seen by some of the other boys in his class.
She suddenly felt small and helpless herself. But that wasn’t good. Not
good at all. She had to be strong for Davey’s sake.
Letting go of his chin, she said, “Listen, Davey, we’ve got to sit down
and talk. About Mom. About people dying, why it happens, you know, all
that stuff, like what it means, how it’s not the end for them but maybe
only the beginning, up there in Heaven, and how we’ve got to just go on,
no matter what.. “Cause we do.
We’ve got to go on. Mom would be very disappointed in us if we didn’t
just go on. And if anything happened to Dad-which nothing is going to
happen to him-but if by some wild chance it did, then he’d want us to go
on, just the way Mom would want. He’d be very unhappy with us if we-”
“Penny! Davey! Over here!”
A yellow cab was at the curb. The rear window was down, and Aunt Faye
leaned out, waved at them.
Davey bolted across the sidewalk, suddenly so eager to be away from any
talk of death that he was even glad to see his twittering old Aunt Faye.
Damn! I botched it, Penny thought. I was too blunt about it.
In that same instant, before she followed Davey to the taxi, before she
even took one step, a sharp pain lanced through her left ankle. She
twitched, yelped, looked down-and was immobilized by terror.
Between the bottom of the green gate and the pavement, there was a
four-inch gap. A hand had reached through that gap, from the darkness
in the covered serviceway beyond, and it had seized her ankle.
She couldn’t scream. Her voice was gone.
It wasn’t a human hand, either. Maybe twice the size of a cat’s paw.
But not a paw. It was a completely although crudely-formed hand with
fingers and a thumb.
She couldn’t even whisper. Her throat was locked.
The hand wasn’t skin-colored. It was an ugly, mottled
gray-green-yellow, like bruised and festering flesh. And it was sort of
lumpy, a little ragged looking.
Breathing was no easier than screaming.
The small gray-green-yellow fingers were tapered and ended in sharp
claws. Two of those claws had punctured her rubber boot.
She thought of the plastic baseball bat.
Last night. In her room. The thing under the bed.
She thought of the shining eyes in the school basement.
And now this.
Two of the small fingers had thrust inside her boot End were scraping at
her, digging at her, tearing, gouging.
Abruptly, her breath came to her in a rush. She gasped, sucked in
lungsful of frigid air, which snapped her out of the terror-induced
trance that, thus far, had held her there by the gate. She jerked her
foot away from the hand, tore loose, and was surprised that she was able
to do so. She turned and ran to the taxi plunged inside, and yanked the
door shut.
She looked back toward the gate. There was nothing unusual in sight, no
creature with small claw-tipped hands, no goblin capering in the snow.
The taxi pulled away from Wellton School.
Aunt Faye and Davey were talking excitedly about the snowstorm which,
Faye said, was supposed to dump ten or twelve inches before it was done.
Neither of them seemed to be aware that Penny was scared half to death.
While they chattered, Penny reached down and felt her boot. At the
ankle, the rubber was torn. A flap of it hung loose.
She unzippered the boot, slipped her hand inside, under her sock, and
felt the wound on her ankle. It burned a little. When she brought her
hand out of the boot, there was some blood glistening on her fingertips.
Aunt Faye saw it. “What’s happened to you, dear?”
“It’s okay,” Penny said.
“That’s blood.”
“Just a scratch.”
Davey paled at the sight of the blood.
Penny tried to reassure him, although she was afraid that her voice was
noticeably shaky and that her face would betray her anxiety: “It’s
nothing, Davey. I’m all right.”
Aunt Faye insisted on changing places with Davey, so she would be next