“Each night. When I say my prayers. I always ask God not to let anything happen to Dad. And then I say, ‘Well, God, if you for some stupid reason just have to let him get shot, then please let me get cancer and die, too. Or let me get hit by a truck. Something.’”
“That’s morbid.”
He didn’t say anything more.
He looked at the ground, at his gloved hands, at Mrs. Shepherd walking her patrol—everywhere but at Penny. She took hold of his chin, turned his face to her. Tears shimmered in his eyes. He was trying hard to hold them back, squinting, blinking.
He was so small. Just seven years old and not big for his age. He looked fragile and helpless, and Penny wanted to grab hold of him and hug him, but she knew he wouldn’t want her to do that when they might be seen by some of the other boys in his class.
She suddenly felt small and helpless herself. But that wasn’t good. Not good at all. She had to be strong for Davey’s sake.
Letting go of his chin, she said, “Listen, Davey, we’ve got to sit down and talk. About Mom. About people dying, why it happens, you know, all that stuff, like what it means, how it’s not the end for them but maybe only the beginning, up there in Heaven, and how we’ve got to just go on, no matter what. ’Cause we do. We’ve got to go on. Mom would be very disappointed in us if we didn’t just go on. And if anything happened to Dad—which nothing is going to happen to him—but if by some wild chance it did, then he’d want us to go on, just the way Mom would want. He’d be very unhappy with us if we—”
“Penny! Davey! Over here!”
A yellow cab was at the curb. The rear window was down, and Aunt Faye leaned out, waved at them.
Davey bolted across the sidewalk, suddenly so eager to be away from any talk of death that he was even glad to see his twittering old Aunt Faye.
Damn! I botched it, Penny thought. I was too blunt about it.
In that same instant, before she followed Davey to the taxi, before she even took one step, a sharp pain lanced through her left ankle. She twitched, yelped, looked down—and was immobilized by terror.
Between the bottom of the green gate and the pavement, there was a four-inch gap. A hand had reached through that gap, from the darkness in the covered serviceway beyond, and it had seized her ankle.
She couldn’t scream. Her voice was gone.
It wasn’t a human hand, either. Maybe twice the size of a cat’s paw. But not a paw. It was a completely—although crudely—formed hand with fingers and a thumb.
She couldn’t even whisper. Her throat was locked.
The hand wasn’t skin-colored. It was an ugly, mottled gray-green-yellow, like bruised and festering flesh. And it was sort of lumpy, a little ragged looking.
Breathing was no easier than screaming.
The small gray-green-yellow fingers were tapered and ended in sharp claws. Two of those claws had punctured her rubber boot.
She thought of the plastic baseball bat.
Last night. In her room. The thing under the bed.
She thought of the shining eyes in the school basement.
And now this.
Two of the small fingers had thrust inside her boot and were scraping at her, digging at her, tearing, gouging.
Abruptly, her breath came to her in a rush. She gasped, sucked in lungsful of frigid air, which snapped her out of the terror-induced trance that, thus far, had held her there by the gate. She jerked her foot away from the hand, tore loose, and was surprised that she was able to do so. She turned and ran to the taxi, plunged inside, and yanked the door shut.
She looked back toward the gate. There was nothing unusual in sight, no creature with small claw-tipped hands, no goblin capering in the snow.
The taxi pulled away from Wellton School.
Aunt Faye and Davey were talking excitedly about the snowstorm which, Faye said, was supposed to dump ten or twelve inches before it was done. Neither of them seemed to be aware that Penny was scared half to death.
While they chattered, Penny reached down and felt her boot. At the ankle, the rubber was torn. A flap of it hung loose.
She unzipped the boot, slipped her hand inside, under her sock, and felt the wound on her ankle. It burned a little. When she brought her hand out of the boot, there was some blood glistening on her fingertips.
Aunt Faye saw it. “What’s happened to you, dear?”
“It’s okay,” Penny said.
“That’s blood.”
“Just a scratch.”
Davey paled at the sight of the blood.
Penny tried to reassure him, although she was afraid that her voice was noticeably shaky and that her face would betray her anxiety: “It’s nothing, Davey. I’m all right.”
Aunt Faye insisted on changing places with Davey, so she would be next to Penny and could have a closer look at the injury. She made Penny take off the boot, and she peeled down the sock, revealing a puncture wound and several scratches on the ankle. It was bleeding, but not very much; in a couple of minutes, even unattended, it would stop.
“How’d this happen?” Aunt Faye demanded.
