Darkfall

by Dean R. Koontz

  Where had it gone? It still had to be here — didn't it?

  Yes. She was sure of it. The thing was still here.

  She had the eerie feeling that she was being watched.

  III

  The assistant medical examiner on the case was Ira Goldbloom, who looked more Swedish than Jewish. He was tall, fair-skinned, with hair so blond it was almost white; his eyes were blue with a lot of gray speckled through them.

  Jack and Rebecca found him on the second floor, in the master bedroom. He had completed his examination of the bodyguard's corpse in the kitchen, had taken a look at Vince Vastagliano, and was getting several instruments out of his black leather case.

  “For a man with a weak stomach,” he said, “I'm in the wrong line of work.”

  Jack saw that Goldbloom did appear paler than usual.

  Rebecca said, “We figure these two are connected with the Charlie Novello homicide on Sunday and the Coleson murder yesterday. Can you make the link for us? ”

  “Maybe.”

  “Only maybe?”

  “Well, yeah, there's a chance we can tie them together,” Goldbloom said. “The number of wounds… the mutilation factor… there are several similarities. But let's wait for the autopsy report.”

  Jack was surprised. “But what about the wounds? Don't they establish a link?”

  “The number, yes. Not the type. Have you looked at these wounds?”

  “At a glance,” Jack said, “they appear to be bites of some kind. Rat bites, we thought.”

  “But we figured they were just obscuring the real wounds, the stab wounds,” Rebecca said.

  Jack said, “Obviously, the rats came along after the men were already dead. Right?”

  “Wrong,” Goldbloom said. “So far as I can tell from a preliminary examination, there aren't any stab wounds in either victim. Maybe tissue bisections will reveal wounds of that nature underneath some of the bites, but I doubt it. Vastagliano and his bodyguard were savagely bitten. They bled to death from those bites. The bodyguard suffered at least three torn arteries, major vessels: the external carotid, the left brachial, and the femoral artery in the left thigh. Vastagliano looks like he was chewed up even worse.”

  Jack said, “But rats aren't that aggressive, damnit. You just don't get attacked by packs of rats in your own home.”

  “I don't think these were rats,” Goldbloom said. “I mean, I've seen rat bites before. Every now and then, a wino will be drinking in an alley, have a heart attack or a stroke, right there behind the garbage bin, where nobody finds him for maybe two days. Meanwhile, the rats get at him. So I know what a rat bite looks like, and this just doesn't seem to match up on a number of points.”

  “Could it have been… dogs?” Rebecca asked.

  “No. For one thing, the bites are too small. I think we can rule out cats, too.”

  “Any ideas?” Jack asked.

  “No. It's weird. Maybe the autopsy will pin it down for us.”

  Rebecca said, “Did you know the bathroom door was locked when the uniforms got here? They had to break it down.”

  “So I heard. A locked room mystery,” Goldbloom said.

  “Maybe there's not much of a mystery to it,” Rebecca said thoughtfully. “If Vastagliano was killed by some kind of animal, then maybe the thing was small enough to get under the door.”

  Goldbloom shook his head. “It would've had to've been real small to manage that. No. It was bigger. A good deal bigger than the crack under the door.”

  “About what size would you say?”

  “As big as a large rat.”

  Rebecca thought for a moment. Then: “There's an outlet from a heating duct in there. Maybe the thing came through the duct.”

  “But there's a grille over the duct,” Jack said. “And the vents in the grille are narrower than the space under the door.”

  Rebecca took two steps to the bathroom, leaned through the doorway, looked around, craning her neck. She came back and said, “You're right. And the grille's firmly in place.”

  “And the little window is closed,” Jack said.

  “And locked,” Goldbloom said.

  Rebecca brushed a shining strand of hair from her forehead. “What about the drains? Could a rat come up through the tub drain?”

  “No,” Goldbloom said. “Not in modern plumbing.”

  “The toilet?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “But possible?”

