Darkfall

to reassure the children.

Their prospects for survival suddenly looked as bleak as the winter night around them.

Ahead, through the sheeting snow, less than a block away, St. Patrick's Cathedral rose out of the raging storm, like some great ship on a cold night sea. It was a massive structure, covering one entire city block.

Rebecca wondered if voodoo devils would dare enter a church. Or were they like vampires in all the novels and movies? Did they shy away in terror and pain from the mere sight of a crucifix?

Another red warning light came on. The engine was overheating.

In spite of the two gleaming indicators on the instrument panel, she tramped on the accelerator, and the car surged forward. She angled across the lanes, toward the front of St. Patrick's.

The engine sputtered.

The cathedral offered small hope. Perhaps false hope. But it was the only hope they had.

XI

The ritual of purification required total immersion in water prepared by the Houngon.

In Hampton's bathroom, Jack undressed. He was more than a little surprised by his own new-found faith in these bizarre voodoo practices. He expected to feel ridiculous as the ceremony began, but he didn't feel anything of the sort because he had seen those Hellborn creatures.

The bathtub was unusually long and deep. It occupied more than half the bathroom. Hampton said he'd had it installed expressly for ceremonial baths.

Chanting in an eerily breathless voice that sounded too delicate to be coming from a man of his size, reciting prayers and petitions in a patois of French and English and various African tribal languages, Hampton used a bar of green soap — Jack thought it was Irish Spring — to draw veves all over the inside of the tub. Then he filled it with hot water. To the water, he added a number of substances and items that he had brought upstairs from his shop: dried rose petals; three bunches of parsley; seven vine leaves; one ounce of orgeat, which is a syrup made from almonds, sugar, and orange blossoms; powdered orchid petals; seven drops of perfume; seven polished stones in seven colors, each from the shore of a different body of water in Africa; three coins; seven ounces of seawater taken from within the territorial limits of Haiti; a pinch of gunpowder; a spoonful of salt; lemon oil; and several other materials.

When Hampton told him that the time had come, Jack stepped into the pleasantly scented bath. The water was almost too hot to bear, but he bore it. With steam rising around him, he sat down, pushed the coins and stones and other hard objects out of his way, then slid onto his tailbone, until only his head remained above the waterline.

Hampton chanted for a few seconds, then said, “Totally immerse yourself and count to thirty before coming up for air.”

Jack closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and slid flat on his back, so that his entire body was submerged. He had counted only to ten when he began to feel a strange tingling from head to foot. Second by second, he felt somehow… cleaner… not just in body but in mind and spirit, as well. Bad thoughts, fear, tension, anger, despair — all were leeched out of him by the specially treated water.

He was getting ready to confront Lavelle.

XII

The engine died. A snowbank loomed.

Rebecca pumped the brakes. They were extremely soft, but they still worked. The car slid nose-first into the mounded snow, hitting with a thank and a crunch, harder than she would have liked, but not hard enough to hurt anyone.

Silence.

They were in front of the main entrance to St. Patrick's.

Davey said, “Something's inside the seat! It's coming through! “

“What?” Rebecca asked, baffled by his statement, turning to look at him.

He was standing behind Penny's seat, pressed up against it, but facing the other way, looking at the backrest of the rear seat where he had been sitting just a short while ago. Rebecca squinted past him and saw movement under the upholstery. She heard an angry, muffled snarling, too.

One of the goblins must have gotten into the trunk. It was chewing and clawing through the seat, burrowing toward the interior of the car.

“Quick,” Rebecca said. “Come up here with us, Davey. We'll all go out through Penny's door, one after the other, real quick, and then straight into the church.”

Making desperate wordless sounds, Davey climbed into the front seat, between Rebecca and Penny.

At the same moment, Rebecca felt something pushing at the floorboards under her feet. A second goblin was tearing its way into the car from that direction.

If there were only two of the beasts, and if both of them were busily engaged in boring holes into the car, they might not immediately realize that their prey was making a run for the cathedral. It was at least something to hope for; not much, but something.

At a signal from Rebecca, Penny flung open the door and went out, into the storm.

Heart hammering, gasping in shock when the bitterly cold wind hit her, Penny scrambled out of the car, slipped on the snowy pavement, almost fell, windmilled her arms, and somehow kept her balance. She expected a goblin to rush out from beneath the car, expected to feel teeth sinking through one of her boots and into her ankle, but nothing like that happened. The streetlamps, shrouded and dimmed by the storm, cast an eerie light like that in a nightmare. Penny's distorted shadow preceded her as she clambered up the ridge of snow that had been formed by passing plows. She struggled all the way to the top, panting, using her hands and knees and feet, getting snow in her face and under her gloves and inside her boots, and then she jumped down to the sidewalk, which was buried under a smooth blanket of virgin snow, and she headed toward the cathedral, never looking back, never, afraid of what she might see behind her, pursued (at least in her imagination) by all the monsters she had seen in the foyer of that brownstone apartment house earlier tonight. The cathedral steps were hidden under deep snow, but Penny grabbed the brass handrail and used it as a guide, stomped all the way up the steps, suddenly wondering if the doors would be unlocked at this late hour. Wasn't a cathedral always open? If it was locked now, they were dead. She went to the center-most portal, gripped the handle, pulled, thought for a moment that it was locked, then realized it was just a very heavy door, seized the handle with both hands, pulled harder than before, opened the door, held it wide, turned, and finally looked back the way she'd come.

Davey was two-thirds of the way up the steps, his breath puffing out of him in jets of frost-white steam. He looked so small and fragile. But he was going to make it.

Rebecca came down off the ridge of snow at the curb, onto the sidewalk, stumbled, fell to her knees.

Behind her, two goblins reached the top of the piledup snow.

Penny screamed. “They're coming! Hurry!”

When Rebecca fell to her knees, she heard Penny scream, and she got up at once, but she took only one step before the two goblins dashed past her, Jesus, as fast as the wind, a lizard-thing and a cat-thing, both of them screeching. They didn't attack her, didn't nip at her or hiss, didn't even pause. They weren't interested in her at all; they just wanted the kids.

Davey was at the cathedral door now, standing with Penny, and both of them were shouting at Rebecca.

The goblins reached the steps and climbed half of them in what seemed like a fraction of a second, but then they abruptly slowed down, as if they had realized they were rushing toward a holy place, although that realization didn't stop them altogether. They crept slowly and cautiously from step to step, sinking half out of sight m the