"In breaking news tonight, another victim has been taken in a series of slayings that some have attributed to occult activities. Twenty-one year old Christina Whitaker was home alone when, under unknown circumstances, the suspected "High Plains Werewolf Killer" murdered her close to midnight on Tuesday morning.

Friends and family of Christina Walker say they first became concerned when she did not arrive at her place of work at the Smith and Boener Department Store yesterday morning. Later that day her father arrived at her Maple Avenue home to find her dead along with her two cats, which were mutilated in a similar fashion.

As with the rest of the thirteen other murders that have shaken the nation over the past six weeks, she was found viciously attacked with most of her blood drained and missing several vital and non-vital organs. Police have declined to comment further on the nature of the murder or if they have concluded that this is indeed the work of the infamous serial killer.

Since early last month, the Werewolf Killer has stalked a line leading from the first killings in Chicago, those of Julian O'Brian, Joshua Aulds and Amber Baker, to this most recent slaying in Williamstown. Each killing is distinct in the both savage and surgical manner in which each victim has been dismembered. Gristly messages are often written in the victims blood, giving authorities reason to suspect cult activities may be to blame. Police say they have several suspects, but so far have been reluctant to release information.

Amanda Aulds, sister of second victim Joshua Aulds, claims to have seen the suspect as he attacked her brother on January 19th. She and two other witnesses, who's identities have not been disclosed, gave reports describing the Werewolf Killer as, ironically, completely bald, and horribly deformed. He is said to have a large growth dominating the left side of his face, an egg-shaped, bulbous skull, and is missing most of his nose and upper lip. Police put his height and weight at six foot three and one-hundred and ten pounds, making him very tall and painfully thin.

If you have any information about the killings, the FBI is taking tips twenty-four seven at this number... We now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

###

On the small black and white screen of the beaten-up, spill-damaged Sony, a rerun of Saturday Night Live flickered back somewhere near the middle. Brett cursed, thudding his hand on top of the TV, disturbing the picture.

Being a teenager, Brett didn't really pay attention to the news. News, no matter how exciting, was stupid and boring because it was news. At his job working the night shift at the FastMart, he needed distractions.

He got up, opening an orange soda and walking into the back room. It was eight o' clock on Wednesday, so there wasn't any business then and their hadn't been since sundown. Brett thought he could grab a few winks of sleep before the nightclub crowd stumbled in for their midnight coffee. It wasn't like he boss ever bothered to come in on weeknights; he had a life and a family, and was probably at home, watching that same rerun of SNL with his stupid pit bull and a hot TV dinner. Stupid boss.

In the storage room, Brett dragged his Sony and put it on a milk crate in front of a lawn chair he had snuck into the store a few days before. Adjusting the antenna, he sat and grinned, feeling clever. No one came in this time of night on a weekday, anyway.

Except for people who weren't locals. People just blowing through town.

Lester limped into the FastMart with what he now knew was a sprained ankle, wincing every time he took a step. He needed some aspirin and some food in his razor-thin body, anything to soothe his discomfort and make his life easier. Anything would do, but a warm bed and someone to tell him everything was okay was what he really, really wanted.

Shuffling on and off his injured leg, Lester pawed the shelves, looking almost desperately for what he needed. His spidery hand closed around a bottle of painkiller, and he let go of a breath. More relaxed, he pulled a jug of water from the shelf along with a bag of potato chips and some candy. As he gathered these things, he saw his own hand out in front of him, and it scared him; it was thin, transparent, and knobby, like some sort of alien bird's. His fingernails were long, sharp, and curved, and there was a rusty line of dried blood under the edge. He clenched his hand and buried it in the pocket of his thick hoodie.

His jacket didn't fit well. He had taken it from a laundromat in a town somewhere between where he was now and Chicago, along with the baggy pants, felt scarf, and tight, ugly dress shoes he was wearing. Then again, no normal clothes could fit him very well any more, with his bulging shoulders, wide hips and lanky limbs.

Stop your whining. You're ugly. Get over it.

Phineas's voice sounded like it was right in his ear. He could almost feel his hot, rancid breath on the side of his face, as if the creature was real, physical and very close.

Shut up, Phineas.

You don't tell me anything.

