Darkfall

pinched, and very pale except for enormous dark circles around his eyes. Rebecca’s heart went out to him, and she wished there was something she could do to make him feel better, but she didn’t feel so terrific herself.
    The night was too cold and the heated air rising out of the street wasn’t heated enough to warm Rebecca as she stood at the edge of the grate and allowed the wind to blow the foul-smelling steam in her face; however, there was an illusion of warmth, if not the real thing, and at the moment the mere illusion was sufficiently spirit- lifting to forestall everyone’s complaints.
    To Penny, Rebecca said, “How’re you doing, honey?”
    “I’m okay,” the girl said, although she looked haggard. “I’m just worried about Davey.”
    Rebecca was amazed by the girl’s resilience and spunk.
    Jack said, “We’ve got to get a car. I’ll only feel safe when we’re in a car, rolling, moving; they can’t get at us when we’re moving.”
    “And it’ll b-b-be warm in a c-car,” Davey said.
    But the only cars on the street were those that were parked at the curb, unreachable beyond a wall of snow thrown up by the plows and not yet hauled away. If any cars had been abandoned in the middle of the avenue, they had already been towed away by the snow emergency crews.
    None of those workmen were in sight now. No plows, either.
    “Even if we could find a car along here that wasn’t plowed in,” Rebecca said, “it isn’t likely there’d be keys in it-or snow chains on the tires.”
    “I wasn’t thinking of these cars,” Jack said. “But if we can find a pay phone, put in a call to headquarters, we could have them send out a department car for us.”
    “Isn’t that a phone over there?” Penny asked, pointing across the broad avenue.
    “Snow’s so thick, I can’t be sure,” Jack said, squinting at the object that had drawn Penny’s attention. “It might be a phone.”
    “Let’s go have a look,” Rebecca said.
    Even as she spoke, a small but sharply clawed hand came out of the grating, from the space between two of the steel bars.
    Davey saw it first, cried out, stumbled back, away from the rising steam.
    A goblin’s hand.
    And another one, scrabbling at the toe of Rebecca’s boot. She stomped on it, saw shining silver-white eyes in the darkness under the grate, and jumped back.
    A third hand appeared, and a fourth, and Penny and Jack got out of the way, and suddenly the entire steel grating rattled in its circular niche, tilted up at one end, slammed back into place, but immediately tilted up again, a little farther than an inch this time, but fell back, rattled, bounced. The horde below was trying to push out of the tunnel.
    Although the grating was large and immensely heavy, Rebecca was sure the creatures below would dislodge it and come boiling out of the darkness and steam. Jack must have been equally convinced, for he snatched up Davey and ran. Rebecca grabbed Penny’s hand, and they followed Jack, fleeing down the blizzard-pounded avenue, not moving as fast as they should, not moving very fast at all. None of them dared to look back.
    Ahead, on the far side of the divided thoroughfare, a Jeep station wagon turned the corner, tires churning effortlessly through the snow. It bore the insignia of the city department of streets.
    Jack and Rebecca and the kids were headed downtown, but the Jeep was headed uptown. Jack angled across the avenue, toward the center divider and the other lanes beyond it, trying to get in front of the Jeep and cut it off before it was past them.
    Rebecca and Penny followed.
    If the driver of the Jeep saw them, he didn’t give any indication of it. He didn’t slow down.
    Rebecca was waving frantically as she ran, and Penny was shouting, and Rebecca started shouting, too, and so did Jack, all of them shouting their fool heads off because the Jeep was their only hope of escape.
    VII
    At the table in the brightly lighted kitchen above Rada , Carver Hampton played a few hands of solitaire. He hoped the game would take his mind off the evil that was loose in the winter night, and he hoped it would help him overcome his feelings of guilt and shame, which plagued him because he hadn’t done anything to stop that evil from having its way in the world. But the cards couldn’t distract him. He kept looking out the window beside the table, sensing something unspeakable out there in the dark. His guilt grew stronger instead of weaker; it chewed on his