Darkfall

I

At five-thirty, Jack and Rebecca went into Captain Walter Gresham's office to present him with the manpower and equipment requirements of the task force, as well as to discuss strategy in the investigation.

During the afternoon, two more members of the Carramazza crime family had been murdered, along with their bodyguards. Already the press was calling it the bloodiest gang war since Prohibition. What the press still didn't know was that the victims (except for the first two) had not been stabbed or shot or garroted or hung on meat hooks in traditional cosa nostra style. For the time being, the police had chosen not to reveal that all but the first two victims had been savagely bitten to death. When reporters uncovered that puzzling and grotesque fact, they would realize this was one of the biggest stories of the decade.

“That's when it'll get really bad,” Gresham said. “They'll be all over us like fleas on a dog.”

The heat was on, about to get even hotter, and Gresham was as fidgety as a toad on a griddle. Jack and Rebecca remained seated in front of the captain's desk, but Gresham couldn't remain still behind it. As they conducted their business, the captain paced the room, went repeatedly to the windows, lit a cigarette, smoked less than a third of it, stubbed it out, realized what he had done, and lit another.

Finally the time came for Jack to tell Gresham about his latest visit to Carver Hampton's shop and about the telephone call from Baba Lavelle. He had never felt more awkward than he did while recounting those events under Gresham's skeptical gaze.

He would have felt better if Rebecca had been on his side, but again they were in adversary positions. She was angry with him because he hadn't gotten back to the office until ten minutes past three, and she'd had to do a lot of the task force preparations on her own. He explained that the snowy streets were choked with crawling traffic, but she was having none of it. She listened to his story, was as angry as he was about the threat to his kids, but was not the least bit convinced that he had experienced anything even remotely supernatural. In fact, she was frustrated by his insistence that a great deal about the incident at the pay phone was just plain uncanny.

When Jack finished recounting those events for Gresham, the captain turned to Rebecca and said, “What do you make of it?”

She said, “I think we can now safely assume that Lavelle is a raving lunatic, not just another hood who wants to make a bundle in the drug trade. This isn't just a battle for territory within the underworld, and we'd be making a big mistake if we tried to handle it the same way we'd handle an honest-to-God gang war.”

“What else?” Gresham asked.

“Well,” she said. “I think we ought to dig into this Carver Hampton's background, see what we can turn up about him. Maybe he and Lavelle are in this together.”

“No,” Jack said. “Hampton wasn't faking when he told me he was terrified of Lavelle.”

“How did Lavelle know precisely the right moment to call that pay phone?” Rebecca asked. “How did he know exactly when you'd be passing by it? One answer is that he was in Hampton's shop the whole time you were there, in the back room, and he knew when you left.”

“He wasn't,” Jack said. “Hampton's just not that good an actor.”

“He's a clever fraud,” she said. “But even if he isn't tied to Lavelle, I think we ought to get men up to Harlem this evening and really scour the block with the pay phone… and the block across the intersection from it. If Lavelle wasn't in Hampton's shop, then he must have been watching it from one of the other buildings along that street. There's no other explanation.”

Unless maybe his voodoo really works, Jack thought.

Rebecca continued: “Have detectives check the apartments along those two blocks, see if Lavelle is holed up in one. Distribute copies of the photograph of Lavelle. Maybe someone up there's seen him around.”

“Sounds good to me,” Gresham said. “We'll do it.”

“And I believe the threat against Jack's kids ought to be taken seriously. Put a guard on them when Jack can't be there.”

“I agree,” Gresham said. “We'll assign a man right now.”

“Thanks, Captain,” Jack said. “But I think it can wait until morning. The kids are with my sister-in-law right now, and I don't think Lavelle could find them. I told her to make sure she wasn't being followed when she picked them up at school. Besides, Lavelle said he'd give me the rest of the day to make up my mind about backing off the voodoo angle, and I assume he meant this evening as well.”

Gresham sat on the edge of his desk. “If you want, I can remove you from the case. No sweat.”

“Absolutely not,” Jack said.

“You take his threat seriously?”

“Yes. But I also take my work seriously. I'm on this one to the bitter end.”

Gresham lit another cigarette, drew deeply on it. “Jack, do you actually think there could be anything to this voodoo stuff?”

Aware of Rebecca's penetrating stare, Jack said, “It's pretty wild to think maybe there could be something to it. But I just can't rule it out.”

“I can,” Rebecca said. “Lavelle might believe in it, but that doesn't make it real.”

“What about the condition of the bodies?” Jack asked.

“Obviously,” she said, “Lavelle's using trained animals.”

“That's almost as far-fetched as voodoo,” Gresham said.

“Anyway,” Jack said, “we went through all of that earlier today. About the only small, vicious, trainable animal we could think of was the ferret. And we've all seen Pathology's report, the one that came in at four-thirty. The teeth impressions don't belong to ferrets. According to Pathology, they don't belong to any other animal Noah took aboard the ark, either.”

Rebecca said, “Lavelle's from the Caribbean. Isn't it likely that he's using an animal indigenous to that part of the world, something our forensic experts wouldn't even think of, some species of exotic lizard or something like that?”

“Now you're grasping at straws,” Jack said.

“I agree,” Gresham said. “But it's worth checking out, anyway. Okay. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Can you explain how I knew that call from Lavelle was for me? Why was I drawn to that pay phone?”

Wind stroked the windows.

Behind Gresham's desk, the ticking of the wall clock sudddenly seemed much louder than it had been.

The captain shrugged. “I guess neither of us has an answer for you, Jack.”

“Don't feel bad. I don't have an answer for me, either.”

Gresham got up from his desk. “All right, if that's it, then I think the two of you ought to knock off, go home, get some rest. You've put in a long day already; the task force is functioning now, and it can get along without you until tomorrow. Jack, if you'll hang around just a couple of minutes, I'll show you a list of the available officers on every shift, and you can handpick the men you want to watch your kids.”

Rebecca was already at the door, pulling it open. Jack called to her. She glanced back.

He said, “Wait for me downstairs, okay?”

Her expression was noncommittal. She walked out.

From the window, where he had gone to look down at the street, Walt Gresham said, “It's like the arctic out there.”

II

The one thing Penny liked about the Jamisons' place was the kitchen, which was big by New York City apartment standards, almost twice as large as the kitchen Penny was accustomed to, and cozy. A green tile floor. White cabinets with leaded glass doors and brass hardware. Green ceramic-tile counters. Above the double sink, there was a beautiful out-thrusting greenhouse window with a four-foot-long, two-foot-wide planting bed in which a variety of herbs were grown all year long, even during the winter. (Aunt Faye liked to cook with fresh herbs whenever possible.) In one corner, jammed against the wall, was a small butcher's block table, not so much a place to eat as a place to plan menus and prepare shopping lists; flanking the table, there was space for two chairs. This was the only room in the Jamisons' apartment in which Penny felt comfortable.

At twenty minutes past six, she was sitting at the butcher's block table, pretending to read one of Faye's magazines; the words blurred together in front of her unfocused eyes. Actually, she was thinking about all sorts of things she didn't want to think about: goblins, death, and whether she'd ever be able to sleep again.

Uncle Keith had come home from work almost an hour ago. He was a partner in a successful stockbrokerage. Tall, lean, with a head as hairless as an egg, sporting a graying mustache and goatee, Uncle Keith always seemed distracted. You had the feeling he never gave you more than two-thirds of his attention when he was talking with you. Sometimes he would sit in his favorite chair for an hour or two, his hands folded in his lap, unmoving, staring at the wall, hardly even blinking, breaking his trance only two or three times an hour in order to pick up a brandy glass and take one tiny sip from it. Other times he would sit at a window, staring and chain-smoking. Secretly, Davey called Uncle Keith “the moon man” because his mind always seemed to be somewhere on the moon. Since coming home today, he'd been in the living room, sipping slowly at a martini, puffing on one cigarette after another, watching TV news and reading the Wall Street Journal at the same time.

Aunt Faye was at the other end of the kitchen from the table where Penny sat. She had begun to prepare dinner, which was scheduled for seven-thirty: lemon chicken, rice, and stir-fried vegetables. The kitchen was the only place Aunt Faye was not too much like Aunt Faye. She enjoyed cooking, was very good at it, and seemed like a different person when she was in the kitchen; more relaxed, kinder than usual.

Davey was helping her prepare dinner. At least she was allowing him to think he was helping. As they worked they talked, not about anything important, this and that.

“Gosh, I'm hungry enough to eat a horse!” Davey said.

“That's not a polite thing to say,” Faye advised him. “It brings to mind an unpleasant image. You should simply say. “I'm extremely hungry,” or “I'm starved,” or something like that.”

“Well, naturally, I meant a dead horse,” Davey said, completely misunderstanding Faye's little lesson in etiquette. “And one that's been cooked, too. I wouldn't want to eat any raw horse, Aunt Faye. Yuch and double yuch. But, man-oh-man, I sure could eat a whole lot of just about anything you gimme right now.”

“My heavens, young man, you had cookies and milk when we got here this afternoon.”

“Only two cookies.”

“And you're famished already? You don't have a stomach; what you have is a bottomless pit!”

“Well, I hardly had any lunch,” Davey said. “Mrs. Shepherd — she's my teacher — she shared some of her lunch with me, but it was really dumb — awful stuff. All she had was yogurt and tuna fish, and I hate both of 'em. So what I did, after she gave me a little of each, I nibbled at it, just to make her feel good, and then when she wasn't looking, I threw most of it away.”

“But doesn't your father pack a lunch for you?” Faye asked, her voice suddenly sharper than it had been.

“Oh, sure. Or when he doesn't have time, Penny packs it. But—”

Faye turned to Penny. “Did he have a lunch to take to school today? Surely he doesn't have to beg for food! “

Penny looked up from her magazine. “I made his lunch myself, this morning. He had an apple, a ham sandwich, and two big oatmeal cookies.”

“That sounds like a fine lunch to me,” Faye said “Why didn't you eat it, Davey?”

“Well, because of the rats, of course,” he said.

Penny twitched in surprise, sat up straight in her chair, and stared intently at Davey.

Faye said, “Rats? What rats?”

“Holy-moly, I forgot to tell you!” Davey said. “Rats must've got in my lunchbox during morning classes. Big old ugly rats with yellow teeth, come right up out of the sewers or somewhere. The food was all messed up, torn to pieces, and chewed on. Grooooooooss,” he said, drawing the word out with evident pleasure, not disgusted by the fact that rats had been at his lunch, actually excited about it, thrilled by it, as only a young boy could be. At his age, an incident like this was a real adventure.

Penny's mouth had gone as dry as ashes. “Davey? Uh… did you see the rats?”

“Nah,” he said, clearly disappointed. “They were gone by the time I went to get my lunchbox.”

“Where'd you have your lunchbox?” Penny asked.

“In my locker.”

“Did the rats chew on anything else in your locker?”

“Like what?”

“Like books or anything.”

“Why would they want to chew on books?”

“Then it was just the food?”

“Sure. What else?”

“Did you have your locker door shut?”

“I thought I did,” he said.

“Didn't you have it locked, too?”

“I thought I did.”

“And wasn't your lunchbox shut tight?”

“It should have been,” he said, scratching his head, trying to remember.

Faye said, “Well, obviously, it wasn't. Rats can't open a lock, open a door, and pry the lid off a lunchbox. You must have been very careless, Davey. I'm surprised at you. I'll bet you ate one of those oatmeal cookies first thing when you got to school, just couldn't wait, and then forgot to put the lid back on the box.”

“But I didn't,” Davey protested.

“Your father's not teaching you to pick up after yourself,” Faye said. “That's the kind of thing a mother teaches, and your father's just neglecting it.”

Penny was going to tell them about how her own locker had been trashed when she'd gone to school this morning. She was even going to tell them about the things in the basement because it seemed to her that what had happened to Davey's lunch would somehow substantiate her story.

But before Penny could speak, Aunt Faye spoke up in her most morally indignant tone of voice: “What I want to know is what kind of school this is your father's sent to you. What kind of dirty hole is this place, this Wellton? “

“It's a good school,” Penny said defensively.

“With rats?” Faye said. “No good school would have rats. No halfway decent school would have rats. Why, what if they'd still been in the locker when Davey went for his lunch? He might've been bitten. Rats are filthy. They carry all kinds of diseases. They're disgusting. I simply can't imagine any school for young children being allowed to remain open if it has rats. The Board of Health has got to be told about this first thing tomorrow. Your father's going to have to do something about the situation immediately. I won't allow him to procrastinate. Not where your health is concerned. Why, your poor dear mother would be appalled by such a place, a school with rats in the wall. Rats! My God, rats carry everything from rabies to the plague!”

Faye droned on and on.

Penny tuned her out.

There wasn't any point in telling them about her own locker and the silver-eyed things in the school basement. Faye would insist they had been rats, too. When that woman got something in her head, there was no way of getting it out again, no way of changing her mind. Now, Faye was looking forward to confronting their father about the rats; she relished the thought of blaming him for putting them in a rat-infested school, and she wouldn't be the least receptive to anything Penny said, to any explanation or any conflicting facts that might put rats completely out of the picture and thereby spare their father from a scolding.

Even if I tell her about the hand, Penny thought, the little hand that came under the green gate, she'll stick to the idea that it's rats. She'll say I was scared and made a mistake about what I saw. She'll say it wasn't really a hand at all, but a rat, a slimy old rat biting at my boot. She'll turn it all around. She'll make it support the story she wants to believe, and it'll just be more ammunition for her to use against Daddy. Damnit, Aunt Faye, why're you so stubborn?

Faye was chattering about the need for a parent to thoroughly investigate a school before sending children to it.

Penny wondered when her father would come to get them, and she prayed he wouldn't be too late. She wanted him to come before bedtime. She didn't want to be alone, just her and Davey, in a dark room, even if it was Aunt Faye's guest room, blocks and blocks away from their own apartment. She was pretty sure the goblins would find them, even here. She had decided to take her father aside and tell him everything. He wouldn't want to believe in goblins, at first. But now there was Davey's lunchbox to consider. And if she went back to their apartment with her father and showed him the holes in Davey's plastic baseball bat, she might be able to convince him. Daddy was a grownup, like Aunt Faye, sure, but he wasn't stubborn, and he listened to kids in a way that few grown-ups did.

Faye said, “With all the money he got from your mother's insurance and from the settlement the hospital made, he could afford to send you to a top-of-the-line school. Absolutely top-of-the-line. I can't imagine why he settled on this Wellton joint.”

Penny bit her lip, said nothing.

She stared down at the magazine. The pictures and words swam in and out of focus.

The worst thing was that now she knew, beyond a doubt, that the goblins weren't just after her. They wanted Davey, too.

III

Rebecca had not waited for Jack, though he had asked her to. While he'd been with Captain Gresham, working out the details of the protection that would be provided for Penny and Davey, Rebecca had apparently put on her coat and gone home.

When Jack found that she had gone, he sighed and said softly, “You sure aren't easy, baby.”

On his desk were two books about voodoo, which he had checked out of the library yesterday. He stared at them for a long moment, then decided he needed to learn more about Bocors and Houngons before tomorrow morning. He put on his coat and gloves, picked up the books, tucked them under one arm, and went down to the subterranean garage, beneath the building.

Because he and Rebecca were now in charge of the emergency task force, they were entitled to perquisites beyond the reach of ordinary homicide detectives, including the full-time use of an unmarked police sedan for each of them, not just during duty hours but around the clock. The car assigned to Jack was a one-year-old, sour-green Chevrolet that bore a few dents and more than a few scratches. It was the totally stripped-down model, without options or luxuries of any kind, just a get-around car, not a racer-and-chaser. The motor pool mechanics had even put the snow chains on the tires. The heap was ready to roll.

He backed out of the parking space, drove up the ramp to the street exit. He stopped and waited while a city truck, equipped with a big snowplow and a salt spreader and lots of flashing lights, passed by in the storm-thrashed darkness.

In addition to the truck, there were only two other vehicles on the street. The storm virtually had the night to itself. Yet, when the truck was gone and the way was clear, Jack still hesitated.

He switched on the windshield wipers.

To head toward Rebecca's apartment, he would have to turn left.

To go to the Jamisons' place, he ought to turn right.

The wipers flogged back and forth, back and forth, left, right, left, right.

He was eager to be with Penny and Davey, eager to hug them, to see them warm and alive and smiling.

Right, left, right.

Of course, they weren't in any real danger at the moment. Even if Lavelle was serious when he threatened them, he wouldn't make his move this soon, and he wouldn't know where to find them even if he did want to make his move.

Left, right, left.

They were perfectly safe with Faye and Keith. Besides, Jack had told Faye that he probably wouldn't make it for dinner; she was already expecting him to be late.

The wipers beat time to his indecision.

Finally he took his foot off the brake, pulled into the street, and turned left.

He needed to talk to Rebecca about what had happened between them last night. She had avoided the subject all day. He couldn't allow her to continue to dodge it. She would have to face up to the changes that last night had wrought in both their lives, major changes which he welcomed wholeheartedly but about which she seemed, at best, ambivalent.

Along the edges of the car roof, wind whistled hollowly through the metal heading, a cold and mournful sound.

Crouching in deep shadows by the garage exit, the thing watched Jack Dawson drive away in the unmarked sedan.

Its shining silver eyes did not blink even once.

Then, keeping to the shadows, it crept back into the deserted, silent garage.

It hissed. It muttered. It gobbled softly to itself in an eerie, raspy little voice.

Finding the protection of darkness and shadows wherever it wished to go — even where there didn't seem to have been shadows only a moment before — the thing slunk from car to car, beneath and around them, until it came to a drain in the garage floor. It descended into the midnight regions below.

IV

Lavelle was nervous.

Without switching on any lamps, he stalked restlessly through his house, upstairs and down, back and forth, looking for nothing, simply unable to keep still, always moving in deep darkness but never bumping into furniture or doorways, pacing as swiftly and surely as if the rooms were all brightly lighted. He wasn't blind in darkness, never the least disoriented. Indeed, he was at home in shadows. Darkness, after all, was a part of him.

Usually, in either darkness or light, he was supremely confident and self-assured. But now, hour by hour, his self-assurance was steadily crumbling.

His nervousness had bred uneasiness. Uneasiness had given birth to fear. He was unaccustomed to fear. He didn't know quite how to handle it. So the fear made him even more nervous.

He was worried about Jack Dawson. Perhaps it had been a grave mistake to allow Dawson time to consider his options. A man like the detective might put that time to good use.

If he senses that I'm even slightly afraid of him, Lavelle thought, and if he learns more about voodoo, then he might eventually understand why I've got good reason to fear him.

If Dawson discovered the nature of his own special power, and if he learned to use that power, he would find and stop Lavelle. Dawson was one of those rare individuals, that one in ten thousand, who could do battle with even the most masterful Bocor and be reasonably certain of victory. If the detective uncovered the secret of himself, then he would come for Lavelle, well-armored and dangerous.

Lavelle paced through the dark house.

Maybe he should strike now. Destroy the Dawson children this evening. Get it over with. Their deaths might send Dawson spiraling down into an emotional collapse. He loved his kids a great deal, and he was already a widower, already laboring under a heavy burden of grief; perhaps the slaughter of Penny and Davey would break him. If the loss of his kids didn't snap his mind, then it would most likely plunge him into a terrible depression that would cloud his thinking and interfere with his work for many weeks. At the very least, Dawson would have to take a few days off from the investigation, in order to arrange the funerals, and those few days would give Lavelle some breathing space.

