es them right--just the way I like
them. They make me feel good inside. "How about a little blackjack
while we're waiting?"

"Sure. They're late, anyway."

I got first ace, and dealt. We traded a few chips back and
forth--nothing exciting--and on the ninth deal Joe got blackjack.

He shuffled, buried a trey, and gave me an ace-down, duck-up.

"Hit me," I said contentedly.

Joe gave me another ace.

"Mama! ... hit me again."

A four.

"Son," I told him, "you're in for a royal beating. Again."

A deuce.

Joe winced.

I turned up my hole ace and said, "Give me a sixth, you poor son. I
can't lose."

A nine.

"Nineteen in six," I crowed. I counted up my bets: five dollars. "You
owe me fifteen bucks!"

Then I looked up at him.

I'll repeat myself. You know that hot flush of pure delight, of high
triumph, even of mild avarice that possesses you from tingling scalp
to tingling toe when you've pulled off a doozy? If you play cards,
you've been there. If you don't play cards, just think back to the
last time someone complimented the pants off you, or the last time you
clinched a big deal, or the last time a sweet kid you'd been hot after
said, "Yes."

That's the feeling I mean ... the feeling I had.

And Joe Arnold was eating it.

I knew it, somehow, the moment I saw his eyes and hands. His eyes
weren't Joe Arnold's blue eyes any longer. They were wet balls of
shining black that took up half his face, and they looked hungry. His
arms were straight out in front of him; his hands were splayed tensely
about a foot from my face. The fingers were thinner and much longer
than I could recall Joe's being, and they just _looked_ like antennae
or electrodes or something, stretched wide-open that way and
quivering, and I just _knew_ that they were picking up and draining
off into Joe's body all the elation, the excitement, the warmth that I
felt.

I looked at him and wondered why I couldn't scream or move a muscle.

"Guess I made a boo-boo," he said. He blinked his big black globes of
eyes. "No harm done, though."

His head had thinned down, just like his fingers, and now came to a
peak on top.

He had practically no shoulders. He smiled at me, and I saw long black
hair growing on the insides of his lips.

_What are you?_ I screamed at him to myself.

Joe licked his hairy lips and folded those long inhuman hands in front
of him.

"It hurts like hell," he said in a not-human voice, "to be _slizzing_
you