His long-fingered hands moved slowly up and down his lean body in a
sensuous caress.
His breathing was labored as he inhaled the heavy warm air and exhaled
an even heavier, warmer vapor.
The beads of sweat on his ebony skin gleamed with reflected orange
light.
Although he had not switched on the overhead light when he’d entered,
the interior of the shed wasn’t pitch black. The perimeter of the
small, windowless room was shrouded in shadows, but a vague orange glow
rose from the floor in the center of the chamber. It came out of a hole
about five feet in diameter. Lavelle had dug it while performing a
complicated, six-hour ritual, during which he had spoken to many of the
evil gods-Congo Savanna, Congo Maussai, Congo Moudongue-and the evil
angels like the Zandor, the Ibos “je rouge,” the Petro Maman Pemba, and
Ti Jean Pie Fin.
The excavation was shaped like a meteor crater, the walls sloping inward
to form a basin. The center of the basin was only three feet deep.
However, if you stared into it long enough, it gradually began to appear
much, much deeper than that. In some mysterious way, when you peered at
the flickering light for a couple of minutes, when you tried hard to
discern its source, your perspective abruptly and drastically changed,
and you could see that the bottom of the hole was hundreds if not
thousands of feet below. It wasn’t merely a hole in the dirt floor of
the shed; not anymore; suddenly and magically, it was a doorway into the
heart of the earth.
But then, with a blink, it seemed only a shallow basin once more.
Now, still singing, Lavelle leaned forward.
He looked at the strange, pulsing orange light.
He looked into the hole.
Looked down.
Down . . .
Down into . . .
Down into the pit.
The Pit.
Shortly before noon, Nayva Rooney had finished cleaning the Dawson’s
apartment.
She had neither seen nor heard anything more of the rat-or whatever it
had been-that she had pursued from room to room earlier in the morning.
It had vanished.
She wrote a note to Jack Dawson, asking him to call her this evening. He
had to be told about the rat, so that he could arrange to have the
building superintendent hire an exterminator. She fixed the note to the
refrigerator with a magnetic plastic butterfly that was usually used to
hold a shopping list in place.
After she put on her rubber boots, coat, scarf, and gloves, she switched
off the last light, the hall light.
Now, the apartment was lit only by the thin, gray, useless daylight that
seemed barely capable of penetrating the windows. The hall, windowless,
was not lit at all.
She stood perfectly still by the front door for more than a
minute-listening.
The apartment remained tomb-silent.
At last, she let herself out and locked the door behind her.
A few minutes after Nayva Rooney had gone, there was movement in the
apartment.
Something came out of Penny and Davey’s bedroom, into the gloomy
hallway. It merged with the shadows. If Nayva had been there, she
would have seen only its bright, glowing, fiery white eyes. It stood for
a moment, just outside the door through which it had come, and then it
moved down the hall toward the living room, its claws clicking on the
wooden floor; it made a cold angry, hissing noise as it went.
A second creature came out of the kids’ room. It, too, was well-hidden
by the darkness in the apartment, just a shadow among shadows-except for
its shining eyes.
A third small, dark, hissing beast appeared.
A fourth.
A fifth.
Another. And another . . .
Soon, they were all over the apartment: crouching in corners; perching
on furniture or squirming under it; slinking along the baseboard;
climbing the walls with insectile skill; creeping behind the drapes;
sniffing and hissing; scurrying restlessly from room to room and then
back again; ceaselessly growling in what almost sounded like a guttural
foreign language; staying, for the most part, in the shadows, as if even
the pale winter light coming through the windows was too harsh for them.