“Got you!” Her cry was an awful sound, tinged with hysteria.
She glanced at the open door. With these things immobilized for the moment, she could make it. But just as she was about to ease her grip on the pillow, a pair of tooth-encrusted jaws burst through the case and snapped at her. She screamed and ran for the door, slipping on the feathers, scrabbling along on her hands and knees until she reached it. She rolled through, stretched up and grabbed the knob, and was just pulling the door closed when the two chewer bugs hurtled through the air above her and dove toward the first floor.
“No!”
And even before they were out of sight she heard an angry shout from Alan in the kitchen. She got to her feet and ran downstairs where she met him and Ba in the foyer. Ba, cleaver in hand, looked like a mad Asian chef.
Alan’s eyes widened when he saw her.
“Sylvia! What happened?” He was staring at her head.
“Why?” She touched the sore spot on her scalp. Her fingers came away wet and red. Some of her skin must have ripped away with her hair. “Two of those things upstairs—in Jeffy’s room. They got away and came down here. Did you see them?”
“No. The second one in the kitchen window got past us. We were just looking for it.”
“Listen, please,” Ba said, holding up his cleaver.
They quieted. A rasping sound … from down the hall … like chisels working wood.
“Where—?” Alan began.
“Oh, God, I think I know!”
She turned and led them toward the cellar door. As she rounded the corner she skidded to a halt and bit back a scream. All three chewers were there, nose-on to the cellar door, gnawing at the wood in blind determination to get through to what lay beyond it.
And from the other side she heard the wail of a child’s small, frightened voice.
“Mommy? Are you out there, Mommy? What’s that noise? What’s happening, Mommy?”
“Get them!” she said in a controlled screech through her teeth. “Get them!”
Ba leapt forward, Alan rolling behind him. Ba cut one in half, then another. As their body parts flopped and flew around, Alan reached out with his towel-wrapped hand and grabbed the third by its tail. He swung it against the floor, smashing its head. Glasslike teeth flew in all directions. The last chewer lay still.
“Get the upstairs windows, Ba,” he said. “I’ll look after the ones down here.”
As the two men hurried off in different directions, Sylvia opened the basement door just enough to slip through and step onto the landing, then quickly pulled it closed behind her.
Jeffy’s face was ashen as he stared up at her.
“Don’t let them get me, Mom!”
She took the boy in her arms and clutched him tight against her. Her mind raced. Jeffy had been right. Those things were after him. But why?
“It’s okay. We’ve killed the bugs and as soon as the house is sealed up tight we’ll get out of here.”
A moment later she heard Alan’s wheelchair on the other side of the door.
“Okay, gang,” he said, pulling it open. “The coast is clear. All the windows are down. No holes in any of the other screens.”
Sylvia stepped out into the hall, carrying Jeffy. Alan was smiling but she noticed that his eyes were apprehensive as he looked at the boy.
“Jeffy, why don’t you and Ba go to the movie room while your mother and I get some hot chocolate. Then we’ll all watch a movie.”
The movie room? It was a converted oversize pantry where they’d set up the giant screen TV. Perfect for movies any time of day because it had no windows. Was that why Alan was suggesting it?
Jeffy let go of her and went with Ba. He no longer looked afraid. What could possibly harm you when Ba Thuy Nguyen was holding your hand?
As soon as Jeffy was out of earshot she turned to Alan.
“What’s wrong?” Dumb question. “I mean, what else is wrong?”
“They’re all over the place, Sylvia,” he said in a low voice. “A huge flock of them swarmed in just as we finished closing up. They’re at every window, trying to get in. Listen.”
She did. And she heard it. A cadenceless tattoo, as if a thousand people were outside bouncing tennis balls off the windows. It congealed her blood to think of how many of those creatures it took to make that kind of noise.
“Who do we call? The police, the fire company, who?”
“All of the above.” Alan grabbed the cordless phone from the counter, listened, then frowned as he put it down. “Phone’s out. Try your cell.”
Sylvia fished it from her pocket but found a two-word message on the display.
“‘No Service.’ How can that be?”
He pointed to the dead creatures on the floor. “How can they be?”
“Then we’re trapped.”
“I think we’re safe for now. We’ll see what the morning brings. But until then, let’s keep Jeffy as calm as we can.”
“They’re after him, aren’t they?”
Alan nodded gravely. “Sure looks that way.”
She bit back a sob as she dropped into Alan’s lap and flung her arms around his neck. So afraid for Jeffy. If anything happened to him …
It took everything to keep from crying.
“Why, Alan?”
“I think Mr. Veilleur might know.”
Sylvia said nothing. Mr. Veilleur … she’d thought of him too. But she didn’t trust him. He was hiding too much. Besides, what could a feeble old man do against these hideous things?
She pulled away from Alan and stood. She took his hand.
“We’ll handle this ourselves. Let’s make that cocoa.”
Ecstasy!
The horror, the pain, the bloodshed, the ravenous, screaming FEAR soaks through from above, filtering down the tissues of the earth, through the living granite into the conduits of Rasalom’s changed being.
