Darkfall

at one time or another in our lives. Emotional problems, mostly. That’s what yours were. Emotional problems.”
    Penny looked at her shyly. She frowned. Clearly, she wanted to believe.
    “They treat some mental problems, too, of course,” Rebecca said. “But in their offices, among their regular patients, they hardly ever see anyone who’s really, really insane. Truly crazy people are hospitalized or kept in institutions.”
    “Sure,” Jack said. He reached for Penny’s hands, held them. They were small, delicate hands. The fragility of her hands, the vulnerability of an eleven-year-old who liked to think of herself as grown-up-it made his heart ache. “Honey, you were never crazy. Never even close to crazy. What a terrible thing to’ve been worrying about all this time.”
    The girl looked from Jack to Rebecca to Jack again. “You really mean it? You really mean lots of ordinary, everyday people go to psychiatrists?”
    “Absolutely,” he said. “Honey, life threw you a pretty bad curve, what with your mom dying so young, and I was so broken up myself that I wasn’t much good at helping you handle it. I guess… I should have made an extra-special effort. But I was feeling so bad, so lost, so helpless, so darned sorry for myself that I just wasn’t able to heal both of us, you and me. That’s why I sent you to Dr. Hannaby when you started having your problems. Not because you were crazy. Because you needed to talk to someone who wouldn’t start crying about your mom as soon as you started crying about your mom. Understand?”
    “Yeah,” Penny said softly, tears shining in her eyes, brightly suspended but unspilled.
    “Positive?”
    “Yeah. I really do, Daddy. I understand now.”
    “So you should have come to me last night, when the thing was in your room. Certainly after it poked holes in that plastic baseball bat. I wouldn’t have thought you were crazy.”
    “Neither would I,” Davey said. “I never-ever thought you were crazy, Penny. You’re probably the least craziest person I know.”
    Penny giggled, and Jack and Rebecca couldn’t help grinning, but Davey didn’t know what was so funny.
    Jack hugged his daughter very tight. He kissed her face and her hair. He said, “I love you, peanut.”
    Then he hugged Davey and told him he loved him, too.
    And then, reluctantly, he looked at his wristwatch.
    Ten-twenty-four.
    Ten minutes had elapsed since they had come into the brownstone and had taken shelter in the space under the big staircase.
    “Looks like they didn’t follow us,” Rebecca said.
    “Let’s not be too hasty,” he said. “Give it another couple of minutes.”
    Ten-twenty-five.
    Ten-twenty-six.
    He didn’t relish going outside and having a look around. He waited one more minute.
    Ten-twenty-seven.
    Finally he could delay no longer. He eased out from the staircase. He took two steps, put his hand on the brass knob of the foyer door- and froze.
    They were here. The goblins.
    One of them was clinging to the glass panel in the center of the door. It was a two-foot-long, wormlike thing with a segmented body and perhaps two dozen legs. Its mouth resembled that of a fish: oval, with the teeth set far back from the writhing, sucking lips. Its fiery eyes fixed on Jack.
    He abruptly looked away from that white-hot gaze, for he recalled how the eyes of the lizard had nearly hypnotized him.
    Beyond the worm-thing, the security foyer was crawling with other, different devils, all of them small, but all of them so incredibly vicious and grotesque in appearance that Jack began to shake and felt his bowels turn to jelly. There were lizard-things in various sizes and shapes. Spider-things. Rat-things. Two of the man-form beasts, one of them with a tail, the other with a sort of cock’s comb on its head and along its back. Dog things. Crablike, feline, snakelike, beetle-form, scorpionlike, dragonish, clawed and ranged, spiked and spurred and sharply horned things . Perhaps twenty of them. No. More than twenty. At least thirty. They slithered and skittered across the mosaic-tile floor, and they crept tenaciously up the walls, their foul tongues darting and fluttering ceaselessly, teeth gnashing and grinding, eyes shining.
    Shocked and repelled, Jack snatched his hand away from the brass doorknob. He turned to Rebecca and the kids. “They’ve found us. They’re here. Come on. Got to get out. Hurry. Before it’s too late.”
    They came away from the stairs. They saw the worm-thing