  “Conceivable, I suppose. But, you see, I'm sure it wasn't just one animal.”

  “How many?” Rebecca asked.

  “There's no way I can give you an exact count. But… I would think, whatever they were, there had to be at least… a dozen of them.

  “Good heavens,” Jack said.

  “Maybe two dozen. Maybe more.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well,” Goldbloom said, “Vastagliano was a big man, a strong man. He'd be able to handle one, two, three rat-size animals, no matter what sort of things they were. In fact, he'd most likely be able to deal with half a dozen of them. Oh, sure, he'd get bitten a few times, but he'd be able to take care of himself. He might not be able to kill all of them, but he'd kill a few and keep the rest at bay. So it looks to me as if there were so many of these things, such a horde of them, that they simply overwhelmed him.”

  With insect-quick feet, a chill skittered the length of Jack's spine. He thought of Vastagliano being borne down onto the bathroom floor under a tide of screeching rats — or perhaps something even worse than rats. He thought of the man harried at every flank, bitten and torn and ripped and scratched, attacked from all directions, so that he hadn't the presence of mind to strike back effectively, his arms weighed down by the sheer numbers of his adversaries, his reaction time affected by a numbing horror. A painful, bloody, lonely death. Jack shuddered.

  “And Ross, the bodyguard,” Rebecca said. “You figure he was attacked by a lot of them, too?”

  “Yes,” Goldbloom said. “Same reasoning applies.”

  Rebecca blew air out through clenched teeth in an expression of her frustration. “This just makes the locked bathroom even more difficult to figure. From what I've seen, it looks as if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were both in the kitchen, making a late-night snack. The attack started there, evidently. Ross was quickly overwhelmed. Vastagliano ran. He was chased, couldn't get to the front door because they cut him off, so he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. Now, the rats — or whatever — weren't in there when he locked the door, so how did they get in there?”

  “And out again,” Goldbloom reminded her.

  “It almost has to be plumbing, the toilet.”

  “I rejected that because of the numbers involved,” Goldbloom said. “Even if there weren't any plumbing traps designed to stop a rat, and even if it held its breath and swam through whatever water barriers there were, I just don't buy that explanation. Because what we're talking about here is a whole pack of creatures slithering in that way, one behind the other, like a commando team, for God's sake. Rats just aren't that smart or that… determined. No animal is. It doesn't make sense.”

  The thought of Vastagliano wrapped in a cloak of swarming, biting rats had caused Jack's mouth to go dry and sour. He had to work up some saliva to unstick his tongue. Finally he said, “Another thing. Even if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were overwhelmed by scores of these… these things, they'd still have killed a couple — wouldn't they? But we haven't found a single dead rat or a single dead anything else — except, of course, dead people.”

  “And no droppings,” Goldbloom said.

  “No what?”

  “Droppings. Feces. If there were dozens of animals involved, you'd find droppings, at least a few, probably piles of droppings.”

  “If you find animal hairs—”

  “We'll definitely be looking for them,” Goldbloom said. “We'll vacuum the floor around each body, of course, and analyze the sweepings. If we could find a few hairs, tha
t would clear up a lot of the mystery.” The assistant medical examiner wiped one hand across his face, as if he could pull off and cast away his tension, his disgust. He wiped so hard that spots of color actually did rise in his cheeks, but the haunted look was still in his eyes. “There's something else that disturbs me, too. The victims weren't… eaten. Bitten, ripped gouged… all of that… but so far as I can see, not an ounce of flesh was consumed. Rats would've eaten the tender parts: eyes, nose, earlobes, testicles…. They'd have torn open the body cavities in order to get to the soft organs. So would any other predator or scavenger. But there was nothing like that in this case. These things killed purposefully, efficiently, methodically… and then just went away without devouring a scrap of their prey. It's unnatural. Uncanny. What motive or force was driving them? And why?”

  IV

  After talking with Ira Goldbloom, Jack and Rebecca decided to question the neighbors. Perhaps one of them had heard or seen something important last night.

