But in a single horrifying instant, everything changed.

"Maybe..." For a horrifying instant she blocked on the proper command to get out of the mainframe, her distracted mind praying he wouldn't notice.

In that horrifying instant last Wednesday, a verbal fight swiftly escalated into violence in a Staten Island firehouse, officials say, leaving one firefighter on a respirator in a hospital and another under arrest, his career in peril.

In the horrifying, static instant that followed, Simon's mind strug- gled to absorb what his eyes saw-the thing that towered above him, swaying in the torch glare.

For one horrifying instant Kim saw his body writhing within the translucent flame, and then he was gone.

Catharine declawed it so that it would not scratch... For one horrifying instant, Gillian felt as if he had ceased to exist.

The word was so alien that for a horrifying instant she thought she was not looking at Kyosti at all, but at some other creature.

If the first face had been familiar to her, then the second was infinitely more so - and in one horrifying instant it confirmed everything the High Initiate's testi- mony had revealed, and swept away all possible doubt.

Cornelu felt as if he were being crushed in an olive p but only for one brief, horrifying instant.

Behind the fugitives the huge head crashed through the twigs, and they looked down for a horrifying instant at the nightmare visage framed among the green leaves, eyes flaming, jaws gaping.