Darkfall

heal both of us, you and me. That's why I sent you to Dr. Hannaby when you started having your problems. Not because you were crazy. Because you needed to talk to someone who wouldn't start crying about your mom as soon as you started crying about your mom. Understand?”

“Yeah,” Penny said softly, tears shining in her eyes, brightly suspended but unspilled.

“Positive?”

“Yeah. I really do, Daddy. I understand now.”

“So you should have come to me last night, when the thing was in your room. Certainly after it poked holes in that plastic baseball bat. I wouldn't have thought you were crazy.”

“Neither would I,” Davey said. “I never-ever thought you were crazy, Penny. You're probably the least craziest person I know.”

Penny giggled, and Jack and Rebecca couldn't help grinning, but Davey didn't know what was so funny.

Jack hugged his daughter very tight. He kissed her face and her hair. He said, “I love you, peanut.”

Then he hugged Davey and told him he loved him, too.

And then, reluctantly, he looked at his wristwatch.

Ten-twenty-four.

Ten minutes had elapsed since they had come into the brownstone and had taken shelter in the space under the big staircase.

“Looks like they didn't follow us,” Rebecca said.

“Let's not be too hasty,” he said. “Give it another couple of minutes.”

Ten-twenty-five.

Ten-twenty-six.

He didn't relish going outside and having a look around. He waited one more minute.

Ten-twenty-seven.

Finally he could delay no longer. He eased out from the staircase. He took two steps, put his hand on the brass knob of the foyer door — and froze.

They were here. The goblins.

One of them was clinging to the glass panel in the center of the door. It was a two-foot-long, wormlike thing with a segmented body and perhaps two dozen legs. Its mouth resembled that of a fish: oval, with the teeth set far back from the writhing, sucking lips. Its fiery eyes fixed on Jack.

He abruptly looked away from that white-hot gaze, for he recalled how the eyes of the lizard had nearly hypnotized him.

Beyond the worm-thing, the security foyer was crawling with other, different devils, all of them small, but all of them so incredibly vicious and grotesque in appearance that Jack began to shake and felt his bowels turn to jelly. There were lizard-things in various sizes and shapes. Spider-things. Rat-things. Two of the man-form beasts, one of them with a tail, the other with a sort of cock's comb on its head and along its back. Dog things. Crablike, feline, snakelike, beetle-form, scorpionlike, dragonish, clawed and ranged, spiked and spurred and sharply horned things. Perhaps twenty of them. No. More than twenty. At least thirty. They slithered and skittered across the mosaic-tile floor, and they crept tenaciously up the walls, their foul tongues darting and fluttering ceaselessly, teeth gnashing and grinding, eyes shining.

Shocked and repelled, Jack snatched his hand away from the brass doorknob. He turned to Rebecca and the kids. “They've found us. They're here. Come on. Got to get out. Hurry. Before it's too late.”

They came away from the stairs. They saw the worm-thing on the door and the horde in the foyer beyond. Rebecca and Penny stared at that Hellborn pack without speaking, both of them driven beyond the need — and perhaps beyond the ability — to scream. Davey was the only one who cried out. He clutched at Jack's arm.

“They must be inside the building by now,” Rebecca said. “In the walls.”

They all looked toward the hallway's heating vents.

“How do we get out?” Penny asked.

How, indeed?

For a moment no one spoke.

In the foyer other creatures had joined the worm-thing on the glass of the inner door.

“Is there a rear entrance?” Rebecca wondered.

“Probably,” Jack said. “But if there is, then these things will be waiting there, too.”

Another pause.

The silence was oppressive and terrifying — like the unspent energy in the raised blade of a cocked guillotine.

“Then we're trapped,” Penny said.

Jack felt his own heart beating. It shook him.

Think.

“Daddy, don't let them get me, please don't let them, “ Davey said miserably.

Jack glanced at the elevator, which was opposite the stairs. He wondered if the devils were already in the elevator shaft. Would the doors of the lift suddenly open, spilling out a wave of hissing, snarling, snapping death?

Think!

He grabbed Davey's hand and headed toward the foot of the stairs.

Following with Penny, Rebecca said, “Where are you going?”

“This way.”

They climbed the steps toward the second floor.

Penny said, “But if they're in the walls, they'll be all through the building.”

“Hurry,” was Jack's only answer. He led them up the steps as fast as they could go.

III

In Carver Hampton's apartment above his shop in Harlem, all the lights were on. Ceiling lights, reading lamps, table lamps, and floor lamps blazed; no room was left in shadow. In those few corners where the lamplight didn't reach, candles had been lit; clusters of them stood in dishes and pie pans and cake tins.

Carver sat at the small kitchen table, by the window, his strong brown hands clamped around a glass of Chivas Regal. He stared out at the falling snow, and once in a while he took a sip of the Scotch.

Fluorescent bulbs glowed in the kitchen ceiling. The stove light was on. And the light above the sink, too. On the table, within easy reach, were packs of matches, three boxes of candles, and two flashlights — just in case the storm caused a power failure.

This was not a night for darkness.

Monstrous things were loose in the city.

They fed on darkness.

Although the night-stalkers had not been sent to get Carver, he could sense them out there in the stormy streets, prowling, hungry; they radiated a palpable evil, the pure and ultimate evil of the Ancient Ones. The creatures now loose in the storm were foul and unspeakable presences that couldn't go unnoticed by a man of Carver Hampton's powers. For one who was gifted with the ability to detect the intrusion of otherworldly forces into this world, their mere existence was an intolerable abrasion of the nerves, the soul. He assumed they were Lavelle's hellish emissaries, bent on the brutal destruction of the Carramazza family, for to the best of his knowledge there was no other Bocor in New York who could have summoned such creatures from the Underworld.

He sipped his Scotch. He wanted to get roaring drunk. But he wasn't much of a drinking man. Besides, this night of all nights, he must remain alert, totally in control of himself. Therefore, he allowed himself only small sips of whiskey.

The Gates had been opened. The very Gates of Hell. Just a crack. The latch had barely been slipped. And through the applicator of his formidable powers as a Bocor, Lavelle was holding the Gates