Darkfall

But I’m not in this man’s league. For instance, with great effort, I might be able to put a curse on his own supply of herbs and powders. I might be able to reach out and cause a few bottles to fall off the shelves in his study or wherever he keeps them-if I had seen the place first, of course. However, I wouldn’t be able to cause so much destruction as he did. And I wouldn’t be able to conjure up a serpent, as he did. I haven’t that much power, that much finesse.”
    “You could try.”
    “No. Absolutely not. In any contest of powers, he would crush me. Like a bug.”
    Hampton went to the door, opened it. The bell above it rang. Hampton stepped aside, holding the door wide open.
    Jack pretended not to get the hint. “Listen, if you’ll just keep asking around-”
    “No. I can’t help you any more, Lieutenant. Can’t you get that through your head?”
    A frigid, blustery wind huffed and moaned and hissed and puffed at the open door, spraying snowflakes like flecks of spittle.
    “Listen,” Jack said. “Lavelle never has to know that you’re asking about him. He-”
    “He would find out!” Hampton said angrily, his eyes wide open as the door he was holding. “He knows everything-or can find it out. Everything.”
    “But-”
    “Please go,” Hampton said.
    “Hear me out. I-”
    “Go.”
    “But-”
    “Go, get out, leave, now, damnit, now!” Hampton said in a tone of voice composed of one part anger, one part terror, and one part panic.
    The big man’s almost hysterical fear of Lavelle had begun to affect Jack. A chill rippled through him, and he found that his hands were suddenly clammy.
    He sighed, nodded. “All right, all right, Mr. Hampton. But I sure wish-”
    “Now, damnit, now!” Hampton shouted.
    Jack got out of there.
    V
    The door to Rada slammed behind him.
    In the snow-quieted street, the sound was like a rifle blast.
    Jack turned and looked back, saw Carver Hampton drawing down the shade that covered the glass panel in the center of the door. In bold white letters on the dark canvas, one word was printed: CLOSED.
    A moment later the lights went out in the shop.
    The snow on the sidewalk was now half an inch deep, twice what it had been when he had gone into Hampton’s store. It was still coming down fast, too, out of a sky that was even more somber and more claustrophobically close than it had been twenty minutes ago.
    Cautiously negotiating the slippery pavement, Jack started toward the patrol car that was waiting for him at the curb, white exhaust trail pluming up from it. He had taken only three steps when he was stopped by a sound that struck him as being out of place here on the wintry street: a ringing telephone. He looked right, left, and saw a pay phone near the corner, twenty feet behind the waiting black-and- white. In the uncitylike stillness that the muffling snow brought to the street, the ringing was so loud that it seemed to be issuing from the air immediately in front of him.
    He stared at the phone. It wasn’t in a booth. There weren’t many real booths around these days, the kind with the folding door, like a small closet, that offered privacy; too expensive, Ma Bell said. This was a phone on a pole, with a scoop- shaped sound baffle bending around three sides of it. Over the years, he had passed a few other public telephones that had been ringing when there was no one waiting nearby to answer them; on those occasions, he had never given them a second glance, had never been the least bit tempted to lift the receiver and find out who was there; it had been none of his business. Just as this was none of his business. And yet… this time was somehow… different. The ringing snaked out like a lariat of sound, roping him, snaring him, holding him.
    Ringing…
    Ringing…
    Insistent.
    Beckoning.
    Hypnotic.
    Ringing…
    A strange and disturbing transformation occurred in the Harlem neighborhood around him. Only three things remained solid and real: the telephone, a narrow stretch of snow-covered pavement leading to the telephone, and Jack himself. The rest of the world seemed to recede into a mist that rose out of nowhere. The buildings appeared to fade away, dissolving as if this were a film in which one scene was fading out to be replaced by another. The few cars progressing hesitantly along the snowy street began to… evaporate; they were replaced by the creeping mist, a white-white mist that was like a movie theater screen splashed with brilliant light but with