Darkfall

“-dog meat, garbage—”

“-I'll find you—”

“-and maybe I'll even rape the girl—”

“-you stinking scumbag!”

“-'cause she's really a tender, juicy little piece. I like them tender sometimes, very young and tender, innocent. The thrill is in the corruption, you see.”

“You threaten my kids, you asshole, you just threw away whatever chance you had. Who do you think you are? My God, where do you think you are? This is America, you dumb shit. You can't get away with that kind of stuff here, threatening my kids.”

“I'll give you the rest of the day to think it over. Then, if you don't back off, I'll take Davey and Penny. And I'll make it very painful for them.”

Lavelle hung up.

“Wait!” Jack shouted.

He rattled the disconnect lever, trying to reestablish contact, trying to bring Lavelle back. Of course, it didn't work.

He was gripping the receiver so hard that his hand ached and his muscles were bunched up all the way to the shoulder. He slammed the receiver down almost hard enough to crack the earpiece.

He was breathing like a bull that, for some time, had been taunted by the movement of a red cape. He was aware of his own pulse throbbing in his temples, and he could feel the heat in his flushed face. The knots in his stomach had drawn painfully tight.

After a moment, he turned away from the phone. He was shaking with rage. He stood in the falling snow, gradually getting a grip on himself.

Everything would be all right. Nothing to worry about. Penny and Davey were safe at school, where there were plenty of people to watch over them. It was a good, reliable school, with first-rate security. And Faye would pick them up at three o'clock and take them to her place; Lavelle couldn't know about that. If he did decide to hurt the kids this evening, he'd expect to find them at the apartment; when he discovered they weren't at home, he wouldn't know where to look for them. In spite of what Carver Hampton had said, Lavelle couldn't know all and see all. Could he? Of course not. He wasn't God. He might be a Bocor, a priest with real power, a genuine sorcerer. But he wasn't God. So the kids would be safe with Faye and Keith. In fact, maybe it would be a good idea for them to stay at the Jamison apartment overnight. Or even for the next few days, until Lavelle was apprehended. Faye and Keith wouldn't mind; they'd welcome the visit, the opportunity to spoil their only niece and nephew. Might even be wise to keep Penny and Davey out of school until this was all over. And he'd talk to Captain Gresham about getting some protection for them, a uniformed officer to stay in the Jamison apartment when Jack wasn't able to be there. Not much chance Lavelle would track the kids down. Highly unlikely. But just in case…. And if Gresham didn't take the threat seriously, if he thought an around-the-clock guard was an unjustified use of manpower, then something could be arranged with the guys, the other detectives; they'd help him, just as he'd help them if anything like this ever fell in their direction; each of them would give up a few hours of off-duty time, take a shift at the Jamisons'; anything for a buddy whose family was marked; it was part of the code. Okay. Fine. Everything would be all right.

The world, which had strangely receded when the telephone had begun to ring, now rushed back. Jack was aware of sound, first: a bleating automobile horn, laughter farther along the street, the clatter-clank of tire chains on the snowy pavement, the howling wind. The buildings crowded in around him. A pedestrian scurried past, bent into the wind; and here came three black teenagers, laughing, throwing snowballs at one another as they ran. The mist was gone, and he didn't feel dizzy or disoriented any longer. He wondered if there actually had been any mist in the first place, and he decided the eerie fog had existed only in his mind, a figment of his imagination. What must have happened was… he must have had an attack of some kind; yeah, sure, nothing more than that.

But exactly what kind of attack? And why had he been stricken by it? What had brought it on? He wasn't an epileptic. He didn't have low blood pressure. No other physical maladies, as far as he was aware. He had never experienced a fainting spell in his life; nothing remotely like that. He was in perfect health. So why?

And how had he known the phone call was for him?

He stood there for a while, thinking about it, as thousands of snowflakes fluttered like moths around him.

Eventually he realized he ought to call Faye and explain the situation to her, warn her to be certain that she wasn't followed when she picked up the kids at Wellton School. He turned to the pay phone, paused. No. He wouldn't make the call here. Not on the very phone Lavelle had used. It seemed ridiculous to suppose that the man could have a tap on a public phone — but it also seemed foolish to test the possibility.

Calmer — still furious but less frightened than he had been — he headed back toward the patrol car that was waiting for him.

Three-quarters of an inch of snow lay on the ground. The storm was turning into a full-fledged blizzard.

The wind had icy teeth. It bit.

VI

Lavelle returned to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of his property. Outside, winter raged; inside, fierce dry heat made sweat pop out of Lavelle's ebony skin and stream down his face, and shimmering orange light cast odd leaping shadows on the ribbed walls. From the pit in the center of the floor, a sound arose, a chilling susurration, as of thousands of distant voices, angry whisperings.

He had brought two photographs with him: one of Davey Dawson, the other of Penny Dawson. He had taken both photographs himself, yesterday afternoon, on the street in front of Wellton School. He had been in his van, parked almost a block away, and he had used a 35-mm Pentax with a telephoto lens. He had processed the film in his own closet-size darkroom.

In order to put a curse on someone and be absolutely certain that it would bring about the desired calamity, a Bocor required an icon of the intended victim. Traditionally, the priest prepared a doll, sewed it together from scraps of cotton cloth and filled it with sawdust or sand, then did the best he could to make the doll's face resemble the face of the victim; that done, the ritual was performed with the doll as a surrogate for the real person.

But that was a tedious chore made even more difficult by the fact that the average Bocor—lacking the talent and skills of an artist — found it virtually impossible to make a cotton face look sufficiently like anyone's real countenance. Therefore, the need always arose to embellish the doll with a lock of hair or a nail clipping or a drop of blood from the victim. Obtaining any one of those items wasn't easy. You couldn't just hang around the victim's barbershop or beauty salon, week after week, waiting for him or her to come in and get a hair cut. You couldn't very well ask him to save a few nail clippings for you the next time he gave himself a manicure. And about the only way to obtain a sample of the would-be victim's blood was to assault him and risk apprehension by the police, which was the very thing you were trying to avoid by striking at him with magic rather than with fists or a knife or a gun.

All of those difficulties could be circumvented by the use of a good photograph instead of a doll. As far as Lavelle knew, he was the only Bocor who had ever applied this bit of modern technology to the practice of voodoo. The first time he'd tried it, he hadn't expected it to work; however, six hours after the ritual was completed, the intended victim was dead, crushed under the wheels of a runaway truck. Since then, Lavelle had employed photographs in every ceremony that ordinarily would have called for a doll. Evidently, he possessed some of his brother Gregory's machine-age sensibility and faith in progress.

Now, kneeling on the earthen floor of the shed, beside the pit, he used a ballpoint pen to punch a hole in the top of each of the eight-by-ten glossiest Then he strung both photographs on a length of slender cord. Two wooden stakes had been driven into the dirt floor, near the brink of the pit, directly opposite each other, with the void between them. Lavelle tied one end of the cord to one of the wooden stakes, stretched it across the pit, and fastened the other end to the second stake. The pictures of the Dawson children dangled over the center of the