Gremlins Read online

  Struggling fiercely, he pulled his arms upward, twisting his shoulders like a cork being screwed out of a wine bottle, pounding rhythmically with his fists, sideways and down, up and sideways, until—

  Splat.

  Stripe’s right arm shot like a rocket through the pulpy mass, rose high into his field of vision in a dripping wet salute of triumph.

  But what an arm! Surely it wasn’t his. And yet it was. It moved, rotated, pointed according to the dictates of his mind. Looking at it, like a person slowly returning to complete consciousness after a long sleep. Stripe knew. The final piece of the puzzle was in place. The power and strength had come.

  He took a moment to survey the imposing appendage raised above him. No longer ending in a soft furry paw, the arm was nearly two feet long, rippling with muscles beneath a scaly skin ringed with white, green, and brown stripes. His arm seemed more an instrument of destruction than a commonplace tool for lifting and manipulating objects. A combination maul and trident, the heavily boned fist ended in three giant claws, each sharpened to a glistening point.

  I am no longer a Mogwai, Stripe thought.

  I am a Gremlin.

  He had no idea how he knew the word, just as he had no knowledge how or why the physical metamorphosis had occurred. Those details were not important at the moment. What mattered now was the feeling of power about to be fulfilled. Worming free of the pod, he stood next to it momentarily, looking down at the rest of his new body. Bouncing lightly on the tips of his enormous clawed feet, he savored the realization that finally, freed from the puny Mogwai body, he would be able to satisfy the urges that had tormented him so long.

  Best of all, he had not only been reborn, but in the process had redeemed himself and his strategy. Shaking with anticipation, he looked intensely at the other pods.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he hissed gleefully at them. “We’ve got work to do, great fun to enjoy!”

  A green mist was hanging gently over the broken pod, as if someone had sprayed a wintergreen aerosol there. No one actually had, but it could have used it, in Roy Hanson’s opinion. Whatever it was that had just come into the world had brought an unpleasant smell with it, acrid, hot, faintly redolent of material scorched by an iron.

  He stood at the doorway to the lab, returning after having made certain no students remained in or near his classroom. At least no immediate explanation was needed and now there was privacy to study what had been produced.

  Looking across the lab at the green glow, he hesitated. In the tub directly below the cloud of fallout material was the new product and the remains of its pod. He had taken only a few seconds to look at it before calling Billy; that was all he’d needed to realize this was indeed no butterfly but a potentially dangerous animal. The flash of teeth—fangs was a better description—had told him that. He could still see them in his mind’s eye—two rows of widely spaced, finely sharpened teeth framing the entrance to a huge, wide, blood-red mouth, the same color as the malevolent eyes that had flashed at him during his brief look at the beast.

  It was getting ready to make its first foray into the world. Bits of the pod were already on the floor and were being joined by others as the creature—whatever it was—churned restlessly in the smooth metal tub. The basin wouldn’t hold it very long, Hanson knew, suddenly realizing he had no idea how to handle the animal or protect himself.

  Standing still, he looked around the room. The shades, which he had drawn in order to keep the Mogwai from crying out in pain, gave him an idea. If the creature was afraid of light, Hanson would use this aversion as a means of protecting himself. At the moment the lab was quite dark. If it got free, the animal would be at ease regardless of where it went.

  “Which is not a good idea,” Hanson said.

  He went to the light panel and one by one flipped on the lights of the room’s perimeter. When the outer rim was illuminated, he added lights to the adjacent interior areas until he had created an island of relative darkness in the very middle of the lab. Surveying the scene, he felt more at ease. The safety of bright lights was less than ten feet away in every direction.

  “Maybe I’m gettin’ chicken in my old age,” Hanson muttered to himself. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  He had already decided that he needed a blood sample to compare with the others he had taken of the parent creature, so he wheeled the cart containing his equipment to the edge of the light. In the case was a sterile container with dozens of samples and already-sterilized hypodermic needles. After checking to make sure he had a pair of heavy gloves, Hanson paused again.

  “This baby won’t be so easy to handle,” he said. “Maybe I better get a bribe.”

  Walking briskly out of the lab, through his classroom, and into the hall outside the canteen, he bought a Snickers bar from one of the vending machines and started unwrapping it as he returned to the lab.

  Then, pausing once again at the rim of darkness, he smiled. “Hey, man,” he said. “Let’s go. What are you, scared or something?”

  Pushing the cart to the tub, he looked inside.

  The animal was lying on its side, obviously still cleaning itself of debris from the pod before exploring further. When it spotted Roy, it fixed him with a cold stare.

  “Hello, boy.” Hanson smiled. “How was your trip to Pupa-land?”

  The animal regarded him with neither friendliness nor open hostility.

  “I figured you might be hungry after all you’ve been through,” Hanson continued, “so I got you a candy bar.”

  He held out the bar but the animal didn’t reach for it.

  As he waited for it to make up its mind, Hanson studied the creature closely. He estimated that it was about two and a half feet tall, a biped with incredibly long arms. The brown soft fur of the Mogwai had been replaced by dark, rippled armor plating that looked rock-hard. Its paws and feet were now three-toed claws and along its back ran a ridge of armor, not unlike that of a prehistoric reptile. The only feature that remained in any way similar to the old Mogwai was its nose, which remained pug and cute in the midst of a face that was notable for its malevolence.

  “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.r />
  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

  Billy 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.