Darkfall

to go on, just the way Mom would want. He’d be very unhappy with us if we- ”
    “Penny! Davey! Over here!”
    A yellow cab was at the curb. The rear window was down, and Aunt Faye leaned out, waved at them.
    Davey bolted across the sidewalk, suddenly so eager to be away from any talk of death that he was even glad to see his twittering old Aunt Faye.
    Damn! I botched it, Penny thought. I was too blunt about it.
    In that same instant, before she followed Davey to the taxi, before she even took one step, a sharp pain lanced through her left ankle. She twitched, yelped, looked down-and was immobilized by terror.
    Between the bottom of the green gate and the pavement, there was a four-inch gap. A hand had reached through that gap, from the darkness in the covered serviceway beyond, and it had seized her ankle.
    She couldn’t scream. Her voice was gone.
    It wasn’t a human hand, either. Maybe twice the size of a cat’s paw. But not a paw. It was a completely-although crudely- formed hand with fingers and a thumb.
    She couldn’t even whisper. Her throat was locked.
    The hand wasn’t skin-colored. It was an ugly, mottled gray- green-yellow, like bruised and festering flesh. And it was sort of lumpy, a little ragged looking.
    Breathing was no easier than screaming.
    The small gray-green-yellow fingers were tapered and ended in sharp claws. Two of those claws had punctured her rubber boot.
    She thought of the plastic baseball bat.
    Last night. In her room. The thing under the bed.
    She thought of the shining eyes in the school basement.
    And now this .
    Two of the small fingers had thrust inside her boot End were scraping at her, digging at her, tearing, gouging.
    Abruptly, her breath came to her in a rush. She gasped, sucked in lungsful of frigid air, which snapped her out of the terror-induced trance that, thus far, had held her there by the gate. She jerked her foot away from the hand, tore loose, and was surprised that she was able to do so. She turned and ran to the taxi plunged inside, and yanked the door shut.
    She looked back toward the gate. There was nothing unusual in sight, no creature with small claw-tipped hands, no goblin capering in the snow.
    The taxi pulled away from Wellton School.
    Aunt Faye and Davey were talking excitedly about the snowstorm which, Faye said, was supposed to dump ten or twelve inches before it was done. Neither of them seemed to be aware that Penny was scared half to death.
    While they chattered, Penny reached down and felt her boot. At the ankle, the rubber was torn. A flap of it hung loose.
    She unzippered the boot, slipped her hand inside, under her sock, and felt the wound on her ankle. It burned a little. When she brought her hand out of the boot, there was some blood glistening on her fingertips.
    Aunt Faye saw it. “What’s happened to you, dear?”
    “It’s okay,” Penny said.
    “That’s blood.”
    “Just a scratch.”
    Davey paled at the sight of the blood.
    Penny tried to reassure him, although she was afraid that her voice was noticeably shaky and that her face would betray her anxiety: “It’s nothing, Davey. I’m all right.”
    Aunt Faye insisted on changing places with Davey, so she would be next to Penny and could have a closer look at the injury. She made Penny take off the boot, and she peeled down the sock, revealing a puncture wound and several scratches on the ankle. It was bleeding, but not very much; in a couple of minutes, even unattended, it would stop.
    “How’d this happen?” Aunt Faye demanded.
    Penny hesitated. More than anything, she wanted to tell Faye all about the creatures with shining eyes. She wanted help, protection. But she knew that she couldn’t say a word. They wouldn’t believe her. After all, she was The Girl Who Had Needed A Psychiatrist. If she started babbling about goblins with shining eyes, they’d think she was having a relapse; they would say she still hadn’t adjusted to her mother’s death, and they would make an appointment with a psychiatrist. While she was off seeing the shrink, there wouldn’t be anyone around to keep the goblins away from Davey.
    “Come on, come on,” Faye said. “Fess up. What were you doing that you shouldn’t have been doing?”
    “Huh?”
    “That’s why you’re hesitating. What were you doing that you knew you shouldn’t be doing?”
    “Nothing,” Penny said.
    “Then how’d you get this cut?”
    “I… I caught my boot on a nail.”
    “Nail? Where?”
    “On the