On the other hand, what if Dawson was the kind of man who drew strength from adversity instead of buckling under the weight of it? What if the murder and mutilation of his children only solidified his determination to find and destroy Lavelle?

To Lavelle, that was an unnerving possibility.

Indecisive, the Bocor rambled through the lightless rooms as if he were a ghost come to haunt.

At last, he knew he must consult the ancient gods and humbly request the benefit of their wisdom.

He went to the kitchen and flicked on the overhead light.

From a cupboard, he withdrew a cannister filled with flour.

A radio stood on the counter. He moved it to the center of the kitchen table.

Using the flour, he drew an elaborate veve on the table, all the way around the radio.

He switched on the radio.

An old Beatles song. Eleanor Rigby.

He turned the dial through a dozen stations that were playing every kind of music from pop to rock to country, classical, and jazz. He set the tuner at an unused frequency, where there was no spill-over whatsoever from the stations on either side.

The soft crackle and hiss of the open airwaves filled the room and sounded like the sighing surf-roar of a far-off sea.

He scooped up one more handful of flour and carefully drew a small, simple veve on top of the radio itself.

At the sink he washed his hands, then went to the refrigerator and got a small bottle full of blood.

It was cat's blood, used in a variety of rituals. Once a week, always at a different pet store or animal pound, he bought or “adopted” a cat, brought it home, killed it, and drained it to maintain a fresh supply of blood.

He returned to the table now, sat down in front of the radio. Dipping his fingers in the cat's blood, he drew certain runes on the table and, last of all, on the plastic window over the radio dial.

He chanted for a while, waited, listened, chanted some more, until he heard an unmistakable yet indefinable change in the sound of the unused frequency. It had been dead just a moment ago. Dead air. Dead, random, meaningless sound. Now it was alive. It was still just the crackle-sputter-hiss of static, a silk-soft sound. But somehow different from what it had been a few seconds ago. Something was making use of the open frequency, reaching out from the Beyond.

Staring at the radio but not really seeing it, Lavelle said, “Is someone there?”

No answer.

“Is someone there?”

It was a voice of dust and mummified remains: “I wait.” It was a voice of dry paper, of sand and splinters, a voice of infinite age, as bitterly cold as the night between the stars, jagged and whispery and evil.

It might be any one of a hundred thousand demons, or a full-fledged god of one of the ancient African religions, or the spirit of a dead man long ago condemned to Hell. There was no way of telling for sure which it was, and Lavelle wasn't empowered to make it speak its name. Whatever it might be, it would be able to answer his questions.

“I wait.”

“You know of my business here?”

“Yessss.”

“The business involving the Carramazza family.”

“Yessss.”

If God had given snakes the power of speech, this was what they would have sounded like.

“You know the detective, this man Dawson?”

“Yessss.”

“Will he ask his superiors to remove him from the case?”

“Never.”

“Will he continue to do research into voodoo?”

“Yessss.”

“I've warned him to stop.”

“He will not.”

The kitchen had grown extremely cold in spite of the house's furnace, which was still operating and still spewing hot air out of the wall vents. The air seemed thick and oily, too.

“What can I do to keep Dawson at bay?”

“You know.”

“Tell me.”

“You know.”

Lavelle licked his lips, cleared his throat.

“You know.”

Lavelle said, “Should I have his children murdered now, tonight, without further delay?”

V

Rebecca answered the door. She said, “I sort of figured it would be you.”

He stood on the landing, shivering. “We've got a raging blizzard out there.”

She was wearing a soft blue robe, slippers.

Her hair was honey-yellow. She was gorgeous.

She didn't say anything. She just looked at him.

He said, “Yep, the storm of the century is what it is. Maybe even the start of a new ice age. The end of the world. I asked myself who I'd most like to be with if this actually was the end of the world—”

“And you decided on me.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh?”

“I just didn't know where to find Jacqueline Bisset.”

“So I was second choice.”

“I didn't know Raquel Welch's address, either.”

“Third.”

“But out of four billion people on earth, third isn't

She almost smiled at him.

He said, “Can I come in? I already took my boots off, see. I won't track up your carpet. And I've got very good manners. I never belch or scratch my ass in public — not intentionally, anyway.”

She stepped back.

He went in.

She closed the door and said, “I was about to make something to eat. Are you hungry?”

“What've you got?”

“Drop-in guests can't afford to be choosy.”

They went into the kitchen, and he draped his coat over the back of a chair.

She said, “Roast beef sandwiches and soup.”

“What flavor soup?”

“Minestrone.”

“Homemade? “

“Canned.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“I hate homemade stuff.”

“Is that so?”

“Too many vitamins in homemade stuff.”

“Can there be too many?”

“Sure. Makes me all jumpy with excess energy.”

“Ah.”

“And there's too much taste in homemade,” he said.

“Overwhelms the palate.”

“You do understand! Give me canned any day.”

“Never too much taste in canned.”

“Nice and bland, easy to digest.”

“I'll set the table and get the soup started.”

“Good idea.”

“You slice the roast beef.”

“Sure.”

“It's in the refrigerator, in Saran Wrap. Second shelf, I think. Be careful.”

“Why, is it alive?”

“The refrigerator's packed pretty full. If you're not careful taking something out, you can start an avalanche.”

He opened the refrigerator. On each shelf, there were two or three layers of food, one atop the other. The storage spaces on the doors were crammed full of bottles, cans, and jars.

“You afraid the government's going to outlaw food?” he asked.

“I like to keep a lot of stuff on hand.”

“I noticed.”

“Just in case.”

“In case the entire New York Philharmonic drops in for a nosh?”

She didn't say anything.

He said, “Most supermarkets don't have this much stock.”

She seemed embarrassed, and he dropped the subject.

But it was odd. Chaos reigned in the refrigerator, while every other inch of her apartment was neat, orderly, and even Spartan in its decor.

He found the roast beef behind a dish of pickled eggs, atop an apple pie in a bakery box, beneath a package of Swiss cheese, wedged in between two leftover casseroles on one side and a jar of pickles and a leftover chicken breast on the other side, in front of three jars of jelly.

For a while they worked in silence.

Once he had finally cornered her, he had thought it would be easy to talk about what had happened between them last night. But now he felt awkward. He couldn't decide how to begin, what to say first. The direct approach was best, of course. He ought to say, Rebecca, where do we go from here? Or maybe, Rebecca, didn't it mean as much to you as it did to me? Or maybe even, Rebecca, I love you. But everything he might have said sounded, in his own mind, either trite or too abrupt or just plain dumb.

The silence stretched.

She put placemats, dishes, and silverware on the table.

He sliced the beef, then a large tomato.

She opened two cans of soup.

From the refrigerator, he got pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and two kinds of cheese. The bread was in the breadbox.

He turned to Rebecca to ask how she wanted her sandwich.

She was standing at the stove with her back to him, stirring the soup in the pot. Her hair shimmered softly against her dark blue robe.

Jack felt a tremor of desire. He marveled at how very different she was now from the way she had been when he'd last seen her at the office, only an hour ago. No longer the ice maiden. No longer the Viking woman. She looked smaller, not particularly shorter but narrower of shoulder, slimmer of wrist, overall more slender, more fragile, more girlish than she had seemed earlier.

Before he realized what he was doing, he moved toward her, stepped up behind her, and put his hands on her shoulders.

She wasn't startled. She had sensed him coming. Perhaps she had even willed him to come to her.

At first her shoulders were stiff beneath his hands, her entire body rigid.

He pulled her hair aside and kissed her neck, made a chain of kisses along the smooth, sweet skin.

She relaxed, softened, leaned back against him.

He slid his hands down her sides, to the swell of her hips.

She sighed but said nothing.

He kissed her ear.

He slid one hand up, cupped her breast.

She switched off the gas burner on which the pot of minestrone was heating.

His arms were around her now, both hands on her flat belly.

He leaned over her shoulder, kissed the side of her throat. Through his lips, pressed to her supple flesh, he felt one of her arteries throb with her strong pulse; a rapid pulse; faster now and faster still.

She seemed to melt back into him.

No woman, except his lost wife, had ever felt this warm to him.

She pressed her bottom against him.

He was so hard he ached.

She murmured wordlessly, a feline sound.

His hands would not remain still but moved over her in gentle, lazy exploration.

She turned to him.

They kissed.

Her hot tongue was quick, but the kiss was long and slow.

When they broke, drawing back only inches, to take a much-needed breath, their eyes met, and hers were such a fiercely bright shade of green that they didn't seem real, yet he saw a very real longing in them.

Another kiss. This one was harder than the first, hungrier.

Then she pulled back from him. Took his hand in hers.

They walked out of the kitchen. Into the living room.

The bedroom.

She switched on a small lamp with an amber glass shade. It wasn't bright. The shadows retreated slightly but didn't go away.

She took off her robe. She wasn't wearing anything else.

She looked as if she were made of honey and butter and cream.

She undressed him.

Many minutes later, on the bed, when he finally entered her, he said her name with a small gasp of wonder, and she said his. Those were the first words they had spoken since he had put his hands on her shoulders, out in the kitchen.

They found a soft, silken, satisfying rhythm and gave pleasure to each other on the cool, crisp sheets.

VI

Lavelle sat at the kitchen table, staring at the radio.

Wind shook the old house.

To the unseen presence using the radio as a contact point with this world, Lavelle said, “Should I have his children murdered now, tonight, without further delay?”

“Yessss.”

“But if I kill his children, isn't there a danger that Dawson will be more determined than ever to find me?”

“Kill them.”

“Do you mean killing them might break Dawson?”

“Yessss.”

“Contribute to an emotional or mental collapse?”

“Yessss.”

“Destroy him?”

“Yessss.”

“There is no doubt about that?”

“He lovessss them very muchhhh.”

“And there's no doubt what it would do to him?” Lavelle pressed.

“Kill them.”

“I want to be sure.”

“Kill them. Brutally. It musssst be esssspecccially brutal.”

“I see. The brutality of it is the thing that will make Dawson snap. Is that it?”

“Yessss.”

“I'll do anything to get him out of my way, but I want to be absolutely sure it'll work the way I want it to work.”

“Kill them. Ssssmasssh them. Break their bonessss and tear out their eyessss. Rip out their tonguessss. Gut them assss if they were two pigssssfor butchhhhering.”

VII

Rebecca's bedroom.

Spicules of snow tapped softly on the window.

They lay on their backs, side by side on the bed, holding hands, in the butterscotch-colored light.

Rebecca said, “I didn't think it would happen again.”

“What?”

“This.”

“Oh.”

“I thought last night was an… aberration.”

“Really?”

“I was sure we'd never make love again.”

“But we did.”

“We sure did.”

“God, did we ever!”

She was silent.

He said, “Are you sorry we did?”

“No.”

“You don't think this was the last time, do you?”

“No.”

“Can't be the last. Not as good as we are together.”

“So good together.”

“You can be so soft.”

“And you can be so hard.”

“Crude.”

“But true.”

A pause.

Then she said, “What's happened to us?”

“Isn't that clear?”

“Not entirely.”

“We've fallen for each other.”

“But how could it happen so fast?”

“It wasn't fast.”

“All this time, just cops, just partners—”

“More than partners.”

“-then all of a sudden-wham!”

“It wasn't sudden. I've been falling a long time.”

“Have you?”

“For a couple of months, anyway.

“I didn't realize it.”

“A long, long, slow fall.”

“Why didn't I realize?”

“You realized. Subconsciously.”

“Maybe.”

“What I wonder is why you resisted it so strenuously.”

She didn't reply.

He said, “I thought maybe you found me repellent.”

“I find you irresistible.”

“Then why'd you resist?”

“It scares me.”

“What scares you?”

“This. Having someone. Caring about someone.”

“Why's that scare you?”

“The chance of losing it.”

“But that's silly.”

“It is not.”

“You’ve got to risk losing a thing—”

“I know, “

“-or else never have it in the first place.”

“Maybe that's best.”

“Not having it at all?”

“Yes.”

“That philosophy makes for a damned lonely life.”

“It still scares me.”

“We won't lose this, Rebecca.”

“Nothing lasts forever.”

“That's not what you'd call a good attitude.”

“Well, nothing does.”

“If you've been hurt by other guys—”

“It isn't that.”

“Then what is it?”

She dodged the question. “Kiss me.”

He kissed her. Again and again.

They weren't passionate kisses. Tender. Sweet.

After a while he said, “I love you.”

“Don't say that.”

“I'm not just saying it. I mean it.”

“Just don't say it.”

“I'm not a guy who says things he doesn't mean.”

“I know.”

“And I'm not saying it before I'm sure.”

She wouldn't look at him.

He said, “I'm sure, Rebecca. I love you.”

“I asked you not to say that.”

“I'm not asking to hear it from you.”

She bit her lip.

“I'm not asking for a commitment,” he said.

“Jack—”

“Just say you don't hate me.”

“Will you stop—”

“Can't you please just say you don't hate me?”

She sighed. “I don't hate you.”

He grinned. “Just say you don't loathe me too much.”

“I don't loathe you too much.”

“Just say you like me a little bit.”

“I like you a little bit.”

“Maybe more than a little bit.”

“Maybe more than a little bit.”

“All right. I can live with that for now.”

“Good.”

“Meanwhile, I love you.”

“Damnit, Jack!”

She pulled away from him.

She drew the sheet over herself, all the way up to her chin.

“Don't be cold with me, Rebecca.”

“I'm not being cold.”

“Don't treat me like you treated me all day today.”

She met his eyes.

He said, “I thought you were sorry last night ever happened.”

She shook her head: no.

“It hurt me, the way you were, today,” he said. “I thought you were disgusted with me, with yourself, for what we'd done.”

“No. Never.”

“I know that now, but here — you are drawing away again, keeping me at arm's length. What's wrong?”

She chewed on her thumb. Like a little girl.

“Rebecca?”

“I don't know how to say it. I don't know how to explain. I've never had to put it into words for anyone before.”

“I'm a good listener.”

“I need a little time to think.”

“So take your time.”

“Just a little time. A few minutes.”

“Take all the time you want.”

She stared at the ceiling, thinking.

He got under the sheet with her and pulled the blanket over both of them.

They lay in silence for a while.

Outside, the wind sang a two-note serenade.

She said, “My father died when I was six.”

“I'm sorry. That's terrible. You never really had a chance to know him, then.”

“True. And yet, odd as it seems, I still sometimes miss him so bad, you know, even after all these years — even a father I never really knew and can hardly remember. I miss him, anyway.”

Jack thought of his own little Davey, not even quite six when his mother had died.

He squeezed Rebecca's hand gently.

She said, “But my father dying when I was six — in a way, that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that I saw him die. I was there when it happened.”

“God. How… how did it happen?”

“Well… he and Mama owned a sandwich shop. A small place. Four little tables. Mostly take-out business. Sandwiches, potato salad, macaroni salad, a few desserts. It's hard to make a go of it in that business unless you have two things, right at the start: enough start-up capital to see you through a couple of lean years at the beginning, and a good location with lots of foot traffic passing by or office workers in the neighborhood. But my folks were poor. They had very little capital. They couldn't pay the high rent in a good location, so they started in a bad one and kept moving whenever they could afford to, three times in three years, each time to a slightly better spot. They worked hard, so hard…. My father held down another job, too, janitorial work, late at night, after the shop closed, until just before dawn. Then he'd come home, sleep four or five hours, and go open the shop for the lunch trade. Mama cooked a lot of the food that was served, and she worked behind the counter, too, but she also did some house cleaning for other people, to bring in a few extra dollars. Finally, the shop began to pay off. My dad was able to drop his janitorial job, and Mama gave up the house cleaning. In fact, business started getting so good that they were looking for their first employee; they couldn't handle the shop all by themselves any more. The future looked bright. And then… one afternoon… during the slack time between the lunch and dinner crowds, when Mama was out on an errand and I was alone in the shop with my father… this guy came in… with a gun…”

“Oh, shit,” Jack said. He knew the rest of it. He'd seen it all before, many times. Dead storekeepers, sprawled in pools of their own blood, beside their emptied cash registers.

“There was something strange about this creep,” Rebecca said. “Even though I was only six years old, I could tell there was something wrong with him the moment he came in, and I went to the kitchen and peeked out at him through the curtain. He was fidgety… pale… funny around the eyes.

“A junkie?”

“That's the way it turned out, yeah. If I close my eyes now, I can still see his pale face, the way his mouth twitched. The awful thing is… I can see it clearer than I can see my own father's face. Those terrible eyes.”

She shuddered.

Jack said, “You don't have to go on.”

“Yes. I do. I have to tell you. So you'll understand why… why I am like I am about certain things.”

“Okay. If you're sure—”

“I'm sure.”

“Then… did your father refuse to hand over the money to this son of a bitch — or what? ”

“No. Dad gave him the money. All of it.”

“He offered no resistance at all?”

“None.”

“But cooperation didn't save him.”

“No. This junkie had a bad itch, a real bad need. The need was like something nasty crawling around in his head, I guess, and it made him irritable, mean, crazymad at the world. You know how they get. So I think maybe he wanted to kill somebody even more than he wanted the money. So… he just… pulled the trigger.”

Jack put an arm around her, drew her against him.

She said, “Two shots. Then the bastard ran. Only one of the slugs hit my father. But it… hit him… in the face.”

“Jesus,” Jack said softly, thinking of six-year-old Rebecca in the sandwich shop's kitchen, peering through the parted curtain, watching as her father's face exploded.

“It was a.45,” she said.

Jack winced, thinking of the power of the gun.

“Hollow-point bullets,” she said.

“Oh, Christ.”

“Dad didn't have a chance at point-blank range.”

“Don't torture yourself with—”

“Blew his head off,” she said.

“Don't think about it any more now,” Jack said.

“Brain tissue…”

“Put it out of your mind now.”

“… pieces of his skull…”

“It was a long time ago.”

“… blood all over the wall.”

“Hush now. Hush.”

“There's more to tell.”

“You don't have to pour it out all at once.”

“I want you to understand.”

“Take your time. I'll be here. I'll wait. Take your time.”

VIII

In the corrugated metal shed, leaning over the pit, using two pair of ceremonial scissors with malachite handles, Lavelle snipped both ends of the cord simultaneously.

The photographs of Penny and Davey Dawson fell into the hole, vanished in the flickering orange light.

A shrill, unhuman cry came from the depths.

“Kill them,” Lavelle said.

IX

Still in Rebecca's bed.

Still holding each other.

She said, “The police only had my description to go on.”

“A six-year-old child doesn't make the best witness.”

“They worked hard, trying to get a lead on the creep who'd shot Daddy. They really worked hard.”

“They ever catch him?”

“Yes. But too late. Much too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“See, he got two hundred bucks when he robbed the shop.”

“So?”

“That was over twenty-two years ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Two hundred was a lot more money then. Not a fortune. But a lot more than it is now.”

“I still don't see what you're driving at.”

“It looked like an easy score to him.”

“Not too damned easy. He killed a man.”

“But he wouldn't have had to. He wanted to kill someone that day.”

“Okay. Right. So, twisted as he is, he figures it was easy.”

“Six months went by…”

“And the cops never got close to him?”

“No. So it looks easier and easier to the creep.”

A sickening dread filled Jack. His stomach turned over.

He said, “You don't mean…?”

“Yes.”

“He came back.”

