Darkfall

The door to her father's room was ajar, as usual. She stood beside it, ear to the crack, listening. He was snoring. She couldn't hear anything else in there, no strange rustling noises.

Again, she considered waking Daddy. He was a police detective. Lieutenant Jack Dawson. He had a gun. If something was in the apartment, he could blast it to smithereens. On the other hand, if she woke him and they found nothing, he would tease her and speak to her as if she were a child, Jeez, even worse than that, as if she were an infant. She hesitated, then sighed. No. It just wasn't worth the risk of being humiliated.

Heart pounding, she crept along the hall to the front door and tried it. It was stir! securely locked.

A coat rack was fixed to the wall beside the door. She took a tightly rolled umbrella from one of the hooks. The metal tip was pointed enough to serve as a reasonably good weapon.

With the umbrella thrust out in front of her, she went into the living room, turned on all the lights, looked everywhere. She searched the dining alcove and the small L-shaped kitchen, as well.

Nothing.

Except the window.

Above the sink, the kitchen window was open. Cold December air streamed through the ten-inch gap.

Penny was sure it hadn't been open when she'd gone to bed. And if Daddy had opened it to get a breath of fresh air, he'd have closed it later; he was conscientious about such things because he was always setting an example for Davey, who needed an example because he wasn't conscientious about much of anything.

She carried the kitchen stool to the sink, climbed onto it, and pushed the window up farther, far enough to lean out and take a look. She winced as the cold air stung her face and sent icy fingers down the neck of her pajamas. There was very little light. Four stories beneath her, the alleyway was blacker than black at its darkest, ash-gray at its brightest. The only sound was the soughing of the wind in the concrete canyon. It blew a few twisted scraps of paper along the pavement below and made Penny's brown hair flap like a banner; it tore the frosty plumes of her breath into gossamer rags. Otherwise, nothing moved.

Farther along the building, near the bedroom window, an iron fire escape led down to the alley. But here at the kitchen, there was no fire escape, no ledge, noway that a would-be burglar could have reached the window, no place for him to stand or hold on while he pried his way inside.

Anyway, it hadn't been a burglar. Burglars weren't small enough to hide under a young lady's bed.

She closed the window and put the stool back where she'd gotten it. She returned the umbrella to the coat rack in the hall, although she was somewhat reluctant to give up the weapon. Switching off the lights as she went, refusing to glance behind into the darkness that she left in her wake, she returned to her room and got back into bed and pulled up the covers.

Davey was still sleeping soundly.

Night wind pressed at the window.

Far off, across the city, an ambulance or police siren made a mournful song.

For a while, Penny sat up in bed, leaning against the pillows, the reading lamp casting a protective circle of light around her. She was sleepy, and she wanted to sleep, but she was afraid to turn out the light. Her fear made her angry. Wasn't she almost twelve years old? And wasn't twelve too old to fear the dark? Wasn't she the woman of the house now, and hadn't she been the woman of the house for more than a year and a half, ever since her mother had died? After about ten minutes, she managed to shame herself into switching off the lamp and lying down.

She couldn't switch her mind off as easily.

What had it been?

Nothing. A remnant of a dream. Or a vagrant draft. Just that and nothing more.

Darkness.

She listened.

Silence.

She waited.

Nothing.

She slept.

II Wednesday, 1:34 A.M

Vince Vastagliano was halfway down the stairs when he heard a shout, then a hoarse scream. It wasn't shrill. It wasn't a piercing scream. It was a startled, guttural cry that he might not even have heard if he'd been upstairs; nevertheless, it managed to convey stark terror. Vince paused with one hand on the stair railing, standing very still, head cocked, listening intently, heart suddenly hammering, momentarily frozen by indecision.

Another scream.

Ross Morrant, Vince's bodyguard, was in the kitchen, making a late-night snack for both of them, and it was Morrant who had screamed. No mistaking the voice.

There were sounds of struggle, too. A crash and clatter as something was knocked over. A hard thump. The brittle, unmelodic music of breaking glass.

Ross Morrant's breathless, fear-twisted voice echoed along the downstairs hallway from the kitchen, and between grunts and gasps and unnerving squeals of pain, there were words: “No… no… please… Jesus, no… help… someone help me… oh, my God, my God, please… no!”

Sweat broke out on Vince's face.

Morrant was a big, strong, mean son of a bitch. As a kid he'd been an ardent street fighter. By the time he was eighteen, he was taking contracts, doing murder for hire, having fun and being paid for it. Over the years he gained a reputation for taking any job, regardless of how dangerous or difficult it was, regardless of how well- protected the target was, and he always got his man. For the past fourteen months, he had been working for Vince as an enforcer, collector, and bodyguard; during that time, Vince had never seen him scared. He couldn't imagine Morrant being frightened of anyone or anything. And Morrant begging for mercy… well, that was simply inconceivable; even now, hearing the bodyguard whimper and plead, Vince still couldn't conceive of it; it just didn't seem real.

Something screeched. Not Morrant. It was an ungodly, inhuman sound. It was a sharp, penetrating eruption of rage and hatred and alien need that belonged in a science fiction movie, the hideous cry of some creature from another world.

Until this moment, Vince had assumed that Morrant was being beaten and tortured by other people, competitors in the drug business, who had come to waste Vince himself in order to increase their market share. But now, as he listened to the bizarre, ululating wall that came from the kitchen, Vince wondered if he had just stepped into the Twilight Zone. He felt cold all the way to his bones, queasy, disturbingly fragile, and alone.

He quickly descended two more steps and looked along the hall toward the front door. The way was clear.

He could probably leap down the last of the stairs, race along the hallway, unlock the front door, and get out of the house before the intruders came out of the kitchen and saw him. Probably. But he harbored a small measure of doubt, and because of that doubt he hesitated a couple of seconds too long.

In the kitchen Morrant shrieked more horribly than ever, a final cry of bleak despair and agony that was abruptly cut off.

Vince knew what Morrant's sudden silence meant. The bodyguard was dead.

Then the lights went out from one end of the house to the other. Apparently someone had thrown the master breaker switch in the fuse box, down in the basement.

Not daring to hesitate any longer, Vince started down the stairs in the dark, but he heard movement in the unlighted hallway, back toward the kitchen, coming in this direction) and he halted again. He wasn't hearing anything as ordinary as approaching footsteps; instead, it was a strange, eerie hissing-rustling-rattling-grumbling that chilled him and made his skin crawl. He sensed that something monstrous, something with pale dead eyes and