Darkfall

Another shot.

Then silence.

Jack leaned out into the archway again and pulled off three shots in rapid succession, aiming at where Lavelle had been, but Lavelle was already on his way upstairs, and all three shots missed him, and then he was out of sight.

Pausing to reload his revolver with the loose bullets he carried in one coat pocket, Jack glanced at Carver and said, “Can you make it out to the car on your own?”

“No. Can't walk with this leg. But I'll be all right here. He only winged me. You just go get him.”

“We should call an ambulance for you.”

“Just get him!” Carver said.

Jack nodded, stepped through the archway, and went cautiously to the foot of the stairs.

IX

Penny, Davey, Rebecca, and Father Walotsky took refuge in the chancel, behind the altar railing. In fact, they climbed up onto the altar platform, directly beneath the crucifix.

The goblins stopped on the other side of the railing. Some of them peered between the ornate supporting posts. Others climbed onto the communion rail itself, perched there, eyes flickering hungrily, black tongues licking slowly back and forth across their sharp teeth.

There were fifty or sixty of them now, and more were still coming out of the vestibule, far back at the end of the main aisle.

“They w-won't come up here, wow-will they?” Penny asked. “Not this c-close to the crucifix. Will they?”

Rebecca hugged the girl and Davey, held them tight and dose. She said, “You can see they've stopped. It's all right. It's all right now. They're afraid of the altar.

They've stopped.”

But for how long? she wondered.

X

Jack climbed the stairs with his back flat against the wall, moving sideways, trying to be utterly silent, nearly succeeding. He held his revolver in his left hand, with his arm rigidly extended, aiming at the top of the steps, his aim never wavering as he ascended, so he'd be ready to pull the trigger the instant Lavelle appeared. He reached the landing without being shot at, climbed three steps of the second flight, and then Lavelle leaned out around the corner above, and both of them fired — Lavelle twice, Jack once.

Lavelle pulled the trigger without pausing to take aim, without even knowing exactly where Jack was. He just took a chance that two rounds, placed down the center of the stairwell, would do the job. Both missed.

On the other hand, Jack's gun was aimed along the wall, and Lavelle leaned right into its line of fire. The slug smashed into his arm at the same moment he finished pulling the trigger of his own gun. He screamed, and the pistol flew out of his hand, and he stumbled back into the upstairs hall where he'd been hiding.

Jack took the stairs two at a time, jumping over Lavelle's pistol as it came tumbling down. He reached the second-floor hallway in time to see Lavelle enter a room and slam the door behind him.

Downstairs, Carver lay on the dust-filmed floor, eyes closed. He was too weary to keep his eyes open. He was growing wearier by the second.

He didn't feel like he was lying on a hard floor. He felt as if he were floating in a warm pool of water, somewhere in the tropics. He remembered being shot, remembered falling; he knew the floor really was there, under him, but he just couldn't feel it.

He figured he was bleeding to death. The wound didn't seem that bad, but maybe it was worse than he thought. Or maybe it was just shock that made him feel this way. Yeah, that must be it, shock, just shock, not bleeding to death after all, just suffering from shock, but of course shock could kill, too.

Whatever the reasons, he floated, oblivious of his own pain, just bobbing up and down, drifting there on the hard floor that wasn't hard at all, drifting on some far-away tropical tide… until, from upstairs, there was the sound of gunfire and a shrill scream that snapped his eyes open. He had an out-of-focus, floor-level view of the empty room. He blinked his eyes rapidly and squinted until his clouded visions cleared, and then — he wished it hadn't cleared because he saw that he was no longer alone.

One of the denizens of the pit was with him, its eyes aglow.

Upstairs, Jack tried the door that Lavelle had slammed. It was locked, but the lock probably didn't amount to much, just a privacy set, flimsy as they could be made, because people didn't want to put heavy and expensive locks inside a house.

“Lavelle?” he shouted.

No answer.

“Open up. No use trying to hide in there.”

From inside the room came the sound of a shattering wmdow.

“Shit,” Jack said.

He stepped back and kicked at the door, but there was more to the lock than he'd expected, and he had to kick it four times, as hard as he could, before he finally smashed it open.

He switched on the light. An ordinary bedroom. No sign of Lavelle.

The window in the opposite wall was broken out. Drapes billowed on the in-rushing wind.

Jack checked the closet first, just to be sure this wasn't a bit of misdirection to enable Lavelle to get behind his back. But no one waited in the closet.

He went to the window. In the light that spilled past him, he saw footprints in the snow that covered the porch roof. They led out to the edge. Lavelle had jumped down to the yard below.

Jack squeezed through the window, briefly snagging his coat on a shard of glass, and went onto the roof.

In the cathedral, approximately seventy or eighty goblins had come out of the vestibule. They were lined up on the communion rail and between the supporting posts under the rail. Behind them, other beasts slouched up the long aisle.

Father Walotsky was on his knees, praying, but he didn't seem to be doing any good, so far as Rebecca could see.

In fact, there were some bad signs. The goblins weren't as sluggish as they had been. Tails lashed. Mutant heads whipped back and forth. Tongues flickered faster than before.

Rebecca wondered if they could, through sheer numbers, overcome the benign power that held sway within the cathedral and that had, so far, prevented them from attacking. As each of the demonic creatures entered, it brought its own measure of malignant energy. If the balance of power tipped in the other direction…

One of the goblins hissed. They had been perfectly silent since entering the cathedral, but now one of them hissed, and then another, and then three more, and in seconds all of them were hissing angrily.

Another bad sign.

Carver Hampton.

When he saw the demonic entity in the hallway, the floor suddenly seemed a bit more solid to him. His heart began to pound, and the real world came swimming back to him out of the tropical hallucination — although this part of the real world contained, at this time, something from a nightmare.

The thing in the hall skittered toward the open arch and the living room. From Carver's perspective, it looked enormous, at least his own size, but he realized it wasn't really as large as it seemed from his peculiar floor- level point of view. But big enough. Oh, yes. Its head was the size of his fist. Its sinuous, segmented, wormlike body was half again as long as his arm. Its crablike legs ticked against the wooden floor. The only features on its