“With a gun. The same gun.”

“But he'd have to've been nuts!”

“All junkies are nuts.”

Jack waited. He didn't want to hear the rest of it, but he knew she would tell him; had to tell him; was compelled to tell him.

She said, “My mother was at the cash register.”

“No,” he said softly, as if a protest from him could somehow alter the tragic history of her family.

“He blew her away.”

“Rebecca…”

“Fired five shots into her.”

“You didn't… see this one?”

“No. I wasn't in the shop that day.”

“Thank God.”

“This time they caught him.”

“Too late for you.”

“Much too late. But it was after that when I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a cop, so I could stop people like that junkie, stop them from killing the mothers and fathers of other little girls and boys. There weren't women cops back then, you know, not real cops, just office workers in police stations, radio dispatchers, that sort of thing. I had no role models. But I knew I'd make it someday. I was determined. All the time I was growing up, there was never once when I thought about being anything else but a cop. I never even considered getting married, being a wife, having kids, being a mother, because I knew someone would only come along and shoot my husband or take my kids away from me or take me away from my kids. So what was the point in it? I would be a cop. Nothing else. A cop. And that's what I became. I think I felt guilty about my father's murder. I think I believed that there must've been something I could have done that day to save him. And I know I felt guilty about my mother's death. I hated myself for not giving the police a better description of the man who shot my dad, hated myself for being numb and useless, because if I had been of more help to them, maybe they'd have gotten the guy before he killed Mama. Being a cop, stopping other creeps like that junkie, it was a way to atone for my guilt. Maybe that's amateur psychology. But not far off the mark. I'm sure it's part of what motivates me.”

“But you haven't any reason at all to feel guilty,” Jack assured her. “You did all you possibly could've done. You were only six!”

“I know. I understand that. But the guilt is there nevertheless. Still sharp, at times. I guess it'll always be there, fading year by year, but never fading away altogether.”

Jack was, at last, beginning to understand Rebecca Chandler — why she was the way she was. He even saw the reason for the overstocked refrigerator; after a childhood filled with so much bad news and unanticipated shocks and instability, keeping a well-supplied larder was one way to buy at least a small measure of security, a way to feel safe. Understanding increased his respect and already deep affection for her. She was a very special woman.

He had a feeling that this night was one of the most important of his life. The long loneliness after Linda's passing was finally drawing to an end. Here, with Rebecca, he was making a new beginning. A good beginning. Few men were fortunate enough to find two good women and be given two chances at happiness in their lives. He was very lucky, and he knew it, and that knowledge made him exuberant. In spite of a day filled with blood and mutilated bodies and threats of death, he sensed a golden future out there ahead of them. Everything was going to work out fine, after all. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong now.

X

“Kill them, kill them,” Lavelle said.

His voice echoed down into the pit, echoed and echoed, as if it had been cast into a deep shaft.

The indistinct, pulsing, shifting, amorphous floor of the pit suddenly became more active. It bubbled surged, churned. Out of that molten, lavalike substance — which might have been within arm's reach or, instead, miles below — something began to take shape.

Something monstrous.

XI

“When your mother was killed, you were only—”

“Seven years old. Turned seven the month before she died.”

“Who raised you after that?”

“I went to live with my grandparents, my mother's folks.”

“Did that work out?”

“They loved me. So it worked for a while.”

“Only for a while?”

“My grandfather died.”

“Another death?”

“Always another one.”

“How?”

“Cancer. I'd seen sudden death already. It was time for me to learn about slow death.”

“How slow?”

“Two years from the time the cancer was diagnosed until he finally succumbed to it. He wasted away, lost sixty pounds before the end, lost all his hair from the radium treatments. He looked and acted like an entirely different person during those last few weeks. It was a ghastly thing to watch.”

“How old were you when you lost him?”

“Eleven and a half.”

“Then it was just you and your grandmother.”

“For a few years. Then she died when I was fifteen.

Her heart. Not real sudden. Not real slow, either. After that, I was made a ward of the court. I spent the next three years, until I was eighteen, in a series of foster homes. Four of them, in all. I never got close to any of my foster parents; I never allowed myself to get close. I kept asking to be transferred, see. Because by then, even as young as I was, I realized that loving people, depending on them, needing them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It's the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you finally decide that everything's going to be fine. We're all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life's so unpredictable.”

“But that's no reason to insist on going it alone,” Jack said. “In fact, don't you see — that's the reason we must find people to love, people to share our lives with, to open our hearts and minds to, people to depend on, cherish, people who'll depend on us when they need to know they're not alone. Caring for your friends and family, knowing they care for you — that's what keeps our minds off the void that waits for all of us. By loving and letting ourselves be loved, we give meaning and importance to our lives; it's what keeps us from being just another species of the animal kingdom, grubbing for survival. At least for a short while, through love, we can forget about the goddamned darkness at the end of everything.”

He was breathless when he finished — and astonished by what he had said, startled that such an understanding had been in him.

She slipped an arm across his chest. She held him fast.

She said, “You're right. A part of me knows that what you've said is true.”

“Good.”

“But there's another part of me that's afraid of letting myself love or be loved, ever again. The part that can't bear losing it all again. The part that thinks loneliness is preferable to that kind of loss and pain.”

“But see, that's just it. Love given or love taken is never lost,” he said, holding her. “Once you've loved someone, the love is always there, even after they're gone. Love is the only thing that endures. Mountains are torn down, built up, torn down again over millions and millions of years. Seas dry up. Deserts give way to new seas. Time crumbles every building man erects. Great ideas are proven wrong and collapse as surely as castles and temples. But love is a force, an energy, a power. At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, I think love is like a ray of sunlight, traveling for all eternity through space, deeper and deeper into infinity; like that ray of light, it never ceases to exist. Love endures. It's a binding force in the universe, like the energy within a molecule is a binding force, as surely as gravity is a binding force. Without the cohesive energy in a molecule, without gravity, without love-chaos. We exist to love and be loved, because love seems to me to be the only thing that brings order and meaning and light to existence. It must be true. Because if it isn't true, what purpose do we serve? Because if it isn't true — God help us.”

For minutes, they lay in silence, touching.

Jack was exhausted by the flood of words and feelings that had rushed from him, almost without his volition.

He desperately wanted Rebecca to be with him for the rest of his life. He dreaded losing her.

But he said not more. The decision was hers.

After a while she said, “For the first time in ages, I'm not so afraid of loving and losing; I’m more afraid of not loving at all.”

Jackøs heart lifted.

He said, “Don’t ever freeze me out again.”

“It won’t be easy learning to open up.”

“You can do it.”

“I’m sure I’ll backslide occasionally, withdraw from you a little bit, now and then. You’ll have to be patient with me.”

“I can be patient.”

“God, don’t I know it! You’re the most infuriatingly patient man I’ve ever known.”

“Infuriatingly.”

“There’ve been times. At work, when I’ve been so incredibly bitchy, and I knew it, didn’t want to be but couldn’t seem to help myself. I wished, sometimes, you’d snap back at me, blow up at me. Bit when you finally responded, you were always so reasonable, so calm, so damned patient.”

“You make me sound too saintly.”

“Well, you’re a good man, Jack Dawson. A nice man. A damned nice man.”

“Oh, I know, to you I seem perfect,” he said self-mockingly. “But believe it or not, even I, paragon that I am, even I have a few faults.”

“No!” she said, pretending astonishment.

“It’s true.”

“Name one.”

“I actually like to listen to Barry Manilow.”

“No!”

“Oh, I know his music’s slick, too smooth, a little plastic. But it sounds good, anyway. I like it. And another thing. I don’t like Alan Alda.”

“Everyone likes Alan Alda!”

“I think he’s a phony.”

“You disgusting fiend!”

“And I like peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”

“Ach! Alan Alda wouldn't eat peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”

“But I have one great virtue that more than makes up for all of those terrible faults,” he said.

She grinned. “What's that?”

“I love you.”

This time, she didn't ask him to refrain from saying it.

She kissed him.

Her hands moved over him.

She said, “Make love to me again.”

XII

Ordinarily, no matter how late Davey was allowed to stay up, Penny was permitted one more hour than he was. Being the last to bed was her just due, by virtue of her four-year age advantage over him. She always fought valiantly and tenaciously at the first sign of any attempt to deny her this precious and inalienable right. Tonight, however, at nine o'clock, when Aunt Faye suggested that Davey brush his teeth and hit the sack, Penny feigned sleepiness and said that she, too, was ready to call it a night.

She couldn't leave Davey alone in a dark bedroom where the goblins might creep up on him. She would have to stay awake, watching over him, until their father arrived. Then she would tell Daddy all about the goblins and hope that he would at least hear her out before he sent for the men with the straitjackets.

She and Davey had come to the Jamisons' without overnight bags, but they had no difficulty getting ready for bed. Because they occasionally stayed with Faye and Keith when their father had to work late, they kept spare toothbrushes and pajamas here. And in the guest bedroom closet, there were fresh changes of clothes for them, so they wouldn't have to wear the same thing tomorrow that they'd worn today. In ten minutes, they were comfortably nestled in the twin beds, under the covers.

Aunt Faye wished them sweet dreams, turned out the light, and closed the door.

The darkness was thick, smothering.

Penny fought off an attack of claustrophobia.

Davey was silent awhile. Then: “Penny?”

“Huh?”

“You there?”

“Who do you think just said 'huh?”

“Where's Dad?”

“Working late.”

“I mean… really.”

“Really working late.”

“What if he's been hurt?”

“He hasn't.”

“What if he got shot?”

“He didn't. They'd have told us if he'd been shot. They'd probably even take us to the hospital to see him.”

“No, they wouldn't, either. They try to protect kids from bad news like that.”

“Will you stop worrying, for God's sake? Dad's all right. If he'd been shot or anything, Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith would know all about it.”

“But maybe they do know.”

“We'd know if they knew.”

“How?”

“They'd show it, even if they were trying hard not to.”

“How would they show it?”

“They'd have treated us different. They'd have acted strange.”

“They always act strange.”

“I mean strange in a different sort of way. They'd have been especially nice to us. They'd have pampered us because they'd have felt sorry for us. And do you think Aunt Faye would have criticized Daddy all evening, the way she did, if she'd known he was shot and in a hospital somewhere?

“Well… no. I guess you're right. Not even Aunt Faye would do that.”

They were silent.

Penny lay with her head propped up on the pillow, listening.

Nothing to be heard. Just the wind outside. Far off, the grumble of a snowplow.

She looked at the window, a rectangle of vague snowy luminosity.

Would the goblins come through the window?

The door?

Maybe they'd come out of a crack in the baseboard, come in the form of smoke and then solidify when they had completely seeped into the room. Vampires did that sort of thing. She'd seen it happen in an old Dracula movie.

Or maybe they'd come out of the closet.

She looked toward the darkest end of the room, where the closet was. She couldn't see it; only blackness.

Maybe there was a magical, invisible tunnel at the back of the closet, a tunnel that only goblins could see and use.

That was ridiculous. Or was it? The very idea of goblins was ridiculous, too; yet they were out there; she'd seen them.

Davey's breathing became deep and slow and rhythmic. He was asleep.

Penny envied him. She knew she'd never sleep again.

Time passed. Slowly.

Her gaze moved around and around the dark room. The window. The door. The closet. The window.

She didn't know where the goblins would come from, but she knew, without doubt, that they would come.

XIII

Lavelle sat in his dark bedroom.

The additional assassins had risen out of the pit and had crept off into the night, into the storm-lashed city. Soon, both of the Dawson children would be slaughtered, reduced to nothing more than bloody mounds of dead meat.

That thought pleased and excited Lavelle. It even gave him an erection.

The rituals had drained him. Not physically or mentally. He felt alert, fresh, strong. But his Bocor's power had been depleted, and it was time to replenish it. At the moment, he was a Bocor in name only; drained like this, he was really just a man — and he didn't like being just a man.

Embraced by the darkness, he reached upward with his mind, up through the ceiling, through the roof of the house, through the snow-filled air, up toward the rivers of evil energy that flowed across the great city. He carefully avoided those currents of benign energy that also surged through the night, for they were of no use whatsoever to him; indeed, they posed a danger to him. He tapped into the darkest, foulest of those ethereal waters and let them pour down into him, until his own reservoirs were full once more.

In minutes he was reborn. Now he was more than a man. Less than a god, yes. But much, much more than just a man.

He had one more act of sorcery to perform this night, and he was happily anticipating it. He was going to humble Jack Dawson. At last he was going to make Dawson understand how awesome was the power of a masterful Bocor. Then, when Dawson's children were exterminated, the detective would understand how foolish he had been to put them at such risk, to defy a Bocor. He would see how easily he could have saved them — simply by swallowing his pride and walking away from the investigation. Then it would be clear to the detective that he, himself, had signed his own children's death warrants, and that terrible realization would shatter him.

XIV

Penny sat straight up in bed and almost shouted for Aunt Faye.

She had heard something. A strange, shrill cry. It wasn't human. Faint. Far away. Maybe in another apartment, several floors farther down in the building. The cry seemed to have come to her through the heating ducts.

She waited tensely. A minute. Two minutes. Three.

The cry wasn't repeated. There were no other unnatural sounds, either.

But she knew what she had heard and what it meant. They were coming for her and Davey. They were on their way now. Soon, they would be here.

XV

This time, their love-making was slow, lazy, achingly tender, filled with much nuzzling and wordless murmuring and soft-soft stroking. A series of dreamy sensations: a feeling of floating, a feeling of being composed only of sunlight and other energy, an exhilaratingly weightless tumbling, tumbling. This time, it was not so much an act of sex as it was an act of emotional bonding, a spiritual pledge made with the flesh. And when, at last, Jack spurted deep within her velvet recesses, he felt as if he were fusing with her, melting into her, becoming one with her., and he sensed that she felt the same thing.

“That was wonderful.”

“Perfect.”

“Better than a peanut butter and onion sandwich?”

“Almost.”

“You bastard.”

“Hey, peanut butter and onion sandwiches are pretty darned terrific, you know!”

“I love you,” he said.

“I'm glad,” she said.

That was an improvement.

She still couldn't bring herself to say she loved him, too. But he wasn't particularly bothered by that. He knew she did.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressing.

She was standing on the other side of the bed, slipping into her blue robe.

Both of them were startled by a sudden violent movement. A framed poster from a Jasper Johns art exhibition tore loose of its mountings and flew off the wall. It was a large poster, three-and-a-half-feet-by-two-and-a half-feet, framed behind glass. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, vibrating, and then it struck the floor at the foot of the bed with a tremendous crash.

“What the hell!” Jack said.

“What could've done that?” Rebecca said.

The sliding closet door flew open with a bang, slammed shut, flew open again.

The six-drawer highboy tipped away from the wall, toppled toward Jack, and he jumped out of the way, and the big piece of furniture hit the floor with the sound of a bomb explosion.

Rebecca backed against the wall and stood there, rigid and wide-eyed, her hands fisted at her sides.

The air was cold. Wind whirled through the room. Not just a draft, but a wind almost as powerful as the one that whipped through the city streets, outside. Yet there was nowhere that a cold wind could have gained admission; the door and the window were closed tight.

And now, at the window, it seemed as if invisible hands grabbed the drapes and tore them loose of the rod from which they were hung. The drapes dropped in a heap, and then the rod itself was torn out of the wall and thrown aside.

Drawers slid all the way out of the nightstands and fell onto the floor, spilling their contents.

Several strips of wallpaper began to peel off the walls, starting at the top and going down.

Jack turned this way and that, frightened, confused, not sure what he should do.

The dresser mirror cracked in a spiderweb pattern.

The unseen presence stripped the blanket from the bed and pitched it onto the toppled highboy.

“Stop it!” Rebecca shouted at the empty air. “Stop it!”

The unseen intruder did not obey.

The top sheet was pulled from the bed. It whirled into the air, as if it had been granted life and the ability to fly; it floated off into a corner of the room, where it collapsed, lifeless again.

The fitted bottom sheet popped loose at two corners.

Jack grabbed it.

The other two corners came loose, as well.

Jack tried to hold on to the sheet. It was a feeble and pointless effort to resist whatever power was wrecking the room, but it was the only thing he could think to do, and he simply had to do something. The sheet was quickly wrenched out of his hands with such force that he was thrown off balance. He stumbled and fell to his knees.

On a wheeled TV stand in the corner, the portable television set snapped on of its own accord, the volume booming. A fat woman was dancing the cha-cha with a cat, and a thunderous chorus was singing the praises of Purina Cat Chow.

Jack scrambled to his feet.

The mattress cover was skinned off the bed, lifted into the air, rolled into a ball, and thrown at Rebecca.

On the TV, George Plimpton was shouting like a baboon about the virtues of Intellivision.

The mattress was bare now. The quilted sheath dimpled; a rent appeared in it. The fabric tore right down the middle, from top to bottom, and stuffing erupted along with a few uncoiling springs that rose like cobras to an unheard music.

More wallpaper peeled down.

On the TV, a barker for the American Beef Council was shouting about the benefits of eating meat, while an unseen chef carved a bloody roast on camera.

The closet door slammed so hard that it jumped partially out of its track and rattled back and forth.

The TV screen imploded. Simultaneously with the sound of breaking glass, there was a brief flash of light within the guts of the set, and then a little smoke.

Silence.

Stillness.

Jack glanced at Rebecca.

She looked bewildered. And terrified.

The telephone rang.

The instant Jack heard it, he knew who was calling. He snatched up the receiver, held it to his ear, said nothing.

“You're panting like a dog, Detective Dawson,” Lavelle said. “Excited? Evidently, my little demonstration thrilled you.”

Jack was shaking so badly and uncontrollably that he didn't trust his voice. He didn't reply because he didn't want Lavelle to hear how scared he was.

Besides, Lavelle didn't seem interested in anything Jack might have to say; he didn't wait long enough to hear a reply even if one had been offered. The Bocor said, “When you see your kids — dead, mangled, their eyes torn out, their lips eaten off, their fingers bitten to the bone — remember that you could have saved them. Remember that you're the one who signed their death warrants. You bear the responsibility for their deaths as surely as if you'd seen them walking in front of a train and didn't even bother to call out a warning to them. You threw away their lives as if they were nothing but garbage to you.”

A torrent of words spewed from Jack before he even realized he was going to speak: “You fucking sleazy son of a bitch, you'd better not touch one hair on them!

You'd better not—”

Lavelle had hung up.

Rebecca said, “Who—”

“Lavelle.”

“You mean… all of this?”

“You believe in black magic now? Sorcery? Voodoo? ”

“Oh, my God.”

“I sure as hell believe in it now.”

She looked around at the demolished room, shaking her head, trying without success to deny the evidence before her eyes.

Jack remembered his own skepticism when Carver Hampton had told him about the falling bottles and the black serpent. No skepticism now. Only terror now.

He thought of the bodies he had seen this morning and this afternoon, those hideously ravaged corpses.

His heart jackhammered. He was short of breath. He felt as if he might vomit.

He still had the phone in his hand. He punched out a number.

Rebecca said, “Who're you calling?”

“Faye. She's got to get the kids out of there, fast.”

“But Lavelle can't know where they are.”

“He couldn't have known where I was, either. I didn't tell anyone I was coming to see you. I wasn't followed here; I'm sure I wasn't. He couldn't have known where to find me — and yet he knew. So he probably knows where to find the kids, too. Damnit, why isn't it ringing? “

He rattled the telephone buttons, got another dial tone, tried Faye's number again. This time he got a recording telling him that her phone was no longer in service. Not true, of course.