Penny hesitated. More than anything, she wanted to tell Faye all about the creatures with shining eyes. She wanted help, protection. But she knew that she couldn’t say a word. They wouldn’t believe her. After all, she was The Girl Who Had Needed A Psychiatrist. If she started babbling about goblins with shining eyes, they’d think she was having a relapse; they would say she still hadn’t adjusted to her mother’s death, and they would make an appointment with a psychiatrist. While she was off seeing the shrink, there wouldn’t be anyone around to keep the goblins away from Davey.
“Come on, come on,” Faye said. “Fess up. What were you doing that you shouldn’t have been doing?”
“Huh?”
“That’s why you’re hesitating. What were you doing that you knew you shouldn’t be doing?”
“Nothing,” Penny said.
“Then how’d you get this cut?”
“I... I caught my boot on a nail.”
“Nail? Where?”
“On the gate.”
“What gate?”
“Back at the school, the gate where we were waiting for you. A nail was sticking out of it, and I got caught up on it.”
Faye scowled. Unlike her sister, Penny’s mother, Faye was a redhead with sharp features and gray eyes that were almost colorless. In repose, hers was a pretty enough face; however, when she wanted to scowl, she could really do a first-rate job of it. Davey called it her “witch look.”
She said, “Was it rusty?”
Penny said, “What?”
“The nail, of course. Was it rusty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you saw it, didn’t you? Otherwise, how’d you know it was a nail?”
Penny nodded. “Yeah. I guess it was rusty.”
“Have you had a tetanus shot?”
“Yeah.”
Aunt Faye peered at her with undisguised suspicion. “Do you even know what a tetanus shot is?”
“Sure.”
“When did you get it?”
“First week of October.”
“I wouldn’t have imagined that your father would think of things like tetanus shots.”
“They gave it to us at school,” Penny said.
“Is that right?” Faye said, still doubtful.
Davey spoke up: “They make us take all kinds of shots at school. They have a nurse in, and all week we get shots. It’s awful. Makes you feel like a pin cushion. Shots for mumps and measles. A flu shot. Other stuff. I hate it.”
Faye seemed to be satisfied. “Okay. Just the same, when we get home, we’ll wash that cut out really good, bathe it in alcohol, get some iodine on it, and a proper bandage.”
“It’s only a scratch,” Penny said.
“We won’t take chances. Now put your boot back on, dear.”
Just as Penny got her foot in the boot and pulled up the zipper, the taxi hit a pothole. They were all
bounced up and thrown forward with such suddenness and force that they almost fell off the seat.
“Young man,” Faye said to the driver, even though he was at least forty years old, her own age, “where on earth did you learn to drive a car?”
He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, lady.”
“Don’t you know the streets of this city are a mess?” Faye demanded. “You’ve got to keep your eyes open.”
“I try to,” he said.
While Faye lectured the driver on the proper way to handle his cab, Penny leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes, and thought about the ugly little hand that had torn her boot and ankle. She tried to convince herself that it had been the hand of an ordinary animal of some kind; nothing strange; nothing out of the Twilight Zone. But most animals had paws, not hands. Monkeys had hands, of course. But this wasn’t a monkey. No way. Squirrels had hands of a sort, didn’t they? And raccoons. But this wasn’t a squirrel or a raccoon, either. It wasn’t anything she had ever seen or read about.
Had it been trying to drag her down and kill her? Right there on the street?
No. In order to kill her, the creature—and others like it, others with the shining silver eyes—would have had to come out from behind the gate, into the open, where Mrs. Shepherd and others would have seen them. And Penny was pretty sure the goblins didn’t want to be seen by anyone but her. They were secretive. No, they definitely hadn’t meant to kill her back there at the school; they had only meant to give her a good scare, to let her know they were still lurking around, waiting for the right opportunity....
But why?
Why did they want her and, presumably, Davey, instead of some other kids?
What made goblins angry? What did you have to do to make them come after you like this?
She couldn’t think of anything she had done that would make anyone terribly angry with her; certainly not goblins.
Confused, miserable, frightened, she opened her eyes and looked out the window. Snow was piling up everywhere. In her heart, she felt as cold as the icy, wind-scoured street beyond the window.
PART TWO
Wednesday, 5:30 P.M.-11:00 P.M.
Darkness devours every shining day. Darkness demands and always has its way. Darkness listens, watches, waits. Darkness claims the day and celebrates. Sometimes in silence darkness comes. Sometimes with a gleeful banging of drums.
—THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
Who is more foolish—the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?
—MAURICE FREEHILL
CHAPTER FOUR
1
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 almo
st 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 hand-pick 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.”
2
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.