She had no doubt that they were there.
She took a deep breath. She was determined not to lose her head. She
wasn’t a child.
They won’t hurt me, she thought.
But she couldn’t convince herself.
She shuffled cautiously to the foot of the stairs, the carry-all in one
hand, her other hand out in front of her, feeling her way as if she were
blind, which she might as well have been.
The cellar had two windows, but they were small rectangles set high in
the wall, at street level, with no more than one square foot of glass in
each of them. Besides, they were dirty on the outside; even on a bright
day, those grimy panes did little to illuminate the basement.
On a cloudy day like today, with a storm brewing, the windows gave forth
only a thin, milky light that traveled no more than a few inches into
the cellar before expiring.
She reached the foot of the stairs and looked up.
Deep, deep blackness.
Mrs. March was still hammering on the piano, and the kids were still
singing about the snowman that had come to life.
Penny raised one foot, found the first step.
Overhead, at the top of the stairs, a pair of eyes appeared only a few
inches above the landing floor, as if disembodied, as if floating in the
air, although they must have been attached to an animal about the size
of a cat. It wasn’t a cat, of course. She wished it were. The eyes
were as large as a cat’s eyes, too, and very bright, not merely
reflective like the eyes of a cat, but so unnaturally bright that they
glowed like two tiny lanterns.
The color was odd, too: white, moon-pale, with the faintest trace of
silvery blue. Those cold eyes glared down at her.
She took her foot off the first step.
The creature above slipped off the landing, onto the highest step,
edging closer.
Penny retreated.
The thing descended two more steps, its advance betrayed only by its
unblinking eyes. Darkness cloaked its form.
Breathing hard, her heart pounding louder than the music above, she
backed up until she collided with a metal storage shelf. There was
nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide.
The thing was now a third of the way down the stairs and still coming.
Penny felt the urge to pee. She pressed back against the shelves and
squeezed her thighs together.
The thing was halfway down the stairs. Moving faster.
Overhead, in the music room, they had really gotten into the spirit of
Frosty the Snowman, a lilt in their voices, belting it out with what
Mrs. March always called “gusto.”
From the corner of her eye, Penny saw something in the cellar, off to
the right: a wink of soft light, a flash, a glow, movement. Daring to
look away from the creature that was descending the stairs in front of
her, she glanced into the unlighted room-and immediately wished she
hadn’t.
Eyes.
Silver-white eyes.
The darkness was full of them. Two eyes shone up at her from the floor,
hardly more than a yard away, regarding her with a cold hunger. Two
more eyes were little farther than a foot behind the first pair. Another
four eyes gleamed frostily from a point at least three feet above the
floor, in the center of the room, and for a moment she thought she had
misjudged the height of these creatures, but then she realized two of
them had climbed onto the worktable. Two, four, six pair of eyes peered
malevolently at her from various shelves along the far wall. Three more
pair were at floor level near the fire door that led to the furnace
room. Some were perfectly still; some were moving restlessly back and
forth;
some were creeping slowly toward her. None of them blinked. Others
were moving out from the space under the stairs. There were about
twenty of the things: forty brightly glowing, vicious, unearthly eyes.
Shaking, whimpering, Penny tore her own gaze away from the demonic horde
in the cellar and looked at the stairs again.
The lone beast that had started slinking down from the landing no more