“Somehow, Lavelle's screwed up Faye's line,” he said, dropping the receiver. “We've got to get over there right away. Jesus, we've got to get the kids out! “

Rebecca had stripped off her robe, had yanked a pair of jeans and a pull-over sweater from the closet. She was already half dressed.

“Don't worry,” she said. “It'll be all right. We'll get to them before Lavelle does.”

But Jack had the sickening feeling that they were already too late.

I

Again, sitting alone in his dark bedroom, with only the phosphoric light of the snowstorm piercing the windows, Lavelle reached up with his mind and tapped the psychic rivers of malignant energy that coursed through the night above the city.

His sorceror's power was not only depleted this time but utterly exhausted. Calling forth a poltergeist and maintaining control over it — as he had done in order to arrange the demonstration for Jack Dawson a few minutes ago — was one of the most draining of all the rituals of black magic.

Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to use a poltergeist to destroy one's enemies. Poltergeists were merely mischievous — at worst, nasty — spirits; they were not evil. If a Bocor, having conjured up such an entity, attempted to employ it to murder someone, it would then be able to break free of his controlling spell and turn its energies upon him.

However, when used only as a tool to exhibit a Bocor's powers, a poltergeist produced impressive results. Skeptics were transformed into believers. The bold were made meek. After witnessing the work of a poltergeist, those who were already believers in voodoo and the supernatural were humbled, frightened, and reduced to obedient servants, pitifully eager to do whatever a Bocor demanded of them.

Lavelle's rocking chair creaked in the quiet room.

In the darkness, he smiled and smiled.

From the night sky, malignant energy poured down.

Lavelle, the vessel, was soon overflowing with power.

He sighed, for he was renewed.

Before long, the fun would begin.

The slaughter.

II

Penny sat on the edge of her bed, listening.

The sounds came again. Scraping, hissing. A soft thump, a faint clink, and again a thump. A far-off, rattling, shuffling noise.

Far off — but getting closer.

She snapped on the bedside lamp. The small pool of light was warm and welcome.

Davey remained asleep, undisturbed by the peculiar sounds. She decided to let him go on sleeping for the time being. She could wake him quickly if she had to, and one scream would bring Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith.

The raspy cry came again, faint, though perhaps not quite as faint as it had been before.

Penny got up from the bed, went to the dresser, which lay in shadows, beyond the fan of light from her nightstand lamp. In the wall above the dresser, approximately a foot below the ceiling, was a vent for the heating and air-conditioning systems. She cocked her head, trying to hear the distant and furtive noises, and she became convinced that they were being transmitted through the ducts in the walls.

She climbed onto the dresser, but the vent was still almost a foot above her head. She climbed down. She fetched her pillow from the bed and put it on the dresser. She took the thick seat cushions from the two chairs that flanked the window, and she piled those atop her bed pillow. She felt very clever and capable. Once on the dresser again, she stretched, rose up onto her toes, and was able to put her ear against the vent plate that covered the outlet from the ventilation system.

She had thought the goblins were in other apartments or common hallways, farther down in the building; she had thought the ducts were only carrying the sound of them. Now, with a jolt, she realized the ducts were carrying not merely the sound of the goblins but the goblins themselves. This was how they intended to get into the bedroom, not through the door or window, not through some imaginary tunnel in the back of the closet. They were in the ventilation network, making their way up through the building, twisting and turning, slithering and creeping, hurrying along the horizontal pipes, climbing laboriously through the vertical sections of the system, but steadily rising nearer and nearer as surely as the warm air was rising from the huge furnace below.

Trembling, teeth chattering, gripped by fear to which she refused to succumb, Penny put her face to the vent plate and peered through the slots, into the duct beyond. The darkness in there was as deep and as black and as smooth as the darkness in a tomb.

III

Jack hunched over the wheel, squinting at the wintry street ahead.

The windshield was icing up. A thin, milky skin of ice had formed around the edges of the glass and was creeping inward. The wipers were caked with snow that was steadily compacting into lumps of ice.

“Is that damned defroster on full-blast?” he asked, even though he could feel the waves of heat washing up into his face.

Rebecca leaned forward and checked the heater controls. “Full-blast,” she affirmed.

“Temperature sure dropped once it got dark.”

“Must be ten degrees out there. Colder, if you figure in the wind-chill factor.”

Trains of snowplows moved along the main avenues, but they were having difficulty getting the upper hand on the blizzard. Snow was falling in blinding sheets, so thick it obscured everything beyond the distance of one block. Worse, the fierce wind piled the snow in drifts that began to form again and reclaim the pavement only minutes after the plows had scraped it clean.

Jack had expected to make a fast trip to the Jamisons' apartment building. The streets held little or no traffic to get in his way. Furthermore, although his car was unmarked, it had a siren. And he had clamped the detachable red emergency beacon to the metal heading at the edge of the roof, thereby insuring right-of-way over what other traffic there was. He had expected to be holding Penny and Davey in his arms in ten minutes. Now, clearly, the trip was going to take twice that long.

Every time he tried to put on a little speed, the car started to slide, in spite of the snow chains on the tires.

“We could walk faster than this!” Jack said ferociously.

“We'll get there in time,” Rebecca said.

“What if Lavelle is already there?”

“He's not. Of course he's not.”

And then a terrible thought rocked him, and he didn't want to put it into words, but he couldn't stop himself: “What if he called from the Jamisons?”

“He didn't,” she said.

But Jack was abruptly obsessed with that horrendous possibility, and he could not control the morbid compulsion to say it aloud, even though the words brought hideous images to him.

“What if he killed all of them—”

(Mangled bodies.)

“-killed Penny and Davey—”

(Eyeballs torn from sockets.)

“-killed Faye and Keith—”

(Throats chewed open.)

“-and then called from right there—”

(Fingertips bitten off.)

“-called me from right there in the apartment, for Christ's sake—”

(Lips torn, ears hanging loose.)

“-while he was standing over their bodies! ”

She had been trying to interrupt him. Now she shouted at him: “Stop torturing yourself, Jack! We'll make it in time.”

“How the hell do you know we'll make it in time?”

he demanded angrily, not sure why he was angry with her, just striking out at her because she was a convenient target, because he couldn't strike out at Lavelle or at the weather that was hindering him, and because he had to strike out at someone, something, or go absolutely crazy from the tension that was building in him like excess current flowing into an already overcharged battery. “You can't know!”

“I know,” she insisted calmly. “Just drive.”

“Goddamnit, stop patronizing me!”

“Jack—”

“He's got my kids!”

He accelerated too abruptly, and the car immediately began to slide toward the right-hand curb.

He tried to correct their course by pulling on the steering wheel, instead of going along with the slide and turning into the direction of it, and even as he realized his mistake the car started to spin, and for a moment they were traveling sideways — and Jack had the gutwrenching feeling that they were going to slam into the curb at high speed, tip, and roll over — but even as they continued to slide they also continued to swing around on their axis until they were completely reversed from where they had been, a full one hundred and eighty degrees, half the circumference of a circle, now sliding backwards along the street, looking out the icy windshield at where they had been instead of at where they were going, and still they turned, turned like a carousel, until at last the car stopped just short of one entire revolution.

With a shudder engendered by a mental image of what might have happened to them, but aware that he couldn't waste time dwelling on their close escape, Jack started up again. He handled the wheel with even greater caution than before, and he pressed his foot lightly and slowly down on the accelerator.

Neither he nor Rebecca spoke during the wild spin, not even to cry out in surprise or fear, and neither of them spoke for the next block, either.

Then he said, “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.”

“I shouldn't have snapped at you like that.”

“I understand. You were crazy with worry.”

“Still am. No excuse. That was stupid of me. I won't be able to help the kids if I kill us before we ever get to Faye's place.”

“I understand what you're going through,” she said again, softer than before. “It's all right. And everything'll be all right, too.”

He knew that she did understand all the complex thoughts and emotions that were churning through him and nearly tearing him apart. She understood him better than just a friend could have understood, better than just a lover. They were more than merely compatible; in their thoughts and perceptions and feelings, they were in perfect sympathy, physically and psychologically synchronous. It had been a long time since he'd had anyone that close, that much a part of him. Eighteen months, in fact. Since Linda's death. Not so long, perhaps, considering he had never expected it to happen again. It was good not to be alone any more.

“Almost there, aren't we?” she asked.

“Two or three minutes,” he said, hunching over the wheel, peering ahead nervously at the slick, snowy street.

The windshield wipers, thickly crusted with ice, grated noisily back and forth, cleaning less and less of the glass with each swipe they took at it.

IV

Lavelle got up from his rocking chair.

The time had come to establish psychic bonds with the small assassins that had come out of the pit and were now stalking the Dawson children.

Without turning on any lights, Lavelle went to the dresser, opened one of the top drawers, and withdrew a fistful of silk ribbons. He went to the bed, put the ribbons down, and stripped out of his clothes. Nude, he sat on the edge of the bed and tied a purple ribbon to his right ankle, a white one to his left ankle. Even in the dark, he had no difficulty discerning one color from another. He tied a long scarlet ribbon around his chest, directly over his heart. Yellow around his forehead. Green around his right wrist; black around his left wrist. The ribbons were symbolic ties that would help to put him in intimate contact with the killers from the pit, as soon as he finished the ritual now begun.

It was not his intention to take control of those demonic entities and direct their every move; he couldn't have done so, even if that was what he wanted. Once summoned from the pit and sent after their prey, the assassins followed their own whims and strategies until they had dealt with the intended victims; then, murder done, they were compelled to return to the pit. That was all the control he had over them.

The point of this ritual with the ribbons was merely to enable Lavelle to participate, first-hand, in the thrill of the slaughter. Psychically linked to the assassins, he would see through their eyes, hear with their ears, and feel with their golem bodies. When their razor-edged claws slashed at Davey Dawson, Lavelle would feel the boy's flesh rending in his own hands. When their teeth chewed open Penny's jugular, Lavelle would feel her warm throat against his own lips, too, and would taste the coppery sweetness of her blood.

The thought of it made him tremble with excitement.

And if Lavelle had timed it right, Jack Dawson would be there in the Jamison apartment when his children were torn to pieces. The detective ought to arrive just in time to see the horde descend on Penny and Davey. Although he would try to save them, he would discover that the small assassins couldn't be driven back or killed. He would be forced to stand there, powerless, while his children's precious blood spattered over him.

That was the best part.

Yes. Oh, yes.

Lavelle sighed.

He shivered with anticipation.

The small bottle of cat's blood was on the nightstand. He wet two fingertips in it, made a crimson spot on each cheek, wet his fingers again, anointed his lips. Then, still using blood, he drew a very simple veve on his bare chest.

He stretched out on the bed, on his back.

Staring at the ceiling, he began to chant quietly.

Soon, he was transported in mind and spirit. The real psychic links, which the ribbons symbolized, were successfully achieved, and he was with the demonic entities in the ventilation system of the Jamisons' apartment building. The creatures were only two turns and perhaps twenty feet away from the end of the duct, where it terminated in the wall of the guest bedroom.

The children were near.

The girl was the nearer of the two.

Like the small assassins, Lavelle could sense her presence. Close. Very close. Only another bend in the pipe, then a straightaway, then a final bend.

Close.

The time had come.

V

Standing on the dresser, peering into the duct, Penny heard a voice calling out from within the wall, from another part of the ventilation system, but not far away now. It was a brittle, whispery, cold, hoarse voice that turned her blood to icy slush in her veins. It said, “Penny? Penny?”

She almost fell in her haste to get down from the dresser.

She ran to Davey, grabbed him, shook him. “Wake up! Davey, wake up!”

He hadn't been asleep long, no more than fifteen minutes, but he was nevertheless groggy. “Huh? Whaa?”

“They're coming,” she said. “They're coming. We've got to get dressed and get out of here. Fast. They're coming!”

She screamed for Aunt Faye.

VI

The Jamisons' apartment was in a twelve-story building on a cross street that hadn't yet been plowed. The street was mantled with six inches of snow. Jack drove slowly forward and had no trouble for about twenty yards, but then the wheels sank into a hidden drift that had completely filled in a dip in the pavement. For a moment he thought they were stuck, but he threw the car into reverse and then forward and then reverse and then forward again, rocking it, until it broke free. Two-thirds of the way down the block, he tapped the brakes, and the car slid to a stop in front of the right building.

He flung open the door and scrambled out of the car. An arctic wind hit him with sledgehammer force. He put his head down and staggered around the front of the car, onto the sidewalk, barely able to see as the wind picked up crystals of snow from the ground and sprayed them in his face.

By the time Jack climbed the steps and pushed through the glass doors, into the lobby, Rebecca was already there. Flashing her badge and photo ID at the startled doorman, she said, “Police.”

He was a stout man, about fifty, with hair as white as the snow outside. He was sitting at a Sheraton desk near the pair of elevators, drinking coffee and taking shelter from the storm. He must have been a day-shift man, filling in for the regular night-shift man (or perhaps new) because Jack had never seen him on the evenings when he'd come here to pick up the kids.

“What is it?” the doorman asked. “What's wrong?”

This wasn't the kind of building where people were accustomed to anything being wrong; it was first-class all the way, and the mere prospect of trouble was sufficient to cause the doorman's face to turn nearly as pale as his hair.

Jack punched the elevator call button and said, “We're going up to the Jamisons' apartment. Eleventh floor.”

“I know which floor they're on,” the doorman said, flustered, getting up so quickly that he bumped the desk and almost knocked over his coffee cup. “But why—”

One set of elevator doors opened.

Jack and Rebecca stepped into the cab.

Jack shouted back to the doorman: “Bring a passkey!

I hope to God we don't need it.”

Because if we need it, he thought, that'll mean no one's left alive in the apartment to let us in.

The lift doors shut. The cab started up.

Jack reached inside his overcoat, drew his revolver.

Rebecca pulled her gun, too.

Above the doors, the panel of lighted numbers indicated that they had reached the third floor.

“Guns didn't help Dominick Carramazza,” Jack said shakily, staring at the Smith & Wesson in his hand.

Fourth floor.

“We won't need guns anyway,” Rebecca said. “We've gotten here ahead of Lavelle. I know we have.”

But the conviction had gone out of her voice.

Jack knew why. The journey from her apartment had taken forever. It seemed less and less likely that they were going to be in time.

Sixth floor.

“Why're the elevators so goddamned slow in this building?” Jack demanded.

Seventh floor.

Eighth.

Ninth.

“Move, damnit!” he commanded the lift machinery, as if he thought it would actually speed up if he ordered it to do so.

Tenth floor.

Eleventh.

At last the doors slid open, and Jack stepped through them.

Rebecca followed close behind.

The eleventh floor was so quiet and looked so ordinary that Jack was tempted to hope.

Please, God, please.

There were seven apartments on this floor. The Jamisons had one of the two front units.

Jack went to their door and stood to one side of it. His right arm was bent and tucked close against his side, and the revolver was in his right hand, held close to his face, the muzzle pointed straight up at the ceiling for the moment, but ready to be brought into play in an instant.

Rebecca stood on the other side, directly opposite him, in a similar posture.

Let them be alive. Please. Please.

His eyes met Rebecca's. She nodded. Ready.

Jack pounded on the door.

VII

In the shadow-crowded room, on the bed, Lavelle breathed deeply and rapidly. In fact, he was panting like an animal.

His hands were curled at his sides, fingers hooked and rigid, as if they were talons. For the most part, his hands were still, but now and then they erupted in sudden violent movement, striking at the empty air or clawing frantically at the sheets.

He shivered almost continuously. Once in a while, he jerked and twitched as if an electric current had snapped through him; on these occasions, his entire body heaved up, off the bed, and slammed back down, making the mattress springs squeal in protest.

Deep in a trance, he was unaware of these spasms.

He stared straight up, eyes wide, seldom blinking, but he wasn't seeing the ceiling or anything else in the room. He was viewing other places, in another part of the city, where his vision was held captive by the eager pack of small assassins with which he had established psychic contact.

He hissed.

Groaned.

Gnashed his teeth.

He jerked, flopped, twisted.

Then lay silent, still.

Then clawed the sheets.

He hissed so forcefully that he sprayed spittle into the dark air around him.

His legs suddenly became possessed. He drummed his heels furiously upon the mattress.

He growled in the back of his throat.

He lay silent for a while.

Then he began to pant. He sniffed. Hissed again.

He smelled the girl. Penny Dawson. She had a wonderful scent. Sweet. Young. Fresh. Tender.

He wanted her.

VIII

Faye opened the door, saw Jack's revolver, gave him a startled look, and said, “My God, what's that for? What're you doing? You know how I hate guns. Put that thing away.”

From Faye's demeanor as she stepped back to let them in, Jack knew the kids were all right, and he sagged a little with relief. But he said, “Where's Penny? Where's Davey? Are they okay?”

Faye glanced at Rebecca and started to smile, then realized what Jack was saying, frowned at him, and said, “Okay? Well, of course, they're okay. They're perfectly fine. I might not have kids of my own, but I know how to take care of them. You think I'd let anything happen to those two little monkeys? For heaven's sake, Jack, I don't—”

“Did anyone try to follow you back here from the school? “ he asked urgently.

“And just what was all that nonsense about, anyway? “ Faye demanded.

“It wasn't nonsense. I thought I made that clear. Did anyone try to follow you? You did look out for a tail, like I told you to — didn't you, Faye?”

“Sure, sure, sure. I looked. No one tried to follow me. And I don't think—”

They had moved out of the foyer, into the living room, while they had been talking. Jack looked around, didn't see the kids.

He said, “Faye, where the hell are they?”

“Don't take that tone, for goodness sake. What are you—”

“Faye, damnit!”

She recoiled from him. “They're in the guest room. With Keith,” she said quickly and irritably. “They were put to bed at about a quarter past nine, just as they should have been, and we thought they were just about sound asleep when all of a sudden Penny screamed—”

“Screamed?”

“-and said there were rats in their room. Well, of course, we don't have any—”

Rats!

Jack bolted across the living room, hurried along the short hall, and burst into the guest room.

The bedside lamps, the standing lamp in the corner and the ceiling light were all blazing.

Penny and Davey were standing at the foot of one of the twin beds, still in their pajamas. When they saw Jack, they cried out happily—“Daddy! Daddy!”—and ran to him, hugged him.

Jack was so overwhelmed at finding them alive and unhurt, so grateful, that for a moment he couldn't speak. He just grabbed hold of them and held them very tightly.

In spite of all the lights in the room, Keith Jamison was holding a flashlight. He was over by the dresser holding the flash above his head, directing the beam into the darkness beyond the vent plate that covered the outlet in the heating duct. He turned to Jack, frowning, and said, “Something odd's going on here. I—”

“Goblins!” Penny said, clutching Jack. “They're coming, Daddy, they want me and Davey, don't let them, don't let them get us, oh please, I've been waiting for them, waiting and waiting, scared, and now they're almost here!” The words tumbled over one another, flooding out of her, and then she sobbed.

“Whoa,” Jack said, holding her close and petting her, smoothing her hair. “Easy now. Easy.”

Faye and Rebecca had followed him from the living room.

Rebecca was being her usual cool, efficient self. She was at the bedroom closet, getting the kids' clothes off hangers.

