“They were babbling about goblins, but-”
“It wasn’t just babble,” Rebecca said, finding it odd to be the one
professing and defending a belief in the supernatural, she who had
always been anything but excessively open-minded on the subject. She
hesitated.
Then, as succinctly as possible, she told him about Lavelle, the
slaughter of the Carramazzas, and the voodoo devils that were now after
Jack Dawson’s children.
When she finished, the priest said nothing and couldn’t meet her eyes.
He stared at the floor for long seconds.
She said, “Of course, you don’t believe me.”
He looked up and appeared to be embarrassed. “Oh, I don’t think you’re
lying to me . . . exactly. I’m sure you believe everything you’ve
told me. But, to me, voodoo is a sham, a set of primitive
superstitions. I’m a priest of the Holy Roman Church, and I believe in
only one Truth, the Truth that Our Savior-”
“You believe in Heaven, don’t you? And Hell?”
“Of course. That’s part of Catholic-”
“These things have come straight up from Hell, Father. If I’d told you
that it was a Satanist who had summoned these demons, if I’d never
mentioned the word voodoo, then maybe you still wouldn’t have believed
me, but you wouldn’t have dismissed the possibility so fast, either,
because your religion encompasses Satan and Satanists.”
“I think you should-”
Davey screamed.
Penny said, “They’re here! ”
Rebecca turned, breath caught in her throat, heart hanging in mid-beat.
Beyond the archway through which the center aisle of the nave entered
the vestibule, there were shadows, and in those shadows were
silver-white eyes glowing brightly. Eyes of fire. Lots of them.
Jack drove the snow-packed streets, and as he approached each
intersection, he somehow sensed when a right turn was required, when he
should go left instead, and when he should just speed straight through.
He didn’t know how he sensed those things; each time, a feeling came
over him, a feeling he couldn’t put into words, and he gave himself to
it, followed the guidance that was being given to him. It was certainly
unorthodox procedure for a cop accustomed to employing less exotic
techniques in the search for a suspect. It was also creepy, and he
didn’t like it. But he wasn’t about to complain, for he desperately
wanted to find Lavelle.
Thirty-five minutes after they had collected the two small jars of holy
water, Jack made a left turn into a street of pseudo-Victorian houses.
He stopped in front of the fifth one. It was a three-story brick house
with lots of gingerbread trim. It was in need of repairs and painting,
as were all the houses in the block, a fact that even the snow and
darkness couldn’t hide. There were no lights in the house; not one. The
windows were perfectly black.
“We’re here,” Jack told Carver.
He cut the engine, switched off the headlights.
Four goblins crept out of the vestibule, into the center aisle, into the
light that, while not bright, revealed their grotesque forms in more
stomach-churning detail than Rebecca would have liked.
At the head of the pack was a foot-tall, man-form creature with four
fire-filled eyes, two in its forehead.
Its head was the size of an apple, and in spite of the four eyes, most
of the misshapen skull was given over to a mouth crammed full and
bristling with teeth. It also had four arms and was carrying a crude
spear in one spikefingered hand.
It raised the spear above its head in a gesture of challenge and
defiance.
Perhaps because of the spear, Rebecca was suddenly possessed of a
strange but unshakable conviction that the man-form beast had once
been-in very ancient times-a proud and blood-thirsty African warrior who
had been condemned to Hell for his crimes and who was now forced to
endure the agony and humiliation of having his soul embedded within a
small, deformed body.
The man-form goblin, the three even more hideous creatures behind it,
and the other beasts moving through the dark vestibule (and now seen
only as pairs of shining eyes) all moved slowly, as if the very air
inside this house of worship was, for them, an immensely heavy burden