Niceville

the wall faded into a faint suggestion of colored motion.
    The light also showed something underneath the octopus furnace, in the shadows of it, a dark rounded mass.
    Beau went over to it, kneeling down to peer under the old tin ductworks.The dark mass receded, almost as if it were liquid, pulling itself back deeper into the shadows, but in complete silence. Beau recoiled, sat back on his heels.
    “I do not like this house, Nick. I truly do not. Now I know what the jimjams are. What the hell is that thing?”
    “I don’t know,” said Nick, leaning down to look under the pipe, his heart blipping. Beau wasn’t the only cop here with the jimjams.
    “It’s alive, whatever it is,” said Beau. “Now I can hear something hissing. How about I just shoot it?”
    “You can’t just shoot things, Beau. Tig wouldn’t like it. He’d make you pay for the bullet. How about you just get down there and go on in and see what it is?”
    Beau gave him a look, pushed himself to his feet, stepped back, smiled broadly, and waved Nick on through with a graceful veronica.
    “Sir, according to the manual, this is where a highly skilled senior officer is supposed to show the dumb-ass rookie how these things are done.”
    “According to the manual?”
    “Oh yes sir. It surely is. Just like on
NCIS
.”
    Nick looked sideways at him, sighed, and stepped forward, going down on one knee, leaning over to peer into the darkness.
    Whatever was in there, it didn’t like that and the low hissing turned into a long, throaty snarl that made all his favorite body parts go tingly and cold. He looked up at Beau.
    “We got any gloves in the car?”
    “Just those latex jobs,” said Beau.
    “See if there’s any gardening gloves around.”
    “What is it?” asked Beau, backing away, afraid he was going to miss something interesting.
    “Just find some,” said Nick, settling back into a crouch, breathing through his mouth and trying to calm down, listening to Beau ramble up the wooden staircase and make the floorboards creak as he walked down the front hall.
    Alone in the basement—well, not entirely alone—Nick could feel the big house settling down on him, a great dead weight trying to crush him into the concrete.
    He had no idea what had happened to Delia Cotton, but something had definitely happened to her house. The whole place was just …
    Outside?
    Lemon Featherlight’s phrase came back, the way he had described whatever had happened to Rainey Teague, how the kid had somehow been … transported … to an ancient crypt.
    Whatever it was, it came from … outside
.
    Nick shook himself, ran his hands through his hair. That was just horseshit. Somebody—somebody real—was screwing around with Niceville, and that was what guys like him were supposed to stop.
    He heard the floorboards creaking, Beau coming across the main floor and down the basement stairs. Whatever was under the furnace hissed again, and recoiled farther into the shadows.
    “I got these,” said Beau, handing him a pair of long, heavy cotton gardening gloves. “And these,” he said, holding up a shovel and a rough gray blanket.
    Nick slipped the gloves on, tugged his shirtsleeves down, got down on his knees, and crawled under the pipe, tensed, and made a sudden snapping lunge.
    He got a fistful of thick fur—felt his glove and his forearm getting raked—the thing hissing and snarling deep down in its throat. Incredibly strong, it writhed under his hand and sank its teeth into the glove—Nick could feel the pinpricks of its fangs just touching his skin. He came back out, holding a large Maine Coon cat by the scruff of its neck.
    He grabbed the hind legs with his other hand, struggling to keep a grip on the thing. The cat’s eyes were wild and dilated, ears flat back, ruff flared up, tail lashing, lips snarling back and fangs exposed to the gum line, a crazy green light in its irises. It was trying to use its hind-leg claws to rip the flesh off Nick’s forearm.
    Beau threw the blanket around it and they finally managed to wrap the big cat up tightly inside it, with only its head sticking out, the cat fighting with everything it had, hissing and snarling at them, trying to bend its head around far enough to bite Nick’s hand.
    “Jeez,” said Beau, looking at the cat. “What the hell’s got into her?”
    “This is Delia’s cat,” said Nick. “On the report. Mildred … something. Mildred Pierce.”
    Hearing the name, the cat seemed to settle