“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.
9
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. Hissi
ng. 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 demon’s 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.
10
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 n
ot 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 blue-blood, 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.”