Darkfall

the basin was only three feet deep. However, if you stared into it long enough, it gradually began to appear much, much deeper than that. In some mysterious way, when you peered at the flickering light for a couple of minutes, when you tried hard to discern its source, your perspective abruptly and drastically changed, and you could see that the bottom of the hole was hundreds if not thousands of feet below. It wasn’t merely a hole in the dirt floor of the shed; not anymore; suddenly and magically, it was a doorway into the heart of the earth. But then, with a blink, it seemed only a shallow basin once more.
    Now, still singing, Lavelle leaned forward.
    He looked at the strange, pulsing orange light.
    He looked into the hole.
    Looked down.
    Down…
    Down into…
    Down into the pit.
    The Pit.
    XIII
    Shortly before noon, Nayva Rooney had finished cleaning the Dawson’s apartment.
    She had neither seen nor heard anything more of the rat-or whatever it had been-that she had pursued from room to room earlier in the morning. It had vanished.
    She wrote a note to Jack Dawson, asking him to call her this evening. He had to be told about the rat, so that he could arrange to have the building superintendent hire an exterminator. She fixed the note to the refrigerator with a magnetic plastic butterfly that was usually used to hold a shopping list in place.
    After she put on her rubber boots, coat, scarf, and gloves, she switched off the last light, the hall light. Now, the apartment was lit only by the thin, gray, useless daylight that seemed barely capable of penetrating the windows. The hall, windowless, was not lit at all. She stood perfectly still by the front door for more than a minute-listening.
    The apartment remained tomb-silent.
    At last, she let herself out and locked the door behind her.
    A few minutes after Nayva Rooney had gone, there was movement in the apartment.
    Something came out of Penny and Davey’s bedroom, into the gloomy hallway. It merged with the shadows. If Nayva had been there, she would have seen only its bright, glowing, fiery white eyes. It stood for a moment, just outside the door through which it had come, and then it moved down the hall toward the living room, its claws clicking on the wooden floor; it made a cold angry, hissing noise as it went.
    A second creature came out of the kids’ room. It, too, was well-hidden by the darkness in the apartment, just a shadow among shadows-except for its shining eyes.
    A third small, dark, hissing beast appeared.
    A fourth.
    A fifth.
    Another. And another…
    Soon, they were all over the apartment: crouching in corners; perching on furniture or squirming under it; slinking along the baseboard; climbing the walls with insectile skill; creeping behind the drapes; sniffing and hissing; scurrying restlessly from room to room and then back again; ceaselessly growling in what almost sounded like a guttural foreign language; staying, for the most part, in the shadows, as if even the pale winter light coming through the windows was too harsh for them.
    Then, suddenly, they all stopped moving and were motionless, as if a command had come to them. Gradually, they began to sway from side to side, their beaming eyes describing small arcs in the darkness. Their metronomic movement was in time with the song that Baba Lavelle sang in another, distant part of the city.
    Eventually, they stopped swaying.
    They did not become restless again.
    They waited in the shadows, motionless, eyes shining.
    Soon, they might be called upon to kill.
    They were ready. They were eager.

Chapter Three

    I
    Captain Walter Gresham, of Homicide, had a face like a shovel. Not that he was an ugly man; in fact, he was rather handsome in a sharp-edged sort of way. But his entire face sloped forward, all of his strong features pointing down and out, toward the tip of his chin, so that you were reminded of a garden spade.
    He arrived at the hotel a few minutes before noon and met with Jack and Rebecca at the end of the elevator alcove on the sixteenth floor, by a window that looked down on Fifth Avenue.
    “What we’ve got brewing here is a full-fledged gang war,” Gresham said. “We haven’t seen anything like this in my time. It’s like something out of the roaring twenties, for God’s sake! Even if it is just a bunch of hoods and scumbags killing one another, I don’t like it. Absolutely won’t tolerate it in my jurisdiction. I spoke with the Commissioner before I came over here, and