Darkfall

one foot, found the first step.
    Overhead, at the top of the stairs, a pair of eyes appeared only a few inches above the landing floor, as if disembodied, as if floating in the air, although they must have been attached to an animal about the size of a cat. It wasn’t a cat, of course. She wished it were. The eyes were as large as a cat’s eyes, too, and very bright, not merely reflective like the eyes of a cat, but so unnaturally bright that they glowed like two tiny lanterns. The color was odd, too: white, moon-pale, with the faintest trace of silvery blue. Those cold eyes glared down at her.
    She took her foot off the first step.
    The creature above slipped off the landing, onto the highest step, edging closer.
    Penny retreated.
    The thing descended two more steps, its advance betrayed only by its unblinking eyes. Darkness cloaked its form.
    Breathing hard, her heart pounding louder than the music above, she backed up until she collided with a metal storage shelf. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide.
    The thing was now a third of the way down the stairs and still coming.
    Penny felt the urge to pee. She pressed back against the shelves and squeezed her thighs together.
    The thing was halfway down the stairs. Moving faster.
    Overhead, in the music room, they had really gotten into the spirit of Frosty the Snowman , a lilt in their voices, belting it out with what Mrs. March always called “gusto.”
    From the corner of her eye, Penny saw something in the cellar, off to the right: a wink of soft light, a flash, a glow, movement. Daring to look away from the creature that was descending the stairs in front of her, she glanced into the unlighted room-and immediately wished she hadn’t.
    Eyes.
    Silver-white eyes.
    The darkness was full of them. Two eyes shone up at her from the floor, hardly more than a yard away, regarding her with a cold hunger. Two more eyes were little farther than a foot behind the first pair. Another four eyes gleamed frostily from a point at least three feet above the floor, in the center of the room, and for a moment she thought she had misjudged the height of these creatures, but then she realized two of them had climbed onto the worktable. Two, four, six pair of eyes peered malevolently at her from various shelves along the far wall. Three more pair were at floor level near the fire door that led to the furnace room. Some were perfectly still; some were moving restlessly back and forth; some were creeping slowly toward her. None of them blinked. Others were moving out from the space under the stairs. There were about twenty of the things: forty brightly glowing, vicious, unearthly eyes.
    Shaking, whimpering, Penny tore her own gaze away from the demonic horde in the cellar and looked at the stairs again.
    The lone beast that had started slinking down from the landing no more than a minute ago had now reached the bottom. It was on the last step.
    VI
    Both to the east and to the west of Vincent Vastagliano’s house, the neighbors were established in equally large, comfortable, elegantly furnished homes that might as well have been isolated country manors instead of townhouses. The city did not intrude into these stately places, and none of the occupants had seen or heard anything unusual during the night of blood and murder.
    In less than half an hour, Jack and Rebecca had exhausted that line of inquiry and had returned to the sidewalk. They kept their heads tucked down to present as small a target as possible to the wind, which had grown steadily more powerful. It was now a wicked, icy, lashing whip that snatched litter out of the gutters and flung it through the air, shook the bare trees with almost enough violence to crack the brittle limbs, snapped coattails with sharp reports, and stung exposed flesh.
    The snow flurries were falling in greater numbers now. In a few minutes, they would be coming down too thick to be called flurries any more. The street was still bare black macadam, but soon it would boast a fresh white skin.
    Jack and Rebecca headed back toward Vastagliano’s place and were almost there when someone called to them. Jack turned and saw Harry Ulbeck, the young officer who had earlier been on watch at the top of Vastagliano’s front steps; Harry was leaning out of one of the three black-and-whites that were parked at the curb. He said something, but the wind ripped his words into meaningless sounds. Jack went to the car, bent down to the open window, and said,