Twilight Eyes Read Free Page B

stabbed again.
    If he had been an ordinary man, he would have been lost, defeated as much by the temporary paralysis of terror and surprise as by the ferocity of my attack. However, he was a goblin, and although he was encumbered by his disguise of human flesh and bone, he was not limited to human reaction. With inhumanly quick reflexes he brought up one beefy arm to shield himself and hunched his shoulders and drew his head in as if he were a turtle, the net effect of which was to deflect my second blow. The blade sliced lightly across his arm and skipped over the top of his skull, gouging his scalp but doing no serious damage.
    Even as my knife ripped up a small patch of skin and hair, he was shifting from a defensive to an offensive posture, and I knew I was in trouble. I was atop him, shoving him against the car, and I tried driving a knee into his crotch to give myself time to wield the knife again, but he blocked the knee and grabbed a handful of my T-shirt. I knew that his other hand was coming for my eyes, so I threw myself backward, pushing off him with one foot on his chest. My T-shirt tore from collar to hem, but I was free, tumbling across the floor, between two cars.
    In the great genetic lottery that is God’s idea of efficient management, I had won not only my psychic gifts but also a natural athletic ability, and I had always been quick and agile. If I had not been thus blessed, I would never have survived my first fight with a goblin (my Uncle Denton), let alone that nightmare battle among the Dodgem Cars.
    Our struggles had dislodged the Eveready propped on the rubber bumper, which fell to the floor and went out, leaving us to war in shadows, able to see each other only by the indirect, milky radiance of the waning moon. Even as I tumbled away and came to my feet in a crouch, he was launching up from the car, rushing toward me, his face a black blank except for a pale disc of cataractic light shimmering in one eye.
    As he descended on me, I swung the knife up from the floor in a skyward arc, but he jerked back. As the blade swept by a quarter of an inch from the tip of his nose, he seized the wrist of my knife hand. With his greater size came superior strength, and he was able to hold my right arm rigidly above my head.
    He pulled back his right arm and drove his fist into my throat, a terrible blow that would have crushed my windpipe if it had landed squarely. But I lowered my head and twisted away from him, taking the impact half in the throat and half in the neck. Nevertheless, the punch was devastating. I gagged, couldn’t draw breath. Behind my watering eyes I saw a rising darkness much deeper than the night around us.
    Desperate, with an adrenaline-stoked strength born of panic, I saw his fist drawing back to take another whack at me, and I abruptly stopped struggling. Instead I embraced him, clung to him, so he would not be able to put power behind his punches, and in frustrating his counterattack I found both my breath and hope.
    We stumbled several steps across the floor, turning, dipping, breathing hard, his left hand still locked around my right wrist, our two arms raised. We must have looked like a bizarre pair of clumsy apache dancers performing without benefit of music.
    When we drew close to the scalloped wooden railing that ringed the pavilion, where the ash-silver moonlight was brightest, I saw through my adversary’s human glaze with unusual and startling clarity, not because of the moon but because my psychic power seemed to surge for a moment. His counterfeit features faded until they were like the barely visible lines and planes of a crystal mask. Beyond the now perfectly transparent costume, the hellish details and nauseating textures of the dog-pig thing were more vivid and real than I had ever perceived before—or wished to perceive. Its long tongue, as forked as that of a serpent, pebbled and wart-covered, oily and dark, flickered out of its ragged-toothed mouth.