Darkfall

the work of a poltergeist, those who were already believers in voodoo and the supernatural were humbled, frightened, and reduced to obedient servants, pitifully eager to do whatever a Bocor demanded of them.

Lavelle's rocking chair creaked in the quiet room.

In the darkness, he smiled and smiled.

From the night sky, malignant energy poured down.

Lavelle, the vessel, was soon overflowing with power.

He sighed, for he was renewed.

Before long, the fun would begin.

The slaughter.

II

Penny sat on the edge of her bed, listening.

The sounds came again. Scraping, hissing. A soft thump, a faint clink, and again a thump. A far-off, rattling, shuffling noise.

Far off — but getting closer.

She snapped on the bedside lamp. The small pool of light was warm and welcome.

Davey remained asleep, undisturbed by the peculiar sounds. She decided to let him go on sleeping for the time being. She could wake him quickly if she had to, and one scream would bring Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith.

The raspy cry came again, faint, though perhaps not quite as faint as it had been before.

Penny got up from the bed, went to the dresser, which lay in shadows, beyond the fan of light from her nightstand lamp. In the wall above the dresser, approximately a foot below the ceiling, was a vent for the heating and air-conditioning systems. She cocked her head, trying to hear the distant and furtive noises, and she became convinced that they were being transmitted through the ducts in the walls.

She climbed onto the dresser, but the vent was still almost a foot above her head. She climbed down. She fetched her pillow from the bed and put it on the dresser. She took the thick seat cushions from the two chairs that flanked the window, and she piled those atop her bed pillow. She felt very clever and capable. Once on the dresser again, she stretched, rose up onto her toes, and was able to put her ear against the vent plate that covered the outlet from the ventilation system.

She had thought the goblins were in other apartments or common hallways, farther down in the building; she had thought the ducts were only carrying the sound of them. Now, with a jolt, she realized the ducts were carrying not merely the sound of the goblins but the goblins themselves. This was how they intended to get into the bedroom, not through the door or window, not through some imaginary tunnel in the back of the closet. They were in the ventilation network, making their way up through the building, twisting and turning, slithering and creeping, hurrying along the horizontal pipes, climbing laboriously through the vertical sections of the system, but steadily rising nearer and nearer as surely as the warm air was rising from the huge furnace below.

Trembling, teeth chattering, gripped by fear to which she refused to succumb, Penny put her face to the vent plate and peered through the slots, into the duct beyond. The darkness in there was as deep and as black and as smooth as the darkness in a tomb.

III

Jack hunched over the wheel, squinting at the wintry street ahead.

The windshield was icing up. A thin, milky skin of ice had formed around the edges of the glass and was creeping inward. The wipers were caked with snow that was steadily compacting into lumps of ice.

“Is that damned defroster on full-blast?” he asked, even though he could feel the waves of heat washing up into his face.

Rebecca leaned forward and checked the heater controls. “Full-blast,” she affirmed.

“Temperature sure dropped once it got dark.”

“Must be ten degrees out there. Colder, if you figure in the wind-chill factor.”

Trains of snowplows moved along the main avenues, but they were having difficulty getting the upper hand on the blizzard. Snow was falling in blinding sheets, so thick it obscured everything beyond the distance of one block. Worse, the fierce wind piled the snow in drifts that began to form again and reclaim the pavement only minutes after the plows had scraped it clean.

Jack had expected to make a fast trip to the Jamisons' apartment building. The streets held little or no traffic to get in his way. Furthermore, although his car was unmarked, it had a siren. And he had clamped the detachable red emergency beacon to the metal heading at the edge of the roof, thereby insuring right-of-way over what other traffic there was. He had expected to be holding Penny and Davey in his arms in ten minutes. Now, clearly, the trip was going to take twice that long.

Every time he tried to put on a little speed, the car started to slide, in spite of the snow chains on the tires.

“We could walk faster than this!” Jack said ferociously.

“We'll get there in time,” Rebecca said.

“What if Lavelle is already there?”

“He's not. Of course he's not.”

And then a terrible thought rocked him, and he didn't want to put it into words, but he couldn't stop himself: “What if he called from the Jamisons?”

“He didn't,” she said.

But Jack was abruptly obsessed with that horrendous possibility, and he could not control the morbid compulsion to say it aloud, even though the words brought hideous images to him.

“What if he killed all of them—”

(Mangled bodies.)

“-killed Penny and Davey—”

(Eyeballs torn from sockets.)

“-killed Faye and Keith—”

(Throats chewed open.)

“-and then called from right there—”

(Fingertips bitten off.)

“-called me from right there in the apartment, for Christ's sake—”

(Lips torn, ears hanging loose.)

“-while he was standing over their bodies! ”

She had been trying to interrupt him. Now she shouted at him: “Stop torturing yourself, Jack! We'll make it in time.”

“How the hell do you know we'll make it in time?”

he demanded angrily, not sure why he was angry with her, just striking out at her because she was a convenient target, because he couldn't strike out at Lavelle or at the weather that was hindering him, and because he had to strike out at someone, something, or go absolutely crazy from the tension that was building in him like excess current flowing into an already overcharged battery. “You can't know!”

“I know,” she insisted calmly. “Just drive.”

“Goddamnit, stop patronizing me!”

“Jack—”

“He's got my kids!”

He accelerated too abruptly, and the car immediately began to slide toward the right-hand curb.