Faye said, “First, Penny shouted that there were rats in her room; and then she started carrying on about goblins, nearly hysterical. I tried to tell her it was only a nightmare—”

“It wasn't a nightmare!” Penny shouted.

“Of course it was,” Faye said.

“They've been watching me all day,” Penny said. “And there was one of them in our room last night, Daddy. And in the school basement today — a whole bunch of them. They chewed up Davey's lunch. And my books, too. I don't know what they want, but they're after us, and they're goblins, real goblins, I swear!”

“Okay,” Jack said. “I want to hear all of this, every detail. But later. Now, we have to get out of here.”

Rebecca brought their clothes.

Jack said, “Get dressed. Don't bother taking off your pajamas. Just put your clothes on over them.”

Faye said, “What on earth—”

“We've got to get the kids out of here,” Jack said. “Fast.”

“But you act as if you actually believe this goblin talk,” Faye said, astonished.

Keith said, “I sure don't believe in goblins, but I sure do believe we have some rats.”

“No, no, no,” Faye said, scandalized. “We can't.

Not in this building.”

“In the ventilation system,” Keith said. “I heard them myself. That's why I was trying to see in there with the flashlight when you came busting in, Jack.”

“Sssshhh, “ Rebecca said. “Listen.”

The kids continued to get dressed, but no one spoke.

At first Jack heard nothing. Then… a peculiar hissing-muttering-growling.

That's no damned rat, he thought.

Inside the wall, something rattled. Then a scratching sound, a furious scrabbling. Industrious noises: clinking, tapping, scraping, thumping.

Faye said, “My God.”

Jack took the flashlight from Keith, went to the dresser, pointed the light at the duct. The beam was bright and tightly focused, but it did little to dispel the blackness that pooled beyond the slots in the vent plate.

Another thump in the wall.

More hissing and muted growling.

Jack felt a prickling along the back of his neck.

Then, incredibly, a voice came out of the duct. It was a hoarse, crackling, utterly inhuman voice, thick with menace: “Penny? Davey? Penny?”

Faye cried out and stumbled back a couple of steps.

Even Keith, who was a big and rather formidable man, went pale and moved away from the vent. “What the devil was that?”

To Faye, Jack said, “Where're the kids' coats and boots? Their gloves?”

“Uh… in… in the kitchen. D-Drying out.”

“Get them.”

Faye nodded but didn't move.

Jack put a hand on her shoulder. “Get their coats and boots and gloves, then meet us by the front door.”

She couldn't take her eyes off the vent.

He shook her. “Faye! Hurry!”

She jumped as if he'd slapped her face, turned, and ran out of the bedroom.

Penny was almost dressed, and she was holding up remarkably well, scared but in control. Davey was sitting on the edge of the bed, trying not to cry, crying anyway, wiping at the tears on his face, glancing apologetically at Penny and biting his lip and trying very hard to follow her example; his legs were dangling over the side of the bed, and Rebecca was hastily tying his shoes for him.

From the vent: “Davey? Penny? “

“Jack, for Christ's sake, what's going on here?”

Keith asked.

Not bothering to respond, having no time or patience for questions and answers just now, Jack pointed the flashlight at the vent again and glimpsed movement in the duct. Something silvery lay in there; it glowed and flickered like a white-hot fire — then blinked and was gone. In its place, something dark appeared, shifted, pushed against the vent plate for a moment, as if trying hard to dislodge it, then withdrew when the plate held. Jack couldn't see enough of the creature to get a clear idea of its general appearance. Keith said, “Jack. The vent screw.”

Jack had already seen it. The screw was revolving, slowly coming out of the edge of the vent plate. The creature inside the duct was turning the screw, unfastening it from the other side of the flange to which the plate was attached. The thing was muttering, hissing, and grumbling softly while it worked.

“Let's go,” Jack said, striving to keep his voice calm. “Come on, come on. Let's get out of here right now.”

The screw popped loose. The vent plate swung down, away from the ventilation outlet, hanging from the one remaining screw.

Rebecca hustled the kids toward the door.

A nightmare crawled out of the duct. It hung there on the wall, with utter disregard for gravity, as if there were suction pads on its feet, although it didn't seem equipped with anything of that sort.

“Jesus,” Keith said, stunned.

Jack shuddered at the thought of this repulsive little beast touching Davey or Penny.

The creature was the size of a rat. In shape, at least, its body was rather like that of a rat, too: low-slung, long in the flanks, with shoulders and haunches that were large and muscular for an animal of its size. But there the resemblance to a rat ended, and the nightmare began. This thing was hairless. Its slippery skin was darkly mottled gray-green-yellow and looked more like a slimy fungus than like flesh. The tail was not at all similar to a rat's tail; it was eight or ten inches long, an inch wide at the base, segmented in the manner of a scorpion's tail, tapering and curling up into the air above the beast's hindquarters, like that of a scorpion, although it wasn't equipped with a stinger. The feet were far different from a rat's feet: They were oversize by comparison to the animal itself; the long toes were triple-jointed, gnarly; the curving claws were much too big for the feet to which they were fitted; a razor-sharp, multiply-barbed spur curved out from each heel. The head was even more deadly in appearance and design than were the feet; it was formed over a flattish skull that had many unnaturally sharp angles, unnecessary convexities and concavities, as if it had been molded by an inexpert sculptor. The snout was long and pointed, a bizarre cross between the muzzle of a wolf and that of a crocodile. The small monster opened its mouth and hissed, revealing too many pointed teeth that were angled in various directions along its jaws. A surprisingly long black tongue slithered out of the mouth, glistening like a strip of raw liver; the end of it was forked, and it fluttered continuously.

But the thing's eyes were what frightened Jack the most. They appeared not to be eyes at all; they had no pupils or irises, no solid tissue that he could discern. There were just empty sockets in the creature's malformed skull, crude holes from which radiated a harsh, cold, brilliant light. The intense glow seemed to come from a fire within the beast's own mutant cranium. Which simply could not be. Yet was. And the thing wasn't blind, either, as it should have been; there wasn't any question about its ability to see, for it fixed those fire-filled “eyes” on Jack, and he could feel its demonic gaze as surely as he would have felt a knife rammed into his gut. That was the other thing that disturbed him, the very worst aspect of those mad eyes: the death-cold, hate-hot, soul-withering feeling they imparted when you dared to meet them. Looking into the thing's eyes, Jack felt both physically and spiritually ill.

With insectile disregard for gravity, the beast slowly crept head-first down the wall, away from the duct.

A second creature appeared at the opening in the ventilation system. This one wasn't anything like the first. It was in the form of a small man, perhaps ten inches high, crouching up there in the mouth of the duct. Although it possessed the crude form of a man, it was in no other way humanlike. Its hands and feet resembled those of the first beast, with dangerous claws and barbed spurs. The flesh was funguslike, slippery looking, though less green, more yellow and gray. There were black circles around the eyes and patches of corrupted-looking black flesh fanning out from the nostrils. Its head was misshapen, with a toothy mouth that went from ear to ear. And it had those same hellish eyes, although they were smaller than the eyes in the ratlike thing.

Jack saw that the man-form beast was holding a weapon. It looked like a miniature spear. The point was well-honed; it caught the light and glinted along its cutting edge.

Jack remembered the first two victims of Lavelle's crusade against the Carramazza family. They had both been stabbed hundreds of times with a weapon no bigger than a penknife — yet not a penknife. The medical examiner had been perplexed; the lab technicians had been baffled. But, of course, it wouldn't have occurred to them to explore the possibility that those homicides were the work of ten-inch voodoo devils and that the murder weapons were miniature spears.

Voodoo devils? Goblins? Gremlins? What exactly were these things?

Did Lavelle mold them from clay and then somehow invest them with life and malevolent purpose?

Or were they conjured up with the help of pentagrams and sacrifices and arcane chants, the way demons were supposedly called forth by Satanists? Were they demons?

Where did they come from?

The man-form thing didn't creep down the wall behind the first beast. Instead, it leaped out of the duct, dropping to the top of the dresser, landing on its feet, agile and quick.

It looked past Jack and Keith, and it said, “Penny? Davey?”

Jack pushed Keith across the threshold, into the hall, then followed him and pulled the door shut behind them.

An instant later, one of the creatures — probably the manlike beast — crashed against the other side of the door and began to claw frantically at it.

The kids were already out of the hall, in the living room.

Jack and Keith hurried after them.

Faye shouted, “Jack! Quick! They're coming through the vent out here!”

“Trying to cut us off,” Jack said.

Jesus, we're not going to make it, they're everywhere, the damned building's infested with them, they're all around us-

In his mind, Jack quickly slammed the door on those bleak thoughts, closed it tight and locked it and told himself that their worst enemies were their own pessimism and fear, which could enervate and immobilize them.

Just this side of the foyer, in the living room, Faye and Rebecca were helping the kids put on coats and boots.

Snarling, hissing, and eager wordless jabbering issued from the vent plate in the wall above the long sofa.

Beyond the slots in that grille, silver eyes blazed in the darkness. One of the screws was being worked loose from inside.

Davey had only one boot on, but time had run out.

Jack picked up the boy and said, “Faye, bring his other boot, and let's get moving.”

Keith was already in the foyer. He'd been to the closet and had gotten coats for himself and Faye. Without pausing to put them on, he grabbed Faye by the arm and hurried her out of the apartment.

Penny screamed.

Jack turned toward the living room, instinctively crouching slightly and holding Davey even tighter.

The vent plate was off the duct above the sofa.

Something was starting to come out of the darkness there.

But that wasn't why Penny had screamed. Another hideous intruder had come out of the kitchen, and that was what had seized her attention. It was two-thirds of the way through the dining room, scurrying toward the living room archway, coming straight at them. Its coloration was different from that of the other beasts, although no less disgusting; it was a sickly yellow-white with cancerous-looking green-black pockmarks all over it, and like the other beasts Lavelle had sent, this one appeared to be slick, slimy. It was also a lot bigger than any of the others, almost three times the size of the ratlike creature in the bedroom. Somewhat resembling an iguana, although more slender through its body than an iguana, this spawn of nightmares was three to four feet in length, had a lizard's tail, a lizard's head and face. Unlike an iguana, however, the small monster had eyes of fire, six legs, and a body so slinky that it appeared capable of tying itself in knots; it was the very slinkiness and flexibility that made it possible for a creature of this size to slither through the ventilation pipes. Furthermore, it had a pair of batlike wings which were atrophied and surely useless but which unfurled and flapped and fluttered with frightening effect.

The thing charged into the living room, tail whipping back and forth behind it. Its mouth cracked wide, emitting a cold shriek of triumph as it bore down on them.

Rebecca dropped to one knee and fired her revolver. She was at point-blank range; she couldn't miss; she didn't. The slug smashed squarely into its target. The shot lifted the beast off the floor and flung it backwards as if it were a bundle of rags. It landed hard, clear back at the archway to the dining room.

It should have been blown to pieces. It wasn't.

The floor and walls should have been splashed with blood — or with whatever fluid pumped through these creatures' veins. But there was no mess whatsoever.

The thing flopped and writhed on its back for a few seconds, then rolled over and got onto its feet, wobbled sideways. It was disoriented and sluggish, but unharmed. It scuttled around in a circle, chasing its own tail.

Meanwhile, Jack's eyes were drawn to the repulsive thing that had come out of the duct above the sofa. It hung on the wall, mewling, approximately the size of a rat but otherwise unlike a rodent. More than anything else, it resembled a featherless bird. It had an eggshaped head perched atop a long, thin neck that might have been that of a baby ostrich, and it had a wickedly pointed beak with which it kept slashing at the air. However, its flickering, fiery eyes were not like those of any bird, and no bird on earth possessed stubby tentacles, like these, instead of legs. The beast was an abomination, a mutant horror; just looking at it made Jack queasy. And now, behind it, another similar though not identical creature crept out of the duct.

“Guns aren't any damned use against these things,” Jack said.

The iguana-form monstrosity was becoming less disoriented. In a moment it would regain its senses and charge at them again.

Two more creatures appeared at the far end of the dining room, crawling out of the kitchen, coming fast.

A screech drew Jack's attention to the far end of the living room, where the hallway led back to the bedroom and baths. The man-shaped thing was standing there, squealing, holding the spear above its head. It ran toward them, crossing the carpet with shocking speed.

Behind it came a horde of small but deadly creatures, reptilian-serpentine-canine-feline-insectile-rodentlike-arachnoid grotesqueries. In that instant Jack realized that they were, indeed, the Hellborn; they were demonic entities summoned from the depths of Hell by Lavelle's sorcery. That must be the answer, insane as it seemed, for there was no place else from which such gruesome horrors could have come. Hissing and chattering and snarling, they flopped and rolled over one another in their eagerness to reach Penny and Davey. Each of them was quite different from the one before it, although all of them shared at least two features: the eyes of silver-white fire, like windows in a furnace — and murderously sharp little teeth. It was as if the gates of Hell had been flung open.

Jack pushed Penny into the foyer. Carrying Davey, he followed his daughter out of the front door, into the eleventh-floor corridor, and hurried toward Keith and Faye, who stood with the white-haired doorman at one of the elevators, keeping the lift open.

Behind Jack, Rebecca fired three shots.

Jack stopped, turned. He wanted to go back for her, but he wasn't sure how he could do that and still protect Davey.

“Daddy! Hurry!” Penny screamed from where she stood half in and half out of the elevator.

“Daddy, let's go, let's go,” Davey said, clinging to him.

Much to Jack's relief, Rebecca came out of the apartment, unharmed. She fired one shot into the Jamisons' foyer, then pulled the door shut.

By the time Jack reached the elevators, Rebecca was right behind him. Gasping for breath, he put Davey down, and all seven of them, including the doorman, crowded into the cab, and Keith hit the button that was marked LOBBY.

The doors didn't immediately slide shut.

“They're gonna get in, they're gonna get in,” Davey cried, voicing the fear that had just flashed into everyone's mind.

Keith pushed the LOBBY button again, kept his thumb on it this time.

Finally the doors slid shut.

But Jack didn't feel any safer.

Now that he was closed up tight in the cramped cab, he wondered if they would have been wiser to take the stairs. What if the demons could put the lift out of commission, stop it between floors? What if they crept into the elevator shaft and descended onto the stranded cab? What if that monstrous horde found a way to get inside? God in heaven, what if…?

The elevator started down.

Jack looked up at the ceiling of the cab. There was an emergency escape hatch. A way out. And a way in. This side of the hatch was featureless: no hinges, no handles. Apparently, it could be pushed up and out — or pulled up and out by rescue workers on the other side. There would be a handle out there on the roof of the cab, which would make it easy for the demons, if they came. But since there wasn't a handle on the inside, the hatch couldn't be held down; the forced entrance of those vicious creatures couldn't be resisted — if they came.

God, please, don't let them come.

The elevator crawled down its long cables as slowly as it had pulled itself up. Tenth floor… ninth…

Penny had taken Davey's boot from Faye. She was helping her little brother get his foot into it.

Eighth floor.

In a haunted voice that cracked more than once, but still with her familiar imperious tone, Faye said, “What were they, Jack? What were those things in the vents?”

“Voodoo,” Jack said, keeping his eyes on the lighted floor indicator above the doors.

Seventh floor.

“Is this some sort of joke?” the doorman asked.

“Voodoo devils, I think,” Jack told Faye, “but don't ask me to explain how they got here or anything about them.”

Shaken as she was, and in spite of what she'd heard and seen in the apartment, Faye said, “Are you out of your mind?”

“Almost wish I was.”

Sixth floor.

“There aren't such things as voodoo devils,” Faye said. “There aren't any—”

“Shut up,” Keith told her. “You didn't see them. You left the guest room before they came out of the vent in there.”

Fifth floor.

Penny said, “And you'd gotten out of the apartment before they started coming through the living room vent, Aunt Faye. You just didn't see them — or you'd believe.”

Fourth floor.

The doorman said, “Mrs. Jamison, how well do you know these people? Are they—”

Ignoring and interrupting him, Rebecca spoke to Faye and Keith: “Jack and I have been on a weird case. Psychopathic killer. Claims to waste his victims with voodoo curses.”

Third floor.

Maybe we're going to make it, Jack thought. Maybe we won't be stopped between floors. Maybe we'll get out of here alive.

And maybe not.

To Rebecca, Faye said, “Surely you don't believe in voodoo.”

“I didn't,” Rebecca said. “But now… yeah.”

With a nasty shock, Jack realized the lobby might be teeming with small, vicious creatures. When the elevator doors opened, the nightmare horde might come rushing in, clawing and biting.

“If it's a joke, I don't get it,” the doorman said.

Second floor.

Suddenly Jack didn't want to reach the lobby, didn't want the lift doors to open. Suddenly he just wanted to go on descending in peace, hour after hour, on into eternity.

The lobby.

Please, no!

The doors opened.

The lobby was deserted.

They poured out of the elevator, and Faye said, “Where are we going?”

Jack said, “Rebecca and I have a car—”

“In this weather—”

“Snow chains,” Jack said, cutting her off sharply. “We're taking the car and getting the kids out of here, keep moving around, until I can figure out what to do.”

“We'll go with you,” Keith said.

“No,” Jack said, ushering the kids toward the lobby doors. “Being with us is probably dangerous.”

“We can't go back upstairs,” Keith said. “Not with those… those demons or devils or whatever the hell they are.”

“Rats,” Faye said, apparently having decided that she could deal with the uncouth more easily than she could deal with the unnatural. “Only some rats. Of course, we'll go back. Sooner or later, we'll have to go back, set traps, exterminate them. The sooner the better, in fact.”

Paying no attention to Faye, talking over her head to Keith, Jack said, “I don't think the damned things will hurt you and Faye. Not unless you were to stand between them and the kids. They'll probably kill anyone who tries to protect the kids. That's why I'm getting them away from you. Still, I wouldn't go back there tonight. A few of them might wait around.”

“You couldn't drag me back there tonight,” Keith assured him.

“Nonsense,” Faye said. “Just a few rats—”

“Damnit, woman,” Keith said, “it wasn't a rat that called for Davey and Penny from inside that duct!”

Faye was already pale. When Keith reminded her of the voice in the ventilation system, she went pure white.

They all paused at the doors, and Rebecca said, “Keith, is there someone you can stay with?”

“Sure,” Keith said. “One of my business partners, Anson Dorset, lives on this same block. On the other side of the street. Up near the avenue. We can spend the night there, with Anson and Francine.”

Jack pushed the door open. The wind tried to slam it shut again, almost succeeded, and snow exploded into the lobby. Fighting the wind, turning his face away from the stinging crystals, Jack held the door open for the others and motioned them ahead of him. Rebecca went first, then Penny and Davey, then Faye and Keith.

The doorman was the only one left. He was scratching his white-haired head and frowning at Jack. “Hey, wait. What about me?”

“What about you? You're not in any danger,” Jack said, starting through the door, in the wake of the others.

“But what about all that gunfire upstairs?”

Turning to the man again, Jack said, “Don't worry about it. You saw our ID when we came in here, right? We're cops.”

“Yeah, but who got shot?”

“Nobody,” Jack said.

“Then who were you shooting at? “

“Nobody.”

Jack went out into the storm, letting the door blow shut behind him.

The doorman stood in the lobby, face pressed to the glass door, peering out at them, as if he were a fat and unpopular schoolboy who was being excluded from a game.

IX

The wind was a hammer.

The spicules of snow were nails.

