Aunt Faye was at the other end of the kitchen from the table where Penny sat. She had begun to prepare dinner, which was scheduled for seven-thirty: lemon chicken, rice, and stir-fried vegetables. The kitchen was the only place Aunt Faye was not too much like Aunt Faye. She enjoyed cooking, was very good at it, and seemed like a different person when she was in the kitchen; more relaxed, kinder than usual.
Davey was helping her prepare dinner. At least she was allowing him to think he was helping. As they worked they talked, not about anything important, this and that.
“Gosh, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse!” Davey said.
“That’s not a polite thing to say,” Faye advised him. “It brings to mind an unpleasant image. You should simply say, ‘I’m extremely hungry,’ or ‘I’m starved,’ or something like that.”
“Well, naturally, I meant a
dead
horse,” Davey said, completely misunderstanding Faye’s little lesson in etiquette. “And one that’s been cooked, too. I wouldn’t want to eat any
raw
horse, Aunt Faye. Yuch and double yuch. But, man-oh-man, I sure could eat a whole lot of just about anything you gimme right now.”
“My heavens, young man, you had cookies and milk when we got here this afternoon.”
“Only two cookies.”
“And you’re famished already? You don’t have a stomach; what you have is a bottomless pit!”
“Well, I hardly had any lunch,” Davey said. “Mrs. Shepherd—she’s my teacher—she shared some of her lunch with me, but it was really dumb-awful stuff. All she had was yogurt and tuna fish, and I
hate
both of ’em. So what I did, after she gave me a little of each, I nibbled at it, just to make her feel good, and then when she wasn’t looking, I threw most of it away.”
“But doesn’t your father pack a lunch for you?” Faye asked, her voice suddenly sharper than it had been.
“Oh, sure. Or when he doesn’t have time, Penny packs it. But—”
Faye turned to Penny. “Did he have a lunch to take to school today? Surely he doesn’t have to beg for food!”
Penny looked up from her magazine. “I made his lunch myself, this morning. He had an apple, a ham sandwich, and two big oatmeal cookies.”
“That sounds like a fine lunch to me,” Faye said. “Why didn’t you eat it, Davey?”
“Well, because of the rats, of course,” he said.
Penny twitched in surprise, sat up straight in her chair, and stared intently at Davey.
Faye said, “Rats? What rats?”
“Holy-moly, I forgot to tell you!” Davey said. “Rats must’ve got in my lunchbox during morning classes. Big old ugly rats with yellow teeth, come right up out of the sewers or somewhere. The food was all messed up, torn to pieces, and chewed on.
Grooooooooss,”
he said, drawing the word out with evident pleasure, not disgusted by the fact that rats had been at his lunch, actually excited about it, thrilled by it, as only a young boy could be. At his age, an incident like this was a real adventure.
Penny’s mouth had gone as dry as ashes. “Davey? Uh ... did you see the rats?”
“Nah,” he said, clearly disappointed. “They were gone by the time I went to get my lunchbox.”
“Where’d you have your lunchbox?” Penny asked.
“In my locker.”
“Did the rats chew on anything else in your locker?”
“Like what?”
“Like books or anything.”
“Why would they want to chew on books?”
“Then it was just the food?”
“Sure. What else?”
“Did you have your locker door shut?”
“I thought I did,” he said.
“Didn’t you have it locked, too?”
“I thought I did.”
“And wasn’t your lunchbox shut tight?”
“It
should
have been,” he said, scratching his head, trying to remember.
Faye said, “Well, obviously, it wasn’t. Rats can’t open a lock, open a door, and pry the lid off a lunchbox. You must have been very careless, Davey. I’m surprised at you. I’ll bet you ate one of those oatmeal cookies first thing when you got to school, just couldn’t wait, and then forgot to put the lid back on the box.”
“But I didn’t,” Davey protested.
“Your father’s not teaching you to pick up after yourself,” Faye said. “That’s the kind of thing a mother teaches, and your father’s just neglecting it.”
Penny was going to tell them about how her own locker had been trashed when she’d gone to school this morning. She was even going to tell them about the things in the basement because it seemed to her that what had happened to Davey’s lunch would somehow substantiate her story.