And he was right. Lester drew back from the conflict and didn't bother his alter-ego any longer. In the imaginary face of the bloodthirsty killer, Lester folded like a wet piece of paper. How stupid and small he felt, not standing up to someone who didn't even exist. Phineas controlled everything he did; he couldn't go where Phineas didn't want to go, and he could forget about trying to turn himself in or, as he had tried, suicide. When Phineas wasn't totally in control and forcing Lester down, he was still guiding every action like a master of puppets.

Pondering this made him think about what Phineas had done, and then he had to stop. If he wanted to stay sane, he had to stay numb.

Stumbling up to the counter, Lester dumped a handful of cash out of his hand and started out. No one had seen him, and he registered that as a good thing. Now he had to get out and away from the light and exposure of this public place.

"Hey, man. Anything else?"

He froze. The voice came from behind him, making shivers go up his spine. He considered bolting, but he was too afraid to run. Very slowly, he turned around and faced a smiling teenage boy, with tired eyes and rumpled hair, a dirty shirt and jeans on his portly frame. The boy held out a pack of chewing gum.

"You look kinda nervous," he said.

Swallowing, Lester tugged up the scarf covering his horribly disfigured face. "No, I'm fine. Thank you," he stuttered. This didn't change the boy's smile, but Lester saw something flicker in his dark eyes. Fear? His fear made Phineas stir in his dormancy, a wicked smile forming on the mental image Lester had of his face.

"Oh. Okay," the boy said. Slowly, he started into the back room again. Lester watched him, and he started to feel faint. Oh no. Please, please, not now. If you do one good thing in your life, Phineas, please spare this boy's life.

But look at him, Lesty! Have you ever seen such a thing? He's so...

No. No, Phineas. Please.

Darkness began to pry at the edges of Lester's vision as Phineas fought for control. In his pocket, that clawed hand began to writhe and twitch. He couldn't flee; the floor seemed to grab his feet and hold him there.

"Are... you okay?" The boy asked. Lester didn't turn around.

Sure. I'm fine. How are you, boy-o?

Phineas was hungry. Lester could feel it in the very pit of his soul. The creature inside him was anxious for the kill and wouldn't stay still for much longer.

"Run, kid," Lester managed to squeak. "Run."

He heard the boy take a step, but he didn't know if he was approaching or retreating. Every bit of his power went into fighting Phineas down, into giving himself a chance to run; he managed to fight in a couple of steps out into the cold night.

"Mister?"

The feeling of a hand on his shoulder made Lester break. He whipped around, still half-conscious and barely in control, and off came the scarf covering his monstrous face.

A scream, and a fist connected hard with Lester's empty left eye socket. He saw stars, and fell with a painful thud on his twisted ankle. Screeching like an animal, Phineas took control and lunged at the boy, slashing his raised arm with his claws. With a scream, the teenager backed up and had the presence of mind to slam the glass door behind him, stopping Phineas's charge.

For several seconds, Phineas pounded on the thick glass, baying like a wild animal and dragging his claws on the surface. On the other side, the teenage boy just stood there, his mouth open, his eyes as wide as a fish's. It went on for a long time, the two of them staring and waiting for the other to make a move; eventually, Phineas quieted and sank down on all fours, fixing the boy with a dangerous look. A smile carved across his horrible face, showing all of his long, pointy teeth.

"This glass won't keep me out forever, little gene slave," he said. A giggle escaped him, echoing in the cavern formed by the tall roof of the gas station outside. "I'm thinking about how you're going to taste."

Now his hood was down, and the boy could see his whole face and head. From the back of Phineas's mind, Lester quietly acknowledged that he was exposed.

Carefully, never taking his eyes off Phineas, the boy began to back away and slip behind the counter. This infuriated Phineas, and he started up screaming again. Long, harsh, keening screeches ripped through the quiet air of the sleepy neighborhood, sending birds flittering confused from their nests. Lester could feel how deep Phineas dug into their chest for all this air and all this fury, his throat strangled with mucus, his lungs full of acrid smoke. Sputum flew from his mouth onto the glass, crawling down it slowly like a living thing.

Headlights suddenly filled Phineas's vision, making him recoil with a hiss. A truck was pulling into the gas station, and its bewildered driver was leaning out of the cab. He heard the boy yelling from inside, and that's all he needed. Phineas was insane, but he wasn't stupid.

