Had it been trying to drag her down and kill her?
Right there on the street?
No. In order to kill her, the creature-and others like it, others with
the shining silver eyes-would have had to come out from behind the gate,
into the open, where Mrs. Shepherd and others would have seen them. And
Penny was pretty sure the goblins didn’t want to be seen by anyone but
her. They were secretive. No, they definitely hadn’t meant to kill her
back there at the school; they had only meant to give her a good scare,
to let her know they were still lurking around, waiting for the right
opportunity….
But why?
Why did they want her and, presumably, Davey, instead of some other
kids?
What made goblins angry? What did you have to do to make them come
after you like this?
She couldn’t think of anything she had done that would make anyone
terribly angry with her; certainly not goblins.
Confused, miserable, frightened, she opened her eyes and looked out the
window. Snow was piling up everywhere. In her heart, she felt as cold
as the icy, windscoured street beyond the window.
PART TWO
Wednesday, 5:30 P.M.-11:00P.M.
Darkness devours every shining day.
Darkness demands and always has its way.
Darkness listens, watches, waits.
Darkness claims the day and celebrates.
Sometimes in silence darkness comes.
Sometimes with a gleeful banging of drums.
-THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
Who is more f oolishthe child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of
the light? -MAURICE FREEHILL
CHAPTER FOUR
At five-thirty, Jack and Rebecca went into Captain Walter Gresham’s
office to present him with the manpower and equipment requirements of
the task force, as well as to discuss strategy in the investigation.
During the afternoon, two more members of the Carramazza crime family
had been murdered, along with their bodyguards. Already the press was
calling it the bloodiest gang war since Prohibition. What the press
still didn’t know was that the victims (except for the first two) had
not been stabbed or shot or garroted or hung on meat hooks in
traditional cosa nostril style. For the time being, the police had
chosen not to reveal that all but the first two victims had been
savagely bitten to death. When reporters uncovered that puzzling and
grotesque fact, they would realize this was one of the biggest stories
of the decade.
“That’s when it’ll get really bad,” Gresham said.
“They’ll be all over us like fleas on a dog.”
The heat was on, about to get even hotter, and Gresham was as fidgety as
a toad on a griddle. Jack and Rebecca remained seated in front of the
captain’s desk, but Gresham couldn’t remain still behind it. As they
conducted their business, the captain paced the room, went repeatedly to
the windows, lit a cigarette, smoked less than a third of it, stubbed it
out, realized what he had done, and lit another.
Finally the time came for Jack to tell Gresham about his latest visit to
Carver Hampton’s shop and about the telephone call from Baba Lavelle. He
had never felt more awkward than he did while recounting those events
under Gresham’s skeptical gaze.
He would have felt better if Rebecca had been on his side, but again
they were in adversary positions. She was angry with him because he
hadn’t gotten back to the office until ten minutes past three, and she’d
had to do a lot of the task force preparations on her own. He explained
that the snowy streets were choked with crawling traffic, but she was
having none of it. She listened to his story, was as angry as he was
about the threat to his kids, but was not the least bit convinced that
he had experienced anything even remotely supernatural. In fact, she
was frustrated by his insistence that a great deal about the incident at
the pay phone was just plain uncanny.
When Jack finished recounting those events for Gresham, the captain
turned to Rebecca and said, “What do you make of it?”
She said, “I think we can now safely assume that Lavelle is a raving
lunatic, not just another hood who wants to make a bundle in the drug