Twilight Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

set balusters were narrower than the balusters themselves. That design was fortunate; although the spotlight flickered through the gaps, there was no place where the guards could get a good look into the pavilion, certainly not as long as they continued to move.
    The dying goblin flopped forward with another spasmodic flexing of its powerful legs, heaving into a patch of moonglow, where I could see blood oozing from its piggish snout and dripping from its mouth. Twelve feet away. It snapped its jaws and shuddered and heaved again, its head moving out of the light, into shadow. Ten feet.
    I slid backward, staying flat on my belly, eager to get farther from this living gargoyle—but I froze after moving only a couple of feet, for the cruising security car had come to a full stop on the concourse, directly beside the Dodgem Car attraction. I told myself that it must be part of the guards’ routine to stop every so often along their patrol route, that they had not halted in response to anything they had seen in the pavilion, and I prayed fervently that such would prove to be the case. Nevertheless, on a night as warm and sticky as this one, they would be riding with their windows open, and once stopped, they were more likely to hear any sound that I or the goblin made. With that in mind I ceased retreating from my enemy, skinned myself to the floor, and silently cursed this nasty bit of luck.
    With a grunt and a lurch and a hard-drawn breath, the wounded beast dragged itself closer to me, reclosing the gap I had begun to widen, once more only ten feet away. Its vermilion eyes were not as clear or bright as they had been, muddy now, their strange depths clouded, as mysterious and foreboding as the lanterns of a distant ghost ship seen at night on a dark and fogbound sea.
    From the car the guards played the spotlight over the shuttered hanky-panks on the far side of the concourse, then slowly moved it around until it was stabbing brightly at the flank of the pavilion, spearing between the wide supports of the balustrade. Though it was unlikely they would spot either me or the goblin past the screen of balusters and among the score of miniature cars, it was not unlikely that, above the noise of the Ford’s idling engine, they might hear the monster’s wheezing inhalations or the thump of its tail upon the hollow floor.
    I nearly shrieked out loud: Die, damn you!
    It heaved itself forward more energetically than before, covering a full five feet, and thudded down on its belly with little more than one yard separating us.
    The spotlight stopped moving.
    The security men had heard something.
    A dazzling lance of light cut between two balusters, its point embedding in the pavilion floor eight or ten feet to my left. In the beam’s narrow revelatory width the wood planks—the grain, nicks, scrapes, gouges, and stains—were, at least from my deck-level point of view, preternaturally revealed in the most amazing and intricate detail. A tiny up-thrusting splinter seemed like a towering tree—as if the spotlight not only illuminated but also magnified what it touched.
    With a soft sputter, the goblin’s breath passed out of its ruined throat—and no new breath was drawn in. To my great relief the glow faded from its hateful eyes: blazing fire subsiding to flickering flame, flame to hot coals, hot coals to dull embers.
    The beam of the spotlight moved in this direction, paused again, no more than six feet from the dying goblin.
    And now the creature underwent another remarkable transformation, like a movie werewolf’s final reaction to a silver bullet, relinquishing its phantasmic form and once more dressing itself in the comparatively mundane face and limbs and skin of a human being. Its last energies were committed to maintaining the secrecy of its race’s presence in the midst of ordinary men. The gargoyle was gone. A dead man lay in the gloom before me. A dead man whom I had killed.
    I could no longer see the goblin