The flickering ice-white eyes watched her.
Mrs. March pounded on the piano.
The kids sang.
Penny bolted away from the shelves, dashed to the stairs, and clambered upward. Step by step she expected the things to bite her heels, latch onto her, and drag her down. She stumbled once, almost fell back to the bottom, grabbed the railing with her free hand, and kept going. The top step. The landing. Fumbling in the dark for the doorknob, finding it. The hallway. Light, safety. She slammed the door behind her. Leaned on it. Gasping.
In the music room, they were still singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
The corridor was deserted.
Dizzy, weak in the legs, Penny slid down and sat on the floor, her back against the door. She let go of the carry-all. She had been gripping it so tightly that the handle had left its mark across her palm. Her hand ached.
The song ended.
Another song began. Silver Bells.
Gradually, Penny regained her strength, calmed herself, and was able to think clearly. What were those hideous little things? Where did they come from? What did they want from her?
Thinking clearly wasn’t any help. She couldn’t come up with a single acceptable answer.
A lot of really dumb answers kept occurring to her, however: goblins, gremlins, ogres.... Cripes. It couldn’t be anything like that. This was real life, not a fairy tale.
How could she ever tell anyone about her experience in the cellar without seeming childish or, worse, even slightly crazy? Of course, grown-ups didn’t like to use the term “crazy” with children. You could be as nuts as a walnut tree, babble like a loon, chew on furniture, set fire to cats, and talk to brick walls, and as long as you were still a kid, the worst they’d say about you —in public, at least—was that you were “emotionally disturbed,” although what they meant by that was “crazy.” If she told Mr. Quillen or her father or any other adult about the things she had seen in the school basement, everyone would think she was looking for attention and pity; they’d figure she hadn’t yet adjusted to her mother’s death. For a few months after her mother passed away, Penny had been in bad shape, confused, angry, frightened, a problem to her father and to herself. She had needed help for a while. Now, if she told them about the things in the basement, they would think she needed help again. They would send her to a “counselor,” who would actually be a psychologist or some other kind of head doctor, and they’d do their best for her, give her all sorts of attention and sympathy and treatment, but they simply wouldn’t believe her—until, with their own eyes, they saw such things as she had seen.
Or until it was too late for her.
Yes, they’d all believe then—when she was dead.
She had no doubt whatsoever that the fiery-eyed things would try to kill her, sooner or later. She didn’t know why they wanted to take her life, but she sensed their evil intent, their hatred. They hadn’t harmed her yet, true, but they were growing bolder. Last night, the one in her bedroom hadn’t damaged anything except the plastic baseball bat she’d poked at it, but by this morning, they had grown bold enough to destroy the contents of her locker. And now, bolder still, they had revealed themselves and had threatened her.
What next?
Something worse.
They enjoyed her terror; they fed on it. But like a cat with a mouse, they would eventually grow tired of the game. And then ...
She shuddered.
What am I going to do? she wondered miserably. What am I going to do?
8
The hotel, one of the best in the city, overlooked Central Park. It was the same hotel at which Jack and Linda had spent their honeymoon, thirteen years ago. They hadn’t been able to afford the Bahamas or Florida or even the Catskills. Instead, they had remained in the city and had settled for three days at this fine old landmark, and even that had been an extravagance. They’d had a memorable honeymoon, nevertheless, three days filled with laughter and good conversation and talk of their future and lots of loving. They’d promised themselves a trip to the Bahamas on their tenth anniversary, something to look forward to. But by the time that milestone rolled around, they had two kids to think about and a new apartment to get in order, and they renegotiated the promise, rescheduling the Bahamas for their fifteenth anniversary. Little more than a year later, Linda was dead. In the eighteen months since her funeral, Jack had often thought about the Bahamas, which were now forever spoiled for him, and about this hotel.
The murders had been committed on the sixteenth floor, where there were now two uniformed officers—Yeager and Tufton—stationed at the elevator alcove. They weren’t letting anyone through except those with police ID and those who could prove they were registered guests with lodgings on that level.
