Darkfall

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 limerich 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 were lined up along 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 hissingscrabbling-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.