“We won’t be pulled off.”
“But don’t you see? If some sort of animal did it ...”
“Yes?”
“Then how can they possibly classify it as murder?”
“It’s murder,” he said emphatically.
“But you can’t charge an animal with homicide.”
He nodded. “I see what you’re driving at.”
“Damn.”
“Listen, if these were animals that were trained to kill, then it’s still homicide; the trainer is the murderer.”
“If these were dog bites that Vastagliano and Ross died from,” Rebecca said, “then maybe you might just be able to sell that theory. But what animal—what animal as small as these apparently were—can be trained to kill, to obey all commands? Rats? No. Cats? No. Gerbils, for God’s sake?”
“Well, they train ferrets,” Jack said. “They use them for hunting sometimes. Not game hunting where they’re going after the meat, but just for sport, ’cause the prey is generally a ragged mess when the ferret gets done with it.”
“Ferrets, huh? I’d like to see you convince Captain Gresham that someone’s prowling the city with a pack of killer ferrets to do his dirty work for him.”
“Does sound far-fetched,” Jack admitted.
“To say the least.”
“So what does that leave us with?”
She shrugged.
Jack thought about Baba Lavelle.
Voodoo?
No. Surely not. It was one thing to propose that Lavelle was making the murders look strange in order to frighten his adversaries with the threat of voodoo curses, but it was quite something else to imagine that the curses actually worked.
Then again ... What about the locked bathroom? What about the fact that Vastagliano and Ross hadn’t been able to kill even one of their attackers? What about the lack of animal droppings?
Rebecca must have known what he was thinking, for she scowled and said, “Come on. Let’s talk to the neighbors.”
The wind suddenly woke, breathed, raged. Spitting flecks of snow, it came along the street as if it were a living beast, a very cold and angry wind.
5
Mrs. Quillen, Penny’s teacher at Wellton School, was unable to understand why a vandal would have wrecked only one locker.
“Perhaps he intended to ruin them all but had second thoughts. Or maybe he started with yours, Penny dear, then heard a sound he couldn’t place, thought someone was coming, got frightened, and ran. But we keep the school locked up tight as a drum at night, of course, and there’s the alarm system, too. However did he get in and out?”
Penny knew it wasn’t a vandal. She knew it was something a whole lot stranger than that. She knew the trashing of her locker was somehow connected with the eerie experience she’d had last night in her room. But she didn’t know how to express this knowledge without sounding like a child afraid of boogeymen, so she didn’t try to explain to Mrs. Quillen those things which, in truth, she couldn’t even explain to herself.
After some discussion, much sympathy, and even more bafflement, Mrs. Quillen sent Penny to the basement where the supplies and spare textbooks were kept on well-ordered storage shelves.
“Get replacements for everything that was destroyed, Penny. All the books, new pencils, a three-ring notebook with a pack of filler, and a new tablet. And don’t dawdle, please. We’ll be starting the math lesson in a few minutes, and you know that’s where you need to work the hardest.”
Penny went down the front stairs to the ground floor, paused at the main doors to look through the beveled glass windows at the swirling puffs of snow, then hurried back the hall to the rear of the building, past the deserted gymnasium, past the music room where a class was about to begin.
The cellar door was at the very end of the hallway. She opened it and found the light switch. A long, narrow flight of stairs led down.
The ground-floor hallway, through which she’d just passed, had smelled of chalk dust that had escaped from classrooms, pine-scented floor wax, and the dry heat of the forced-air furnace. But as she descended the narrow steps, she noticed that the smells of the cellar were different from those upstairs. She detected the mild lime-rich odor of concrete dust. Insecticide lent a pungent note to the air; she knew they sprayed every month to discourage silverfish from making a meal of the books stored here. And, underlying everything else, there was a slightly damp smell, a vague but nonetheless unpleasant mustiness.
She reached the bottom of the stairs. Her footsteps rang sharply, crisply on the concrete floor and echoed hollowly in a far corner.
The basement extended under the entire building and was divided into two chambers. At the opposite end from the stairs lay the furnace room, beyond a heavy metal fire door that was always kept closed. The largest of the two rooms was on this side of the door. A work table occupied the center, and free-standing metal storage shelves lined the walls, all crammed full of books and supplies.
Penny took a folding carry-all basket from a rack, opened it, and collected the items she needed. She had just located the last of the textbooks when she heard a strange sound behind her. That sound. The hissing-scrabbling-muttering noise that she had heard last night in her bedroom.
She whirled.
As far as she could see, she was alone.
The problem was that she couldn’t see everywhere. Deep shadows coiled under the stairs. In one corner of the room, over by the fire door, a ceiling light was burned out. Shadows had claimed that area. Furthermore, each unit of metal shelving stood on six-inch legs, and the gap between the lowest shelf and the floor was untouched by light. There were a lot of places where something small and quick could hide.
She waited, frozen, listening, and ten long seconds elapsed, then fifteen, twenty, and the sound didn’t come again, so she wondered if she’d really heard it or only imagined it, and another few seconds ticked away as slowly as minutes, but then something thumped overhead, at the top of the stairs: the cellar door.