“Who were the victims?” Rebecca asked Yeager. “Civilians?”
“Nope,” Yeager said. He was a lanky man with enormous yellow teeth. Every time he paused, he probed at his teeth with his tongue, licked and pried at them. “Two of them were pretty obviously professional muscle.”
“You know the type,” Tufton said as Yeager paused to probe again at his teeth. “Tall, big hands, big arms; you could break ax handles across their necks, and they’d think it was just a sudden breeze.”
“The third one,” Yeager said, “was one of the Carramazzas.” He paused; his tongue curled out, over his upper teeth, swept back and forth. “One of the immediate family, too.” He scrubbed his tongue over his lowers. “In fact—” Probe, probe. “—it’s Dominick Carramazza.”
“Oh, shit!” Jack said. “Gennaro’s brother?”
“Yeah, the godfather’s little brother, his favorite brother, his right hand,” Tufton said quickly, before Yeager started to answer. Tufton was a fast-spoken man with a sharp face, an angular body, and quick movements, brisk and efficient gestures. Yeager’s slowness must be a constant irritant to him, Jack thought. “And they didn’t just kill him. They tore him up bad. There isn’t any mortician alive who can put Dominick back together well enough for an open-casket funeral, and you know how important funerals are to these Sicilians.”
“There’ll be blood in the streets now,” Jack said wearily.
“Gang war like we haven’t seen in years,” Tufton agreed.
Rebecca said, “Dominick ... ? Wasn’t he the one who was in the news all summer?”
“Yeah,” Yeager said. “The D.A. thought he had him nailed for—”
When Yeager paused to swab his yellowed teeth with his big pink tongue, Tufton quickly said, “Trafficking in narcotics. He’s in charge of the entire Carramazza narcotics operation. They’ve been trying to put him in the stir for twenty years, maybe longer, but he’s a fox. He always walks out of the courtroom a free man.”
“What was he doing here in the hotel?” Jack wondered.
“I think he was hiding out,” Tufton said.
“Registered under a phony name,” Yeager said.
Tufton said, “Holed up here with those two apes to protect him. They must’ve known he was targeted, but he was hit anyway.”
“Hit?” Yeager said scornfully. He paused to tend to his teeth and made an unpleasant sucking sound. Then: “Hell, this was more than just a hit. This was total devastation. This was crazy, totally off the wall; that’s what this was. Christ, if I didn’t know better, I’d say these three here had been chewed, just chewed to pieces.”
The scene of the crime was a two-room suite. The door had been broken down by the first officers to arrive. An assistant medical examiner, a police photographer, and a couple of lab technicians were at work in both rooms.
The parlor, decorated entirely in beige and royal blue, was elegantly appointed with a stylish mixture of French provincial and understated contemporary furniture. The room would have been warm and welcoming if it hadn’t been thoroughly splattered with blood.
The first body was sprawled on the parlor floor, on its back, beside an overturned, oval-shaped coffee table. A man in his thirties. Tall, husky.
His dark slacks were torn. His white shirt was torn, too, and much of it was stained crimson. He was in the same condition as Vastagliano and Ross: savagely bitten, mutilated.
The carpet around the corpse was saturated with blood, but the battle hadn’t been confined to that small portion of the room. A trail of blood, weaving and erratic, led from one end of the parlor to the other, then back again; it was the route the panicked victim had taken in a futile attempt to escape from and slough off his attackers.
Jack felt sick.
“It’s a damned slaughterhouse,” Rebecca said.
The dead man had been packing a gun. His shoulder holster was empty. A silencer-equipped .38 pistol was at his side.
Jack interrupted one of the lab technicians who was moving slowly around the parlor, collecting blood samples from various stains. “You didn’t touch the gun?”
“Of course not,” the technician said. “We’ll take it back to the lab in a plastic bag, see if we can work up any prints.”
