how he could do that and still protect Davey.
“Daddy! Hurry!” Penny screamed from where she stood half in and half
out of the elevator.
“Daddy, let’s go, let’s go,” Davey said, clinging to him.
Much to Jack’s relief, Rebecca came out of the apartment, unharmed. She
fired one shot into the Jamisons’ foyer, then pulled the door shut.
By the time Jack reached the elevators, Rebecca was right behind him.
Gasping for breath, he put Davey down, and all seven of them, including
the doorman, crowded into the cab, and Keith hit the button that was
marked LOBBY.
The doors didn’t immediately slide shut.
“They’re gonna get in, they’re gonna get in,” Davey cried, voicing the
fear that had just flashed into everyone’s mind.
Keith pushed the LOBBY button again, kept his thumb on it this time.
Finally the doors slid shut.
But Jack didn’t feel any safer.
Now that he was closed up tight in the cramped cab, he wondered if they
would have been wiser to take the stairs. What if the demons could put
the lift out of commission, stop it between floors? What if they crept
into the elevator shaft and descended onto the stranded cab?
What if that monstrous horde found a way to get inside? God in heaven,
what if . . . ?
The elevator started down.
Jack looked up at the ceiling of the cab. There was an emergency escape
hatch. A way out. And a way in. This side of the hatch was
featureless: no hinges, no handles.
Apparently, it could be pushed up and out-or pulled up and out by rescue
workers on the other side. There would be a handle out there on the
roof of the cab, which would make it easy for the demons, if they came.
But since there wasn’t a handle on the inside, the hatch couldn’t be
held down; the forced entrance of those vicious creatures couldn’t be
resisted-if they came.
God, please, don’t let them come.
The elevator crawled down its long cables as slowly as it had pulled
itself up. Tenth floor . . . ninth . . .
Penny had taken Davey’s boot from Faye. She was helping her little
brother get his foot into it.
Eighth floor.
In a haunted voice that cracked more than once, but still with her
familiar imperious tone, Faye said, “What were they, Jack? What were
those things in the vents?”
“Voodoo,” Jack said, keeping his eyes on the lighted floor indicator
above the doors.
Seventh floor.
“Is this some sort of joke?” the doorman asked.
“Voodoo devils, I think,” Jack told Faye, “but don’t ask me to explain
how they got here or anything about them.”
Shaken as she was, and in spite of what she’d heard and seen in the
apartment, Faye said, “Are you out of your mind?”
“Almost wish I was.”
Sixth floor.
“There aren’t such things as voodoo devils,” Faye said. “There aren’t
any-”
“Shut up,” Keith told her. “You didn’t see them.
You left the guest room before they came out of the vent in there.”
Fifth floor.
Penny said, “And you’d gotten out of the apartment before they started
coming through the living room vent, Aunt Faye. You just didn’t see
them-or you’d believe.”
Fourth floor.
The doorman said, “Mrs. Jamison, how well do you know these people? Are
they-”
Ignoring and interrupting him, Rebecca spoke to Faye and Keith: “Jack
and I have been on a weird case.
Psychopathic killer. Claims to waste his victims with voodoo curses.”
Third floor.
Maybe we’re going to make it, Jack thought. Maybe we won’t be stopped
between floors. Maybe we’ll get out of here alive.
And maybe not.
To Rebecca, Faye said, “Surely you don’t believe in voodoo.”
“I didn’t,” Rebecca said. “But now
. . . yeah.”
With a nasty shock, Jack realized the lobby might be teeming with small,
vicious creatures. When the elevator doors opened, the nightmare horde
might come rushing in, clawing and biting.
“If it’s a joke, I don’t get it,” the doorman said.
Second floor.
Suddenly Jack didn’t want to reach the lobby, didn’t want the lift doors
to open. Suddenly he just wanted to go on descending in peace, hour