Like a jackrabbit, Phineas tore away from the light and noise of the gas station and into the darkness of some nearby woods. On all fours, he gained speed fast and kept it, even through the tangles and puddles of the scrubby borders of the New Jersey pine barrens. His four broad paws dodged over the vines easily and waded through mud without losing a single step. The light of the street grew farther and farther away.

Laughing, the Spider Splicer dashed up a tree and started swinging gracefully into the swamp. His burrow was close by, and they'd never find him there. Not even a bloodhound could follow his path through the trees and the thick bogs he was so comfortable with. In a few days, he would move on, just as any predator does, to a new territory to the south.

Back at the FastMart, Brett was still standing there. The driver of the truck was trying to get him to talk, but he couldn't move an inch. Still clamped in his sweaty hand was that red scarf from the lost and found at a Laundromat he visited often; he thought that he had even seen it once or twice.

He had looked into the one ugly yellow eye of the High Plains Werewolf Killer.

Right then, Brett resolved to watch the news more often.

###

It was light when Lester woke up. He was back in the dank, cool burrow Phineas had dug with his big claws in the loose soil around the base of a pine tree. Just like an animal, he was curled up in a tight ball, a dirty bone cradled in his arms, the ball joint gnawed by his sharp incisors. The taste of blood was in his mouth.

What have you done now, Phineas?

Nothing. Don't get your panties in a bunch. I killed a possum after you made me chicken out at that gas station.

Lester felt sick. Taking the bone between two fingers, he tossed it to the far side of the burrow. Even then, he still felt his gut twisting around the weight of Phineas's meal. He had eaten a possum. A dirty possum from the swamp. He was sleeping in a hole in the ground! How on Earth was this happening?

Of course, he knew why. Somewhere in his tired, tattered mind, Lester knew exactly what Phineas had been up to; he simply denied it for as long as he could. If he ignored it, if he pretended that this sort of lighthearted mischief was the only thing Phineas did during Lester's blackouts, he would be able to hold on to the last scraps of sanity he had left. So, in the end, Phineas won either way.

Groaning, Lester flipped on his back and tried to go back to sleep; the pain in his ankle and poorly-healed shoulder kept him from resting. His head couldn't rest on the ground because of the protruding, bony growth around his left eye socket, and his crooked body didn't like to bend the way he wanted to.

There was no more denying it. As hard as he tried, Lester couldn't hold back the racing train of thought straining to break into his consciousness.

Phineas was killing people.

It took you this long to catch up with the news, Lester? Phineas asked. In the landscape of his mind, Lester saw his alter-ego lounging on the ground, smiling whimsically.

Suddenly, they were together in the burrow. Lester knew he was hallucinating; maybe he had finally snapped. He could see his counterpart lying there, his slender head propped up on his calligraphy-brush fingers. A thick, inky tongue slid out of his mouth like a loathsome snake, and licked his single eyeball. Lester gagged.

Don't act like that, Lesty. Phineas said, grinning even wider. Unlike you, I just do what's natural. You're in denial of your true nature.

I'm not you. I'll never be you.

Oh! Phineas giggled. Mister Hero thinks he's so much better than me! He's so pure and wonderful and I'm so evil and bad! That's a real lark, Lesty. That's a real lark.

You know, we are pretty different. I'm the one in charge, and you're the sniveling little underling. You serve me. I'm the one pulling your strings and there's nothing you can do about it.

Doc Lamb told us that everyone's equal, but you and me? We're not equal. Just like me and all those infidels we've wiped off our new Earth aren't equal.

So that was it. Phineas thought he was better than everyone else. Calmly, Lester realized that Phineas had killed several people now.

Why, Phineas? Why are you doing this to me?

An invisible eyebrow went up on Phineas's stiff face, but he continued to smile. Do you really want to know, Lesty? Should I really break this nice little bubble you live in now?

I have a life, Phineas. I had a life. Why do you want to hurt me? What did I ever do to you?

Phineas laughed. You don't exist. You're not a person. You never had a life outside mine. In fact... I kind of fancied that Jackie of yours, too. She had a scent that I just loved. Did you sniff when you saw her? That was me. I had to drink in that smell... hmmm... like a fix. Like ADAM.