But before Penny could speak, Aunt Faye spoke up in her most morally indignant tone of voice: “What
I
want to know is what kind of school this is your father’s sent you to. What kind of dirty hole is this place, this Wellton?”
“It’s a good school,” Penny said defensively.
“With
rats?”
Faye said. “No good school would have rats. No halfway decent school would have rats. Why, what if they’d still been in the locker when Davey went for his lunch? He might’ve been bitten. Rats are filthy. They carry all kinds of diseases. They’re disgusting. I simply can’t image any school for young children being allowed to remain open if it has rats. The Board of Health has got to be told about this first thing tomorrow. Your father’s going to have to do something about the situation immediately. I won’t allow him to procrastinate. Not where your health is concerned. Why, your poor dear mother would be appalled by such a place, a school with rats in the wall. Rats! My God, rats carry everything from rabies to the plague!”
Faye droned on and on.
Penny tuned her out.
There wasn’t any point in telling them about her own locker and the silver-eyed things in the school basement. Faye would insist they had been rats, too. When that woman got something in her head, there was no way of getting it out again, no way of changing her mind. Now, Faye was looking forward to confronting their father about the rats; she relished the thought of blaming him for putting them in a rat-infested school, and she wouldn’t be the least receptive to anything Penny said, to any explanation or any conflicting facts that might put rats completely out of the picture and thereby spare their father from a scolding.
Even if I tell her about the hand, Penny thought, the little hand that came under the green gate, she’ll stick to the idea that it’s rats. She’ll say I was scared and made a mistake about what I saw. She’ll say it wasn’t really a hand at all, but a rat, a slimy old rat biting at my boot. She’ll turn it all around. She’ll make it support the story she wants to believe, and it’ll just be more ammunition for her to use against Daddy. Damnit, Aunt Faye, why’re you so stubborn?
Faye was chattering about the need for a parent to thoroughly investigate a school before sending children to it.
Penny wondered when her father would come to get them, and she prayed he wouldn’t be too late. She wanted him to come before bedtime. She didn’t want to be alone, just her and Davey, in a dark room, even if it was Aunt Faye’s guest room, blocks and blocks away from their own apartment. She was pretty sure the goblins would find them, even here. She had decided to take her father aside and tell him everything. He wouldn’t want to believe in goblins, at first. But now there was Davey’s lunchbox to consider. And if she went back to their apartment with her father and showed him the holes in Davey’s plastic baseball bat, she might be able to convince him. Daddy was a grown-up, like Aunt Faye, sure, but he wasn’t stubborn, and he
listened
to kids in a way that few grown-ups did.
Faye said, “With all the money he got from your mother’s insurance and from the settlement the hospital made, he could afford to send you to a top-of-the-line school. Absolutely top-of-the-line. I can’t imagine why he settled on this Wellton joint.”
Penny bit her lip, said nothing.
She stared down at the magazine. The pictures and words swam in and out of focus.
The worst thing was that now she knew, beyond a doubt, that the goblins weren’t just after her. They wanted Davey, too.
3
Rebecca had not waited for Jack, though he had asked her to. While he’d been with Captain Gresham, working out the details of the protection that would be provided for Penny and Davey, Rebecca had apparently put on her coat and gone home.
When Jack found that she had gone, he sighed and said softly, “You sure aren’t easy, baby.”
On his desk were two books about voodoo, which he had checked out of the library yesterday. He stared at them for a long moment, then decided he needed to learn more about
Bocors
and
Houngons
before tomorrow morning. He put on his coat and gloves, picked up the books, tucked them under one arm, and went down to the subterranean garage, beneath the building.
Because he and Rebecca were now in charge of the emergency task force, they were entitled to perquisites beyond the reach of ordinary homicide detectives, including the full-time use of an unmarked police sedan for each of them, not just during duty hours but around the clock. The car assigned to Jack was a one-year-old, sour-green Chevrolet that bore a few dents and more than a few scratches. It was the totally stripped-down model, without options or luxuries of any kind, just a get-around car, not a racer-and-chaser. The motor pool mechanics had even put the snow chains on the tires. The heap was ready to roll.