The storm was busily engaged on its carpentry work, building drifts in the street.

By the time Jack reached the bottom of the steps in front of the apartment building, Keith and Faye were already angling across the street, heading up toward the avenue, toward the building where their friends lived. Step by step, they were gradually disappearing beyond the phosphorescent curtains of wind-blown snow.

Rebecca and the kids were standing at the car.

Raising his voice above the huffing and moaning of the wind, Jack said, “Come on, come on. Get in. Let's get out of here.”

Then he realized something was wrong.

Rebecca had one hand on the door handle, but she wasn't opening the door. She was staring into the car, transfixed.

Jack moved up beside her and looked through the window and saw what she saw. Two of the creatures. Both on the back seat. They were wrapped in shadows, and it was impossible to see exactly what they looked like, but their glowing silver eyes left no doubt that they were kin to the murderous things that had come out of the heating ducts. If Rebecca had opened the door without looking inside, if she hadn't noticed that the beasts were waiting in there, she might have been attacked and overwhelmed. Her throat could have been torn open, her eyes gouged out, her life taken before Jack was even aware of the danger, before he had a chance to go to her assistance.

“Back off,” he said.

The four of them moved away from the car, huddled together on the sidewalk, wary of the night around them.

They were the only people on the wintry street, now. Faye and Keith were out of sight. There were no plows, no cars, no pedestrians. Even the doorman was no longer watching them.

It's strange, Jack thought, to feel this isolated and this alone in the heart of Manhattan.

“What now?” Rebecca asked urgently, her eyes fixed on the car, one hand on Davey, one hand inside her coat where she was probably gripping her revolver.

“We keep moving,” Jack said, dissatisfied with his answer, but too surprised and too scared to think of anything better.

Don't panic.

“Where?” Rebecca asked.

“Toward the avenue,” he said.

Calm. Easy. Panic will finish us.

“The way Keith went?” Rebecca asked.

“No. The other avenue. Third Avenue. It's closer.”

“I hope there's people out there,” she said.

“Maybe even a patrol car.”

And Penny said, “I think we're a whole lot safer around people, out in the open.”

“I think so, too, sweetheart,” Jack said. “So let's go now. And stay close together.”

Penny took hold of Davey's hand.

The attack came suddenly. The thing rushed out from beneath their car. Squealing. Hissing. Eyes beaming silvery light. Dark against the snow. Swift and sinuous. Too damned swift. Lizardlike. Jack saw that much in the storm-diluted glow of the streetlamps, reached for his revolver, remembered that bullets couldn't kill these things, also realized that they were in too close quarters to risk using a gun anyway, and by then the thing was among them, snarling and spitting — all of this in but a single second, one tick of time, perhaps even less. Davey shouted. And tried to get out of the thing's way. He couldn't avoid it. The beast pounced on the boy's boot. Davey kicked. It clung to him. Jack lifted-pushed Penny out of the way. Put her against the wall of the apartment building. She crouched there. Gasping. Meanwhile, the lizard had started climbing Davey's legs. The boy flailed at it. Stumbled. Staggered backwards. Shrieking for help. Slipped. Fell. All of this in only one more second, maybe two—tick, tick—and Jack felt as if he were in a fever dream, with time distorted as it could be only in a dream. He went after the boy, but he seemed to be moving through air as thick as syrup. The lizard was on the front of Davey's chest now, its tail whipping back and forth, its clawed feet digging at the heavy coat, trying to tear the coat to shreds so that it could then rip open the boy's belly, and its mouth was wide, its muzzle almost at the boy's face—no! — and Rebecca got there ahead of Jack. Tick. She tore the disgusting thing off Davey's chest. It wailed. It bit her hand. She cried out in pain. Threw the lizard down. Penny was screaming: “Davey, Davey, Davey!” Tick. Davey had regained his feet. The lizard went after him again. This time, Jack got hold of the thing. In his bare hands. On the way up to the Jamisons' apartment, he'd removed his gloves in order to be able to use his gun more easily. Now, shuddering at the feel of the thing, he ripped it off the boy. Heard the coat shredding in its claws. Held it at arm's length. Tick. The creature felt repulsively cold and oily in Jack's hands, although for some reason he had expected it to be hot, maybe because of the fire inside its skull, the silvery blaze that now flickered at him through the gaping sockets where the demons eyes should have been. The beast squirmed. Tick. It tried to wrench free of him, and it was strong, but he was stronger. Tick. It kicked the air with its wickedly clawed feet. Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick…

Rebecca said, “Why isn't it trying to bite you?”

“I don't know,” he said breathlessly.

“What's different about you?”

“I don't know.”

But he remembered the conversation he'd had with Nick Iervolino in the patrol car, earlier today, on the way downtown from Carver Hampton's shop in Harlem. And he wondered…

The lizard-thing had a second mouth, this one in its stomach, complete with sharp little teeth. The aperture gaped at Jack, opened and closed, but this second mouth was no more eager to bite him than was the mouth in the lizard's head.

“Davey, are you all right?” Jack asked.

“Kill it, Daddy,” the boy said. He sounded terrified but unharmed. “Please kill it. Please.”

“I only wish I could,” Jack said.

The small monster twisted, flopped, wriggled, did its best to slither out of Jack's hands. The feel of it revolted him, but he gripped it even tighter than before, harder, dug his fingers into the cold oily flesh.

“Rebecca, what about your hand?”

“Just a nip,” she said.

“Penny?”

“I… I'm okay.”

“Then the three of you get out of here. Go to the avenue.”

“What about you?” Rebecca asked.

“I'll hold onto this thing, give you a head start.” The lizard thrashed. “Then I'll throw it as far as I can before I follow you.”

“We can't leave you alone,” Penny said desperately.

“Only for a minute or two,” Jack said. “I'll catch up. I can run faster than the three of you. I'll catch up easy. Now go on. Get out of here before another one of these damned things charges out from somewhere. Go!”

They ran, the kids ahead of Rebecca, kicking up plumes of snow as they went.

The lizard-thing hissed at Jack.

He looked into those eyes of fire.

Inside the lizard's malformed skull, flames writhed, fluttered, flickered, but never wavered, burned bright and intense, all shades of white and silver, but somehow it didn't seem like a hot fire; it looked cool, instead.

Jack wondered what would happen if he poked a finger through one of those hollow sockets, into the fire beyond. Would he actually find fire in there? Or was it an illusion? If there really was fire in the skull, would he burn himself? Or would he discover that the flames were as lacking in heat as they appeared to be?

White flames. Sputtering.

Cold flames. Hissing.

The lizard's two mouths chewed at the night air.

Jack wanted to see more deeply into that strange fire.

He held the creature closer to his face.

He stared into the empty sockets.

Whirling flames.

Leaping flames.

He had the feeling there was something beyond the fire, something amazing and important, something awesome that he could almost glimpse between those scintillating, tightly contained pyrotechnics.

He brought the lizard even closer.

Now his face was only inches from its muzzle.

He could feel the light of its eyes washing over him.

It was a bitterly cold light.

Incandescent.

Fascinating.

He peered intently into the skull fire.

The flames almost parted, almost permitted him to see what lay beyond them.

He squinted, trying harder to see.

He wanted to understand the great mystery.

The mystery beyond the fiery veil.

Wanted, needed, had to understand it.

White flames.

Flames of snow, of ice.

Flames that held a shattering secret.

Flames that beckoned…

Beckoned…

He almost didn't hear the car door opening behind him. The “eyes” of the lizard-thing had seized him and half mesmerized him. His awareness of the snowswept street around him had grown fuzzy. In a few more seconds, he would have been lost. But they misjudged; they opened the car door one moment too soon, and he heard it. He turned, threw the lizard-thing as far as he could into the stormy darkness.

He didn't wait to see where it fell, didn't look to see what was coming out of the unmarked sedan.

He just ran.

Ahead of him, Rebecca and the kids had reached the avenue. They turned left at the corner, moving out of sight.

Jack pounded through the snow, which was almost over the tops of his boots in some places, and his heart triphammered, and his breath spurted from him in white clouds, and he slipped, almost fell, regained his balance, ran, ran, and it seemed to him that he wasn't running along a real street, that this was only a street in a dream, a nightmare place from which there was no escape.

X

In the elevator, on the way up to the fourteenth floor, where Anson and Francine Dorset had an apartment, Faye said, “Not a word about voodoo or any of that nonsense. You hear me? They'll think you're crazy.”

Keith said, “Well, I don't know about voodoo. But I sure as hell saw something strange.”

“Don't you dare go raving about it to Anson and Francine. He's your business partner, for heaven's sake. You've got to go on working with the man. That's going to be hard to do if he thinks you're some sort of superstitious nut. A broker's got to have an image of stability. A banker's image. Bankers and brokers. People want to see stable, conservative men at a brokerage firm before they trust it with their investments. You can't afford the damage to your reputation. Besides, they were only rats.”

“They weren't rats,” he said. “I saw—”

“Nothing but rats.”

“I know what I saw.”

“Rats,” she insisted. “But we're not going to tell Anson and Francine we have rats. What would they think of us? I won't have them knowing we live in a building with rats. Why, Francine already looks down on me, she looks down on everyone; she thinks she's such a blueblood, that family she comes from. I won't give her the slightest advantage. I swear I won't. Not a word about rats. What we'll tell them is that there's a gas leak. They can't see our building from their apartment and they won't be going out on a night like this, so we'll tell them we've been evacuated because of a gas leak.”

“Faye—”

“And tomorrow morning,” she said determinedly, “I'll start looking for a new place for us.”

“But—”

“I won't live in a building with rats. I simply won't do it, and you can't expect me to. You should want out of there yourself, just as fast as it can be arranged.”

“But they weren't—”

“We'll sell the apartment. And maybe it's even time we got out of this damned dirty city altogether. I've been half wanting to get out for years. You know that. Maybe it's time we start looking for a place in Connecticut. I know you won't be happy about commuting, but the train isn't so bad, and think of all the advantages. Fresh air. A bigger place for the same money. Our own pool. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe Penny and Davey could come and stay with us for the entire summer. They shouldn't spend their entire childhood in the city. It isn't healthy. Yes, definitely, I'll start looking into it tomorrow.”

“Faye, for one thing, everything'll be shut up tight on account of the blizzard—”

“That won't stop me. You'll see. First thing tomorrow.”

The elevator doors opened.

In the fourteenth-floor corridor, Keith said, “Aren't you worried about Penny and Davey? I mean, we left them—”

“They'll be fine,” she said, and she even seemed to believe it. “It was only rats. You don't think rats are going to follow them out of the building? They're in no danger from a few rats. What I'm most worried about is that father of theirs, telling them it's voodoo, scaring them like that, stuffing their heads full of such nonsense. What's gotten into that man? Maybe he does have a psychotic killer to track down, but voodoo has nothing to do with it. He doesn't sound rational. Honestly, I just can't understand him; no matter how hard I try, I just can't.”

They had reached the door to the Dorset apartment. Keith rang the bell.

Faye said, “Remember, not a word!”

Anson Dorset must have been waiting with his hand on the doorknob ever since they phoned up from downstairs, for he opened up at once, just as Faye issued that warning to Keith. He said, “Not a word about what?”

“Rats,” Keith said. “All of a sudden, it seems as if our building is infested with rats.”

Faye cast a murderous look at him.

He didn't care. He wasn't going to spin an elaborate story about a gas leak. They could be caught too easily in a lie like that, and then they'd look like fools. So he told Anson and Francine about a plague of vermin, but he didn't mention voodoo or say anything about the weird creatures that had come out of the guest room vent. He conceded that much to Faye because she was absolutely right on that score: A stockbroker had to maintain a conservative, stable, level-headed image at all times — or risk ruin.

But he wondered how long it would be before he could forget what he had seen.

A long time.

A long, long time.

Maybe never.

XI

Sliding a little, then stomping through a drift that put snow inside his boots, Jack turned the corner, onto the avenue. He didn't look back because he was afraid he'd discover the goblins — as Penny called them — close at his heels.

Rebecca and the kids were only a hundred feet ahead. He hurried after them.

Much to his dismay, he saw that they were the only people on the broad avenue. There were only a few cars, all deserted and abandoned after becoming stuck in the snow. Nobody out walking. And who, in his right mind, would be out walking in gale-force winds, in the middle of a blinding snowstorm? Nearly two blocks away, red taillights and revolving red emergency beacons gleamed and winked, barely visible in the sheeting snow. It was a train of plows, but they were headed the other way.

He caught up with Rebecca and the kids. It wasn't difficult to close the gap. They were no longer moving very fast. Already, Davey and Penny were flagging. Running in deep snow was like running with lead weights on the feet; the constant resistance was quickly wearing them down.

Jack glanced back the way they had come. No sign of the goblins. But those lantern-eyed creatures would show up, and soon. He couldn't believe they had given up this easily.

When they did come, they would find easy prey. The kids would have slowed to a weary, shambling walk in another minute.

Jack didn't feel particularly spry himself. His heart was pounding so hard and fast that it seemed as if it would tear loose of its moorings. His face hurt from the cold, biting wind, which also stung his eyes and brought tears to them. His hands hurt and were somewhat numb, too, because he hadn't had time to put on his gloves again. He was breathing hard, and the arctic air cracked his throat, made his chest ache. His feet were freezing because of all the snow that had gotten into his boots. He wasn't in any condition to provide much protection to the kids, and that realization made him angry and fearful, for he and Rebecca were the only people standing between the kids and death.

As if excited by the prospect of their slaughter, the wind howled louder, almost gleefully.

The winter-bare trees, rising from cut-out planting beds in the wide sidewalk, rattled their stripped limbs in the wind. It was the sound of animated skeletons.

Jack looked around for a place to hide. Just ahead, five brownstone apartment houses, each four stories tall, were sandwiched between somewhat higher and more modern (though less attractive) structures. To Rebecca, he said, “We've got to get out of sight,” and he hurried all of them off the sidewalk, up the snowcovered steps, through the glass-paneled front doors, into the security foyer of the first brownstone.

The foyer wasn't well-heated; however, by comparison with the night outside, it seemed wonderfully tropical. It was also clean and rather elegant, with brass mailboxes and a vaulted wooden ceiling, although there was no doorman. The complex mosaic-tile floor — which depicted a twining vine, green leaves, and faded yellow flowers against an ivory background — was highly polished, and not one piece of tile was missing.

But, even as pleasant as it was, they couldn't stay here. The foyer was also brightly lighted. They would be spotted easily from the street.

The inner door was also glass paneled. Beyond it lay the first-floor hall, the elevator and stairs. But the door was locked and could be opened only with a key or with a lock-release button in one of the apartments.

There were sixteen apartments in all, four on each floor. Jack stepped to the brass mailboxes and pushed the call button for a Mr. and Mrs. Evans on the fourth floor.

A woman's voice issued tinnily from the speaker at the top of the mailbox. “Who is it?”

“Is this the Grofeld apartment?” Jack asked, knowing full well that it wasn't.

“No,” the unseen woman said. “You've pressed the wrong button. The Grofelds' mailbox is next to ours.”

“Sorry,” he said as Mrs. Evans broke the connection.

He glanced toward the front door, at the street beyond.

Snow. Naked, blackened trees shaking in the wind. The ghostly glow of storm-shrouded streetlamps.

But nothing worse than that. Nothing with silvery eyes. Nothing with lots of pointed little teeth.

Not yet.

He pressed the Grofelds' button, asked if this were the Santini apartment, and was curtly told that the Santinis' mailbox was the next one.

He rang the Santinis and was prepared to ask if theirs was the Porterfield apartment. But the Santinis apparently expected someone and were considerably less cautious than their neighbors, for they buzzed him through the inner door without asking who he was.

Rebecca ushered the kids inside, and Jack quickly followed, closing the foyer door behind them.

He could have used his police ID to get past the foyer, but it would have taken too long. With the crime rate spiraling upward, most people were more suspicious these days than they'd once been. If he had been straightforward with Mrs. Evans, right there at the start, she wouldn't have accepted his word that he was a cop. She would have wanted to come down — and rightly so — to examine his badge through the glass panel in the inner door. By that time, one of Lavelle's demonic assassins might have passed by the building and spotted them.

Besides, Jack was reluctant to involve other people, for to do so would be to put their lives at risk if the goblins should suddenly arrive and attack.

Apparently, Rebecca shared his concern about dragging strangers into it, for she warned the kids to be especially quiet as she escorted them into a shadowy recess under the stairs, to the right of the main entrance.

Jack crowded into the nook with them, away from the door. They couldn't be seen from the street or from the stairs above, not even if someone leaned out over the railing and looked down.

After less than a minute had passed, a door opened a few floors overhead. Footsteps. Then someone, apparently Mr. Santini, said, “Alex? Is that you?”

Under the stairs, they remained silent, unmoving.

Mr. Santini waited.

Outside, the wind roared.

Mr. Santini descended a few steps. “Is anyone there?”

Go away, Jack thought. You haven't any idea what you might be walking into. Go away.

As if he were telepathic and had received Jack's warning, the man returned to his apartment and closed the door.

Jack sighed.

Eventually, speaking in a tremulous whisper, Penny said, “How will we know when it's safe to go outside again?”

“We'll just give it a little time, and then when it seems right… I'll slip out there and take a peek,” Jack said softly.

Davey was shaking as if it were colder in here than it was outside. He wiped his runny nose with the sleeve of his coat and said, “How much time will we wait?”

“Five minutes,” Rebecca told him, also whispering. “Ten at most. They'll be gone by then.”

“They will?”

“Sure. They might already be gone.”

“You really think so?” Davey asked. “Already?”

“Sure,” Rebecca said. “There's a good chance they didn't follow us. But even if they did come after us, they won't hang around this area all night.”

“Won't they?” Penny asked doubtfully.

“No, no, no,” Rebecca said. “Of course they won't. Even goblins get bored, you know.”

“Is that what they are?” Davey asked. “Goblins? Really?”

“Well, it's hard to know exactly what we ought to call them,” Rebecca said.

“Goblins was the only word I could think of when I saw them,” Penny said. “It just popped into my mind.”

“And it's a pretty darned good word,” Rebecca assured her. “You couldn't have thought of anything better, so far as I'm concerned. And, you know, if you think back to all the fairytales you ever heard, goblins were always more bark than bite. About all they ever really did to anyone was scare them. So if we're patient and careful, really careful, then everything will be all right.”

Jack admired and appreciated the way Rebecca was handling the children, alleviating their anxiety. Her voice had a soothing quality. She touched them continually as she spoke to them, squeezed and stroked them, gentled them down.

Jack pulled up his sleeve and looked at his watch.

Ten-fourteen.

They huddled together in the shadows under the stairs, waiting. Waiting.

I

For a while Lavelle lay on the floor of the dark bedroom, stunned, breathing only with difficulty, numb with pain. When Rebecca Chandler shot a few of those small assassins in the Jamisons' apartment, Lavelle had been in psychic contact with them, and he'd felt the impact of the bullets on their golem bodies. He hadn't been injured, not any more than the demonic entities themselves had been injured. His skin wasn't broken. He wasn't bleeding. In the morning, there would be no bruises, no tenderness of flesh. But the impact of those slugs had been agonizingly real and had rendered him briefly unconscious.

He wasn't unconscious now. Just disoriented. When the pain began to subside a little, he crawled around the room on his belly, not certain what he was searching for, not even certain where he was. Gradually he regained his senses. He crept back to the bed, levered himself onto the mattress, and flopped on his back, groaning.

