Darkfall (40 page)

Turning quickly, she yanked open the door, slipped inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and pushed the door shut after her.

The goblins thumped against the other side of it, once, and then were silent.

She was safe. Amazingly, thank fully safe.

She limped away from the door, out of the dimly lighted vestibule in which she found herself, past the marble holy water fonts, into the vast, vaulted, massively-columned nave with its rows and rows of polished pews. The towering stained-glass windows were dark and somber with only night beyond them, except in a few places where an errant beam from a streetlamp outside managed to find and pierce a cobalt blue or brilliant red piece of glass. Everything here was big and solid-looking—the huge pipe organ with its thousands of brass pipes soaring up like the spires of a smaller cathedral, the great choir loft above the front portals, the stone steps leading up to the high pulpit and the brass canopy above it—and that massiveness contributed to the feeling of safety and peace that settled over Rebecca.

Penny and Davey were in the nave, a third of the way down the center aisle, talking excitedly to a young and baffled priest. Penny saw Rebecca first, shouted, and ran toward her. Davey followed, crying with relief and happiness at the sight of her, and the cassocked priest came, too.

They were the only four in the immense chamber, but that was all right. They didn’t need an army. The cathedral was an inviolable fortress. Nothing could harm them there. Nothing. The cathedral was safe. It had to be safe, for it was their last refuge.

In the car in front of Carver Hampton’s shop, Jack pumped the accelerator and raced the engine, warming it.

He looked sideways at Hampton and said, “You sure you really want to come along?”

“It’s the last thing I want to do,” the big man said. “I don’t share your immunity to Lavelle’s powers. I’d much rather stay up there in the apartment, with all the lights on and the candles burning.”

“Then stay. I don’t believe you’re hiding anything from me. I really believe you’ve done everything you can. You don’t owe me anything more.”

“I owe me. Going with you, helping you if I can—that’s the right thing to do. I owe it to myself not to make another wrong choice.”

“All right then.” Jack put the car in gear but kept his foot on the brake pedal. “I’m still not sure I understand how I’m going to find Lavelle.”

“You’ll simply
know
what streets to follow, what turns to make,” Hampton said. “Because of the purification bath and the other rituals we performed, you’re now being guided by a higher power.”

“Sounds better than a Three-A map, I guess. Only ... I sure don’t feel anything guiding me.”

“You will, Lieutenant. But first, we’ve got to stop at a Catholic church and fill these jars”—he held up two small, empty jars that would hold about eight ounces each—“with holy water. There’s a church straight ahead, about five blocks from here.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “But one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Will you drop the formality, stop calling me Lieutenant? My name’s Jack.”

“You can call me Carver, if you like.”

“I’d like.”

They smiled at each other, and Jack took his foot off the brake, switched on the windshield wipers, and pulled out into the street.

They entered the church together.

The vestibule was dark. In the deserted nave there were a few dim lights burning, plus three or four votive candles flickering in a wrought iron rack that stood on this side of the communion railing and to the left of the chancel. The place smelled of incense and furniture polish that had evidently been used recently on the well-worn pews. Above the altar, a large crucifix rose high into the shadows.

Carver genuflected and crossed himself. Although Jack wasn’t a practicing Catholic, he felt a sudden strong compulsion to follow the black man’s example, and he realized that; as a representative of the
Rada
on this special night, it was incumbent upon him to pay obeisance to all the gods of good and light, whether it was the Jewish god of the Old Testament, Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, or any other deity. Perhaps this was the first indication of the “guidance” of which Carver had spoken.

The marble font, just this side of the narthex, contained only a small puddle of holy water, insufficient for their needs.

“We won’t even be able to fill one jar,” Jack said.

“Don’t be so sure,” Carver said, unscrewing the lid from one of the containers. He handed the open jar to Jack. “Try it.”

Jack dipped the jar into the font, scraped it along the marble, scooped up some water, didn’t think he’d gotten more than two ounces, and blinked in surprise when he held the jar up and saw that it was full. He was even more surprised to see just as much water left in the font as had been there before he’d filled the jar.

He looked at Carver.

The black man smiled and winked. He screwed the lid on the jar and put it in his coat pocket. He opened the second jar and handed it to Jack.

Again, Jack was able to fill the container, and again the small puddle of water in the font appeared untouched.

Lavelle stood by the window, looking out at the storm.

He was no longer in psychic contact with the small assassins. Given more time, time to marshal their forces, they might yet be able to kill the Dawson children, and if they did he would be sorry he’d missed it. But time was running out.

Jack Dawson was coming, and no sorcery, regardless of how powerful it might be, would stop him.

Lavelle wasn’t sure how everything had gone wrong so quickly, so completely. Perhaps it had been a mistake to target the children. The
Rada
was always incensed at a Bocor who used his power against children, and they always tried to destroy him if they could. Once committed to such a course, you had to be extremely careful. But, damnit, he
had
been careful. He couldn’t think of a single mistake he might have made. He was well-armored; he was protected by all the power of the dark gods.

Yet Dawson was coming.

Lavelle turned away from the window.

He crossed the dark room to the dresser.

He took a .32 automatic out of the top drawer.

Dawson was coming. Fine. Let him come.

Rebecca sat down in the aisle of the cathedral and pulled up the right leg of her jeans, above her knee. The claw and fang wounds were bleeding freely, but she was in no danger of bleeding to death. The jeans had provided some protection. The bites were deep but not too deep. No major veins or arteries had been severed.

The young priest, Father Walotsky, crouched beside her, appalled by her injuries. “How did this happen? What did this to you?”

Both Penny and Davey said,
“Goblins,”
as if they were getting tired of trying to make him understand.