Lester ignored how disgusting Phineas's pleasure was and asked him a question.

What is ADAM?

Very suddenly, Phineas's smile vanished, and a feral snarl formed on his rotted lips. He lifted himself with his arms, but Lester calmly reminded himself that Phineas wasn't real and he was only snarling at himself alone in this dark little hole. Lester was unafraid.

You don't remember?

No.

Turning away, Phineas started laughing again. He stretched, yawning, and scratched behind his ear with his foot in a horrible display of contortion. Lester swallowed when he realized that his own foot was clawing at his own ear in the same way, as if he was a mirror of the imaginary thing crouched next to him. Phineas was him as much as he was.

Well, Lester... if you really want to know... I could tell you. But you don't want to know. If you want to keep a hold of yourself and keep living in this little fantasy world of yours, where everything is okay and I'm just some bad dream... you'll not ask anymore.

Okay. I'll tell you just to see the look on your face when your cute little reality snaps in half.

Phineas's story didn't begin where Lester thought it would. Lounging on his back, he put his arms behind his head and recounted his childhood home.

He had been born in a house on the high desert of Arizona in 1924. His mother and father were dirt poor, and until he started going to school when he was ten, he had no idea how people outside the desert lived. His heavy-drinking father and his belt-wielding mother were an annoyance to him, so as soon as he was eighteen, he moved away to go to college on a scholarship.

The boy that Phineas was had a mind that impressed adults. He was a prodigy, with an intellect rivaling most of his teachers before he was in high school. Math was his passion, just as Lester's was, and his quick mind was totally confident and consumed with it's own ability. Always wanting to grow. Always wanting more. Phineas was gleeful in telling him about how he had visions of being surrounded by numbers, and how everything was made of numbers. He went between lucid and psychotic- his memory was muddled by the drugs he dabbled in during his first years at his first college.

By the time he was twenty, Phineas was accepted and transferred into Harvard. Among the bright minds there, he had flourished, living large in intellectual communities of students. He graduated four years later with a degree in theoretical physics, and moved on to more accomplishments in science and mathematics. His dream was tied to the huge, beautiful, whirring machines that did math he couldn't dream of within seconds. Difference engines, computers.

The letter had come on no particular occasion. Phineas had been sitting in his apartment, sipping his morning coffee, when he opened it and saw it was from Andrew Ryan.

The name pinged hard against Lester's psyche, for whatever reason.

Ryan's letter had been an invitation. An invitation to come along with him to a gulch he had built in Iceland. At first, Phineas had laughed at such a ludicrous idea- then his colleagues began disappearing. One by one, the brightest minds he knew vanished, often without a trace. They'd take one suitcase and some valuables, but nothing else. At least one of them had told him about the letters they had received. Phineas said that instead of concern, he had been consumed by burning jealousy.

Rapture. How beautiful Rapture was.

The city beneath the sea was like a place out of a dream, a foggy painting of one of Phineas's drug-induced fantasies. Great, glowing towers and pulsing neon, glittering bronze bathyspheres and shimmering fish. The halls of the city were plush, only for the greatest of all humanity. The people Phineas knew he belonged with.

Phineas found his place in the city immediately. The scientific community accepted him with open arms, drinking up every word he said in every rambling paper he published. People gathered to hear him speak at the many conventions and celebrations of knowledge the city held. Andrew Ryan himself was very often in attendance.

For years, Rapture gave Phineas the perfect life. He didn't really care about the amount of money he made; he only cared about how people felt about him and his powerful mind. As long as he had his office in Minerva's Den, the great computing hub of the city, he was happy. Sometimes he slept in his office, lulled by the sound of his beloved machines humming and working long into the night, smiling when he thought about how the punch cards running them eternally had his name written on them: Phineas Hull, programmer.

It was better than having his name in lights.

But life in Rapture didn't last.

Here, Phineas stopped. The mirage lying before Lester had his twisted hand over his eye, and he was shaking violently.

He said that one of the people he trusted had betrayed him in a way that destroyed everything he had. Reed Wahl, the director of Rapture Central Computing and one of the only men Phineas admired.

