“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.
Pénny 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.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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, a
s 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.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
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 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.
2
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 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 buildin
g; 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.
3
Jack hunched over the wheel, squinting at the wintry street ahead.
The windshield was icing. 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 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 beading 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.