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.
He went to the window. In the light that spilled past him, he saw
footprints in the snow that covered the porch roof. They led out to the
edge. Lavelle had jumped down to the yard below.
Jack squeezed through the window, briefly snagging his coat on a shard
of glass, and went onto the roof.
In the cathedral, approximately seventy or eighty goblins had come out
of the vestibule. They were lined up on the communion rail and between
the supporting posts under the rail. Behind them, other beasts slouched
up the long aisle.
Father Walotsky was on his knees, praying, but he didn’t seem to be
doing any good, so far as Rebecca could see.
In fact, there were some bad signs. The goblins weren’t as sluggish as
they had been. Tails lashed. Mutant heads whipped back and forth.
Tongues flickered faster than before.
Rebecca wondered if they could, through sheer numbers, overcome the
benign power that held sway within the cathedral and that had, so far,
prevented them from attacking. As each of the demonic creatures
entered, it brought its own measure of malignant energy. If the balance
of power tipped in the other direction . . .
One of the goblins hissed. They had been perfectly silent since
entering the cathedral, but now one of them hissed, and then another,
and then three more, and in seconds all of them were hissing angrily.
Another bad sign.
Carver Hampton.
When he saw the demonic entity in the hallway, the floor suddenly seemed
a bit more solid to him. His heart began to pound, and the real world
came swimming back to him out of the tropical hallucination-although
this part of the real world contained, at this time, something from a
nightmare.
The thing in the hall skittered toward the open arch and the living
room. From Carver’s perspective, it looked enormous, at least his own
size, but he realized it wasn’t really as large as it seemed from his
peculiar floor-level point of view. But big enough. Oh, yes. Its head
was the size of his fist. Its sinuous, segmented, wormlike body was
half again as long as his arm. Its crablike legs ticked against the
wooden floor. The only features on its misshapen head were an ugly