She had left the door standing open.
Someone or something had just pulled it shut.
With the basket of books and supplies in one hand, Penny started toward the foot of the stairs but stopped abruptly when she heard other noises up there on the landing. Hissing. Growling. Murmuring. The tick and scrape of movement.
Last night, she had tried to convince herself that the thing in her room hadn’t actually been there, that it had been only a remnant of a dream. Now she knew it was more than that. But just what was it? A ghost? Whose ghost? Not her mother’s ghost. She maybe wouldn’t have minded if her mother had been hanging around, sort of watching over her. Yeah, that would have been okay. But, at best, this was a malicious spirit; at worst, a dangerous spirit. Her mother’s ghost would never be malicious like this, not in a million years. Besides, a ghost didn’t follow you around from place to place. No, that wasn’t how it worked. People weren’t haunted. Houses were haunted, and the ghosts doing the haunting were bound to one place until their souls were finally at rest; they couldn’t leave that special place they haunted, couldn’t just roam all over the city, following one particular young girl.
Yet the cellar door had been drawn shut.
Maybe a draft had closed it.
Maybe. But something was moving around on the landing up there where she couldn’t see it. Not a draft. Something strange.
Imagination.
Oh, yeah?
She stood by the stairs, looking up, trying to figure it out, trying to calm herself, carrying on an urgent conversation with herself:
—Well, if it’s not a ghost, what is it?
—Something bad.
—Not necessarily.
—Something very, very bad.
—Stop it! Stop scaring yourself. It didn’t try to hurt you last night, did it?
—No.
—So there. You’re safe.
—But now it’s back.
A new sound jolted her out of her interior dialogue.
Another thump. But this was different from the sound the door had made when it had been pushed shut. And again: thump! Again. It sounded as if something was throwing itself against the wall at the head of the stairs, bumping mindlessly like a summer moth battering against a window.
Thump!
The lights went out.
Penny gasped.
The thumping stopped.
In the sudden darkness, the weird and unsettlingly eager animal sounds rose on all sides of Penny, not just from the landing overhead, and she detected movement in the claustrophobic blackness. There wasn’t merely one unseen, unknown creature in the cellar with her; there were many of them.
But what were they?
Something brushed her foot, then darted away into the subterranean gloom.
She screamed. She was loud but not loud enough. Her cry hadn’t carried beyond the cellar.
At the same moment, Mrs. March, the music teacher, began pounding on the piano in the music room directly overhead. Kids began to sing up there. Frosty the Snowman. They were rehearsing for a Christmas show which the entire school would perform for parents just prior to the start of the holiday vacation.
Now, even if Penny could manage a louder scream, no one would hear her anyway.
Likewise, because of the music and singing, she could no longer hear the things moving in the darkness around her. But they were still there. She had no doubt that they were there.
She took a deep breath. She was determined not to lose her head. She wasn’t a child.
They won’t hurt me, she thought.
But she couldn’t convince herself.
She shuffled cautiously to the foot of the stairs, the carry-all in one hand, her other hand out in front of her, feeling her way as if she were blind, which she might as well have been.
The cellar had two windows, but they were small rectangles set high in the wall, at street level, with no more than one square foot of glass in each of them. Besides, they were dirty on the outside; even on a bright day, those grimy panes did little to illuminate the basement. On a cloudy day like today, with a storm brewing, the windows gave forth only a thin, milky light that traveled no more than a few inches into the cellar before expiring.
She reached the foot of the stairs and looked up. Deep, deep blackness.
Mrs. March was still hammering on the piano, and the kids were still singing about the snowman that had come to life.
Penny raised one foot, found the first step.
Overhead, at the top of the stairs, a pair of eyes appeared only a few inches above the landing floor, as if disembodied, as if floating in the air, although they must have been attached to an animal about the size of a cat. It wasn’t a cat, of course. She wished it were. The eyes were as large as a cat’s eyes, too, and very bright, not merely reflective like the eyes of a cat, but so unnaturally bright that they glowed like two tiny lanterns. The color was odd, too: white, moon-pale, with the faintest trace of silvery blue. Those cold eyes glared down at her.
She took her foot off the first step.
The creature above slipped off the landing, onto the highest step, edging closer.
Penny retreated.
The thing descended two more steps, its advance betrayed only by its unblinking eyes. Darkness cloaked its form.
Breathing hard, her heart pounding louder than the music above, she backed up until she collided with a metal storage shelf. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide.
The thing was now a third of the way down the stairs and still coming.
Penny felt the urge to pee. She pressed back against the shelves and squeezed her thighs together.
The thing was halfway down the stairs. Moving faster.
Overhead, in the music room, they had really gotten into the spirit of Frosty the Snowman, a lilt in their voices, belting it out with what Mrs. March always called “gusto.”
From the corner of her eye, Penny saw something in the cellar, off to the right: a wink of soft light, a flash, a glow, movement. Daring to look away from the creature that was descending the stairs in front of her, she glanced into the unlighted room—and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Eyes.
