downstairs, he moved through the dining room and stopped just at the edge of the kitchen, where she was talking on the phone. Listening to her was really not eavesdropping in the strictest sense, as he did not understand every word these people said; rather, he usually got a sense of what they were talking about, and now he knew immediately she was involved in a personal matter, distressing but not life threatening.

  “But Rand, honey,” she said, sighing, “we’re expecting you tonight.”

  At the other end of the line, standing in the middle of a frenzied convention room, Rand Peltzer tried not to be distracted by the parade of robots, bizarre mechanical toys, and noisy salespeople who moved back and forth. “I know, honey,” he said. “But they’ve closed most of the roads, at least the main ones. And the ones that are open . . . they’re so treacherous . . . But I promise if it clears a little, I’ll try to drive home.”

  “O.K.,” Lynn murmured. “Just be careful . . . I mean, we’ve never spent a Christmas apart.”

  “Yeah. How’s everything there?”

  Lynn hesitated, but only briefly, deciding in a split second that it would do no good to tell him about the things that were upstairs. He was a terrible driver on snow and ice, and if he were in a hurry . . .

  “Fine,” she replied. “Billy went to work and I’m sitting here with Gizmo.”

  “See you soon, then.”

  “Bye, honey,” Lynn said, and hung up.

  “Bye.”

  “Hello,” Billy said.

  Getting an “urgent” telephone call at work, especially on this day and under his present circumstances, made Billy nervous for several reasons. He was, first of all, concerned that his mother was in some kind of danger; nor was he made comfortable by Gerald Hopkins’s hanging around after he gave him the receiver (expecting, no doubt, at least a death in the family for the call to be legitimate); finally, the dust from the battle with Mrs. Deagle had barely settled and he was still the center of attention of most eyes in the bank. Under the magnifying glass, he found it difficult to compose himself and his hand shook when he lifted the receiver to his mouth.

  “It hatched,” the voice at the other end said, startling him with its succinctness.

  “What?”

  “I said it just hatched,” Roy Hanson said at the other end of the line.

  “What . . . what is it?” Billy stammered.

  “Hard to say right now. Why don’t you come by and have a look? It’s almost time for you to quit, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Billy replied. “But . . . listen, I’ll have to call home first and find out what’s happened there.”

  “Sure. I’ll be here.”

  “Listen, Mr. Hanson, you don’t think it’s dangerous, do you?” Billy asked, aware that several sets of eyes were on him.

  “Well, it’s no butterfly,” Hanson replied. “I can tell you that.”

  “I’m gonna call home first,” Billy said. “And if everything’s all right there, I’ll drop by.”

  “Good. See you in a while then, I hope.”

  Billy hung up, dialed his home phone number. When his mother answered, he spoke quickly and decisively. “Listen carefully,” he said. “Mr. Hanson at the school just called to tell me the Mogwai came out of its pod. So ours probably aren’t far behind. Can you go upstairs and see what’s happened with them?”

  “How can I?” Lynn demanded. “You made me lock the door from the inside.”

  Billy had forgotten that.

  “Then go up and put your ear to the door. You’ll be able to hear if anything’s moving around.”

  “All right. Shall I call you back?”

  “I’ll wait,” Billy said. Hopkins and Mr. Corben were staring at him, not to mention Mrs. Deagle, but he was too agitated about the latest Mogwai development to care. A minute later his mother picked up the receiver.

  “All quiet,” she said.

  “Good. I’ll be home soon. I’m leaving now, but I thought I’d make a pass by school first. Maybe Mr. Hanson will know more by then or be able to give me some advice on how to deal with these new critters.”

  “O.K. I’ll be careful.”

  “When’s Dad coming home?”

  “Not until later. He’s been held up by the snow.”

  “Oh . . . well, bye.”

  Billy hung up, then went to close his window, and reached for his jacket.

  “Sorry, Mr. Corben,” he said to his boss, who watched him with a quizzical expression. “There’s a small emergency at home and I’ve got to take care of it.”

