Free The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden Page A

same.
    But it was only his face.
    Keomany had moved to one side and let the light seep in from the front of the shoppe and that tainted illumination showed her what had become of Paul. His face was suspended in the air in the midst of the room upon the tip of a rancid, pitted thing like a tentacle the color of oxidized copper. How it spoke she did not know. It extended, this limb, back into the store room among shelves of hand-dipped chocolates and shipping materials, and now she could hear something thick and fat and wet sliding along the concrete floor and in her mind she recalled the image of a manatee she had seen at the New England Aquarium when she was a girl. Yet she knew that this thing, if she saw all of it, would be nothing like that. It would be worse than what she had already seen, the face and the putrescent limb and . . .
    “Oh, you poor bastard,” Keomany whispered to Paul.
    She had taken in all of this in the tiniest fraction of a heartbeat and in the very next she saw the shadows deeper inside the room begin to unfold. They were sharp, those shadows, and they were coming for her.
    Keomany screamed and stumbled, turned and fled back into the shoppe. Something hissed from behind the counter and she glimpsed other dark things rising back there. The smell inside Sweet Somethings had changed once more, the air now heavy with an acrid stench like burning rubber. With another small shriek she launched herself toward the front door and collided with a floor display unit of glass and metal candlesticks. Now she did not even have the luxury of screaming as she fell, the display crashing to the floor beside her with a clanging of metal and a spray of shattering glass.
    Tiny pinpricks of fear ran across her flesh like the legs of a thousand spiders. Keomany felt as though her throat was closing up and tears began to sting her eyes. Her hands lashed out to either side in an attempt to leverage herself up and shards of broken glass cut her. She looked back toward the store room and now she saw them far more clearly than she had before, as if they had gathered the darkness of the room to carve their own bodies out of those shadows.
    The creatures were not black but the indigo of the midnight sky. Their near-skeletal bodies were covered in a strange armor plating like some insectoid carapace, their heads sheathed by the same chitinous material save for the long, whipping tendril that dangled from beneath each of those plated heads like some obscene and deadly rapier tongue. If they had faces under there, Keomany could not see them, and it was that more than anything else that snapped her from the paralysis of her terror and sent her scuttling backward, slicing her palms to ribbons on broken glass, toward the door.
    “What the hell are you?” Keomany cried as she finally spun onto her knees and launched herself to her feet.
    The shadow things hissed in unison and her back felt exposed, a target simply waiting for the attack. In the space between eyeblinks she imagined in excruciating detail the long, slender, blue-black talons of the things raking her back, slicing her throat, and ripping her chest open. She could feel the hunger in them, could sense their malign intentions, as though she was receiving those savage images of her own mutilation directly from their minds.
    They came after her, then, scrambling and capering like monkeys, those hideous rapier tongues darting about as though they might reach for her, thrust their foul points into her flesh.
    Keomany raced for the door.
    It was closed.
    She did not even slow down. When she reached the door, she thrust herself forward, pulling her legs up beneath her and crashing through the plate glass of the door, her mind consumed wholly with her terror and the thundering of her heart in her chest and the knowledge that if she did not escape these things she might end up like Paul.
    In a tangle of limbs and shattered window she tumbled across the sidewalk and a sliver of a