Wahl was a great man. A computer genius and a brilliant leader, he was one of Rapture's brightest. Phineas looked up to him, but it was with envious eyes, and eventually, that began to erode their relationship- especially with the advent of ADAM.

ADAM, ADAM, ADAM... the word licked off Phineas's tongue like he could taste it; he relished it with a crazed grin on his face. ADAM had been Rapture's waxen wings, a discovery that could change the world as Lester knew it, but not for the better. From what his maddened counterpart said, ADAM was something consumed, like the drugs he had still depended on, even in his greatest years. ADAM could do anything, and ADAM destroyed the Utopia under the frozen northern sea.

Lester didn't understand what exactly ADAM was, but Phineas talked about it like it was some sort of glorious, delicious cake. Except this cake had properties that defied reality, properties that didn't make sense. He said that it gave people amazing superpowers and made them beautiful beyond human possibility, then in the next breath, he'd curse it, screaming about the maddening hunger for it that consumed him and everyone in the city. Lester felt a strange sensation in his stomach whenever the word was used.

ADAM made people insane. It made Phineas insane, and it made Reed Wahl insane. Wahl was the first to act on it.

Paranoid and unstable, Wahl had begun suspecting his closest friends of conspiracies against him. For hours, Wahl had locked himself in his office, and through the walls Phineas could hear him ranting and raving to his great computer, The Thinker. He was afraid his friends were planning to steal The Thinker, that they were plotting against him the whole time. So Wahl had hatched an idea.

The next thing Phineas knew, he was being hauled away from his apartment at three AM by twenty armed members of Ryan's secret police. He was being charged of high treason, a crime not rewarded by any trial, plea, or negotiations- only a one-way trip to Persephone Penal Colony.

Wahl told Andrew Ryan that I was in a plot to take over the center of computing. Phineas said. His face was blank, and his eye was looking past Lester, somewhere in the distance to something Lester couldn't see.

So I went to the penal colony outside the city for six years. Do you remember what they did to me?

No.

Persephone was a place where nobody could tell anybody about anything. Ryan could do whatever he wanted with the people he put there. He liked to test his new Plasmids on them.

People were afraid of going to Persephone because that's where they made people into Big Daddies. He went on. Lester didn't know what a Big Daddy was, but he didn't ask.

Those people never went to Persephone. I wish they made me a metal Daddy. I know that's the very best thing that can happen to you there, short of dying.

But I'm not going to tell you about Persephone. There's no way I can put that into words. Enough telling. I'm going to show you.

There was a huge flash of light, and Lester felt the bottom fall out of his stomach, as if he was falling- falling, falling into a blinding white pit. He was twisting in the void, trying to find which was was up, but he had no body. It was a dream while he was fully awake and aware.

THUD!

Like a physical blow, the ground came up to meet him with a smack. Very suddenly, everything was totally silent and still. No longer was Lester in his warm, moist burrow in the swamp; he was in a world of ice and steel and quiet.

Welcome to Rapture, Lesty.

Lester hefted himself up onto his elbows, the dream thick and heavy around his ears. In the back of his head, he could feel the tension of Phineas's concentration, his straining to keep the hallucination solid. It felt very, very real.

He was in a tiny cage. Not a cell, but a cage. It was only six by four, but tall enough for him to stand up, if he had the strength to. It was like a kennel. There wasn't anything in the kennel except for himself and a puddle of water from a leak in the ceiling. It was cold. He was shivering. And he wasn't himself.

A pair of much shorter, stubbier arms was holding him up, with tan, healthy skin and normal fingernails. A hand went up to his face, and he only felt normal, soft flesh; the growth over his left eye was gone, and he had a nose again. He had a nose! If he hadn't been so terrified, he would have been overjoyed.

This is what I was like before. Phineas said in his mind. I was handsome.

Around him, as Lester's dream became more vivid, he found a place of terrible suffering. There was an acrid stench of ammonia in the air, mixing with the stench of rotting flesh and unwashed bodies. The foul air was buzzing with constant, grating noise; groaning, screaming, and raving human voices, and sounds that had to be animals being tortured- there was no way human beings were making those sounds. Looking outside the bars, Lester found he was surrounded by hundreds of other kennels down a long concrete hallway, a miserable pair of eyes looking back at him from each one.