His raw flesh has healed now, hardened into a tough new covering. His limbs remain fused to the walls of the granite pocket, reaching deeper and deeper into the rock, sending intangible feeder roots through the surrounding earth, searching for more nourishment. More.
And as he feeds, Rasalom gains mass, grows larger, thicker. The granite walls of the pocket flake away to accommodate his increasing size. The chips slide to the bottom and collect there like shattered bones.
SATURDAY
Daybreak
Monroe, Long Island
It took Sylvia a moment or two to appreciate the silence, but shortly before sunup she realized the incessant beating on the windows had stopped.
She was the first to know because she hadn’t slept a wink all night. Jeffy had dozed off halfway through his umpteenth viewing of The Incredibles. Alan had succumbed a short while later in his wheelchair. Ba had spent much of the night working on some sort of weapon—carving tiny niches into the wood of one of his billy clubs and fixing chew-bug teeth into them with Krazy Glue. But even he dozed now and then. Sylvia had sat by the door of the movie room, keeping it open an inch or two, listening at the gap.
Silence. She was almost afraid to believe it could be true. As she rose from her chair, Ba sprang up, instantly alert.
“Missus?”
“It’s all right, Ba,” she whispered. “I’m just going to take a look outside.”
“I will come.”
“That’s okay. I’ll just be—”
But he was already by her side, peering into the hall. When he was satisfied it was safe, he stepped out and held the door for her. Sylvia sighed, smiled her thanks, and followed him.
She wondered if she’d ever get used to having someone around who was ready at any moment to lay down his life for her. It had all started sometime when her father had recognized Ba in a TV news story about the boat people crossing the South China Sea with nothing but the clothes on their backs. He’d stood out because he towered above his fellow Vietnamese. Dad had dug out a photo and told her about this huge South Vietnamese kid his Special Forces group
had trained as a guerrilla, how they’d become friends. The man in the photo and on the tube were the same.
He’d rushed to Manila, brought Ba and his wife, Nhung Thi, back to the States, and found them jobs in the Vietnamese community on the Lower East Side.
Shortly after that, her father died in his sleep. Years later, when Sylvia learned that Nhung Thi had lung cancer, she’d brought her to Toad Hall and paid her medical expenses until her death. Afterward, Ba stayed on as driver, groundskeeper, and one-man security force. Sylvia had told him a thousand times that he didn’t owe her a thing, but Ba didn’t see it that way.
Now, as he glided ahead of her, as silent and fluid as a shadow in the pale light filtering down the hall, his newly customized billy club poised at the ready, she was glad he’d never listened to her.
They entered the dining room and went directly to the windows. Sylvia pulled back the sheers and gasped. The screens hung in tatters, the panes were smeared and fouled, the mullions gouged and splintered.
But no bugs. Not a single chewer or booger bug in sight. As if they’d evaporated in the morning light—or gone back to where they came from.
“Let’s take a look outside.”
He led the way to the front door, motioned for her to stay back, opened it, then slipped outside. A moment later he returned.
“It is safe, Missus, but…”
“But what?”
“It is not nice.”
Sylvia strode to the door and stepped outside. Down the steps, into the driveway, then she turned and faced the house.
“Oh … my … God!”
Toad Hall looked like a disaster area—as if it had sat empty for a decade, then been struck by a hurricane, a hailstorm, a horde of carpenter ants, and a plague of locusts all at once. Besides the shredded screens and splintered mullions on the windows, all the wooden siding looked gnawed. The chewers had left hundreds, thousands of their sharp, crystalline teeth in the wood. They gleamed like diamonds in the morning sun. And the trees—her beautiful willows! Half the branches, the ones facing the house, had been denuded of their leaves, as if the creatures had been so frustrated by their inability to get into the house that they’d attacked the trees in retaliation.
“Why, Ba? Why’d this happen? What’s going on?”
Ba said nothing. He never offered opinions, even when asked. He stood beside her in silence, his tooth-studded club at the ready as he scanned the grounds, his head swiveling in a smooth, continuous motion, like a radar dish.
“Stay here,” she told him. “I want to take a look next door.”
Ba didn’t stay, of course. He fell in behind her.
The stone wall that ran three sides of Toad Hall’s perimeter lay a good fifty yards away. When Sylvia reached it she fitted her foot into a crevice and pulled herself up to where she could see over. She peered through the shrubs at the house next door, a contemporary that had fallen into disrepair for a while after its previous owner, a golden oldies DJ and entrepreneur named Lenny Winter, disappeared. But the new owners had done a complete overhaul. She pushed a branch aside for a better look.
Her stomach turned. The house was untouched. Well, not completely. She noticed a few ripped screens flapping in the breeze, and a wet smear or two on the cedar siding, but nothing near what had happened to Toad Hall. The owners might not be aware of the damage yet.
Weak and shaky, she dropped back to the ground. As she stared again at the violated exterior of her home, Jeffy’s voice echoed in her brain.
They want to eat me!
He was right. They’d concentrated their attack on the house where he lived and they’d come after him when they broke in.
