Darkfall

coat, trying to tear the coat to shreds so that it could then rip open the boy's belly, and its mouth was wide, its muzzle almost at the boy's face—no! — and Rebecca got there ahead of Jack. Tick. She tore the disgusting thing off Davey's chest. It wailed. It bit her hand. She cried out in pain. Threw the lizard down. Penny was screaming: “Davey, Davey, Davey!” Tick. Davey had regained his feet. The lizard went after him again. This time, Jack got hold of the thing. In his bare hands. On the way up to the Jamisons' apartment, he'd removed his gloves in order to be able to use his gun more easily. Now, shuddering at the feel of the thing, he ripped it off the boy. Heard the coat shredding in its claws. Held it at arm's length. Tick. The creature felt repulsively cold and oily in Jack's hands, although for some reason he had expected it to be hot, maybe because of the fire inside its skull, the silvery blaze that now flickered at him through the gaping sockets where the demons eyes should have been. The beast squirmed. Tick. It tried to wrench free of him, and it was strong, but he was stronger. Tick. It kicked the air with its wickedly clawed feet. Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick…

Rebecca said, “Why isn't it trying to bite you?”

“I don't know,” he said breathlessly.

“What's different about you?”

“I don't know.”

But he remembered the conversation he'd had with Nick Iervolino in the patrol car, earlier today, on the way downtown from Carver Hampton's shop in Harlem. And he wondered…

The lizard-thing had a second mouth, this one in its stomach, complete with sharp little teeth. The aperture gaped at Jack, opened and closed, but this second mouth was no more eager to bite him than was the mouth in the lizard's head.

“Davey, are you all right?” Jack asked.

“Kill it, Daddy,” the boy said. He sounded terrified but unharmed. “Please kill it. Please.”

“I only wish I could,” Jack said.

The small monster twisted, flopped, wriggled, did its best to slither out of Jack's hands. The feel of it revolted him, but he gripped it even tighter than before, harder, dug his fingers into the cold oily flesh.

“Rebecca, what about your hand?”

“Just a nip,” she said.

“Penny?”

“I… I'm okay.”

“Then the three of you get out of here. Go to the avenue.”

“What about you?” Rebecca asked.

“I'll hold onto this thing, give you a head start.” The lizard thrashed. “Then I'll throw it as far as I can before I follow you.”

“We can't leave you alone,” Penny said desperately.

“Only for a minute or two,” Jack said. “I'll catch up. I can run faster than the three of you. I'll catch up easy. Now go on. Get out of here before another one of these damned things charges out from somewhere. Go!”

They ran, the kids ahead of Rebecca, kicking up plumes of snow as they went.

The lizard-thing hissed at Jack.

He looked into those eyes of fire.

Inside the lizard's malformed skull, flames writhed, fluttered, flickered, but never wavered, burned bright and intense, all shades of white and silver, but somehow it didn't seem like a hot fire; it looked cool, instead.

Jack wondered what would happen if he poked a finger through one of those hollow sockets, into the fire beyond. Would he actually find fire in there? Or was it an illusion? If there really was fire in the skull, would he burn himself? Or would he discover that the flames were as lacking in heat as they appeared to be?

White flames. Sputtering.

Cold flames. Hissing.

The lizard's two mouths chewed at the night air.

Jack wanted to see more deeply into that strange fire.

He held the creature closer to his face.

He stared into the empty sockets.

Whirling flames.

Leaping flames.

He had the feeling there was something beyond the fire, something amazing and important, something awesome that he could almost glimpse between those scintillating, tightly contained pyrotechnics.

He brought the lizard even closer.

Now his face was only inches from its muzzle.

He could feel the light of its eyes washing over him.

It was a bitterly cold light.

Incandescent.

Fascinating.

He peered intently into the skull fire.

The flames almost parted, almost permitted him to see what lay beyond them.

He squinted, trying harder to see.

He wanted to understand the great mystery.

The mystery beyond the fiery veil.

Wanted, needed, had to understand it.

White flames.

Flames of snow, of ice.

Flames that held a shattering secret.

Flames that beckoned…

Beckoned…

He almost didn't hear the car door opening behind him. The “eyes” of the lizard-thing had seized him and half mesmerized him. His awareness of the snowswept street around him had grown fuzzy. In a few more seconds, he would have been lost. But they misjudged; they opened the car door one moment too soon, and he heard it. He turned, threw the lizard-thing as far as he could into the stormy darkness.

He didn't wait to see where it fell, didn't look to see what was coming out of the unmarked sedan.

He just ran.

Ahead of him, Rebecca and the kids had reached the avenue. They turned left at the corner, moving out of sight.

Jack pounded through the snow, which was almost over the tops of his boots in some places, and his heart triphammered, and his breath spurted from him in white clouds, and he slipped, almost fell, regained his balance, ran, ran, and it seemed to him that he wasn't running along a real street, that this was only a street in a dream, a nightmare place from which there was no escape.

X

In the elevator, on the way up to the fourteenth floor, where Anson and Francine Dorset had an apartment, Faye said, “Not a word about voodoo or any of that nonsense. You hear me? They'll think you're crazy.”

Keith said, “Well, I don't know about voodoo. But I sure as hell saw something strange.”

“Don't you dare go raving about it to Anson and Francine. He's your business partner, for heaven's sake. You've got to go on working with the man. That's going to be hard to do if he thinks you're some sort of superstitious nut. A broker's got to have an image of stability. A banker's image. Bankers and brokers. People want to see stable, conservative men at a brokerage firm before they trust it with their investments. You can't afford the damage to your reputation. Besides, they were only rats.”