When the girl finished, Rebecca looked at Jack and said, "He's been keeping a watch on them. So he'd always know exactly where to find them when the time came."

To Penny, Jack said, "My G.o.d, baby, why didn't you wake me last night when the thing was in your room?"

"I didn't really see it-"

"But you heard it."

"That's all."

"And the baseball bat-"

"Anyway," Penny said with a sudden odd shyness, unable to meet his eyes, "I was afraid you'd think I'd gone* crazy* again."

"Huh? Again?" Jack blinked at her. "What on earth do you mean-again?"

"Well* you know* like after Mama died, the way I was then* when I had my* trouble."

"But you weren't crazy," Jack said. "You just needed a little counseling; that's all, honey."

"That's what you called him," the girl said, barely audible. "A counselor."

"Yeah. Dr. Hannaby."

"Aunt Faye, Uncle Keith, everyone called him a counselor. Or sometimes a doctor."

"That's what he was. He was there to counsel you, to show you how to deal with your grief over your mom's death."

The girl shook her head: no. "One day, when I was in his office, waiting for him* and he didn't come in to start the session right away* I started to read the college degrees on his wall."

"And?"

With evident embarra.s.sment, Penny said, "I found out he was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists treat crazy people. That's when I knew I was a little bit* crazy."

Surprised and dismayed that such a misconception could have gone uncorrected for so long, Jack said, "No, no, no. Sweetheart, you've got it all wrong."

Rebecca said, "Penny, for the most part, psychiatrists treat ordinary people with ordinary problems. Problems that we all have at one time or another in our lives. Emotional problems, mostly. That's what yours were. Emotional Emotional problems." problems."

Penny looked at her shyly. She frowned. Clearly, she wanted to believe.

"They treat some mental problems, too, of course," Rebecca said. "But in their offices, among their regular patients, they hardly ever see anyone who's really, really insane. Truly crazy people are hospitalized or kept in inst.i.tutions."

"Sure," Jack said. He reached for Penny's hands, held them. They were small, delicate hands. The fragility of her hands, the vulnerability of an eleven-year-old who liked to think of herself as grown-up-it made his heart ache. "Honey, you were never crazy. Never even close to crazy. What a terrible thing to've been worrying about all this time."

The girl looked from Jack to Rebecca to Jack again. "You really mean it? You really mean lots of ordinary, everyday people go to psychiatrists?"

"Absolutely," he said. "Honey, life threw you a pretty bad curve, what with your mom dying so young, and I was so broken up myself that I wasn't much good at helping you handle it. I guess* I should have made an extra-special effort. But I was feeling so bad, so lost, so helpless, so darned sorry for myself that I just wasn't able to 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 you started crying about your mom. Understand?" 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 wrist.w.a.tch.

Ten-twenty-four.

Ten minutes had elapsed since they had come into the brownstone and had taken shelter in the s.p.a.ce 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 bra.s.s k.n.o.b of the foyer door- and froze.

They were here. The goblins.

One of them was clinging to the gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.k'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 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away from the bra.s.s doork.n.o.b. 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 h.e.l.lborn 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 gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.ked 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; cl.u.s.ters 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 gla.s.s 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 fed on darkness. 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 a.s.sumed they were Lavelle's h.e.l.lish emissaries, bent on the brutal destruction of the Carramazza family, for to the best of his knowledge there was no other Bocor Bocor in New York who could have summoned such creatures from the Underworld. 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 h.e.l.l. Just a crack. The latch had barely been slipped. And through the applicator of his formidable powers as a Bocor Bocor, Lavelle was holding the Gates against the crush of demonic ent.i.ties that sought to push forth from the other side. Carver could sense all of those things in the currents of the ether, in the invisible and soundless tides of benign and malevolent energies that ebbed and flowed over the great metropolis.

Opening the Gates was a wildly dangerous step to have taken. Few Bocors Bocors were even capable of doing it. And of those few, fewer still would have dared such a thing. Because Lavelle evidently was one of the most powerful were even capable of doing it. And of those few, fewer still would have dared such a thing. Because Lavelle evidently was one of the most powerful Bocors Bocors who had ever drawn a who had ever drawn a vv vv, there was good reason to believe that he would be able to maintain control of the Gates and that, in time, when the Carramazzas were disposed of, he would be able to cast back the creatures that he had permitted out of h.e.l.l. But if he lost control for even a moment*

Then G.o.d help us, Carver thought.

If He will will help us. help us.

If He can can help us. help us.

A hurricane-force gust of wind slammed into the building and whined through the eaves.

The window rattled in front of Carver, as if something more than the wind was out there and wanted to get in at him.

A whirling ma.s.s of snow pressed to the gla.s.s. Incredibly, those hundreds upon hundreds of quivering, suspended flakes seemed to form a leering face that glared at Hampton. Although the wind huffed and hammered and whirled and shifted directions and then shifted back again, that impossible face did not dissolve and drift away on the changing air currents; it hung there, just beyond the pane, unmoving, as if it were painted on canvas.

Carver lowered his eyes.

In time the wind subsided a bit.

When the howling of it had quieted to a moan, he looked up once more. The snow-formed face was gone.

He sipped his Scotch. The whiskey didn't warm him. Nothing could warm him this night.

Guilt was one reason he wished he could get drunk. He was eaten by guilt because he had refused to give Lieutenant Dawson any more help. That had been wrong. The situation was too dire for him to think only about himself. The Gates were open, after all. The world stood at the brink of Armageddon-all because one Bocor Bocor, driven by ego and pride and an unslakeable thirst for blood, was willing to take any risk, no matter how foolish, to settle a personal grudge. At a time like this, a Houngon Houngon had certain responsibilities. Now was an hour for courage. Guilt gnawed at him because he kept remembering the midnight-black serpent that Lavelle had sent, and with that memory tormenting him, he couldn't find the courage he required for the task that called. had certain responsibilities. Now was an hour for courage. Guilt gnawed at him because he kept remembering the midnight-black serpent that Lavelle had sent, and with that memory tormenting him, he couldn't find the courage he required for the task that called.

Even if he dared get drunk, he would still have to carry that burden of guilt. It was far too heavy-immense-to be lifted by booze alone.

Therefore, he was now drinking in hope of finding courage. It was a peculiarity of whiskey that, in moderation, it could sometimes make heroes of the very same men of whom it had made buffoons on other occasions.

He must find the courage to call Detective Dawson and say, I want to help I want to help.

More likely than not, Lavelle would destroy him for becoming involved. And whatever death Lavelle chose to administer, it would not be an easy one.

He sipped his Scotch.

He looked across the room at the wall phone.

Call Dawson, he told himself.

He didn't move.