  “Wait just a moment,” Mrs. Deagle said, emerging from the background to assert herself. “This man was impertinent and I demand you fire him.”

  “Mr. Corben can fire me later,” Billy said.

  “And he will,” the voice of Gerald Hopkins called after him as he raced for the front door.

  Stripe thought at first, as consciousness started to return, that while sleeping he had slipped his head beneath one of the heavy rugs in Billy’s room. But he soon realized that it wasn’t just his head that was immobilized in some foreign environment; his entire being seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. Try as he might, he could see nothing but a filamentous curtain, as if he were packed past his eyes in heavy soup or grease. Nor could he hear much beyond a murky burble every time he moved what, with his blunted senses, he judged was his head.

  His first emotion was curiosity; the second—panic—followed quickly. It came with the sudden surety that he and his cohorts had been drugged and packed in crates or some other strong containers and were now awaiting destruction. We waited too long, he thought angrily; we knew how to multiply but didn’t. I, their leader, was tricked by that mealy-mouthed, smooth-talking minority Mogwai into delaying reproduction until the secret of greater size and strength was revealed. Now, too late, Stripe saw the fiendish logic of his adversary’s strategy. With only four majority Mogwai, they were not only manageable but could be trapped at some opportune moment and eliminated. But how could Gizmo and his human allies have drugged and imprisoned dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of them? It would have been impossible. In waiting for greater power, as opposed to numbers, Stripe had failed. Nearly deaf and blind, immobile, physically and mentally helpless, his main emotion was self-loathing at what his stupidity had cost them.

  As the shock waves generated by his thoughts coursed through him, Stripe thought for a moment that his physical presence shifted. Was there not a soft white, out-of-focus area ahead of him where only gray had been before? Struggling to move toward it but being unable to do so, he experienced new pulsations of frustration and anger. If only he could be free a minute! Just a single minute of time so that he could place one claw on the lower jaw of the creature called Gizmo, another on his upper, pause to enjoy the look of anguish and panic, and then pull, tear, and twist downward.

  The mental image brought Stripe pleasure, but it was nothing compared to the joy he experienced a moment later. That was generated by the flash of knowledge that he could kill Gizmo . . . Countless times before, he had tried to envision doing violence to him, but something inside his brain had invariably denied him even the pleasure of imaginary retribution. It was as if that thought was automatically short-circuited out of existence before it could be implemented. Now he remembered. Mogturmen, that bungling do-gooder, had programmed his precious Mogwai creations so that they could not kill one another, or, for that matter, even think seriously of it.

  Why then could Stripe now not only picture himself killing Gizmo, but know deep down that what he saw would not be just a mental image but a certainty if they met again? There was only one answer. He was no longer a Mogwai!

  If he could have leape
d for joy, Stripe would have done so at that moment of recognition.

  Now his thoughts and intuitions were crystallizing even as new developments were taking place in the physical realm. The white area he could see ahead was definitely closer and brighter. Stripe became more conscious of having a body as opposed to being a helpless blob suspended in liquid Styrofoam. If he concentrated very hard, it seemed a possibility for him to actually propel himself toward the mouth of the cave—toward the light. Though its intensity tortured him, he knew this was the painful portal through which he must pass—he was moving more perceptibly now, definitely moving—through which he must pass—a rushing sound grew so rapidly it was deafening, competing with the growing light to control his agony—must pass to be—

  Reborn!

  Suddenly, through a thick haze at first and then with startling clarity, Stripe saw the room again. The bed . . . drawing table . . . drawn window shades . . . all the familiar things.

  And some unfamiliar ones. Notably three huge pods surrounding him. Staring at them curiously, it took Stripe nearly a minute to realize that he himself was projecting from the top of a fourth huge wad. With the realization came a new rush of panic. Could the four objects be carnivorous plants of some sort, plants that even now were in the process of devouring him? Could it be that his “rebirth” was nothing more than a momentary escape from the jaws of this hungry plant?