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.
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
building. 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