Darkness touched him.

Darkness healed him.

Snow tapped the windows.

Darkness breathed over him.

Roof rafters creaked in the wind.

Darkness whispered to him.

Darkness.

Eventually, the pain was gone.

But the darkness remained. It embraced and caressed him. He suckled on it. Nothing else soothed as completely and as deeply as the darkness.

In spite of his unsettling and painful experience, he was eager to reestablish the psychic link with the creatures that were in pursuit of the Dawsons. The ribbons were still tied to his ankles, wrists, chest, and head. The spots of cat's blood were still on his cheeks. His lips were still anointed with blood. And the blood veve was still on his chest. All he had to do was repeat the proper chants, which he did, staring at the tenebrous ceiling. Slowly, the bedroom faded around him, and he was once again with the silver-eyed horde, relentlessly stalking the Dawson children.

II

Ten-fifteen.

Ten-sixteen.

While they huddled under the stairs, Jack looked at the bite on Rebecca's left hand. Three puncture marks were distributed over an area as large as a nickel, on the meatiest part of her palm, and there was a small tear in the skin, as well, but the lizard-thing hadn't bitten deeply. The flesh was only slightly puffy. The wound no longer wept; there was only dried blood.

“How does it feel?”

“Burns a bit,” she said.

“That's all?”

“It'll be fine. I'll put my glove on; that ought to help prevent it from breaking open and bleeding again.”

“Keep a watch on it, okay? If there's any discoloration, any more swelling, anything at all odd about it, maybe we ought to get you to a hospital.”

“And when I talk to the doctor, what'll I say happened to me?”

“Tell him you were bitten by a goblin. What else?”

“Might be worth it just to see his expression.”

Ten-seventeen.

Jack examined Davey's coat, at which the lizard had clawed in a murderous frenzy. The garment was heavy and well-made; the fabric was sturdy. Nevertheless, the creature's claws had sliced all the way through in at least three places — and through the quilted lining, too.

It was a miracle that Davey was unharmed. Although the claws had pierced the coat as if it were so much cheesecloth, they hadn't torn the boy's sweater or his shirt; they hadn't left even one shallow scratch on his skin.

Jack thought about how close he had come to losing both Davey and Penny, and he was acutely aware that he might still lose them before this case was closed. He put one hand to his son's fragile face. An icy premonition of dreadful loss began to blossom within him, spreading frozen petals of terror and despair. His throat clenched. He struggled to hold back tears. He must not cry. The kids would come apart if he cried. Besides, if he gave in to despair now, he would be surrendering — in some small but significant way — to Lavelle. Lavelle was evil, not just another criminal, not merely corrupted, but evil, the very essence and embodiment of it, and evil thrived on despair. The best weapons against evil were hope, optimism, determination, and faith. Their chances of survival depended on — their ability to keep hoping, to believe that life (not death) was their destiny, to believe that good could triumph over evil, simply to believe. He would not lose his kids. He would not allow Lavelle to have them.

“Well,” he said to Davey, “it's too well-ventilated for a winter coat, but I think we can fix that.” He took off his long neckscarf, wound it overtop the boy's damaged coat, twice around his small chest, and knotted it securely at his waist. “There. That ought to keep the gaps closed. You okay, skipper?”

Davey nodded and tried very hard to look brave. He said, “Dad, do you think maybe what you need here is a magic sword?”

“A magic sword?” Jack said.

“Well, isn't that what you've got to have if you're going to kill a bunch of goblins?” the boy asked earnestly. “In all the stories, they usually have a magic sword or a magic staff, see, or maybe just some magic powder, and that's what always does in the goblins or the witches or ogres or whatever it is that has to be done in. Oh, and sometimes, what it is they have… it's a magic jewel, you know, or a sorcerer's ring. So, since you and Rebecca are detectives maybe this time it's a goblin gun. Do you know if the police department has anything like that? A goblin gun?”

“I don't really know,” Jack said solemnly, wanting to hug the boy very close and very tight. “But it's a darned good suggestion, son. I'll look into it.”

“And if they don't have one,” Davey said, “then maybe you could just ask a priest to sort of bless your own gun, the one you already have, and then you could load it up with lots and lots of silver bullets. That's what they do with werewolves, you know.”

“I know. And that's a good suggestion, too. I'm real glad to see you're thinking about ways to beat these things. I'm glad you aren't giving up. That's what's important — not giving up.”

“Sure,” Davey said, sticking his chin out. “I know that.”

Penny was watching her father over Davey's shoulder. She smiled and winked.

Jack winked back at her.

Ten-twenty.

With every minute that passed uneventfully, Jack felt safer.

Not safe. Just safer.

Penny gave him a very abbreviated account of her encounters with the goblins.

When the girl finished, Rebecca looked at Jack and said, “He's been keeping a watch on them. So he'd always know exactly where to find them when the time came.”

To Penny, Jack said, “My God, baby, why didn't you wake me last night when the thing was in your room?”

“I didn't really see it—”

“But you heard it.”

“That's all.”

“And the baseball bat—”

“Anyway,” Penny said with a sudden odd shyness, unable to meet his eyes, “I was afraid you'd think I'd gone… crazy… again.”

“Huh? Again?” Jack blinked at her. “What on earth do you mean — again?”

“Well… you know… like after Mama died, the way I was then… when I had my… trouble.”

“But you weren't crazy,” Jack said. “You just needed a little counseling; that's all, honey.”

“That's what you called him,” the girl said, barely audible. “A counselor.”

“Yeah. Dr. Hannaby.”

“Aunt Faye, Uncle Keith, everyone called him a counselor. Or sometimes a doctor.”

“That's what he was. He was there to counsel you, to show you how to deal with your grief over your mom's death.”

The girl shook her head: no. “One day, when I was in his office, waiting for him… and he didn't come in to start the session right away… I started to read the college degrees on his wall.”

“And?”

With evident embarrassment, Penny said, “I found out he was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists treat crazy people. That's when I knew I was a little bit… crazy.”

Surprised and dismayed that such a misconception could have gone uncorrected for so long, Jack said, “No, no, no. Sweetheart, you've got it all wrong.”

Rebecca said, “Penny, for the most-part, psychiatrists treat ordinary people with ordinary problems. Problems that we all have at one time or another in our lives. Emotional problems, mostly. That's what yours were. Emotional problems.”

Penny looked at her shyly. She frowned. Clearly, she wanted to believe.

“They treat some mental problems, too, of course,” Rebecca said. “But in their offices, among their regular patients, they hardly ever see anyone who's really, really insane. Truly crazy people are hospitalized or kept in institutions.”

“Sure,” Jack said. He reached for Penny's hands, held them. They were small, delicate hands. The fragility of her hands, the vulnerability of an eleven-year-old who liked to think of herself as grown-up — it made his heart ache. “Honey, you were never crazy. Never even close to crazy. What a terrible thing to've been worrying about all this time.”

The girl looked from Jack to Rebecca to Jack again. “You really mean it? You really mean lots of ordinary, everyday people go to psychiatrists?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Honey, life threw you a pretty bad curve, what with your mom dying so young, and I was so broken up myself that I wasn't much good at helping you handle it. I guess… I should have made an extra-special effort. But I was feeling so bad, so lost, so helpless, so darned sorry for myself that I just wasn't able to heal both of us, you and me. That's why I sent you to Dr. Hannaby when you started having your problems. Not because you were crazy. Because you needed to talk to someone who wouldn't start crying about your mom as soon as you started crying about your mom. Understand?”

“Yeah,” Penny said softly, tears shining in her eyes, brightly suspended but unspilled.

“Positive?”

“Yeah. I really do, Daddy. I understand now.”

“So you should have come to me last night, when the thing was in your room. Certainly after it poked holes in that plastic baseball bat. I wouldn't have thought you were crazy.”

“Neither would I,” Davey said. “I never-ever thought you were crazy, Penny. You're probably the least craziest person I know.”

Penny giggled, and Jack and Rebecca couldn't help grinning, but Davey didn't know what was so funny.

Jack hugged his daughter very tight. He kissed her face and her hair. He said, “I love you, peanut.”

Then he hugged Davey and told him he loved him, too.

And then, reluctantly, he looked at his wristwatch.

Ten-twenty-four.

Ten minutes had elapsed since they had come into the brownstone and had taken shelter in the space under the big staircase.

“Looks like they didn't follow us,” Rebecca said.

“Let's not be too hasty,” he said. “Give it another couple of minutes.”

Ten-twenty-five.

Ten-twenty-six.

He didn't relish going outside and having a look around. He waited one more minute.

Ten-twenty-seven.

Finally he could delay no longer. He eased out from the staircase. He took two steps, put his hand on the brass knob of the foyer door — and froze.

They were here. The goblins.

One of them was clinging to the glass panel in the center of the door. It was a two-foot-long, wormlike thing with a segmented body and perhaps two dozen legs. Its mouth resembled that of a fish: oval, with the teeth set far back from the writhing, sucking lips. Its fiery eyes fixed on Jack.

He abruptly looked away from that white-hot gaze, for he recalled how the eyes of the lizard had nearly hypnotized him.

Beyond the worm-thing, the security foyer was crawling with other, different devils, all of them small, but all of them so incredibly vicious and grotesque in appearance that Jack began to shake and felt his bowels turn to jelly. There were lizard-things in various sizes and shapes. Spider-things. Rat-things. Two of the man-form beasts, one of them with a tail, the other with a sort of cock's comb on its head and along its back. Dog things. Crablike, feline, snakelike, beetle-form, scorpionlike, dragonish, clawed and ranged, spiked and spurred and sharply horned things. Perhaps twenty of them. No. More than twenty. At least thirty. They slithered and skittered across the mosaic-tile floor, and they crept tenaciously up the walls, their foul tongues darting and fluttering ceaselessly, teeth gnashing and grinding, eyes shining.

Shocked and repelled, Jack snatched his hand away from the brass doorknob. He turned to Rebecca and the kids. “They've found us. They're here. Come on. Got to get out. Hurry. Before it's too late.”

They came away from the stairs. They saw the worm-thing on the door and the horde in the foyer beyond. Rebecca and Penny stared at that Hellborn pack without speaking, both of them driven beyond the need — and perhaps beyond the ability — to scream. Davey was the only one who cried out. He clutched at Jack's arm.

“They must be inside the building by now,” Rebecca said. “In the walls.”

They all looked toward the hallway's heating vents.

“How do we get out?” Penny asked.

How, indeed?

For a moment no one spoke.

In the foyer other creatures had joined the worm-thing on the glass of the inner door.

“Is there a rear entrance?” Rebecca wondered.

“Probably,” Jack said. “But if there is, then these things will be waiting there, too.”

Another pause.

The silence was oppressive and terrifying — like the unspent energy in the raised blade of a cocked guillotine.

“Then we're trapped,” Penny said.

Jack felt his own heart beating. It shook him.

Think.

“Daddy, don't let them get me, please don't let them, “ Davey said miserably.

Jack glanced at the elevator, which was opposite the stairs. He wondered if the devils were already in the elevator shaft. Would the doors of the lift suddenly open, spilling out a wave of hissing, snarling, snapping death?

Think!

He grabbed Davey's hand and headed toward the foot of the stairs.

Following with Penny, Rebecca said, “Where are you going?”

“This way.”

They climbed the steps toward the second floor.

Penny said, “But if they're in the walls, they'll be all through the building.”

“Hurry,” was Jack's only answer. He led them up the steps as fast as they could go.

III

In Carver Hampton's apartment above his shop in Harlem, all the lights were on. Ceiling lights, reading lamps, table lamps, and floor lamps blazed; no room was left in shadow. In those few corners where the lamplight didn't reach, candles had been lit; clusters of them stood in dishes and pie pans and cake tins.

Carver sat at the small kitchen table, by the window, his strong brown hands clamped around a glass of Chivas Regal. He stared out at the falling snow, and once in a while he took a sip of the Scotch.

Fluorescent bulbs glowed in the kitchen ceiling. The stove light was on. And the light above the sink, too. On the table, within easy reach, were packs of matches, three boxes of candles, and two flashlights — just in case the storm caused a power failure.

This was not a night for darkness.

Monstrous things were loose in the city.

They fed on darkness.

Although the night-stalkers had not been sent to get Carver, he could sense them out there in the stormy streets, prowling, hungry; they radiated a palpable evil, the pure and ultimate evil of the Ancient Ones. The creatures now loose in the storm were foul and unspeakable presences that couldn't go unnoticed by a man of Carver Hampton's powers. For one who was gifted with the ability to detect the intrusion of otherworldly forces into this world, their mere existence was an intolerable abrasion of the nerves, the soul. He assumed they were Lavelle's hellish emissaries, bent on the brutal destruction of the Carramazza family, for to the best of his knowledge there was no other Bocor in New York who could have summoned such creatures from the Underworld.

He sipped his Scotch. He wanted to get roaring drunk. But he wasn't much of a drinking man. Besides, this night of all nights, he must remain alert, totally in control of himself. Therefore, he allowed himself only small sips of whiskey.

The Gates had been opened. The very Gates of Hell. Just a crack. The latch had barely been slipped. And through the applicator of his formidable powers as a Bocor, Lavelle was holding the Gates against the crush of demonic entities that sought to push forth from the other side. Carver could sense all of those things in the currents of the ether, in the invisible and soundless tides of benign and malevolent energies that ebbed and flowed over the great metropolis.

Opening the Gates was a wildly dangerous step to have taken. Few Bocors were even capable of doing it. And of those few, fewer still would have dared such a thing. Because Lavelle evidently was one of the most powerful Bocors who had ever drawn a sieve, there was good reason to believe that he would be able to maintain control of the Gates and that, in time, when the Carramazzas were disposed of, he would be able to cast back the creatures that he had permitted out of Hell. But if he lost control for even a moment.

Then God help us, Carver thought.

If He will help us.

If He can help us.

A hurricane-force gust of wind slammed into the building and whined through the eaves.

The window rattled in front of Carver, as if something more than the wind was out there and wanted to get in at him.

A whirling mass of snow pressed to the glass. Incredibly, those hundreds upon hundreds of quivering, suspended flakes seemed to form a leering face that glared at Hampton. Although the wind huffed and hammered and whirled and shifted directions and then shifted back again, that impossible face did not dissolve and drift away on the changing air currents; it hung there, just beyond the pane, unmoving, as if it were painted on canvas.

Carver lowered his eyes.

In time the wind subsided a bit.

When the howling of it had quieted to a moan, he looked up once more. The snow-formed face was gone.

He sipped his Scotch. The whiskey didn't warm him.

Nothing could warm him this night.

Guilt was one reason he wished he could get drunk. He was eaten by guilt because he had refused to give Lieutenant Dawson any more help. That had been wrong. The situation was too dire for him to think only about himself. The Gates were open, after all. The world stood at the brink of Armageddon — all because one Bocor, driven by ego and pride and an unslakeable thirst for blood, was willing to take any risk, no matter how foolish, to settle a personal grudge. At a time like this, a Houngon had certain responsibilities. Now was an hour for courage. Guilt gnawed at him because he kept remembering the midnight-black serpent that Lavelle had sent, and with that memory tormenting him, he couldn't find the courage he required for the task that called.

Even if he dared get drunk, he would still have to carry that burden of guilt. It was far too heavy — immense — to be lifted by booze alone.

Therefore, he was now drinking in hope of finding courage. It was a peculiarity of whiskey that, in moderation, it could sometimes make heroes of the very same men of whom it had made buffoons on other occasions.

He must find the courage to call Detective Dawson and say, I wont to help.

More likely than not, Lavelle would destroy him for becoming involved. And whatever death Lavelle chose to administer, it would not be an easy one.

He sipped his Scotch.

He looked across the room at the wall phone.

Call Dawson, he told himself.

He didn't move.

He looked at the blizzard-swept night outside.

He shuddered.

IV

Breathless, Jack and Rebecca and the kids reached the fourth-floor landing in the brownstone apartment house.

Jack looked down the stairs they'd just climbed. So far, nothing was after them.

Of course, something could pop out of one of the walls at any moment. The whole damned world had become a carnival funhouse.

Four apartments opened off the hall. Jack led the others past all four of them without knocking, without ringing any doorbells.

There was no help to be found here. These people could do nothing for them. They were on their own.

At the end of the hall was an unmarked door. Jack hoped to God it was what he thought it was. He tried the knob. From this side, the door was unlocked. He opened it hesitantly, afraid that the goblins might be waiting on the other side. Darkness. Nothing rushed at him. He felt for a light switch, half expecting to put his hand on something hideous. But he didn't. No goblins. Just the switch. Click. And, yes, it was what he hoped: a final flight of steps, considerably steeper and narrower than the eight flights they had already conquered, leading up to a barred door.

“Come on,” he said.

Following him without question, Davey and Penny and Rebecca clumped noisily up the stairs, weary but still too driven by fear to slacken their pace.

At the top of the steps, the door was equipped with two deadbolt locks, and it was braced by an iron bar. No burglar was going to get into this place by way of the roof. Jack snapped open both deadbolts and lifted the bar out of its braces, stood it to one side.

The wind tried to hold the door shut. Jack shouldered it open, and then the wind caught it and pulled on it instead of pushing, tore it away from him, flung it outward with such tremendous force that it banged against the outside wall. He stepped across the threshold, onto the flat roof.

Up here, the storm was a living thing. With a lion's ferocity, it leapt out of the night, across the parapet, roaring and sniffing and snorting. It tugged at Jack's coat. It stood his hair on end, then plastered it to his head, then stood it on end again. It expelled its frigid breath in his face and slipped cold fingers under the collar of his coat.

He crossed to that edge of the roof which was nearest the next brownstone. The crenelated parapet was waist-high. He leaned against it, looked out and down. As he had expected, the gap between the buildings was only about four feet wide.

Rebecca and the kids joined him, and Jack said, “We'll cross over.”

“How do we bridge it?” Rebecca asked.

“Must be something around that'll do the job.”

He turned and surveyed the roof, which wasn't entirely cast in darkness; in fact, it possessed a moon-pale luminescence, thanks to the sparkling blanket of snow that covered it. As far as he could see, there were no loose pieces of lumber or anything else that could be used to make a bridge between the two buildings. He ran to the elevator housing and looked on the other side of it, and he looked on the far side of the exit box that contained the door at the head of the stairs, but he found nothing. Perhaps something useful lay underneath the snow, but there was no way he could locate it without first shoveling off the entire roof.

He returned to Rebecca and the kids. Penny and Davey remained hunkered down by the parapet, sheltering against it, keeping out of the biting wind, but Rebecca rose to meet him.

He said, “We'll have to jump.”

“What?”

“Across. We'll have to jump across.”

“We can't,” she said.

“It's less than four feet.”

“But we can't get a running start.”

“Don't need it. Just a small gap.”

“We'll have to stand on this wall,” she said, touching the parapet, “and jump from there.”

“Yeah.”

“In this wind, at least one of us is sure as hell going to lose his balance even before he makes the jump — get hit by a hard gust of wind and just fall right off the wall.”

“We'll make it,” Jack said, trying to pump-up his own enthusiasm for the venture.

She shook her head. Her hair blew in her face. She pushed it out of her eyes. She said, “Maybe, with luck, both you and I could do it. Maybe. But not the kids.”

“Okay. So one of us will jump on the other roof, and one of us will stay here, and between us we'll hand the kids across, from here to there.”

