The Changed Man Read Free Page A

time. Six-thirty. “A dream,” he said. And the dream had woken him early, too early, with a headache and sore eyes from crying. The pillow was soaked. “A hell of a lousy way to start the day,” he mumbled. And, as was his habit, he got up and went to the window and opened the curtain.
    On the glass, suction cups clinging tightly, was the child.
    It was pressed close, as if by sucking very tightly it would be able to slither through the glass without breaking it. Far below were the honks of early morning traffic, the roar of passing trucks: but the child seemed oblivious to its height far above the street, with no ledge to break its fall. Indeed, there seemed little chance it would fall. The eyes looked closely, piercingly at Howard.

    Howard had been prepared to pretend that the night before had been another terribly realistic nightmare.
    He stepped back from the glass, watched the child in fascination. It lifted a flipper, planted it higher, pulled itself up to a new position where it could stare at Howard eye to eye. And then, slowly and methodically, it began beating on the glass with its head.
    The landlord was not generous with upkeep on the building. The glass with thin, and Howard knew that the child would not give up until it had broken through the glass so it could get to Howard.
    He began to shake. His throat tightened. He was terribly afraid. Last night had been no dream. The fact that the child was here today was proof of that. Yet he had cut the child into small pieces. It could not possibly be alive. The glass shook and rattled with every blow the child’s head struck.
    The glass slivered in a starburst from where the child had hit it. The creature was coming in. And Howard picked up the room’s one chair and threw it at the child, threw it at the window. Glass shattered and the sun dazzled on the fragments as they exploded outward like a glistening halo around the child and the chair.
    Howard ran to the window, looked out, looked down and watched as the child landed brutally on the top of a large truck. The body seemed to smear as it hit, and fragments of the chair and shreds of glass danced around the child and bounced down into the street and the sidewalk.
    The truck didn’t stop moving; it carried the broken body and the shards of glass and the pool of blood on up the street, and Howard ran to the bed, knelt beside it, buried his face in the blanket, and tried to regain control of himself. He had been seen. The people in the street had looked up and seen him in the window. Last night he had gone to great lengths to avoid discovery,
but today discovery was impossible to avoid. He was ruined. And yet he could not, could never have let the child come into the room.
    Footsteps on the stairs. Stamping up the corridor. Pounding on the door. “Open up! Hey in there!”
    If I’m quiet long enough, they’ll go away, he said to himself, knowing it was a he. He must get up, must answer the door. But he could not bring himself to admit that he ever had to leave the safety of his bed.
    â€œHey, you son-of-a-bitch—” The imprecations went on but Howard could not move until, suddenly, it occurred to him that the child could be under the bed, and as he thought of it he could feel the tip of the flipper touching his thigh, stroking and ready to fasten itself—
    Howard leaped to his feet and rushed for the door. He flung it wide, for even if it was the police come to arrest him, they could protect him from the monster that was haunting him.
    It was not a policeman at the door. It was the man on the first floor who collected rent. “You son-of-a-bitch irresponsible pig-kisser!” the man shouted, his toupee only approximately in place. “That chair could have hit somebody! That window’s expensive! Out! Get out of here, right now, I want you out of this place, I don’t care how the hell drunk you are—”
    â€œThere was—there was this