“I was wondering if it’d been fired,” Jack said.
“Well, that’s almost a sure thing. We’ve found four expended shell casings.”
“Same caliber as this weapon?”
“Yep.”
“Find any of the loads?” Rebecca asked.
“All four,” the technician said. He pointed: “Two in that wall, one in the door frame over there, and one right through the upholstery button on the back of that armchair.”
“So it looks as if he didn’t hit whatever he was shooting at,” Rebecca said.
“Probably not. Four shell casings, four slugs. Everything’s been neatly accounted for.”
Jack said, “How could he have missed four times in such close quarters?”
“Damned if I know,” the technician said. He shrugged and went back to work.
The bedroom was even bloodier than the parlor. Two dead men shared it.
There were two living men, as well. A police photographer was snapping the bodies from every angle. An assistant medical examiner named Brendan Mulgrew, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple, was studying the positions of both corpses.
One of the victims was on the king-size bed, his head at the foot of it, his bare feet pointed toward the headboard, one hand at his torn throat, the other hand at his side, the palm turned up, open. He was wearing a bathrobe and a suit of blood.
“Dominick Carramazza,” Jack said.
Looking at the ruined face, Rebecca said, “How can you tell?”
“Just barely.”
The other dead man was on the floor, flat on his stomach, head turned to one side, face torn to ribbons. He was dressed like the one in the parlor: white shirt open at the neck, dark slacks, a shoulder holster.
Jack turned away from the gouged and oozing flesh. His stomach had gone sour; an acid burning etched its way up from his gut to a point under his heart. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a roll of Turns.
Both of the victims in the bedroom had been armed. But guns had been of no more help to them than to the man in the parlor.
The cadaver on the floor was still clutching a silencer-equipped pistol, which was as illegal as a howitzer at a presidential press conference. It was like the gun on the floor in the first room.
The man on the bed hadn’t been able to hold on to his weapon. It was lying on the tangled sheets and blankets.
“Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum,” Jack said. “Powerful enough to blow a hole as big as a fist right through anyone in its way.”
Being a revolver instead of a pistol, it wasn’t fitted with a silencer, and Rebecca said, “Fired indoors, it’d sound like a cannon. They’d have heard it from one end of this floor to the other.”
To Mulgrew, Jack said, “Does it look as if both guns were fired?”
The M.E. nodded. “Yeah. Judging from the expended shell casings, the magazine of the pistol was completely emptied. Ten rounds. The guy with the .357 Magnum managed to get off five shots.”
“And didn’t hit his assailant,” Rebecca said.
“Apparently not,” Mulgrew said, “although we’re taking blood samples from all over the suite, hoping we’ll come up with a type that doesn’t belong to one of the three victims.”
They had to move to get out of the photographer’s way.
Jack noticed two impressive holes in the wall to the left of the bed. “Those from the .357?”
“Yes,” Mulgrew said. He swallowed hard; his Adam’s apple bobbled. “Both slugs went through the wall, into the next room.”
“Jesus. Anyone hurt over there?”
“No. But it was a close thing. The guy in the next room is mad as hell.”
“I don’t blame him,” Jack said.
“Has anyone gotten his story yet?” Rebecca asked.
“He may have talked to the uniforms,” Mulgrew said, “but I don’t think any detectives have formally questioned him.”
Rebecca looked at Jack. “Let’s get to him while he’s still fresh.”
“Okay. But just a second.” To Mulgrew, Jack said, “These three victims... were they bitten to death?”
“Looks that way.”
“Rat bites?”
“I’d rather wait for lab results, the autopsy—”
“I’m only asking for an unofficial opinion,” Jack said.
“Well ... unofficially ... not rats.”
“Dogs? Cats?”
“Highly unlikely.”
“Find any droppings?”
Mulgrew was surprised. “I thought of that, but it’s funny you should. I looked everywhere. Couldn’t find a single dropping.”
“Anything else strange?”
“You noticed the door, didn’t you?”
