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 fanged, 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 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.
3
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.<
br />
The Gates had been opened. The very Gates of Hell. Just a crack. The latch had barely been slipped. And through the applicaton 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 vèvè, 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 want 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.
4
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.
5
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 time and space, and was now suspended in a void.