Darkfall

and sniffing and snorting. It tugged at Jack’s coat. It stood his hair on end, then plastered it to his head, then stood it on end again. It expelled its frigid breath in his face and slipped cold fingers under the collar of his coat.
    He crossed to that edge of the roof which was nearest the next brownstone. The crenelated parapet was waist-high. He leaned against it, looked out and down. As he had expected, the gap between the buildings was only about four feet wide.
    Rebecca and the kids joined him, and Jack said, “We’ll cross over.”
    “How do we bridge it?” Rebecca asked.
    “Must be something around that’ll do the job.”
    He turned and surveyed the roof, which wasn’t entirely cast in darkness; in fact, it possessed a moon-pale luminescence, thanks to the sparkling blanket of snow that covered it. As far as he could see, there were no loose pieces of lumber or anything else that could be used to make a bridge between the two buildings. He ran to the elevator housing and looked on the other side of it, and he looked on the far side of the exit box that contained the door at the head of the stairs, but he found nothing. Perhaps something useful lay underneath the snow, but there was no way he could locate it without first shoveling off the entire roof.
    He returned to Rebecca and the kids. Penny and Davey remained hunkered down by the parapet, sheltering against it, keeping out of the biting wind, but Rebecca rose to meet him.
    He said, “We’ll have to jump.”
    “What?”
    “Across. We’ll have to jump across.”
    “We can’t,” she said.
    “It’s less than four feet.”
    “But we can’t get a running start.”
    “Don’t need it. Just a small gap.”
    “We’ll have to stand on this wall,” she said, touching the parapet, “and jump from there.”
    “Yeah.”
    “In this wind, at least one of us is sure as hell going to lose his balance even before he makes the jump-get hit by a hard gust of wind and just fall right off the wall.”
    “We’ll make it,” Jack said, trying to pump up his own enthusiasm for the venture.
    She shook her head. Her hair blew in her face. She pushed it out of her eyes. She said, “Maybe, with luck, both you and I could do it. Maybe. But not the kids.”
    “Okay. So one of us will jump on the other roof, and one of us will stay here, and between us we’ll hand the kids across, from here to there.”
    “Pass them over the gap?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Over a fifty-foot drop?”
    “There’s really not much danger,” he said, wishing he believed it. “From these two roofs, we could reach across and hold hands.”
    “Holding hands is one thing. But transferring something as heavy as a child-”
    “I’ll make sure you have a good grip on each of them before I let go. And as you haul them in, you can brace yourself against the parapet over there. No sweat.”
    “Penny’s getting to be a pretty big girl.”
    “Not that big. We can handle her.”
    “But-”
    “Rebecca, those things are in this building, right under our feet, looking for us right this very minute.”
    She nodded. “Who goes first?”
    “You.”
    “Gee, thanks.”
    He said, “I can help you get up on top of the wall, and I can hold you until just a split second before you jump. That way, there’s hardly any chance you could lose your balance and fall.”
    “But after I’m over there and after we’ve passed the kids across, who’s going to help you get on top of the wall and keep your balance up there?”
    “Let me worry about that when the time comes,” he said.
    Wind like a freight train whistled across the roof.
    V
    Snow didn’t cling to the corrugated metal storage shed at the rear of Lavelle’s property. The falling flakes melted when they touched the roof and walls of that small structure. Wisps of steam were actually rising from the leeward slope of the roof; those pale snakes of vapor writhed up until they came within range of the wind’s brisk broom; then they were swept away.
    Inside, the shed was stifling hot.
    Nothing moved except the shadows. Rising out of the hole in the floor, the irregularly pulsing orange light was slightly brighter than it had been earlier. The flickering of it caused the shadows to shiver, giving an illusion of movement to every inanimate object in the dirt-floored room.
    The cold night air wasn’t the only thing that failed to penetrate these metal walls. Even the shrieking and soughing of the storm was inaudible herein. The