He backed out of the parking space, drove up the ramp to the street exit. He stopped and waited while a city truck, equipped with a big snowplow and a salt spreader and lots of flashing lights, passed by in the storm-thrashed darkness.
In addition to the truck, there were only two other vehicles on the street. The storm virtually had the night to itself. Yet, when the truck was gone and the way was clear, Jack still hesitated.
He switched on the windshield wipers.
To head toward Rebecca’s apartment, he would have to turn left.
To go to the Jamisons’ place, he ought to turn right.
The wipers flogged back and forth, back and forth, left, right, left, right.
He was eager to be with Penny and Davey, eager to hug them, to see them warm and alive and smiling.
Right, left, right.
Of course, they weren’t in any real danger at the moment. Even if Lavelle was serious when he threatened them, he wouldn’t make his move this soon, and he wouldn’t know where to find them even if he did want to make his move.
Left, right, left.
They were perfectly safe with Faye and Keith. Besides, Jack had told Faye that he probably wouldn’t make it for dinner; she was already expecting him to be late.
The wipers beat time to his indecision.
Finally he took his foot off the brake, pulled into the street, and turned left.
He needed to talk to Rebecca about what had happened between them last night. She had avoided the subject all day. He couldn’t allow her to continue to dodge it. She would have to face up to the changes that last night had wrought in both their lives, major changes which he welcomed wholeheartedly but about which she seemed, at best, ambivalent.
Along the edges of the car roof, wind whistled hollowly through the metal beading, a cold and mournful sound.
Crouching in deep shadows by the garage exit, the thing watched Jack Dawson drive away in the unmarked sedan.
Its shining silver eyes did not blink even once.
Then, keeping to the shadows, it crept back into the deserted, silent garage.
It hissed. It muttered. It gobbled softly to itself in an eerie, raspy little voice.
Finding the protection of darkness and shadows wherever it wished to go—even where there didn’t seem to have been shadows only a moment before—the thing slunk from car to car, beneath and around them, until it came to a drain in the garage floor. It descended into the midnight regions below.
4
Lavelle was nervous.
Without switching on any lamps, he stalked restlessly through his house, upstairs and down, back and forth, looking for nothing, simply unable to keep still, always moving in deep darkness but never bumping into furniture or doorways, pacing as swiftly and surely as if the rooms were all brightly lighted. He wasn’t blind in darkness, never the least disoriented. Indeed, he was at home in shadows. Darkness, after all, was a part of him.
Usually, in either darkness or light, he was supremely confident and self-assured. But now, hour by hour, his self-assurance was steadily crumbling.
His nervousness had bred uneasiness. Uneasiness had given birth to fear. He was unaccustomed to fear. He didn’t know quite how to handle it. So the fear made him even more nervous.
He was worried about Jack Dawson. Perhaps it had been a grave mistake to allow Dawson time to consider his options. A man like the detective might put that time to good use.
If he senses that I’m even slightly afraid of him, Lavelle thought, and if he learns more about voodoo, then he might eventually understand why I’ve got good reason to fear him.
If Dawson discovered the nature of his own special power, and if he learned to use that power, he would find and stop Lavelle. Dawson was one of those rare individuals, that one in ten thousand, who could do battle with even the most masterful
Bocor
and be reasonably certain of victory. If the detective uncovered the secret of himself, then he would come for Lavelle, well-armored and dangerous.
Lavelle paced through the dark house.
Maybe he should strike now. Destroy the Dawson children this evening. Get it over with. Their deaths might send Dawson spiraling down into an emotional collapse. He loved his kids a great deal, and he was already a widower, already laboring under a heavy burden of grief; perhaps the slaughter of Penny and Davey would break him. If the loss of his kids didn’t snap his mind, then it would most likely plunge him into a terrible depression that would cloud his thinking and interfere with his work for many weeks. At the very least, Dawson would have to take a few days off from the investigation, in order to arrange the funerals, and those few days would give Lavelle some breathing space.