Darkfall

by Dean R. Koontz

  Jack was shaking so badly and uncontrollably that he didn't trust his voice. He didn't reply because he didn't want Lavelle to hear how scared he was.

  Besides, Lavelle didn't seem interested in anything Jack might have to say; he didn't wait long enough to hear a reply even if one had been offered. The Bocor said, “When you see your kids — dead, mangled, their eyes torn out, their lips eaten off, their fingers bitten to the bone — remember that you could have saved them. Remember that you're the one who signed their death warrants. You bear the responsibility for their deaths as surely as if you'd seen them walking in front of a train and didn't even bother to call out a warning to them. You threw away their lives as if they were nothing but garbage to you.”

  A torrent of words spewed from Jack before he even realized he was going to speak: “You fucking sleazy son of a bitch, you'd better not touch one hair on them!

  You'd better not—”

  Lavelle had hung up.

  Rebecca said, “Who—”

  “Lavelle.”

  “You mean… all of this?”

  “You believe in black magic now? Sorcery? Voodoo? ”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I sure as hell believe in it now.”

  She looked around at the demolished room, shaking her head, trying without success to deny the evidence before her eyes.

  Jack remembered his own skepticism when Carver Hampton had told him about the falling bottles and the black serpent. No skepticism now. Only terror now.

  He thought of the bodies he had seen this morning and this afternoon, those hideously ravaged corpses.

  His heart jackhammered. He was short of breath. He felt as if he might vomit.

  He still had the phone in his hand. He punched out a number.

  Rebecca said, “Who're you calling?”

  “Faye. She's got to get the kids out of there, fast.”

  “But Lavelle can't know where they are.”

  “He couldn't have known where I was, either. I didn't tell anyone I was coming to see you. I wasn't followed here; I'm sure I wasn't. He couldn't have known where to find me — and yet he knew. So he probably knows where to find the kids, too. Damnit, why isn't it ringing? “

  He rattled the telephone buttons, got another dial tone, tried Faye's number again. This time he got a recording telling him that her phone was no longer in service. Not true, of course.

  “Somehow, Lavelle's screwed up Faye's line,” he said, dropping the receiver. “We've got to get over there right away. Jesus, we've got to get the kids out! “

  Rebecca had stripped off her robe, had yanked a pair of jeans and a pull-over sweater from the closet. She was already half dressed.

  “Don't worry,” she said. “It'll be all right. We'll get to them before Lavelle does.”

  But Jack had the sickening feeling that they were already too late.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I

  Again, sitting alone in his dark bedroom, with only the phosphoric light of the snowstorm piercing the windows, Lavelle reached up with his mind and tapped the psychic rivers of malignant energy that coursed through the night above the city.

  His sorceror's power was not only depleted this time but utterly exhausted. Calling forth a poltergeist and maintaining control over it — as he had done in order to arrange the demonstration for Jack Dawson a few minutes ago — was one of the most draining of all the rituals of black magic.

  Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to use a poltergeist to destroy one's enemies. Poltergeists were merely mischievous — at worst, nasty — spirits; they were not evil. If a Bocor, having conjured up such an entity, attempted to employ it to murder someone, it would then be able to break free of his controlling spell and turn its energies upon him.

  However, when used only as a tool to exhibit a Bocor's powers, a poltergeist produced impressive results. Skeptics were transformed into believers. The bold were made meek. After witnessing the work of a poltergeist, those who were already believers in voodoo and the supernatural were humbled, frightened, and reduced to obedient servants, pitifully eager to do whatever a Bocor demanded of them.

  Lavelle's rocking chair creaked in the quiet room.

  In the darkness, he smiled and smiled.

  From the night sky, malignant energy poured down.

  Lavelle, the vessel, was soon overflowing with power.

  He sighed, for he was renewed.

  Before long, the fun would begin.

  The slaughter.

  II

  Penny sat on the edge of her bed, listening.

  The sounds came again. Scraping, hissing. A soft thump, a faint clink, and again a thump. A far-off, rattling, shuffling noise.

  Far off — but getting closer.

  She snapped on the bedside lamp. The small pool of light was warm and welcome.

  Davey remained asleep, undisturbed by the peculiar sounds. She decided to let him go on sleeping for the time being. She could wake him quickly if she had to, and one scream would bring Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith.

  The raspy cry came again, faint, though perhaps not quite as faint as it had been before.

  Penny got up from the bed, went to the dresser, which lay in shadows, beyond the fan of light from her nightstand lamp. In the wall above the dresser, approximately a foot below the ceiling, was a vent for the heating and air-conditioning systems. She cocked her head, trying to hear the distant and furtive noises, and she became convinced that they were being transmitted through the ducts in the walls.

  She climbed onto the dresser, but the vent was still almost a foot above her head. She climbed down. She fetched her pillow from the bed and put it on the dresser. She took the thick seat cushions from the two chairs that flanked the window, and she piled those atop her bed pillow. She felt very clever and capable. Once on the dresser again, she stretched, rose up onto her toes, and was able to put her ear against the vent plate that covered the outlet from the ventilation system.

