In the moment before the kug erupted from his head, the second police officer thought someone in the building was using an old modem, or maybe there were bats.

If he’d been able to perceive Simon-time, he would have heard Simon singing in a voice that started in a deep basso profundo, only to sink infinitely like a Shepard tone into depths below human hearing. “K’th b’lai horath,” Simon sang in the language of the subhuman Tunka, “M’n-arai, gthalla v’dai…”

And outside of time and Simon-time, the kug awakened to the sound of the song, memories of a dark pact reviving in its ganglia, and the kug came back to Earth-time. There were several doors, but one was the singer’s and one was guarded and one was closing, so the kug picked the next available one, entering Earth-time through the brain tissue of the second officer, whose head exploded like an overripe melon at a target range.

The first officer began to scream and piss himself as the kug lashed out from his dead colleague’s neck.