He turned and clambered up the steps. He stumbled once in the
blackness, almost fell, regained his balance.
By the time he reached the master bedroom, the noises behind him were
more savage, closer, louder-and hungrier.
Vague shafts of weak light came through the bedroom windows, errant
beams from the streetlamps outside, lightly frosting the eighteenth
century Italian canopy bed and the other antiques, gleaming on the
beveled edges of the crystal paperweights that were displayed along the
top of the writing desk that stood between the two windows. If Vince
had turned and looked back, he would have been able to see at least the
bare outline of his pursuer. But he didn’t look. He was afraid to
look.
He got a whiff of a foul odor. Sulphur? Not quite, but something like
it.
On a deep, instinctual level, he knew what was coming after him. His
conscious mind could not-or would not-put a name to it, but his
subconscious knew what it was, and that was why he fled from it in blind
panic, as wide-eyed and spooked as a dumb animal reacting to a bolt of
lightning.
He hurried through the shadows to the master bath, which opened off the
bedroom. In the cloying darkness he collided hard with the half-closed
bathroom door. It crashed all the way open. Slightly stunned by the
impact, he stumbled into the large bathroom, groped for the door,
slammed and locked it behind him.
In that last moment of vulnerability, as the door swung shut, he had
seen nightmarish, silvery eyes glowing in the darkness. Not just two
eyes. A dozen of them.
Maybe more.
Now, something struck the other side of the door.
Struck it again. And again. There were several of them out there, not
just one. The door shook, and the lock rattled, but it held.
The creatures in the bedroom screeched and hissed considerably louder
than before. Although their icy cries were utterly alien, like nothing
Vince had ever heard before, the meaning was clear; these were obviously
bleats of anger and disappointment. The things pursuing him had been
certain that he was within their grasp, and they had chosen not to take
his escape in a spirit of good sportsmanship.
The things. Odd as it was, that was the best word for them, the only
word: things.
He felt as if he were losing his mind, yet he could not deny the
primitive perceptions and instinctive understanding that had raised his
hackles. Things. Not attack dogs. Not any animal he’d ever seen or
heard about.
This was something out of a nightmare; only something from a nightmare
could have reduced Ross Morrant to a defenseless, whimpering victim.
The creatures scratched at the other side of the door, gouged and
scraped and splintered the wood. Judging from the sound, their claws
were sharp. Damned sharp.
What the hell were they?
Vince was always prepared for violence because violence was an integral
part of the world in which he moved. You couldn’t expect to be a drug
dealer and lead a life as quiet as that of a schoolteacher. But he had
never anticipated an attack like this. A man with a gun -yes. A man
with a knife-he could handle that, too.
A bomb wired to the ignition of his car-that was certainly within the
realm of possibility. But this was madness.
As the things outside tried to chew and claw and batter their way
through the door, Vince fumbled in the darkness until he found the
toilet. He put the lid down on the seat, sat there, and reached for the
telephone.
When he’d been twelve years old, he had seen, for the first time, the
telephone in his uncle Gennaro Carramazza’s bathroom, and from that
moment it had seemed to him that having a phone in the can was the
ultimate symbol of a man’s importance, proof that he was indispensable
and wealthy. As soon as he’d been old enough to get an apartment of his
own, Vince had had a phone installed in every room, including the john,
and he’d had one in every master bath in every apartment and house since
then. In terms of self-esteem, the bathroom phone meant as much to him