Hampton chanted for a few seconds, then said, “Totally immerse yourself and count to thirty before coming up for air.”
Jack closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and slid flat on his back, so that his entire body was submerged. He had counted only to ten when he began to feel a strange tingling from head to foot. Second by second, he felt somehow… cleaner… not just in body but in mind and spirit, as well. Bad thoughts, fear, tension, anger, despair — all were leeched out of him by the specially treated water.
He was getting ready to confront Lavelle.
XII
The engine died. A snowbank loomed.
Rebecca pumped the brakes. They were extremely soft, but they still worked. The car slid nose-first into the mounded snow, hitting with a thank and a crunch, harder than she would have liked, but not hard enough to hurt anyone.
Silence.
They were in front of the main entrance to St. Patrick's.
Davey said, “Something's inside the seat! It's coming through! “
“What?” Rebecca asked, baffled by his statement, turning to look at him.
He was standing behind Penny's seat, pressed up against it, but facing the other way, looking at the backrest of the rear seat where he had been sitting just a short while ago. Rebecca squinted past him and saw movement under the upholstery. She heard an angry, muffled snarling, too.
One of the goblins must have gotten into the trunk. It was chewing and clawing through the seat, burrowing toward the interior of the car.
“Quick,” Rebecca said. “Come up here with us, Davey. We'll all go out through Penny's door, one after the other, real quick, and then straight into the church.”
Making desperate wordless sounds, Davey climbed into the front seat, between Rebecca and Penny.
At the same moment, Rebecca felt something pushing at the floorboards under her feet. A second goblin was tearing its way into the car from that direction.
If there were only two of the beasts, and if both of them were busily engaged in boring holes into the car, they might not immediately realize that their prey was making a run for the cathedral. It was at least something to hope for; not much, but something.
At a signal from Rebecca, Penny flung open the door and went out, into the storm.
Heart hammering, gasping in shock when the bitterly cold wind hit her, Penny scrambled out of the car, slipped on the snowy pavement, almost fell, windmilled her arms, and somehow kept her balance. She expected a goblin to rush out from beneath the car, expected to feel teeth sinking through one of her boots and into her ankle, but nothing like that happened. The streetlamps, shrouded and dimmed by the storm, cast an eerie light like that in a nightmare. Penny's distorted shadow preceded her as she clambered up the ridge of snow that had been formed by passing plows. She struggled all the way to the top, panting, using her hands and knees and feet, getting snow in her face and under her gloves and inside her boots, and then she jumped down to the sidewalk, which was buried under a smooth blanket of virgin snow, and she headed toward the cathedral, never looking back, never, afraid of what she might see behind her, pursued (at least in her imagination) by all the monsters she had seen in the foyer of that brownstone apartment house earlier tonight. The cathedral steps were hidden under deep snow, but Penny grabbed the brass handrail and used it as a guide, stomped all the way up the steps, suddenly wondering if the doors would be unlocked at this late hour. Wasn't a cathedral always open? If it was locked now, they were dead. She went to the center-most portal, gripped the handle, pulled, thought for a moment that it was locked, then realized it was just a very heavy door, seized the handle with both hands, pulled harder than before, opened the door, held it wide, turned, and finally looked back the way she'd come.
Davey was two-thirds of the way up the steps, his breath puffing out of him in jets of frost-white steam. He looked so small and fragile. But he was going to make it.
Rebecca came down off the ridge of snow at the curb, onto the sidewalk, stumbled, fell to her knees.
Behind her, two goblins reached the top of the piledup snow.
Penny screamed. “They're coming! Hurry!”
When Rebecca fell to her knees, she heard Penny scream, and she got up at once, but she took only one step before the two goblins dashed past her, Jesus, as fast as the wind, a lizard-thing and a cat-thing, both of them screeching. They didn't attack her, didn't nip at her or hiss, didn't even pause. They weren't interested in her at all; they just wanted the kids.
Davey was at the cathedral door now, standing with Penny, and both of them were shouting at Rebecca.
The goblins reached the steps and climbed half of them in what seemed like a fraction of a second, but then they abruptly slowed down, as if they had realized they were rushing toward a holy place, although that realization didn't stop them altogether. They crept slowly and cautiously from step to step, sinking half out of sight m the snow.
Rebecca yelled at Penny—”Get in the church and close the door!" — but Penny hesitated, apparently hoping that Rebecca would somehow make it past the goblins and get to safety herself (if the cathedral actually was safe), but even at their slower pace the goblins were almost to the top of the steps. Rebecca yelled again. And again Penny hesitated. Now, moving slower by the second, the goblins were within one step of the top, only a few feet away from Penny and Davey… and now they were at the top, and Rebecca was shouting frantically, and at last Penny pushed Davey into the cathedral. She followed her brother and stood just inside the door for a moment, holding it open, peering out. Moving slower still, but still moving, the goblins headed for the door. Rebecca wondered if maybe these creatures could enter a church when the door was held open for them, just as (according to legend) a vampire could enter a house only if invited or if someone held the door for him. It was probably crazy to think the same rules that supposedly governed mythical vampires would apply to these very real voodoo devils. Nevertheless, with new panic in her voice, Rebecca shouted at Penny again, and she ran halfway up the steps because she thought maybe the girl couldn't hear her above the wind, and she screamed at the top of her voice, “Don't worry about me! Close the door! Close the door!” And finally Penny closed it, although reluctantly, just as the goblins arrived at the threshold.
The lizard-thing threw itself at the door, rebounded from it, and rolled onto its feet again.
The cat-thing wailed angrily.
Both creatures scratched at the portal, but neither of them showed any determination, as if they knew that, for them, this was too great a task. Opening a cathedral door — opening the door to any holy place — required far greater power than they possessed.
Frustrated, they turned away from the door. Looked at Rebecca. Their fiery eyes seemed brighter than the eyes of the other creatures she had seen at the Jamisons' and in the foyer of that brownstone apartment house.
She backed down one step.
The goblins started toward her.
She descended all the other steps, stopping only when she reached the sidewalk.
The lizard-thing and the cat-thing stood at the top of the steps, glaring at her.
Torrents of wind and snow raced along Fifth Avenue, and the snow was falling so heavily that it almost seemed she would drown in it as surely as she would have drowned in an onrushing flood.