They waited ten or fifteen seconds, and snow blew in through the open door. Finally, crouching, Jack moved into the doorway and crossed the threshold, his gun thrust out in front of him.
The house was exceptionally dark. Darkness would work to Lavelle's advantage, for he was familiar with the place, while it was all strange territory to Jack.
He fumbled for the light switch and found it.
He was in a broad entrance hall. To the left were inlaid oak stairs with an ornate railing. Directly ahead, beyond the stairs, the hall narrowed and led all the way to the rear of the house. A couple of feet ahead and to the right, there was an archway, beyond which lay more darkness.
Jack edged to the brink of the arch. A little light spilled in from the hall, but it showed him only a section of bare floor. He supposed it was a living room.
He reached awkwardly around the corner, trying to present a slim profile, feeling for another light switch, found and flipped it. The switch operated a ceiling fixture; light filled the room. But that was just about the only thing in it — light. No furniture. No drapes. A film of gray dust, a few balls of dust in the corners, a lot of light, and four bare walls.
Carver moved up beside Jack and whispered, “Are you sure this is the right place?”
As Jack opened his mouth to answer, he felt something whiz past his face and, a fraction of a second later, he heard two loud shots, fired from behind him. He dropped to the floor, rolled out of the hall, into the living room.
Carver dropped and rolled, too. But he had been hit.
His face was contorted by pain. He was clutching his left thigh, and there was blood on his trousers.
“He's on the stairs,” Carver said raggedly. “I got a glimpse.”
“Must've been upstairs, then came down behind us.”
“Yeah.”
Jack scuttled to the wall beside the archway, crouched there. “You hit bad?”
“Bad enough,” Carver said. “Won't kill me, though. You just worry about getting him.”
Jack leaned around the archway and squeezed off a shot right away, at the staircase, without bothering to look or aim first.
Lavelle was there. He was halfway down the final flight of stairs, hunkered behind the railing.
Jack's shot tore a chunk out of the bannister two feet from the Bocor's head.
Lavelle returned the fire, and Jack ducked back, and shattered plaster exploded from the edge of the archway.
Another shot.
Then silence.
Jack leaned out into the archway again and pulled off three shots in rapid succession, aiming at where Lavelle had been, but Lavelle was already on his way upstairs, and all three shots missed him, and then he was out of sight.
Pausing to reload his revolver with the loose bullets he carried in one coat pocket, Jack glanced at Carver and said, “Can you make it out to the car on your own?”
“No. Can't walk with this leg. But I'll be all right here. He only winged me. You just go get him.”
“We should call an ambulance for you.”
“Just get him!” Carver said.
Jack nodded, stepped through the archway, and went cautiously to the foot of the stairs.
IX
Penny, Davey, Rebecca, and Father Walotsky took refuge in the chancel, behind the altar railing. In fact, they climbed up onto the altar platform, directly beneath the crucifix.
The goblins stopped on the other side of the railing. Some of them peered between the ornate supporting posts. Others climbed onto the communion rail itself, perched there, eyes flickering hungrily, black tongues licking slowly back and forth across their sharp teeth.
There were fifty or sixty of them now, and more were still coming out of the vestibule, far back at the end of the main aisle.
“They w-won't come up here, wow-will they?” Penny asked. “Not this c-close to the crucifix. Will they?”
Rebecca hugged the girl and Davey, held them tight and dose. She said, “You can see they've stopped. It's all right. It's all right now. They're afraid of the altar.
They've stopped.”
But for how long? she wondered.
X
Jack climbed the stairs with his back flat against the wall, moving sideways, trying to be utterly silent, nearly succeeding. He held his revolver in his left hand, with his arm rigidly extended, aiming at the top of the steps, his aim never wavering as he ascended, so he'd be ready to pull the trigger the instant Lavelle appeared. He reached the landing without being shot at, climbed three steps of the second flight, and then Lavelle leaned out around the corner above, and both of them fired — Lavelle twice, Jack once.
Lavelle pulled the trigger without pausing to take aim, without even knowing exactly where Jack was. He just took a chance that two rounds, placed down the center of the stairwell, would do the job. Both missed.
On the other hand, Jack's gun was aimed along the wall, and Lavelle leaned right into its line of fire. The slug smashed into his arm at the same moment he finished pulling the trigger of his own gun. He screamed, and the pistol flew out of his hand, and he stumbled back into the upstairs hall where he'd been hiding.
Jack took the stairs two at a time, jumping over Lavelle's pistol as it came tumbling down. He reached the second-floor hallway in time to see Lavelle enter a room and slam the door behind him.
Downstairs, Carver lay on the dust-filmed floor, eyes closed. He was too weary to keep his eyes open. He was growing wearier by the second.
He didn't feel like he was lying on a hard floor. He felt as if he were floating in a warm pool of water, somewhere in the tropics. He remembered being shot, remembered falling; he knew the floor really was there, under him, but he just couldn't feel it.
He figured he was bleeding to death. The wound didn't seem that bad, but maybe it was worse than he thought. Or maybe it was just shock that made him feel this way. Yeah, that must be it, shock, just shock, not bleeding to death after all, just suffering from shock, but of course shock could kill, too.
Whatever the reasons, he floated, oblivious of his own pain, just bobbing up and down, drifting there on the hard floor that wasn't hard at all, drifting on some far-away tropical tide… until, from upstairs, there was the sound of gunfire and a shrill scream that snapped his eyes open. He had an out-of-focus, floor-level view of the empty room. He blinked his eyes rapidly and squinted until his clouded visions cleared, and then — he wished it hadn't cleared because he saw that he was no longer alone.
One of the denizens of the pit was with him, its eyes aglow.
Upstairs, Jack tried the door that Lavelle had slammed. It was locked, but the lock probably didn't amount to much, just a privacy set, flimsy as they could be made, because people didn't want to put heavy and expensive locks inside a house.
“Lavelle?” he shouted.
No answer.
“Open up. No use trying to hide in there.”
From inside the room came the sound of a shattering wmdow.
“Shit,” Jack said.
He stepped back and kicked at the door, but there was more to the lock than he'd expected, and he had to kick it four times, as hard as he could, before he finally smashed it open.
He switched on the light. An ordinary bedroom. No sign of Lavelle.
The window in the opposite wall was broken out. Drapes billowed on the in-rushing wind.
Jack checked the closet first, just to be sure this wasn't a bit of misdirection to enable Lavelle to get behind his back. But no one waited in the closet.