“Besides that.”
“Isn’t that enough?” Mulgrew said, astonished. “Listen, the first two bulls on the scene had to break down the door to get in. The suite was locked up tight—from the inside. The windows are locked from the inside, too, and in addition to that, I think they’re probably painted shut. So ... no matter whether they were men or animals, how did the killers get away? You have a locked room mystery on your hands. I think that’s pretty strange, don’t you?”
Jack sighed. “Actually, it’s getting to be downright common.”
9
Ted Gernsby, a telephone company repairman, was working on a junction box in a storm drain not far from Wellton School. He was bracketed by work lights that he and Andy Carnes had brought down from the truck, and the lights were focused on the box; otherwise, the man-high drainage pipe was filled with cool, stagnant darkness.
The lights threw off a small measure of heat, and the air was naturally warmer underground than on the windswept street, although not much warmer. Ted shivered. Because the job involved delicate work, he had removed his gloves. Now his hands were growing stiff from the cold.
Although the storm drains weren’t connected to the sewer system, and although the concrete conduits were relatively dry after weeks of no precipitation, Ted occasionally got a whiff of a dark, rotten odor that, depending on its intensity, sometimes made him grimace and sometimes made him gag. He wished Andy would hurry back with the circuit board that was needed to finish the repair job.
He put down a pair of needle-nose pliers, cupped his hands over his mouth, and blew warm air into them. He leaned past the work lights in order to see beyond the glare and into the unilluminated length of the tunnel.
A flashlight bobbled in the darkness, coming this way. It was Andy, at last.
But why was he running?
Andy Carnes came out of the gloom, breathing fast. He was in his early twenties, about twenty years younger than Ted; they had been working together only a week. Andy was a beachboy type with white-blond hair and a healthy complexion and freckles that were like water-spots on warm, dry sand. He would have looked more at home in Miami or California; in New York, he seemed misplaced. Now, however, he was so pale that, by contrast, his freckles looked like dark holes in his face. His eyes w
ere wild. He was trembling.
“What’s wrong?” Ted asked.
“Back there,” Andy said shakily. “In the branch tunnel. Just this side of the manhole.”
“Something there? What?”
Andy glanced back. “They didn’t follow me. Thank God. I was afraid they were after me.”
Ted Gernsby frowned. “What’re you talking about?”
Andy started to speak, hesitated, shook his head. Looking sheepish, yet still frightened, he said, “You wouldn’t believe it. Not in a million years. I don’t believe it, and I’m the one who saw it!”
Impatient, Ted unclipped his own flashlight from the tool belt around his waist. He started back toward the branch drain.
“Wait!” Andy said. “It might be... dangerous to go back there.”
“Why?” Ted demanded, exasperated with him.
“Eyes.” Andy shivered. “That’s what I saw first. A lot of eyes shining in the dark, there inside the mouth of the branch line.”
“Is that all? Listen, you saw a few rats. Nothing to worry about. When you’ve been on this job a while, you’ll get used to them.”
“Not rats,” Andy said adamantly. “Rats have red eyes, don’t they? These were white. Or ... sort of silvery. Silvery-white eyes. Very bright. It wasn’t that they reflected my flashlight. No. I didn’t even have the flash on them when I first spotted them. They glowed. Glowing eyes, with their own light. I mean... like jack-o’-lantern eyes. Little spots of fire, flickering. So then I turned the flash on them, and they were right there, no more than six feet from me, the most incredible damned things. Right there!”
“What?” Ted demanded. “You still haven’t told me what you saw.”
In a tremulous voice, Andy told him.
It was the craziest story Ted had ever heard, but he listened without comment, and although he was sure it couldn’t be true, he felt a quiver of fear pass through him. Then, in spite of Andy’s protests, he went back to the branch tunnel to have a look for himself. He didn’t find anything at all, let alone the monsters he’d heard described. He even went into the tributary for a short distance, probing with the beam of his flashlight. Nothing.