  She had thought the goblins were in other apartments or common hallways, farther down in the building; she had thought the ducts were only carrying the sound of them. Now, with a jolt, she realized the ducts were carrying not merely the sound of the goblins but the goblins themselves. This was how they intended to get into the bedroom, not through the door or window, not through some imaginary tunnel in the back of the closet. They were in the ventilation network, making their way up through the building, twisting and turning, slithering and creeping, hurrying along the horizontal pipes, climbing laboriously through the vertical sections of the system, but steadily rising nearer and nearer as surely as the warm air was rising from the huge furnace below.

  Trembling, teeth chattering, gripped by fear to which she refused to succumb, Penny put her face to the vent plate and peered through the slots, into the duct beyond. The darkness in there was as deep and as black and as smooth as the darkness in a tomb.

  III

  Jack hunched over the wheel, squinting at the wintry street ahead.

  The windshield was icing up. A thin, milky skin of ice had formed around the edges of the glass and was creeping inward. The wipers were caked with snow that was steadily compacting into lumps of ice.

  “Is that damned defroster on full-blast?” he asked, even though he could feel the waves of heat washing up into his face.

  Rebecca leaned forward and checked the heater controls. “Full-blast,” she affirmed.

  “Temperature sure dropped once it got dark.”

  “Must be ten degrees out there. Colder, if you figure in the wind-chill factor.”

  Trains of snowplows moved along the main avenues, but they were having difficulty getting the upper hand on the blizzard. Snow was falling in blinding sheets, so thick it obscured everything beyond the distance of one block. Worse, the fierce wind piled the snow in drifts that began to form again and reclaim the pavement only minutes after the plows had scraped it clean.

  Jack had expected to make a fast trip to the Jamisons' apartment b
uilding. The streets held little or no traffic to get in his way. Furthermore, although his car was unmarked, it had a siren. And he had clamped the detachable red emergency beacon to the metal heading at the edge of the roof, thereby insuring right-of-way over what other traffic there was. He had expected to be holding Penny and Davey in his arms in ten minutes. Now, clearly, the trip was going to take twice that long.

  Every time he tried to put on a little speed, the car started to slide, in spite of the snow chains on the tires.

  “We could walk faster than this!” Jack said ferociously.

  “We'll get there in time,” Rebecca said.

  “What if Lavelle is already there?”

  “He's not. Of course he's not.”

  And then a terrible thought rocked him, and he didn't want to put it into words, but he couldn't stop himself: “What if he called from the Jamisons?”

  “He didn't,” she said.

  But Jack was abruptly obsessed with that horrendous possibility, and he could not control the morbid compulsion to say it aloud, even though the words brought hideous images to him.

  “What if he killed all of them—”

  (Mangled bodies.)

  “-killed Penny and Davey—”

  (Eyeballs torn from sockets.)

  “-killed Faye and Keith—”

  (Throats chewed open.)

  “-and then called from right there—”

  (Fingertips bitten off.)

  “-called me from right there in the apartment, for Christ's sake—”

  (Lips torn, ears hanging loose.)

  “-while he was standing over their bodies! ”

  She had been trying to interrupt him. Now she shouted at him: “Stop torturing yourself, Jack! We'll make it in time.”

  “How the hell do you know we'll make it in time?”

  he demanded angrily, not sure why he was angry with her, just striking out at her because she was a convenient target, because he couldn't strike out at Lavelle or at the weather that was hindering him, and because he had to strike out at someone, something, or go absolutely crazy from the tension that was building in him like excess current flowing into an already overcharged battery. “You can't know!”

  “I know,” she insisted calmly. “Just drive.”

  “Goddamnit, stop patronizing me!”

  “Jack—”

  “He's got my kids!”

  He accelerated too abruptly, and the car immediately began to slide toward the right-hand curb.

  He tried to correct their course by pulling on the steering wheel, instead of going along with the slide and turning into the direction of it, and even as he realized his mistake the car started to spin, and for a moment they were traveling sideways — and Jack had the gutwrenching feeling that they were going to slam into the curb at high speed, tip, and roll over — but even as they continued to slide they also continued to swing around on their axis until they were completely reversed from where they had been, a full one hundred and eighty degrees, half the circumference of a circle, now sliding backwards along the street, looking out the icy windshield at where they had been instead of at where they were going, and still they turned, turned like a carousel, until at last the car stopped just short of one entire revolution.

  With a shudder engendered by a mental image of what might have happened to them, but aware that he couldn't waste time dwelling on their close escape, Jack started up again. He handled the wheel with even greater caution than before, and he pressed his foot lightly and slowly down on the accelerator.

  Neither he nor Rebecca spoke during the wild spin, not even to cry out in surprise or fear, and neither of them spoke for the next block, either.

  Then he said, “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't be.”

  “I shouldn't have snapped at you like that.”

  “I understand. You were crazy with worry.”

  “Still am. No excuse. That was stupid of me. I won't be able to help the kids if I kill us before we ever get to Faye's place.”