Why? Did it have anything to do with the Dat-tay-vao?
She couldn’t let them hurt Jeffy. She’d risk anything to protect him. Even …
“Ba, do you remember that older man who was here the other day? He left a card on the foyer table. I told Gladys to throw it away. Do you know if she did?”
“No, Missus.”
“Oh. Then I guess I’ll have to wait until she arrives. I may just have to—”
She noticed that Ba was holding out a piece of paper.
“Gladys did not throw it away.”
She took the card. G. Veilleur was embossed at its center.
She looked at Ba and saw only devotion and fierce loyalty in his eyes. But she remembered the fear there last night when he’d pulled her away from that mucus creature. Alan wanted her to contact the old man, and Ba obviously agreed.
Now it was unanimous.
“Thank you, Ba.”
With her heart weighing heavy in her chest, she headed back to the house, hoping her cell phone was working again by now.
WNYW-TV
Hello, I’m Alice Gray, and we interrupt our usual Saturday morning programming to bring you this special news report. Sunrise was late again for the fourth morning in a row. But it never rose at all for many of our fellow New Yorkers. As most of you are no doubt already aware, chaos reigned in Manhattan last night as the midtown area became the set of the world’s goriest horror movie. Except these horrors were real. Real people died, hundreds of them, perhaps as many as a thousand. The police and emergency services are still counting at this time. And these are the killers.
From what we can gather, these creatures flew out of the hole in Central Park and attacked everyone in sight, leaving the streets littered with corpses. They were indiscriminate in their choice of targets, attacking men, women, children, even dogs and cats, creating a reign of bloody terror. But shortly before dawn they fled, forming swarms that streamed along the streets back to here …
Witnesses described the smaller swarms gathering and mingling above the mysterious Central Park hole, swelling to a huge swirling mass before plummeting again into the depths of the earth where they originated.
But what are these things? No live specimens are available, but dead ones abound. It appears that the ones that didn’t make it back to the hole before dawn died in the daylight. People have already begun referring to them as “vampire bugs.” Scientists from a variety of fields—biology, chemistry, even paleontology (that’s the study of fossils)—are working at identifying the creatures and devising ways to combat them. State and federal authorities have already arrived and are conducting studies to find a way to prevent them from getting loose again. Talk of placing a huge metal mesh over the hole is circulating.
But that may prove futile. Chilling news just in from Long Island and New Jersey of other bottomless holes, identical to the one in our own Central Park, opening up in a Bayside cemetery, Glen Cove, Hackensack, and other places. These reports are unconfirmed as yet, but we have a team racing to St. Ann’s Cemetery in Bayside at this very moment and will bring you live coverage from Queens as soon as they arrive and set up.…
Gatherings
Manhattan
Glaeken handed the drawings of the necklaces to Jack and watched the younger man study them. These were Xeroxes. He had the parchment originals safely tucked away in a vault.
“Good,” Jack said, nodding appreciatively. “Great detail. Just what I need. Where’d you get them?”
“I’ve kept them in a series of safe places over the years on the outside chance that I’d need them someday. That day is here.”
“Yeah,” Jack said glumly. He rubbed his gauze-wrapped forearm. “I guess it is.”
He rose from the chair and began pacing the living room, folding the drawings into a neat square as he roamed. Glaeken sensed the tension coiled within the man, the frustration boiling just under the skin. Jack was used to solving problems, usually other people’s problems. Now he himself was faced with a problem for which he had no solution.
“It’s like a butcher shop out there. I saw those things come out of that hole last night. And now there’s rumors of other holes opening u
p all over the place.”
“They’re not rumors. I believe I told you—”
“I know.” Jack slowed and stopped as he passed the window. “I know you told me.” He pointed out toward the park. “Thousands of those holes? Really? Thousands of them?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What’s going to keep one from opening up right under your building and swallowing it up?”
“I doubt very much that will happen. That would be too quick—mercifully quick. Rasalom wants me to witness the death throes of civilization before he comes for me. Besides, those holes cannot open just anywhere. They must locate at specific points in order to connect with the … other place. You’ve seen the map.”
“On the Lady’s back, yeah.”
“Wherever a pair of the crisscrossing lines intersect—”
“But with swarms of those things pouring out through thousands of holes, the whole planet will be overrun. I’m sure we can find ways to exterminate the bugs, but—”
“The belly flies and chew wasps are just the first wave. Worse things are on the way.”
Jack was slowly shaking his head as he stared out the window. “What could be worse than those little horrors last night?”
“Bigger horrors. But only during the hours of darkness. They must return to the holes before sunrise.”
“Swell. I mean, that’s a big comfort, isn’t it, what with the sunlit hours shrinking day by day.” Jack held up the folded drawings. “You’re telling me these necklaces will help close up the holes?”
“They’ll give us a chance. Without them we might as well quit right now.”
“All right.” Jack shoved them into the back pocket of his jeans. “Sounds crazy to me, but crazy seems to be in charge.”
“Very true. But don’t go yet. There are some people I want you to meet.”
“I already know Bill.”