These creatures... these were Splicers. Lester knew them from his nightmares. They had hideous faces, swollen and sallow, with decaying teeth and marble-like eyes. Few had hair. Misshapen hands gripped the bars of their cages limply, the steel being the only thing holding the creatures up.

A man in a white coat walked by; in each cage, he dropped a bucket from a cart he was pulling and continued on. When he got to Lester's cage, Lester saw a familiar face- another from his nightmares. This fellow had a high hairline, and tiny, half-moon glasses. His pudgy face exuded evil.

With one doughy hand, the man checked a card tied to the cage door. Turning, he selected a rusty metal pail from the cart, opened the door, and dropped the pail in front of him, slinging horrid-smelling slop all over the floor.

"Eat," the man said, frowning. "You're getting thin. You won't survive the transition unless you put on weight."

With that, he walked on.

The contents of the pail were a pale tan color, and stunk with fish and entrails. Sniffing, Lester looked into the liquid and saw a piece of intestine bob to the surface and sink again.

I ate this every day. Phineas said. Let's see how you like it.

Darkness seized the corners of Lester's vision, and he was thrown backward by a huge force. The dream began to dissolve around him as the stench of the prison grew and swelled and pushed into his face. His heart hammered in his ears and tears stung his eyes as he pulled himself in a ball, pleading for Phineas to stop. When he looked, praying to see the horrors gone, he saw a huge, slimy tentacle rising from the bucket and surging forth to grab him.

In an instant, he was somewhere else entirely. Lester found he couldn't move. His hands and feet were tied down, and he was pinned to a cold steel table. A huge, blinding light filled his vision from above, and for a moment he thought he was dead.

"Ready the specimen," a voice said. Lester strained to turn and look; on one side of him, he saw some more people in lab coats standing around, acting very casual. Some were smiling and laughing.

There was another table beyond them. On it, Lester saw another body strapped down, unconscious. It was something he had only seen on television: a huge, hairy beast of magnificent beauty that Phineas's vision seemed to accentuate. A massive black panther, from the darkest jungles of India, was sleeping peacefully there. Like Bagheera of The Jungle Book, he seemed to do so out of tameness, and had an air of peace and good.

A man stepped out from between two of the scientists. A rim of black hair covered his head, and two sharp eyes commanded his peons with harshness. A pencil-thin mustache sat on his lip like a worm.

"Let's get this over with," he said.

Without further banter, the team went about their task. A few went to Lester, and a few went to the panther. While Lester watched what they were doing to the cat, a needle slid into his arm, and his world exploded with pain.

Screaming, Lester thrashed violently, his eyes wide with terror. At the same time, the panther began to screech and roar, whipping its body at the people holding it down. More rushed in to control it, and more hands came down on Lester as well. Slowly, everything went black. With the last moments of sight he had, Lester saw the white coats linking tubes up to huge machines; one or two tubes didn't seem to go anywhere- until Lester saw that they went directly from the cat to an IV in his arm.

From here, the dream became indistinct. Blips of sound and shifting images went by him, some horrific, some even pleasant. The surgeries were the worst part: he'd be fully conscious while scientists took things out and put things in, injecting strange fluids and linking him by more machines to different creatures- tigers, baboons, Komodo dragons, eagles. Words like "hybridize," "Spider," and "war" floated around in the mist.

Some images were nice. His life from there seemed to get easier and easier; people tossed him bits of tender, better-tasting food, (raw meat, whispered Phineas) they played simple games with him, like catch and something with a fluffy thing tied to a string on a stick. In some little dreams, he saw the panther. Its big, fluffy body bowled him over, its rough tongue licking his face. He'd play with his panther friend Bagheera in a huge, white room, wrestling and batting a ball back and forth.

Then, in the next scene, the panther was dead. Blood was pouring from his neck, and one of the... creatures... Splicers... whatever... was standing over him, drinking the life that was pumping from his wound. That creature drinking his only friend's blood had snapped Phineas's wits.

They took everything from me. Phineas said. His voice was barely a whisper. They took my freedom, my dignity... my humanity. They locked me up for six years and made me their living weapon. Selfish, wicked gene slaves... but Doc Lamb... she saved me. She gave me a new purpose in my life.