  Outside Vastagliano's house, they stood on the sidewalk for a moment, hands in their coat pockets.

  The sky was lower than it had been an hour ago. Darker, too. The gray clouds were smeared with others that were soot-dark.

  Snowflakes drifted down; not many; they descended lazily, except when the wind gusted, and they seemed like fragments of burnt sky, cold bits of ash.

  Rebecca said, “I'm afraid we'll be pulled off this case.”

  “You mean… off these two murders or off the whole business?”

  “Just these two. They're going to say there's no connection.”

  “There's a connection,” Jack said.

  “I know. But they're going to say Vastagliano and Ross are unrelated to the Novello and Coleson cases.”

  “I think Goldbloom will tie them together for us.”

  She looked sour. “I hate to be pulled off a case, damnit. I like to finish what I start.”

  “We won't be pulled off.”

  “But don't you see? If some sort of animal did it…”

  “Yes?”

  “Then how can they possibly classify it as murder?”

  “It's murder,” he said emphatically.

  “But you can't charge an animal with homicide.”

  He nodded. “I see what you're driving at.”

  “Damn.”

  “Listen, if these were animals that were trained to kill, then it's still homicide; the trainer is the murderer.”

  “If these were dog bites that Vastagliano and Ross died from,” Rebecca said, “then maybe you might just be able to sell that theory. But what animal — what animal as small as these apparently were — can be trained to kill, to obey all commands? Rats? No. Cats? No. Gerbils, for God's sake?”

  “Well, they train ferrets,” Jack said. “They use them for hunting sometimes. Not game hunting where they're going after the meat, but just for sport, 'cause the prey is generally a ragged mess when the ferret gets done with it.”

  “Ferrets, huh? I'd like to see you convince Captain Gresham that someone's prowling the city with a pack of killer ferrets to do his dirty work for him.”

  “Does sound far-fetched,” Jack admitted.

  “To say the least.”

  “So what does that leave us with?”

  She shrugged.

  Jack thought about Baba Lavelle.

  Voodoo?

  No. Surely not. It was one thing to propose that Lavelle was making the murders look strange in order to frighten his adversaries with the threat of voodoo curses, but it was quite something else to imagine that the curses actually worked.

  Then again… What about the locked bathroom? What about the fact that Vastagliano and Ross hadn't been able to kill even one of their attackers? What about the lack of animal droppings?

  Rebecca must have known what he was thinking, for she scowled and said, “Come on. Let's talk to the neighbors.”

  The wind suddenly woke, breathed, raged. Spitting flecks of snow, it came along the street as if it were a living beast, a very cold and angry wind.

  V

  Mrs. Quillen, Penny's teacher at Wellton School, was unable to understand why a vandal would have wrecked only one locker.

  “Perhaps he intended to ruin them all but had second thoughts. Or maybe he started with yours, Penny dear, then heard a sound he couldn't place, thought someone was coming, got frightened, and ran. But we keep the school locked up tight as a drum at night, of course, and there's the alarm system, too. However did he get in and out?”

  Penny knew it wasn't a vandal. She knew it was something a whole lot stranger than that. She knew the trashing of her locker was somehow connected with the eerie experience she'd had last night in her room. But she didn't know how to express this knowledge without sounding like a child afraid of boogeymen, so she didn't try to explain to Mrs. Quillen those things which, in truth, she couldn't even explain to herself.

  After some discussion, much sympathy, and even more bafflement, Mrs. Quillen sent Penny to the basement where the supplies and spare textbooks were kept on well-ordered storage shelves.

  “Get replacements for everything that was destroyed, Penny. All the books, new pencils, a three-ring notebook with a pack of filler, and a new tablet. And don't dawdle, please. We'll be starting the math lesson in a few minutes, and you know that's where you need to work the hardest.”