Silver-white eyes.
The darkness was full of them. Two eyes shone up at her from the floor, hardly more than a yard away, regarding her with a cold hunger. Two more eyes were little farther than a foot behind the first pair. Another four eyes gleamed frostily from a point at least three feet above the floor, in the center of the room, and for a moment she thought she had misjudged the height of these creatures, but then she realized two of them had climbed onto the worktable. Two, four, six pair of eyes peered malevolently at her from various shelves along the far wall. Three more pair were at floor level near the fire door that led to the furnace room. Some were perfectly still; some were moving restlessly back and forth; some were creeping slowly toward her. None of them blinked. Others were moving out from the space under the stairs. There were about twenty of the things: forty brightly glowing, vicious, unearthly eyes.
Shaking, whimpering, Penny tore her own gaze away from the demonic horde in the cellar and looked at the stairs again.
The lone beast that had started slinking down from the landing no more than a minute ago had now reached the bottom. It was on the last step.
6
Both to the east and to the west of Vincent Vastagliano’s house, the neighbors were established in equally large, comfortable, elegantly furnished homes that might as well have been isolated country manors instead of townhouses. The city did not intrude into these stately places, and none of the occupants had seen or heard anything unusual during the night of blood and murder.
In less than half an hour, Jack and Rebecca had exhausted that line of inquiry and had returned to the sidewalk. They kept their heads tucked down to present as small a target as possible to the wind, which had grown steadily more powerful. It was now a wicked, icy, lashing whip that snatched litter out of the gutters and flung it through the air, shook the bare trees with almost enough violence to crack the brittle limbs, snapped coat-tails with sharp reports, and stung exposed flesh.
The snow flurries were falling in greater numbers now. In a few minutes, they would be coming down too thick to be called flurries any more. The street was still bare black macadam, but soon it would boast a fresh white skin.
Jack and Rebecca headed back toward Vastagliano’s place and were almost there when someone called to them. Jack turned and saw Harry Ulbeck, the young officer who had earlier been on watch at the top of Vastagliano’s front steps; Harry was leaning out of one of the three black-and-whites that were parked at the curb. He said something, but the wind ripped his words into meaningless sounds. Jack went to the car, bent down to the open window, and said, “Sorry, Harry, I didn’t hear what you said,” and his breath smoked out of him in cold white plumes.
“Just came over the radio,” Harry said. “They want you right away. You and Detective Chandler.”
“Want us for what?”
“Looks as if it’s part of this case you’re working on. There’s been more killing. More like this here. Maybe even worse ... even bloodier.”
7
Their eyes weren’t at all like eyes should be. They looked, instead, like slots in a furnace grate, providing glimpses of the fire beyond. A silver-white fire. These eyes contained no irises, no pupils, as did human and animal eyes. There was just that fierce glow, the white light from within them, pulsing and flickering.
The creature on the stairs moved down from the last step, onto the cellar floor. It edged toward Penny, then stopped, stared up at her.
She couldn’t move back even one more inch. Already, one of the metal shelves pressed painfully across her shoulder blades.
Suddenly she realized the music had stopped. The cellar was silent. Had been silent for some time. Perhaps for as long as half a minute. Frozen by terror, she hadn’t reacted immediately when Frosty the Snowman was concluded.
Belatedly she opened her mouth to scream for help, but the piano started up again. This time the tune was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which was even louder than the first song.
The thing at the foot of the stairs continued to glare at her, and although its eyes were utterly different from the eyes of a tiger, she was nevertheless reminded of a picture of a tiger that she’d seen in a magazine. The eyes in that photograph and these strange eyes looked absolutely nothing alike, yet they had something in common: They were the eyes of predators.
Even though her vision was beginning to adjust somewhat to the darkness, Penny still couldn’t see what the creatures looked like, couldn’t tell whether they were well-armed with teeth and claws. There were only the menacing, unblinking eyes, adance with white flame.
In the cellar to her right, the other creatures began to move, almost as one, with a single purpose.
She swung toward them, her heart racing faster than ever, her breath caught in her throat.
From the gleam of silvery eyes, she could tell they were leaping down from the shelves where they’d perched.
They’re coming for me.
The two on the work table jumped to the floor.
Penny screamed as loud as she could.
The music didn’t stop. Didn’t even miss a beat.
No one had heard her.
Except for the one at the foot of the stairs, all the creatures had gathered into a pack. Their blazing eyes looked like a cache of diamonds spread on black velvet.
None of them advanced on her. They waited.
After a moment she turned to the stairs again.
Now, the beast at the bottom of the stairs moved, too. But it didn’t come toward her. It darted into the cellar and joined the others of its kind.
The stairs were clear, though dark.
It’s a trick.
As far as she could see, there was nothing to prevent her from climbing the stairs as fast as she could.
It’s a trap.
But there was no need for them to set a trap. She was already trapped. They could have rushed her at any time. They could have killed her if they’d wanted to kill her.