“Pass them over the gap?”

“Yeah.”

“Over a fifty-foot drop?”

“There's really not much danger,” he said, wishing he believed it. “From these two roofs, we could reach across and hold hands.”

“Holding hands is one thing. But transferring something as heavy as a child—”

“I'll make sure you have a good grip on each of them before I let go. And as you haul them in, you can brace yourself against the parapet over there. No sweat.”

“Penny's getting to be a pretty big girl.”

“Not that big. We can handle her.”

“But—”

“Rebecca, those things are in this building, right under our feet, looking for us right this very minute.”

She nodded. “Who goes first?”

“You.”

“Gee, thanks.”

He said, “I can help you get up on top of the wall, and I can hold you until just a split second before you jump. That way, there's hardly any chance you could lose your balance and fall.”

“But after I'm over there and after we've passed the kids across, who's going to help you get on top of the wall and keep your balance up there?”

“Let me worry about that when the time comes,” he said.

Wind like a freight train whistled across the roof.

V

Snow didn't cling to the corrugated metal storage shed at the rear of Lavelle's property. The falling flakes melted when they touched the roof and walls of that small structure. Wisps of steam were actually rising from the leeward slope of the roof; those pale snakes of vapor writhed up until they came within range of the wind's brisk broom; then they were swept away.

Inside, the shed was stifling hot.

Nothing moved except the shadows. Rising out of the hole in the floor, the irregularly pulsing orange light was slightly brighter than it had been earlier. The flickering of it caused the shadows to shiver, giving an illusion of movement to every inanimate object in the dirt-floored room.

The cold night air wasn't the only thing that failed to penetrate these metal walls. Even the shrieking and soughing of the storm wind was inaudible herein. The atmosphere within the shed was unnatural, uncanny, disquieting, as if the room had been lifted out of the ordinary flow of tape and space, and was now suspended in a void.

The only sound was that which came from deep within the pit. It was a distant hissing-murmuring-whispering-growling, like ten thousand voices in a far-off place, the distance-muffled roar of a crowd. An angry crowd.

Suddenly, the sound grew louder. Not a great deal louder. Just a little.

At the same moment, the orange light beamed brighter than ever before. Not a lot brighter. Just a little. It was as if a furnace door, already ajar, had been pushed open another inch.

The interior of the shed grew slightly warmer, too.

The vaguely sulphurous odor became stronger.

And something strange happened to the hole in the floor. All the way around the perimeter, bits of earth broke loose and fell inward, away from the rim, vanishing into the mysterious light at the bottom. Like the increase in the brilliance of that light, this alteration in the rim of the hole wasn't major; only an incremental change. The diameter was increased by less than one inch. The dirt stopped falling away. The perimeter stabilized. Once more, everything in the shed was perfectly still.

But now the pit was bigger.

VI

The top of the parapet was ten inches wide. To Rebecca it seemed no wider than a tightrope.

At least it wasn't icy. The wind scoured the snow off the narrow surface, kept it clean and dry.

With Jack's help, Rebecca b'a,ced on the wall, in a half crouch. The wind 'buffeted her, and she was sure that she would save been toppled by it if Jack hadn't been there.

She tried to ignore the wind and the stinging snow that pricked her exposed face, ignored the chasm in front of her, and focused both her eyes and her mind on the roof of the next building. She had to jump far enough to clear the parapet over there and land on the roof. If she came down a bit short, on top of that waist-high wall, on that meager strip of stone, she would be unbalanced for a moment, even if she landed flat on both feet. In that instant of supreme vulnerability, the wind would snatch at her, and she might fall, either forward onto the roof, or backward into the empty air between the buildings. She didn't dare let herself think about that possibility, and she didn't look down.

She tensed her muscles, tucked her arms in against her sides, and said, “Now,” and Jack let go of her, and she jumped into the night and the wind and the driving snow.

Airborne, she knew at once that she hadn't put enough power into the jump, knew she was not going to make it to the other roof, knew she would crash into the parapet, knew she would fall backwards, knew that she was going to die.

But what she knew would happen didn't happen. She cleared the parapet, landed on the roof, and her feet slipped out from under her, and she went down on her backside, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to break any bones.

As she got to her feet, she saw the dilapidated pigeon coop. Pigeon-keeping was neither a common nor an unusual hobby in this city; in fact, this coop was smaller than some, only six feet long. At a glance she was able to tell that it hadn't been used for years. It was so weathered and in such disrepair that it would soon cease to be a coop and would become just a pile of junk.

She shouted to Jack, who was watching from the other building: “I think maybe I've found our bridge!”

Aware of how fast time was running out, she brushed some of the snow from the roof of the coop and saw that it appeared to be formed by a single six-foot sheet of one-inch plywood. That was even better than she had hoped; now they wouldn't have to deal with two or three loose planks. The plywood had been painted many times over the years, and the paint had protected it from rot once the coop was abandoned and maintenance discontinued; it seemed sturdy enough to support the kids and even Jack. It was loose along one entire side, which was a great help to her. Once she brushed the rest of the snow off the coop roof, she gripped it by the loose end, pulled it up and back. Some of the nails popped out, and some snapped off because they were rusted clear through. In a few seconds she had wrenched the plywood free.

She dragged it to the parapet. If she tried to lever it onto the wall and shove it out toward Jack, the strong wind would get under it, treat it like a sail, lift it, tear it out of her hands, and send it kiting off into the storm. She had to wait for a lull. One came fairly soon, and she quickly heaved the plywood up, balanced it on top of the parapet, slid it out toward Jack's reaching hands. In a moment, as the wind whipped up once more, they had the bridge in place. Now, with the two of them holding it, they would be able to keep it down even if a fierce wind got under it.

Penny made the short journey first, to show Davey how easily it could be done. She wriggled across on her belly, gripping the edges of the board with her hands, pulling herself along. Convinced it could be done, Davey followed safely after her.

Jack came last. As soon as he was on the bridge, there was, of course, no one holding the far end of it. However, his weight held it in place, and he didn't scramble completely off until there was another lull in the wind. Then he helped Rebecca drag the plywood back onto the roof.

“Now what?” she asked.

“One building's not enough,” he said. “We've got to put more distance between us and them.”

Using the plywood, they crossed the gulf between the second and third apartment houses, went from the third roof to the fourth, then from the fourth to the fifth. The next building was ten or twelve stories higher than this one. Their roof-hopping had come to an end, which was just as well, since their arms were beginning to ache from dragging and lifting the heavy sheet of plywood.

At the rear of the fourth brownstone, Rebecca leaned over the parapet and looked down into the alley, four stories below. There was some light down there: a streetlamp at each end of the block, another in the middle, plus the glow that came from all the windows of the first-floor apartments. She couldn't see any goblins in the alley, or any other living creatures for that matterjust snow in blankets and mounds, snow twirling in small and short-lived tornadoes, snow in vaguely phosphorescent sheets like the gowns of ghosts racing in front of the wind. Maybe there were goblins crouching in the shadows somewhere, but she didn't really think so because she couldn't see any glowing white eyes.

A black, iron, switchback fire escape descended to the alley in a zig-zag path along the rear face of the building. Jack went down first, stopping at each landing to wait for Penny and Davey; he was prepared to break their fall if they slipped on the cold, snow-covered, and occasionally ice-sheathed steps.

Rebecca was the last off the roof. At each landing on the fire escape, she paused to look down at the alley, and each time she expected to see strange, threatening creatures loping through the snow toward the foot of the iron steps. But each time, she saw nothing.

When they were all in the alley, they turned right, away from the row of brownstones, and ran as fast as they could toward the cross street. When they reached the street, already slowing from a run to a fast walk, they turned away from Third Avenue and headed back toward the center of the city.

Nothing followed them.

Nothing came out of the dark doorways they passed.

For the moment they seemed safe. But more than that… they seemed to have the entire metropolis to themselves, as if they were the only four survivors of doomsday.

Rebecca had never seen it snow this hard. This was a rampaging, lashing, hammering storm more suitable to the savage polar ice fields than to New York. Her face was numb, and her eyes were watering, and she ached in every joint and muscle from the constant struggle required to resist the insistent wind.

Two-thirds of the way to Lexington Avenue, Davey stumbled and fell and simply couldn't find the energy to continue on his own. Jack carried him.

From the look of her, Penny was rapidly using up the last of her reserves, as well. Soon, Rebecca would have to take Davey, so Jack could then carry Penny.

And how far and how fast could they expect to travel under those circumstances? Not far. Not very damned fast. They needed to find transportation within the next few minutes.

They reached the avenue, and Jack led them to a large steel grate which was set in the pavement and from which issued clouds of steam. It was a vent from one sort of underground tunnel or another, most likely from the subway system. Jack put Davey down, and the boy was able to stand on his own feet. But it was obvious that he would still have to be carried when they started out again. He looked terrible; his small face was drawn, pinched, and very pale except for enormous dark circles around his eyes. Rebecca's heart went out to him, and she wished there was something she could do to make him feel better, but she didn't feel so terrific herself.

The night was too cold and the heated air rising out of the street wasn't heated enough to warm Rebecca as she stood at the edge of the grate and allowed the wind to blow the foul-smelling steam in her face; however, there was an illusion of warmth, if not the real thing, and at the moment the mere illusion was sufficiently spirit-lifting to forestall everyone's complaints.

To Penny, Rebecca said, “How're you doing, honey?”

“I'm okay,” the girl said, although she looked haggard. “I'm just worried about Davey.”

Rebecca was amazed by the girl's resilience and spunk.

Jack said, “We've got to get a car. I'll only feel safe when we're in a car, rolling, moving; they can't get at us when we're moving.”

“And it'll b-b-be warm in a c-car,” Davey said.

But the only cars on the street were those that were parked at the curb, unreachable beyond a wall of snow thrown up by the plows and not yet hauled away. If any cars had been abandoned in the middle of the avenue, they had already been towed away by the snow emergency crews.

None of those workmen were in sight now. No plows, either.

“Even if we could find a car along here that wasn't plowed in, “ Rebecca said, “it isn't likely there'd be keys in it — or snow chains on the tires.”

“I wasn't thinking of these cars,” Jack said. “But if we can find a pay phone, put in a call to headquarters, we could have them send out a department car for us.”

“Isn't that a phone over there?” Penny asked, pointing across the broad avenue.

`'Snow's so thick, I can't be sure,” Jack said, squinting at the object that had drawn Penny's attention. “It might be a phone.”

“Let's go have a look,” Rebecca said.

Even as she spoke, a small but sharply clawed hand came out of the grating, from the space between two of the steel bars.

Davey saw it first, cried out, stumbled back, away from the rising steam.

A goblin's hand.

And another one, scrabbling at the toe of Rebecca's boot. She stomped on it, saw shining silver-white eyes in the darkness under the grate, and jumped back.

A third hand appeared, and a fourth, and Penny and Jack got out of the way, and suddenly the entire steel grating rattled in its circular niche, tilted up at one end, slammed back into place, but immediately tilted up again, a little farther than an inch this time, but fell back, rattled, bounced. The horde below was trying to push out of the tunnel.

Although the grating was large and immensely heavy, Rebecca was sure the creatures below would dislodge it and come boiling out of the darkness and steam. Jack must have been equally convinced, for he snatched up Davey and ran. Rebecca grabbed Penny's hand, and they followed Jack, fleeing down the blizzard-pounded avenue, not moving as fast as they should, not moving very fast at all. None of them dared to look back.

Ahead, on the far side of the divided thoroughfare, a Jeep station wagon turned the corner, tires churning effortlessly through the snow. It bore the insignia of the city department of streets.

Jack and Rebecca and the kids were headed downtown, but the Jeep was headed uptown. Jack angled across the avenue, toward the center divider and the other lanes beyond it, trying to get in front of the Jeep and cut it off before it was past them.

Rebecca and Penny followed.

If the driver of the Jeep saw them, he didn't give any indication of it. He didn't slow down.

Rebecca was waving frantically as she ran, and Penny was shouting, and Rebecca started shouting, too, and so did Jack, all of them shouting their fool heads off because the Jeep was their only hope of escape.

VII

At the table in the brightly lighted kitchen above Rada, Carver Hampton played a few hands of solitaire. He hoped the game would take his mind off the evil that was loose in the winter night, and he hoped it would help him overcome his feelings of guilt and shame, which plagued him because he hadn't done anything to stop that evil from having its way in the world. But the cards couldn't distract him. He kept looking out the window beside the table, sensing something unspeakable out there in the dark. His guilt grew stronger instead of weaker; it chewed on his conscience.

He was a Houngon.

He had certain responsibilities.

He could not condone such monstrous evil as this.

Damn.

He tried watching television. Quincy. Jack Klugman was shouting at his stupid superiors, crusading for Justice, exhibiting a sense of social compassion greater than Mother Teresa's, and otherwise comporting himself more like Superman than like a real medical examiner. On Dynasty, a bunch of rich people were carrying on in the most licentious, vicious, Machiavellian manner, and Carver asked himself the same question he always asked himself when he was unfortunate enough to catch a few minutes of Dynasty or Dallas or one of their clones: If real rich people in the real world were this obsessed with sex, revenge, back-stabbing, and petty jealousies, how could any of them ever have had the time and intelligence to make any money in the first place? He switched off the TV.

He was a Houngon.

He had certain responsibilities.

He chose a book from the living room shelf, the new Elmore Leonard novel, and although he was a big fan of Leonard's, and although no one wrote stories that moved faster than Leonard's stories, he couldn't concentrate on this one. He read two pages, couldn't remember a thing he'd read, and returned the book to the shelf.

He was a Houngon.

He returned to the kitchen, went to the telephone. He hesitated with his hand on it.

He glanced at the window. He shuddered because the vast night itself seemed to be demonically alive.

He picked up the phone. He listened to the dial tone for a while.

Detective Dawson's office and home numbers were on a piece of notepaper beside the telephone. He stared at the home number for a while. Then, at last, he dialed it.

It rang several times, and he was about to give up, when the receiver was lifted at the other end. But no one spoke.

He waited a couple of seconds, then said, “Hello?”

No answer.

“Is someone there?”

No response.

At first he thought he hadn't actually reached the Dawson number, that there was a problem with the connection, that he was listening to dead air. But as he was about to hang up, a new and frightening perception seized him. He sensed an evil presence at the other end, a supremely malevolent entity whose malignant energy poured back across the telephone line.

He broke out in a sweat. He felt soiled. His heart raced. His stomach turned sour, sick.

He slammed the phone down. He wiped his damp hands on his pants. They still felt unclean, merely from holding the telephone that had temporarily connected him with the beast in the Dawson apartment. He went to the sink and washed his hands thoroughly.

The thing at the Dawsons' place was surely one of the entities that Lavelle had summoned to do his dirty work for him. But what was it doing there? What did this mean? Was Lavelle crazy enough to turn loose the powers of darkness not only on the Carramazzas but on the police who were investigating those murders?

If anything happens to Lieutenant Dawson, Hampton thought, I'm responsible because I refused to help him.

Using a paper towel to blot the cold sweat from his face and neck, he considered his options and tried to decide what he should do next.

VIII

There were only two men in the street department's Jeep station wagon, which left plenty of room for Penny, Davey, Rebecca, and Jack.

The driver was a merry-looking, ruddy-faced man with a squashed nose and big ears; he said his name was Burt. He looked closely at Jack's police ID and, satisfied that it was genuine, was happy to put himself at their disposal, swing the Jeep around, and run them back to headquarters, where they could get another car.

The interior of the Jeep was wonderfully warm and dry.

Jack was relieved when the doors were all safely shut and the Jeep began to pull out.

But just as they were making a U-turn in the middle of the deserted avenue, Burt's partner, a freckle-faced young man named Leo, saw something moving through the snow, coming toward them from across the street. He said, “Hey, Burt, hold on a sec. Isn't that a cat out there?”

“So what if it is?” Burt asked.

“He shouldn't be out in weather like this.”

“Cats go where they want,” Burt said. “You're the cat fancier; you should know how independent they are.”

“But it'll freeze to death out there,” Leo said.

As the Jeep completed the turn, and as Burt slowed down a bit to consider Leo's statement, Jack squinted through the side window at the dark shape loping across the snow; it moved with feline grace. Farther back in the storm, beyond several veils of falling snow, there might have been other things coming this way; perhaps it was even the entire nightmare pack moving in for the kill, but it was hard to tell for sure. However, the first of the goblins, the catlike thing that had caught Leo's eye, was undeniably out there, only thirty or forty feet away and closing fast.

“Stop just a see,” Leo said. “Let me get out and scoop up the poor little fella.”

“No!” Jack said. “Get the hell out of here. That's no damned cat out there.”

Startled, Burt looked over his shoulder at Jack.

Penny began to shout the same thing again and again, and Davey took up her chant: “Don't let them in, don't let them in here, don't let them in!”

Face pressed to the window in his door, Leo said, “Jesus, you're right. It isn't any cat.”

“Move!” Jack shouted.

The thing leaped and struck the side window in front of Leo's face. The glass cracked but held.

Leo yelped, jumped, scooted backwards across the front seat, crowding Burt.

Burt tramped down on the accelerator, and the tires spun for a moment.

The hideous cat-thing clung to the cracked glass.

Penny and Davey were screaming. Rebecca tried to shield them from the sight of the goblin.

It probed at them with eyes of fire.

Jack could almost feel the heat of that inhuman gaze. He wanted to empty his revolver at the thing, put half a dozen slugs into it, though he knew he couldn't kill it.

The tires stopped spinning, and the Jeep took off with a lurch and a shudder.

Burt held the steering wheel with one hand and used the other hand to try to push Leo out of the way, but Leo wasn't going to move even an inch closer to the fractured window where the cat-thing had attached itself.

The goblin licked the glass with its black tongue.

The Jeep careened toward the divider in the center of the avenue, and it started to slide.

Jack said, “Damnit, don't lose control!”

“I can't steer with him on my lap,” Burt said.

He rammed an elbow into Leo's side, hard enough to accomplish what all the pushing and shoving and shouting hadn't managed to do; Leo moved — although not much.

The cat-thing grinned at them. Double rows of sharp and pointed teeth gleamed.

Burt stopped the sliding Jeep just before it would have hit the center divider. In control again, he accelerated.

The engine roared.

Snow flew up around them.

Leo was making odd gibbeting sounds, and the kids were crying, and for some reason Burt began blowing the horn, as if he thought the sound would frighten the thing and make it let go.

Jack's eyes met Rebecca's. He wondered if his own gaze was as bleak as hers.

Finally, the goblin lost its grip, fell off, tumbled away into the snowy street.

Leo said, “Thank God,” and collapsed back into his own corner of the front seat.

Jack turned and looked out the rear window. Other dark beasts were coming out of the whiteness of the storm. They loped after the Jeep, but they couldn't keep up with it. They quickly dwindled.

Disappeared.

But they were still out there. Somewhere.

Everywhere.

IX

The shed.

The hot, dry air.

The stench of Hell.

Again, the orange light abruptly grew brighter than it had been, not a lot brighter, just a little, and at the same time the air became slightly hotter, and the noises coming out of the pit grew somewhat louder and angrier, although they were still more of a whisper than a shout.

Again, around the perimeter of the hole, the earth loosened of its own accord, dropped away from the rim, tumbled to the bottom and vanished in the pulsing orange glow. The diameter had increased by more than two inches before the earth became stable once more.

And the pit was bigger.