  “I understand what you're going through,” she said again, softer than before. “It's all right. And everything'll be all right, too.”

  He knew that she did understand all the complex thoughts and emotions that were churning through him and nearly tearing him apart. She understood him better than just a friend could have understood, better than just a lover. They were more than merely compatible; in their thoughts and perceptions and feelings, they were in perfect sympathy, physically and psychologically synchronous. It had been a long time since he'd had anyone that close, that much a part of him. Eighteen months, in fact. Since Linda's death. Not so long, perhaps, considering he had never expected it to happen again. It was good not to be alone any more.

  “Almost there, aren't we?” she asked.

  “Two or three minutes,” he said, hunching over the wheel, peering ahead nervously at the slick, snowy street.

  The windshield wipers, thickly crusted with ice, grated noisily back and forth, cleaning less and less of the glass with each swipe they took at it.

  IV

  Lavelle got up from his rocking chair.

  The time had come to establish psychic bonds with the small assassins that had come out of the pit and were now stalking the Dawson children.

  Without turning on any lights, Lavelle went to the dresser, opened one of the top drawers, and withdrew a fistful of silk ribbons. He went to the bed, put the ribbons down, and stripped out of his clothes. Nude, he sat on the edge of the bed and tied a purple ribbon to his right ankle, a white one to his left ankle. Even in the dark, he had no difficulty discerning one color from another. He tied a long scarlet ribbon around his chest, directly over his heart. Yellow around his forehead. Green around his right wrist; black around his left wrist. The ribbons were symbolic ties that would help to put him in intimate contact with the killers from the pit, as soon as he finished the ritual now begun.

  It was not his intention to take control of those demonic entities and direct their every move; he couldn't have done so, even if that was what he wanted. Once summoned from the pit and sent after their prey, the assassins followed their own whims and strategies until they had dealt with the intended victims; then, murder done, they were compelled to return to the pit. That was all the control he had over them.

  The point of this ritual with the ribbons was merely to enable Lavelle to participate, first-hand, in the thrill of the slaughter. Psychically linked to the assassins, he would see through their eyes, hear with their ears, and feel with their golem bodies. When their razor-edged claws slashed at Davey Dawson, Lavelle would feel the boy's flesh rending in his own hands. When their teeth chewed open Penny's jugular, Lavelle would feel her warm throat against his own lips, too, and would taste the coppery sweetness of her blood.

  The thought of it made him tremble with excitement.

  And if Lavelle had timed it right, Jack Dawson would be there in the Jamison apartment when his children were torn to pieces. The detective ought to arrive just in time to see the horde descend on Penny and Davey. Although he would try to save them, he would discover that the small assassins couldn't be driven back or killed. He would be forced to stand there, powerless, while his children's precious blood spattered over him.

  That was the best part.

  Yes. Oh, yes.

  Lavelle sighed.

  He shivered with anticipation.

  The small bottle of cat's blood was on the nightstand. He wet two fingertips in it, made a crimson spot on each cheek, wet his fingers again, anointed his lips. Then, still using blood, he drew a very simple veve on his bare chest.

  He stretched out on the bed, on his back.

  Staring at the ceiling, he began to chant quietly.

  Soon, he was transported in mind and spirit. The real psychic links, which the ribbons symbolized, were successfully achieved, and he was with the demonic entities in the ventilation system of the Jamisons' apartment building. The creatures were only two turns and perhaps
twenty feet away from the end of the duct, where it terminated in the wall of the guest bedroom.

  The children were near.

  The girl was the nearer of the two.

  Like the small assassins, Lavelle could sense her presence. Close. Very close. Only another bend in the pipe, then a straightaway, then a final bend.

  Close.

  The time had come.

  V

  Standing on the dresser, peering into the duct, Penny heard a voice calling out from within the wall, from another part of the ventilation system, but not far away now. It was a brittle, whispery, cold, hoarse voice that turned her blood to icy slush in her veins. It said, “Penny? Penny?”

  She almost fell in her haste to get down from the dresser.

  She ran to Davey, grabbed him, shook him. “Wake up! Davey, wake up!”

  He hadn't been asleep long, no more than fifteen minutes, but he was nevertheless groggy. “Huh? Whaa?”

  “They're coming,” she said. “They're coming. We've got to get dressed and get out of here. Fast. They're coming!”

  She screamed for Aunt Faye.

  VI

  The Jamisons' apartment was in a twelve-story building on a cross street that hadn't yet been plowed. The street was mantled with six inches of snow. Jack drove slowly forward and had no trouble for about twenty yards, but then the wheels sank into a hidden drift that had completely filled in a dip in the pavement. For a moment he thought they were stuck, but he threw the car into reverse and then forward and then reverse and then forward again, rocking it, until it broke free. Two-thirds of the way down the block, he tapped the brakes, and the car slid to a stop in front of the right building.

  He flung open the door and scrambled out of the car. An arctic wind hit him with sledgehammer force. He put his head down and staggered around the front of the car, onto the sidewalk, barely able to see as the wind picked up crystals of snow from the ground and sprayed them in his face.