Two-thirds of the way to Lexington Avenue, Davey stumbled and fell and simply couldn’t find the energy to continue on his own. Jack carried him.
From the look of her, Penny was rapidly using up the last of her reserves, as well. Soon., Rebecca would have to take Davey, so Jack could then carry Penny.
And how far and how fast could they expect to travel under those circumstances? Not far. Not very damned fast. They needed to find transportation within the next few minutes.
They reached the avenue, and Jack led them to a large steel grate which was set in the pavement and from which issued clouds of steam. It was a vent from one sort of underground tunnel or another, most likely from the subway system. Jack put Davey down, and the boy was able to stand on his own feet. But it was obvious that he would still have to be carried when they started out again. He looked terrible; his small face was drawn, pinched, and very pale except for enormous dark circles around his eyes. Rebecca’s heart went out to him, and she wished there was something she could do to make him feel better, but she didn’t feel so terrific herself.
The night was too cold and the heated air rising out of the street wasn’t heated enough to warm Rebecca as she stood at the edge of the grate and allowed the wind to blow the foul-smelling steam in her face; however, there was an illusion of warmth, if not the real thing, and at the moment the mere illusion was sufficiently spirit-lifting to forestall everyone’s complaints.
To Penny, Rebecca said, “How’re you doing, honey?”
“I’m okay,” the girl said, although she looked haggard. “I’m just worried about Davey.”
Rebecca was amazed by the girl’s resilience and spunk.
Jack said, “We’ve got to get a car. I’ll only feel safe when we’re in a car, rolling, moving; they can’t get at us when we’re moving.”
“And it’ll b-b-be warm in a c-car,” Davey said.
But the only cars on the street were those that were parked at the curb, unreachable beyond a wall of snow thrown up by the plows and not yet hauled away. If any cars had been abandoned in the middle of the avenue, they had already been towed away by the snow emergency crews.
None of those workmen were in sight now. No plows, either.
“Even if we could find a car along here that wasn’t plowed in,” Rebecca said, “it isn’t likely there’d be keys in it—or snow chains on the tires.”
“I wasn’t thinking of these cars,” Jack said. “But if we can find a pay phone, put in a call to headquarters, we could have them send out a department car for us.”
“Isn’t that a phone over there?” Penny asked, pointing across the broad avenue.
“Snow’s so thick, I can’t be sure,” Jack said, squinting at the object that had drawn Penny’s attention. “It might be a phone.”
“Let’s go have a look,” Rebecca said.
Even as she spoke, a small but sharply clawed hand came out of the grating, from the space between two of the steel bars.
Davey saw it first, cried out, stumbled back, away from the rising steam.
A goblin’s hand.
And another one, scrabbling at the toe of Rebecca’s boot. She stomped on it, saw shining silver-white eyes in the darkness under the grate, and jumped back.
A third hand appeared, and a fourth, and Penny and Jack got out of the way, and suddenly the entire steel grating rattled in its circular niche, tilted up at one end, slammed back into place, but immediately tilted up again, a little farther than an inch this time, but fell back, rattled, bounced. The horde below was trying to push out of the tunnel.
Although the grating was large and immensely heavy, Rebecca was sure the creatures below would dislodge it and come boiling out of the darkness and steam. Jack must have been equally convinced, for he snatched up Davey and ran. Rebecca grabbed Penny’s hand, and they followed Jack, fleeing down the blizzard-pounded avenue, not moving as fast as they should, not moving very fast at all. None of them dared to look back.
Ahead, on the far side of the divided thoroughfare, a Jeep station wagon turned the corner, tires churning effortlessly through the snow. It bore the insignia of the city department of streets.
Jack and Rebecca and the kids were headed downtown, but the Jeep was headed uptown. Jack angled across the avenue, toward the center divider and the other lanes beyond it, trying to get in front of the Jeep and cut it off before it was past them.
Rebecca and Penny followed.
If the driver of the Jeep saw them, he didn’t give any indication of it. He didn’t slow down.