  Penny went down the front stairs to the ground floor, paused at the main doors to look through the beveled glass windows at the swirling puffs of snow, then hurried back the hall to the rear of the building, past the deserted gymnasium, past the music room where a class was about to begin.

  The cellar door was at the very end of the hallway.

  She opened it and found the light switch. A long, narrow flight of stairs led down.

  The ground-floor hallway, through which she'd just passed, had smelled of chalk dust that had escaped from classrooms, pine-scented floor wax, and the dry heat of the forced-air furnace. But as she descended the narrow steps, she noticed that the smells of the cellar were different from those upstairs. She detected the mild limerich odor of concrete dust. Insecticide lent a pungent note to the air; she knew they sprayed every month to discourage silverfish from making a meal of the books stored here. And, underlying everything else, there was a slightly damp smell, a vague but nonetheless unpleasant mustiness.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs. Her footsteps rang sharply, crisply on the concrete floor and echoed hollowly in a far corner.

  The basement extended under the entire building and was divided into two chambers. At the opposite end from the stairs lay the furnace room, beyond a heavy metal fire door that was always kept closed. The largest of the two rooms was on this side of the door. A work table occupied the center, and free-standing metal storage shelves were lined up along the walls, all crammed full of books and supplies.

  Penny took a folding carry-all basket from a rack, opened it, and collected the items she needed. She had just located the last of the textbooks when she heard a strange sound behind her. That sound. The hissingscrabbling-muttering noise that she had heard last night in her bedroom.

  She whirled.

  As far as she could see, she was alone.

  The problem was that she couldn't see everywhere. Deep shadows coiled under the stairs. In one corner of the room, over by the fire door, a ceiling light was burned out. Shadows had claimed that area. Furthermore, each unit of metal shelving stood on six-inch legs, and the gap between the lowest shelf and the floor was untouched by light. There were a lot of places where something small and quick could hide.

  She waited, frozen, listening, and ten long seconds elapsed, then fifteen, twenty, and the sound didn't come again, so she wondered if she'd really heard it or only imagined it, and another few seconds ticked away as slowly as minutes, but then something thumped overhead, at the top of the stairs: the cellar door.

  She had left the door standing open.

  Someone or something had just pulled it sh
ut.

  With the basket of books and supplies in one hand, Penny started toward the foot of the stairs but stopped abruptly when she heard other noises up there on the landing. Hissing. Growling. Murmuring. The tick and scrape of movement.

  Last night, she had tried to convince herself that the thing in her room hadn't actually been there, that it had been only a remnant of a dream. Now she knew it was more than that. But just what was it? A ghost? Whose ghost? Not her mother's ghost. She maybe wouldn't have minded if her mother had been hanging around, sort of watching over her. Yeah, that would have been okay. But, at best, this was a malicious spirit; at worst, a dangerous spirit. Her mother's ghost would never be malicious like this, not in a million years. Besides, a ghost didn't follow you around from place to place. No, that wasn't how it worked. People weren't haunted. Houses were haunted, and the ghosts doing the haunting were bound to one place until their souls were finally at rest; they couldn't leave that special place they haunted, couldn't just roam all over the city, following one particular young girl.

  Yet the cellar door had been drawn shut.

  Maybe a draft had closed it.

  Maybe. But something was moving around on the landing up there where she couldn't see it. Not a draft. Something strange.

  Imagination.

  Oh, yeah?

  She stood by the stairs, looking up, trying to figure it out, trying to calm herself, carrying on an urgent conversation with herself:

  — Well, if it's not a ghost, what is it?

  — Something bad.

  — Not necessarily.

  — Something very, very bad.

  — Stop it! Stop scaring yourself. It didn't try to hurt you last night, did it?

  — No.

  — So there. You 're safe.

  — But now it's back.

  A new sound jolted her out of her interior dialogue. Another thump. But this was different from the sound the door had made when it had been pushed shut. And again: thump! Again. It sounded as if something was throwing itself against the wall at the head of the stairs, bumping mindlessly like a summer moth battering against a window.