Night wind pressed at the window.
Far off, across the city, an ambulance or police siren made a mournful song.
For a while, Penny sat up in bed, leaning against the pillows, the reading lamp casting a protective circle of light around her. She was sleepy, and she wanted to sleep, but she was afraid to turn out the light. Her fear made her angry. Wasn't she almost twelve years old? And wasn't twelve too old to fear the dark? Wasn't she the woman of the house now, and hadn't she been the woman of the house for more than a year and a half, ever since her mother had died? After about ten minutes, she managed to shame herself into switching off the lamp and lying down.
She couldn't switch her mind off as easily.
What had it been?
Nothing. A remnant of a dream. Or a vagrant draft. Just that and nothing more.
Darkness.
She listened.
Silence.
She waited.
Nothing.
She slept.
II
Wednesday, 1:34 A.M
Vince Vastagliano was halfway down the stairs when he heard a shout, then a hoarse scream. It wasn't shrill. It wasn't a piercing scream. It was a startled, guttural cry that he might not even have heard if he'd been upstairs; nevertheless, it managed to convey stark terror. Vince paused with one hand on the stair railing, standing very still, head cocked, listening intently, heart suddenly hammering, momentarily frozen by indecision.
Another scream.
Ross Morrant, Vince's bodyguard, was in the kitchen, making a late-night snack for both of them, and it was Morrant who had screamed. No mistaking the voice.
There were sounds of struggle, too. A crash and clatter as something was knocked over. A hard thump. The brittle, unmelodic music of breaking glass.
Ross Morrant's breathless, fear-twisted voice echoed along the downstairs hallway from the kitchen, and between grunts and gasps and unnerving squeals of pain, there were words: “No… no… please… Jesus, no… help… someone help me… oh, my God, my God, please… no!”
Sweat broke out on Vince's face.
Morrant was a big, strong, mean son of a bitch. As a kid he'd been an ardent street fighter. By the time he was eighteen, he was taking contracts, doing murder for hire, having fun and being paid for it. Over the years he gained a reputation for taking any job, regardless of how dangerous or difficult it was, regardless of how well-protected the target was, and he always got his man. For the past fourteen months, he had been working for Vince as an enforcer, collector, and bodyguard; during that time, Vince had never seen him scared. He couldn't imagine Morrant being frightened of anyone or anything. And Morrant begging for mercy… well, that was simply inconceivable; even now, hearing the bodyguard whimper and plead, Vince still couldn't conceive of it; it just didn't seem real.
Something screeched. Not Morrant. It was an ungodly, inhuman sound. It was a sharp, penetrating eruption of rage and hatred and alien need that belonged in a science fiction movie, the hideous cry of some creature from another world.
Until this moment, Vince had assumed that Morrant was being beaten and tortured by other people, competitors in the drug business, who had come to waste Vince himself in order to increase their market share. But now, as he listened to the bizarre, ululating wall that came from the kitchen, Vince wondered if he had just stepped into the Twilight Zone. He felt cold all the way to his bones, queasy, disturbingly fragile, and alone.
He quickly descended two more steps and looked along the hall toward the front door. The way was clear.
He could probably leap down the last of the stairs, race along the hallway, unlock the front door, and get out of the house before the intruders came out of the kitchen and saw him. Probably. But he harbored a small measure of doubt, and because of that doubt he hesitated a couple of seconds too long.
In the kitchen Morrant shrieked more horribly than ever, a final cry of bleak despair and agony that was abruptly cut off.
Vince knew what Morrant's sudden silence meant. The bodyguard was dead.
Then the lights went out from one end of the house to the other. Apparently someone had thrown the master breaker switch in the fuse box, down in the basement.
Not daring to hesitate any longer, Vince started down the stairs in the dark, but he heard movement in the unlighted hallway, back toward the kitchen, coming in this direction) and he halted again. He wasn't hearing anything as ordinary as approaching footsteps; instead, it was a strange, eerie hissing-rustling-rattling-grumbling that chilled him and made his skin crawl. He sensed that something monstrous, something with pale dead eyes and cold clammy hands was coming toward him. Such a fantastic notion was wildly out of character for Vince Vastagliano, who had the imagination of a tree stump, but he couldn't dispel the superstitious dread that had come over him.
Fear brought a watery looseness to his joints.
His heart, already beating fast, now thundered.
He would never make it to the front door alive.
He turned and clambered up the steps. He stumbled once in the blackness, almost fell, regained his balance. By the time he reached the master bedroom, the noises behind him were more savage, closer, louder — and hungrier.
Vague shafts of weak light came through the bedroom windows, errant beams from the streetlamps outside, lightly frosting the eighteenth century Italian canopy bed and the other antiques, gleaming on the beveled edges of the crystal paperweights that were displayed along the top of the writing desk that stood between the two windows. If Vince had turned and looked back, he would have been able to see at least the bare outline of his pursuer. But he didn't look. He was afraid to look.
He got a whiff of a foul odor. Sulphur? Not quite, but something like it.
On a deep, instinctual level, he knew what was coming after him. His conscious mind could not — or would not — put a name to it, but his subconscious knew what it was, and that was why he fled from it in blind panic, as wide-eyed and spooked as a dumb animal reacting to a bolt of lightning.
He hurried through the shadows to the master bath, which opened off the bedroom. In the cloying darkness he collided hard with the half-closed bathroom door. It crashed all the way open. Slightly stunned by the impact, he stumbled into the large bathroom, groped for the door, slammed and locked it behind him.
In that last moment of vulnerability, as the door swung shut, he had seen nightmarish, silvery eyes glowing in the darkness. Not just two eyes. A dozen of them. Maybe more.
Now, something struck the other side of the door. Struck it again. And again. There were several of them out there, not just one. The door shook, and the lock rattled, but it held.
The creatures in the bedroom screeched and hissed considerably louder than before. Although their icy cries were utterly alien, like nothing Vince had ever heard before, the meaning was clear; these were obviously bleats of anger and disappointment. The things pursuing him had been certain that he was within their grasp, and they had chosen not to take his escape in a spirit of good sportsmanship.
The things. Odd as it was, that was the best word for them, the only word: things.
He felt as if he were losing his mind, yet he could not deny the primitive perceptions and instinctive understanding that had raised his hackles. Things. Not attack dogs. Not any animal he'd ever seen or heard about.
This was something out of a nightmare; only something from a nightmare could have reduced Ross Morrant to a defenseless, whimpering victim.
The creatures scratched at the other side of the door, gouged and scraped and splintered the wood. Judging from the sound, their claws were sharp. Damned sharp.