Rebecca was waving frantically as she ran, and Penny was shouting, and Rebecca started shouting, too, and so did Jack, all of them shouting their fool heads off because the Jeep was their only hope of escape.
7
At the table in the brightly lighted kitchen above
Rada,
Carver Hampton played a few hands of solitaire. He hoped the game would take his mind off the evil that was loose in the winter night, and he hoped it would help him overcome his feelings of guilt and shame, which plagued him because he hadn’t done anything to stop that evil from having its way in the world. But the cards couldn’t distract him. He kept looking out the window beside the table, sensing something unspeakable out there in the dark. His guilt grew stronger instead of weaker; it chewed on his conscience.
He was a
Houngon.
He had certain responsibilities.
He could not condone such monstrous evil as this.
Damn.
He tried watching television. Quincy. Jack Klugman was shouting at his stupid superiors, crusading for Justice, exhibiting a sense of social compassion greater than Mother Teresa’s, and otherwise comporting himself more like Superman than like a real medical examiner. On Dynasty, a bunch of rich people were carrying on in the most licentious, vicious, Machiavellian manner, and Carver asked himself the same question he always asked himself when he was unfortunate enough to catch a few minutes of
Dynasty
or
Dallas
or one of their clones: If
real
rich people in the
real
world were this obsessed with sex, revenge, back-stabbing, and petty jealousies, how could any of them ever have had the time and intelligence to make any money in the first place? He switched off the TV.
He was a
Houngon.
He had certain responsibilities.
He chose a book from the living room shelf, the new Elmore Leonard novel, and although he was a big fan of Leonard’s, and although no one wrote stories that moved faster than Leonard’s stories, he couldn’t concentrate on this one. He read two pages, couldn’t remember a thing he’d read, and returned the book to the shelf.
He was a
Houngon.
He returned to the kitchen, went to the telephone. He hesitated with his hand on it.
He glanced at the window. He shuddered because the vast night itself seemed to be demonically alive.
He picked up the phone. He listened to the dial tone for a while.
Detective Dawson’s office and home numbers were on a piece of notepaper beside the telephone. He stared at the home number for a while. Then, at last, he dialed it.
It rang several times, and he was about to give up, when the receiver was lifted at the other end. But no one spoke.
He waited a couple of seconds, then said, “Hello?”
No answer.
“Is someone there?”
No response.
At first he thought he hadn’t actually reached the Dawson number, that there was a problem with the connection, that he was listening to dead air. But as he was about to hang up, a new and frightening perception seized him. He sensed an evil presence at the other end, a supremely malevolent entity whose malignant energy poured back across the telephone line.
He broke out in a sweat. He felt soiled. His heart raced. His stomach turned sour, sick.
He slammed the phone down. He wiped his damp hands on his pants. They still felt unclean, merely from holding the telephone that had temporarily connected him with the beast in the Dawson apartment. He went to the sink and washed his hands thoroughly.
The thing at the Dawsons’ place was surely one of the entities that Lavelle had summoned to do his dirty work for him. But what was it doing there? What did this mean? Was Lavelle crazy enough to turn loose the powers of darkness not only on the Carramazzas but on the police who were investigating those murders?
If anything happens to Lieutenant Dawson, Hampton thought, I’m responsible because I refused to help him.
Using a paper towel to blot the cold sweat from his face and neck, he considered his options and tried to decide what he should do next.
8
There were only two men in the street department’s Jeep station wagon, which left plenty of room for Penny, Davey, Rebecca, and Jack.
The driver was a merry-looking, ruddy-faced man with a squashed nose and big ears; he said his name was Burt. He looked closely at Jack’s police ID and, satisfied that it was genuine, was happy to put himself at their disposal, swing the Jeep around, and run them back to headquarters, where they could get another car.
The interior of the Jeep was wonderfully warm and dry.
Jack was relieved when the doors were all safely shut and the Jeep began to pull out.