The world shifted. Now Lester was in a huge, metal room, lit softly by dripping candles made of fat. Rickety pews were lined up in front of a massive altar crowned with a looming image of a woman in flowing white gowns, a gentle smile on her serene face. Lester couldn't move- he couldn't flee from the gathering of horrid, decaying creatures surrounding him, some grinning with skeletal jaws exposed, others weeping uncontrollably. Splicers.

"My Children!" Bellowed a dark, raspy voice. Up on the altar, a man was standing, casting a massive shadow on the painting behind him. A wide-brimmed hat hid his face, and a volumeous brown robe swallowed him like a monk's. Two yellow eyes sat in black sockets, shimmering wickedly in the candlelight.

"I have received a prophecy from the Lamb!" He yelled. The crowd suddenly became deathly quiet.

"She speaks of a new age... an age of glory for our family! She tells us that we must storm to the surface!"

A rusty cheer rose from the shambling hoard, fists pumping the air weakly. In the shadow of his hat, Lester saw the man smiling triumphantly.

"If we are to bring Utopia to Earth," he went on, "we must take what we need from the bountiful, sunlit world above! We must convert the ignorant masses to the truth, as passed down to us by God!"

Another cry, and some of the Splicers stood, whooping and hollering like wild hunters. Lester saw that some of them were like him, with lanky limbs and heavy claws.

"The infidels will be undone by our righteous efforts! The Lamb will lead us to victory!"

Now the preacher was standing up on his pulpit, and Lester saw that he was a Spider as well. A crooked talon gripped a water-logged Bible, and a razor-toothed mouth foamed like a rabid dog's as he spoke, his words getting faster and more frantic with each second. Lester's heart pounded in his ears.

"Death to the surface-dwellers!"

"HEAR HEAR!" Shouted the crowd.

"Glory to the Lamb!"

"HEAR HEAR!"

"Glory to the Sacred Daughter!"

"HEAR HEAR!"

"Glory to the Rapture Family!"

"HEAR HEAR!"

The rally ended with the fiery speaker falling down from his pedestal, as if he had been in a trance. While some of the parishioners ran to help him, others around Lester began to chatter excitedly.

"Father Wales really can give a sermon, can't he, Phineas?"

Lester didn't react, not knowing he was being addressed. He kept trying to peer over the crowd to see what had happened to the preacher. A hand shook his shoulder, and he turned.

A face out of the deepest, darkest pit stared back a him with a friendly grin. Rotting teeth hung in black gums, and thin hair plastered to wrinkled, slimy skin. Rancid breath hit Lester in the face, clear, real, and very un-dream-like.

"Phineas?Are you alright?" The creature asked.

He woke up.

With a gasp, Lester came awake, and the creature was gone. He was out of Rapture, out of the pit, out of the black mass in Father Wales's church of the damned. He was curled up in a tight ball, his teeth on his white knuckles, safe in his burrow in the swamp. Tears made his face hot and sticky, and sweat ran down his bald head. Phineas was not there, but he could still feel his cold presence in his mind.

So you see? That's why I do what I do. Why don't you come over to my way of thinking? Phineas said. In Lester's mind, he could see him with an almost sympathetic look on his face, supplanting him.

No. Never.

Have it your way.

The world went totally black for Lester. Phineas took control of their body in one small burst of effort, shoving his alter-ego to the very bottom of a deep, dark shaft in their collective mind.

Stretching, Phineas settled back into the soft earth and fell asleep. He licked his chops as he thought off all the atrocities he planned to commit on the next new moon. Under the cover of darkness, he had all the power he needed over frightened surface dwellers: he was an unstoppable plague, a force that could be seen and heard, but not touched.

He dreamed a dream of bloodshed.

###

A warm sun set over Mount Carmel, South Carolina. Spring was still far away, but in the marshes, air rose off the Atlantic and made the air thick and hot during the day. People cranked up the A/C and ignored it, except when the fog made travel difficult.

A car was crashed into a tree deep in the woods outside the tiny town. Its radiator smoked, pouring out fumes and sparking with tiny gouts of flame. The shattered windshield was strewn all over the dirt road, making David Rattigan very thankful that he was unhurt.

