Darkfall

the murders look strange in order to frighten his adversaries with the threat of voodoo curses, but it was quite something else to imagine that the curses actually worked.
    Then again… What about the locked bathroom? What about the fact that Vastagliano and Ross hadn’t been able to kill even one of their attackers? What about the lack of animal droppings?
    Rebecca must have known what he was thinking, for she scowled and said, “Come on. Let’s talk to the neighbors.”
    The wind suddenly woke, breathed, raged. Spitting flecks of snow, it came along the street as if it were a living beast, a very cold and angry wind.
    V
    Mrs. Quillen, Penny’s teacher at Wellton School, was unable to understand why a vandal would have wrecked only one locker.
    “Perhaps he intended to ruin them all but had second thoughts. Or maybe he started with yours, Penny dear, then heard a sound he couldn’t place, thought someone was coming, got frightened, and ran. But we keep the school locked up tight as a drum at night, of course, and there’s the alarm system, too. However did he get in and out?”
    Penny knew it wasn’t a vandal. She knew it was something a whole lot stranger than that. She knew the trashing of her locker was somehow connected with the eerie experience she’d had last night in her room. But she didn’t know how to express this knowledge without sounding like a child afraid of boogeymen, so she didn’t try to explain to Mrs. Quillen those things which, in truth, she couldn’t even explain to herself.
    After some discussion, much sympathy, and even more bafflement, Mrs. Quillen sent Penny to the basement where the supplies and spare textbooks were kept on well-ordered storage shelves.
    “Get replacements for everything that was destroyed, Penny. All the books, new pencils, a three-ring notebook with a pack of filler, and a new tablet. And don’t dawdle, please. We’ll be starting the math lesson in a few minutes, and you know that’s where you need to work the hardest.”
    Penny went down the front stairs to the ground floor, paused at the main doors to look through the beveled glass windows at the swirling puffs of snow, then hurried back the hall to the rear of the building, past the deserted gymnasium, past the music room where a class was about to begin.
    The cellar door was at the very end of the hallway. She opened it and found the light switch. A long, narrow flight of stairs led down.
    The ground-floor hallway, through which she’d just passed, had smelled of chalk dust that had escaped from classrooms, pine- scented floor wax, and the dry heat of the forced-air furnace. But as she descended the narrow steps, she noticed that the smells of the cellar were different from those upstairs. She detected the mild lime- rich odor of concrete dust. Insecticide lent a pungent note to the air; she knew they sprayed every month to discourage silverfish from making a meal of the books stored here. And, underlying everything else, there was a slightly damp smell, a vague but nonetheless unpleasant mustiness.
    She reached the bottom of the stairs. Her footsteps rang sharply, crisply on the concrete floor and echoed hollowly in a far corner.
    The basement extended under the entire building and was divided into two chambers. At the opposite end from the stairs lay the furnace room, beyond a heavy metal fire door that was always kept closed. The largest of the two rooms was on this side of the door. A work table occupied the center, and free-standing metal storage shelves were lined up along the walls, all crammed full of books and supplies.
    Penny took a folding carry-all basket from a rack, opened it, and collected the items she needed. She had just located the last of the textbooks when she heard a strange sound behind her. That sound. The hissing-scrabbling-muttering noise that she had heard last night in her bedroom.
    She whirled.
    As far as she could see, she was alone.
    The problem was that she couldn’t see everywhere. Deep shadows coiled under the stairs. In one corner of the room, over by the fire door, a ceiling light was burned out. Shadows had claimed that area. Furthermore, each unit of metal shelving stood on six-inch legs, and the gap between the lowest shelf and the floor was untouched by light. There were a lot of places where something small and quick could hide.
    She waited, frozen, listening, and ten long seconds elapsed, then fifteen, twenty, and the sound didn’t come again, so she