But just as they were making a U-turn in the middle of the deserted avenue, Burt’s partner, a freckle-faced young man named Leo, saw something moving through the snow, coming toward them from across the street. He said, “Hey, Burt, hold on a sec. Isn’t that a cat out there?”
“So what if it is?” Burt asked.
“He shouldn’t be out in weather like this.”
“Cats go where they want,” Burt said. “You’re the cat fancier; you should know how independent they are.”
“But it’ll freeze to death out there,” Leo said.
As the Jeep completed the turn, and as Burt slowed down a bit to consider Leo’s statement, Jack squinted through the side window at the dark shape loping across the snow; it moved with feline grace. Farther back in the storm, beyond several veils of falling snow, there might have been other things coming this way; perhaps it was even the entire nightmare pack moving in for the kill, but it was hard to tell for sure. However, the first of the goblins, the catlike thing that had caught Leo’s eye, was undeniably out there, only thirty or forty feet away and closing fast.
“Stop just a sec,” Leo said. “Let me get out and scoop up the poor little fella.”
“No!” Jack said. “Get the hell out of here. That’s no damned cat out there.”
Startled, Burt looked over his shoulder at Jack.
Penny began to shout the same thing again and again, and Davey took up her chant: “Don’t let them in, don’t let them in here, don’t let them in!”
Face pressed to the window in his door, Leo said, “Jesus, you’re right. It isn’t any cat.”
“Move!” Jack shouted.
The thing leaped and struck the side window in front of Leo’s face. The glass cracked but held.
Leo yelped, jumped, scooted backwards across the front seat, crowding Burt.
Burt tramped down on the accelerator, and the tires spun for a moment.
The hideous cat-thing clung to the cracked glass.
Penny and Davey were screaming. Rebecca tried to shield them from the sight of the goblin.
It probed at them with eyes of fire.
Jack could almost feel the heat of that inhuman gaze. He wanted to empty his revolver at the thing, put half a dozen slugs into it, though he knew he couldn’t kill it.
The tires stopped spinning, and the Jeep took off with a lurch and a shudder.
Burt held the steering wheel with one hand and used the other hand to try to push Leo out of the way, but Leo wasn’t going to move even an inch closer to the fractured window where the cat-thing had attached itself.
The goblin licked the glass with its black tongue.
The Jeep careened toward the divider in the center of the avenue, and it started to slide.
Jack said, “Damnit, don’t lose control!”
“I can’t steer with him on my lap,” Burt said.
He rammed an elbow into Leo’s side, hard enough to accomplish what all the pushing and shoving and shouting hadn’t managed to do; Leo moved—although not much.
The cat-thing grinned at them. Double rows of sharp and pointed teeth gleamed.
Burt stopped the sliding Jeep just before it would have hit the center divider. In control again, he accelerated.
The engine roared.
Snow flew up around them.
Leo was making odd gibbering sounds, and the kids were crying, and for some reason Burt began blowing the horn, as if he thought the sound would frighten the thing and make it let go.
Jack’s eyes met Rebecca’s. He wondered if his own gaze was as bleak as hers.
Finally, the goblin lost its grip, fell off, tumbled away into the snowy street.
Leo said, “Thank God,” and collapsed back into his own corner of the front seat.
Jack turned and looked out the rear window. Other dark beasts were coming out of the whiteness of the storm. They loped after the Jeep, but they couldn’t keep up with it. They quickly dwindled.
Disappeared.
But they were still out there. Somewhere.
Everywhere.
9
The shed.
The hot, dry air.
The stench of Hell.
Again, the orange light abruptly grew brighter than it had been, not a lot brighter, just a little, and at the same time the air became slightly hotter, and the noises coming out of the pit grew somewhat louder and angrier, although they were still more of a whisper than a shout.
Again, around the perimeter of the hole, the earth loosened of its own accord, dropped away from the rim, tumbled to the bottom and vanished in the pulsing orange glow. The diameter had increased by more than two inches before the earth became stable once more.