He put away his cell and turned on his flashlight.
The beam swept across the steps.
“We keep going anyway?”
“You bet we do,” Vauvert said.
They reached the fourth floor. Leroy directed his beam at the emergency light. It wasn’t on here either.
Behind them, Eva suddenly called out.
“Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?”
They froze.
“I can’t hear anything,” Leroy finally said.
“Me either,” Vauvert said.
“I swear I thought I heard a growl,” Eva said.
Leroy swung the beam of his flashlight down the stairs.
There was nothing there.
They started up the stairs again, more slowly this time.
On the fifth-floor landing, they found a book bag. The contents had spilled all over the stairs.
Vauvert bent down and picked up a plastic ID card bearing Eloise Lombard’s name.
None of the three said anything.
They had only one floor left to go, and then they would know.
As they headed up the steps, Eva checked her cell phone. It was not working.
Whatever they might find up these stairs, they’d have to deal with it all by themselves. Still, they pressed on, their guns out and ready to fire.
93
“Here we are,” Vauvert said.
He grabbed the handle of the door leading to the sixth floor.
“We’re covering you,” Leroy whispered.
Vauvert nodded. He pushed the door wide open, his gun brandished before him.
The flooring gleamed with fresh blood.
“Holy shit,” Leroy mumbled.
Vauvert scanned every dark corner. There were only two apartments on this floor. Both had their doors open.
“Be extremely careful,” he whispered, pressing his back against the wall.
With the huge inspector leading the way, they took a few hesitant steps. Their shoes made sucking sounds as they walked through the puddles.
They pointed their guns into the first apartment.
“Holy shit,” Leroy said again, this time in a stricken voice.
Two naked bodies, horribly mutilated, the flesh punctured numerous times. One was still hanging upside down on the sofa. The other one lay broken on the floor in a river of blood. Bloody footprints led directly from the corpses to the door.
“We came too late,” Vauvert said. “She took their faces. Do you think the Lombard girl is one of them?”
“I don’t think so. They look like they were just young teenagers. Eloise is older than these poor kids.”
They turned to the second door, which also was open. They could hear a loud rumbling, as though the thunder was right in the building.
“Over there,” Vauvert said.
“That’s the Lombards’ apartment,” Leroy said. “You hear that? A window must be open…”
Leroy got into position on the right side of the door. Eva did the same on the left. They held their guns at arm’s length as Vauvert, crouching, carefully stepped inside the Lombards’ living room.
There were no corpses, but the furniture had been thrown all over the room. Vases had been hurled to the floor, and the bookcases had been swept empty of their contents. Smashed chairs lay in pieces in a corner. On the far side of the living room, the sliding door to the balcony had been shattered. Shards of glass were strewn all over the place. Rain was furiously pelting the linoleum floor, and the long drapes were flapping in the wind.
Vauvert crossed the wasteland and stepped onto the balcony to make sure no one was there. It was deserted. A bolt of lightning momentarily illuminated the glistening zinc, tiles and chimneys on the roofs all around him. Then he hurried back inside.
“All clear,” he told his colleagues.
Leroy, his back pressed against the entrance wall, scanned the small kitchen, its floor littered with smashed dishes.
“All clear here, too.”
“There’s blood on the floor,” Eva pointed out.
She crouched to inspect the red puddle that was almost unnoticeable in the bluish and ever-changing light of the storm. Deep inside, her stomach protested, and a familiar feeling ran down her spine. In spite of her exhaustion and the morphine they had given her at the hospital, Eva’s reflexes were still spot-on. She concentrated on breathing slowly as her senses blurred and changed, becoming those of someone else-those of the victim trapped in this apartment and fleeing a terrible, impossible tormentor.
“Those aren’t Eloise’s footprints. It was Saint-Clair walking barefoot. The girl, she was trying to hide.”
She looked down the apartment’s hallway, which was plunged in thick darkness. Leroy headed that way, toward one of the bedrooms, while Vauvert covered him.
“Can’t see shit.”
“Be careful.”
Leroy pushed the door open with his foot. A fetid stench greeted them.
But no monster lunged out.
The room looked as deserted as the rest of the apartment.
“God, what is that smell?” Eva said, covering her mouth and nose.
“I have no idea,” Leroy answered.
In the blue glow coming through the window, they could see bedsheets in disarray. The night stand had been toppled, and pieces of a broken lamp were all over the floor.
“Looks like animals rolled around in the bed,” Leroy said.
“That’s what happened,” Vauvert said.
Without moving any closer, he pointed to the black globs all over the sheets.
“I’ve seen that before. It’s shit. That’s what stinks so bad.”
“But where are the animals that did it?”
“I have no fucking clue,” Vauvert answered.
They opened the other doors, took a look inside a second bedroom, the laundry room, and the bathroom and found nothing. The apartment was deserted.
“I can’t believe this!” Vauvert fumed. “They couldn’t have vanished just like that.”
Eva was still in the living room, her stomach burning with terror. It was the same terror that Eloise Lombard had experienced. It was palpable in this room. The inspector slowly felt her way through the living room debris, recreating the girl’s flight.
She momentarily steadied herself against a wall.
The world was swaying.
In front of her, the full-length mirror was split in two. She called out to her colleagues.
“That’s how the beasts from hell got in.”
“What?”
Eva pointed at the broken mirror.
“They go through mirrors. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s a form of very old magic. In ancient times,
