Darkfall

the door.
    A nightmare crawled out of the duct. It hung there on the wall, with utter disregard for gravity, as if there were suction pads on its feet, although it didn’t seem equipped with anything of that sort.
    “Jesus,” Keith said, stunned.
    Jack shuddered at the thought of this repulsive little beast touching Davey or Penny.
    The creature was the size of a rat. In shape, at least, its body was rather like that of a rat, too: low-slung, long in the flanks, with shoulders and haunches that were large and muscular for an animal of its size. But there the resemblance to a rat ended, and the nightmare began. This thing was hairless. Its slippery skin was darkly mottled gray-green-yellow and looked more like a slimy fungus than like flesh. The tail was not at all similar to a rat’s tail; it was eight or ten inches long, an inch wide at the base, segmented in the manner of a scorpion’s tail, tapering and curling up into the air above the beast’s hindquarters, like that of a scorpion, although it wasn’t equipped with a stinger. The feet were far different from a rat’s feet: They were oversize by comparison to the animal itself; the long toes were triple-jointed, gnarly; the curving claws were much too big for the feet to which they were fitted; a razor-sharp, multiply-barbed spur curved out from each heel. The head was even more deadly in appearance and design than were the feet; it was formed over a flattish skull that had many unnaturally sharp angles, unnecessary convexities and concavities, as if it had been molded by an inexpert sculptor. The snout was long and pointed, a bizarre cross between the muzzle of a wolf and that of a crocodile. The small monster opened its mouth and hissed, revealing too many pointed teeth that were angled in various directions along its jaws. A surprisingly long black tongue slithered out of the mouth, glistening like a strip of raw liver; the end of it was forked, and it fluttered continuously.
    But the thing’s eyes were what frightened Jack the most. They appeared not to be eyes at all; they had no pupils or irises, no solid tissue that he could discern. There were just empty sockets in the creature’s malformed skull, crude holes from which radiated a harsh, cold, brilliant light. The intense glow seemed to come from a fire within the beast’s own mutant cranium. Which simply could not be . Yet was. And the thing wasn’t blind, either, as it should have been; there wasn’t any question about its ability to see, for it fixed those fire-filled “eyes” on Jack, and he could feel its demonic gaze as surely as he would have felt a knife rammed into his gut. That was the other thing that disturbed him, the very worst aspect of those mad eyes: the death- cold, hate-hot, soul-withering feeling they imparted when you dared to meet them. Looking into the thing’s eyes, Jack felt both physically and spiritually ill.
    With insectile disregard for gravity, the beast slowly crept head- first down the wall, away from the duct.
    A second creature appeared at the opening in the ventilation system. This one wasn’t anything like the first. It was in the form of a small man, perhaps ten inches high, crouching up there in the mouth of the duct. Although it possessed the crude form of a man, it was in no other way humanlike. Its hands and feet resembled those of the first beast, with dangerous claws and barbed spurs. The flesh was funguslike, slippery looking, though less green, more yellow and gray. There were black circles around the eyes and patches of corrupted-looking black flesh fanning out from the nostrils. Its head was misshapen, with a toothy mouth that went from ear to ear. And it had those same hellish eyes, although they were smaller than the eyes in the ratlike thing.
    Jack saw that the man-form beast was holding a weapon. It looked like a miniature spear. The point was well-honed; it caught the light and glinted along its cutting edge.
    Jack remembered the first two victims of Lavelle’s crusade against the Carramazza family. They had both been stabbed hundreds of times with a weapon no bigger than a penknife-yet not a penknife. The medical examiner had been perplexed; the lab technicians had been baffled. But, of course, it wouldn’t have occurred to them to explore the possibility that those homicides were the work of ten- inch voodoo devils and that the murder weapons were miniature spears.
    Voodoo devils? Goblins? Gremlins? What exactly were these