teeth set far back from the writhing, sucking lips. Its fiery eyes
fixed on Jack.
He abruptly looked away from that white-hot gaze, for he recalled how
the eyes of the lizard had nearly hypnotized him.
Beyond the worm-thing, the security foyer was crawling with other,
different devils, all of them small, but all of them so incredibly
vicious and grotesque in appearance that Jack began to shake and felt
his bowels turn to jelly. There were lizard-things in various sizes and
shapes. Spider-things. Rat-things. Two of the manform beasts, one of
them with a tail, the other with a sort of cock’s comb on its head and
along its back. Dog things. Crablike, feline, snakelike, beetle-form,
scorpionlike, dragonish, clawed and ranged, spiked and spurred and
sharply horned things. Perhaps twenty of them. No. More than twenty.
At least thirty. They slithered and skittered across the mosaic-tile
floor, and they crept tenaciously up the walls, their foul tongues
darting and fluttering ceaselessly, teeth gnashing and grinding, eyes
shining.
Shocked and repelled, Jack snatched his hand away from the brass
doorknob. He turned to Rebecca and the kids. “They’ve found us.
They’re here. Come on. Got to get out. Hurry. Before it’s too late.”
They came away from the stairs. They saw the wormthing on the door and
the horde in the foyer beyond.
Rebecca and Penny stared at that Hellborn pack without speaking, both of
them driven beyond the needand perhaps beyond the ability-to scream.
Davey was the only one who cried out. He clutched at Jack’s arm.
“They must be inside the building by now,” Rebecca said. “In the
walls.”
They all looked toward the hallway’s heating vents.
“How do we get out?” Penny asked.
How, indeed?
For a moment no one spoke.
In the foyer other creatures had joined the wormthing on the glass of
the inner door.
“Is there a rear entrance?” Rebecca wondered.
“Probably,” Jack said. “But if there is, then these things will be
waiting there, too.”
Another pause.
The silence was oppressive and terrifying-like the unspent energy in the
raised blade of a cocked guillotine.
“Then we’re trapped, ” Penny said.
Jack felt his own heart beating. It shook him.
Think.
“Daddy, don’t let them get me, please don’t let them, ” Davey said
miserably.
Jack glanced at the elevator, which was opposite the stairs. He
wondered if the devils were already in the elevator shaft. Would the
doors of the lift suddenly open, spilling out a wave of hissing,
snarling, snapping death?
Think!
He grabbed Davey’s hand and headed toward the foot of the stairs.
Following with Penny, Rebecca said, “Where are you going? ”
“This way.”
They climbed the steps toward the second floor.
Penny said, “But if they’re in the walls, they’ll be all through the
building.”
“Hurry,” was Jack’s only answer. He led them up the steps as fast as
they could go.
In Carver Hampton’s apartment above his shop in Harlem, all the lights
were on. Ceiling lights, reading lamps, table lamps, and floor lamps
blazed; no room was left in shadow. In those few corners where the
lamplight didn’t reach, candles had been lit; clusters of them stood in
dishes and pie pans and cake tins.
Carver sat at the small kitchen table, by the window, his strong brown
hands clamped around a glass of Chivas Regal. He stared out at the
falling snow, and once in a while he took a sip of the Scotch.
Fluorescent bulbs glowed in the kitchen ceiling. The stove light was
on. And the light above the sink, too. On the table, within easy
reach, were packs of matches, three boxes of candles, and two
flashlights-just in case the storm caused a power failure.
This was not a night for darkness.
Monstrous things were loose in the city.
They fed on darkness.
Although the night-stalkers had not been sent to get Carver, he could
sense them out there in the stormy streets, prowling, hungry; they
radiated a palpable evil, the pure and ultimate evil of the Ancient
Ones. The creatures now loose in the storm were foul and unspeakable
presences that couldn’t go unnoticed by a man of Carver Hampton’s
powers. For one who was gifted with the ability to detect the intrusion