The thick fog had hidden the sides of the road, and he had crashed his car on the dark, black night. Now he was stranded, with no way to get back to town except by a long, cold, wet walk. He sighed and sat down up against a tree, nursing a cut on his right arm. Blood dripped down, staining his tan slacks.

That fog was about to do him another unkindness tonight.

It loved the scent of his blood, hugging it and carrying for miles. The smell wound through the misty bogs to an abandoned shed in the deepest part of the woods.

A jet black tongue flicked snakelike the air, catching the smell of a teaspoon of blood two miles away. Two shiny golden eyes opened, and a smile of razor-sharp teeth appeared.

Through the trees, a white shape began to surge at incredible speeds. Silent, agile, and deadly, like a heat seeking missile. Those shimmering yellow eyes focused on the light of a flashlight up ahead, and the smile grew even wider.

Rattigan swung his flashlight into the woods, nervous. He had heard a sound out in the darkness, and something in the back of his head whispered mountain lion. A stranger to this marshy, hilly country, he knew more about rocket science than staying alive until someone found him.

Eyes settled on him and his wrecked car. They focused on the blood dripping from his arm, and that black tongue wicked across long teeth. A grumble came from an empty stomach. Tonight, he was hungry for revenge. Any revenge. This fellow happened to look like the doctor who had given him his spinal cord injections.

Sighing, Rattigan stood up and started walking toward the faint glow of the town in the distance. It would take an hour to get through the bogs and the muddy dirt roads- and who knows was was out there. He gripped a heavy stick he had pulled off a mangrove tree.

SCRAAAAWWWWW!

Phineas leapt onto the man's back, moving to sink his fangs into the back of his neck. He missed, biting his shoulder instead. Rattigan screamed, trying to beat off his attacker with his staff, but not fazing him. Slashing claws came down on Rattigan's throat, and blood spilled onto the ground.

"FOR THE FAMILY!"

Another swipe across his target's chest.

"FOR THE LAMB!"

A deadly kick with a two-jointed leg.

"FOR RAPTURE!"

A rush of endorphins rewarded Phineas as he approached his disabled prey, who was lying prone on the ground, trembling. His eyes were wide with fear.

"Please!" He begged. "I have children! Be a human being!"

"I'M NOT HUMAN!" Phineas screeched. He reared up, ready to deliver a fatal blow.

CRACK!

That tree limb smacked Phineas across the face, knocking him backward. Rattigan stood, and the branch came down on Phineas over and over and over again. His jaw came close to breaking, but before it did he turned and backed away. Hissing, he displayed his horrid black mouth like a Mamba. The shock made Rattigan stumble, and the instant he fell backward, Phineas was on him. Screaming and struggling, they tumbled down the hill and into a dale.

The struggle ended. Rattigan was still. Phineas propped himself up, smiling wickedly with bloody fangs.

Deep inside, Lester came just barely conscious. His vision flicked back on, and the first thing he saw was a blood-soaked shirt. He thought, for a second, that he should just go back to sleep, and not interrupt Phineas's kill. But he had already done enough.

For a second, just a second, Phineas was distracted with pushing him back down. That one second was enough to make him loose interest in the limp body in front of him. Lester could take control and ruin the ritual; they could be discovered.

So Phineas ran off, back to his new home in a hole in a Spanish-moss eaten tree, leaving the body of David Rattigan in the grassy dale.

###

In other news today, a man has come forward, claiming to have survived an attack by the suspected High Plains Werewolf Killer.

Thirty-five year old David Rattigan of High Plains, Ohio was driving through McCormick County when his car crashed into a tree. Rattigan claims that while walking to Mount Carmel, he was assaulted by the suspected serial killer and managed to escape to a nearby ranger's station. He was treated for several severe lacerations, including bite wounds, and a cracked rib he says came from when the killer kicked him in the chest with superhuman strength.

Earlier tonight, Rattigan came very close to bleeding to death, but is now in stable condition.

Police are now very concerned with the possibility that the killer is in the area. They are asking citizens to stay alert, lock their doors and to not go out at night alone. Because the killer is known to follow his victims to their homes, citizens are advised to travel in carpools and to avoid travel altogether at night in rural areas.

The FBI is asking that anyone with any information call this number...

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.