Rebecca pulled off her gloves. On her right hand was a fresh, bleeding bite mark, but no flesh was torn away; it was just four small puncture wounds. The gloves, like her jeans, had provided at least some protection. Her left hand bore two bite marks; one was bleeding and seemed no more serious than the wound on her right hand, painful but not mortal, while the other was the old bite she’d received in front of Faye’s apartment building.

Father Walotsky said, “What’s all that blood on your neck?” He put a hand to her face, gently pressed her hand back, so he could see the scratches under her chin.

“Those’re minor,” she said. “They sting, but they’re not serious.”

“I think we’d better get you some medical attention,” he said. “Come on.”

She pulled down the leg of her jeans.

He helped her to her feet. “I think it would be all right if I took you to the rectory.”

“No,” she said.

“It’s not far.”

“We’re staying here,” she said.

“But those look like animal bites. You’ve got to have them attended to. Infection, rabies.... Look, it’s not far to the rectory. We don’t have to go out in the storm, either. There’s an underground passage between the cathedral and—”

“No,” Rebecca said firmly. “We’re staying here, in the cathedral, where we’re protected.”

She motioned for Penny and Davey to come close to her, and they did, eagerly, one on each side of her.

The priest looked at each of them, studied their faces, met their eyes, and his face darkened. “What
are
you afraid of?”

“Didn’t the kids tell you some of it?” Rebecca asked.

“They were babbling about goblins, but—”

“It wasn’t just babble,” Rebecca said, finding it odd to be the one professing and defending a belief in the supernatural, she who had always been anything
but
excessively open-minded on the subject. She hesitated. Then, as succinctly as possible, she told him about Lavelle, the slaughter of the Carramazzas, and the voodoo devils that were now after Jack Dawson’s children.

When she finished, the priest said nothing and couldn’t meet her eyes. He stared at the floor for long seconds.

She said, “Of course, you don’t believe me.”

He looked up and appeared to be embarrassed. “Oh, I don’t think you’re lying to me ... exactly. I’m sure you believe everything you’ve told me. But, to me, voodoo is a sham, a set of primitive superstitions. I’m a priest of the Holy Roman Church, and I believe in only one Truth, the Truth that Our Savior—”

“You believe in Heaven, don’t you? And Hell?”

“Of course. That’s part of Catholic—”

“These things have come straight up from Hell, Father. If I’d told you that it was a
Satanist
who had summoned these demons, if I’d never mentioned the word voodoo, then maybe you still wouldn’t have believed me, but you wouldn’t have dismissed the possibility so fast, either, because your religion encompasses Satan and Satanists.”

“I think you should—”

Davey screamed.

Penny said, “They’re here!”

Rebecca turned, breath caught in her throat, heart hanging in mid-beat.

Beyond the archway through which the center aisle of the nave entered the vestibule, there were shadows, and in those shadows were silver-white eyes glowing brightly. Eyes of fire. Lots of them.

Jack drove the snow-packed streets, and as he approached each intersection, he somehow sensed when a right turn was required, when he should go left instead, and when he should just speed straight through. He didn’t know how he sensed those things; each time, a feeling came over him, a feeling he couldn’t put into words, and he gave himself to it, followed the guidance that was being given to him. It was certainly unorthodox procedure for a cop accustomed to employing less exotic techniques in the search for a suspect. It was also creepy, and he didn’t like it. But he wasn’t about to complain, for he desperately wanted to find Lavelle.

Thirty-five minutes after they had collected the two small jars of holy water, Jack made a left turn into a street of pseudo-Victorian houses. He stopped in front of the fifth one. It was a three-story brick house with lots of gingerbread trim. It was in need of repairs and painting, as were all the houses in the block, a fact that even the snow and darkness couldn’t hide. There were no lights in the house; not one. The windows were perfectly black.

“We’re here,” Jack told Carver.

He cut the engine, switched off the headlights.

Four goblins crept out of the vestibule, into the center aisle, into the light that, while not bright, revealed their grotesque forms in more stomach-churning detail than Rebecca would have liked.

At the head of the pack was a foot-tall, man-form creature with four fire-filled eyes, two in its forehead. Its head was the size of an apple, and in spite of the four eyes, most of the misshapen skull was given over to a mouth crammed full and bristling with teeth. It also had four arms and was carrying a crude spear in one spike-fingered hand.

It raised the spear above its head in a gesture of challenge and defiance.

Perhaps because of the spear, Rebecca was suddenly possessed of a strange but unshakable conviction that the man-form beast had once been—in very ancient times—a proud and blood-thirsty African warrior who had been condemned to Hell for his crimes and who was now forced to endure the agony and humiliation of having his soul embedded within a small, deformed body.

The man-form goblin, the three even more hideous creatures behind it, and the other beasts moving through the dark vestibule (and now seen only as pairs of shining eyes) all moved slowly, as if the very air inside this house of worship was, for them, an immensely heavy burden that made every step a painful labor. None of them hissed or snarled or shrieked, either. They just approached silently, sluggishly, but implacably.

Beyond the goblins, the doors to the street still appeared to be closed. They had entered the cathedral by some other route, through a vent or a drain that was unscreened and offered them an easy entrance, a virtual invitation, the equivalent of the “open door” that they, like vampires, probably needed in order to come where evil wasn’t welcome.

Father Walotsky, briefly mesmerized by his first glimpse of the goblins, was the first to break the silence. He fumbled in a pocket of his black cassock, withdrew a rosary, and began to pray.

The man-form devil and the three things immediately behind it moved steadily closer, along the main aisle, and other monstrous beings crept and slithered out of the dark vestibule, while new pairs of glowing eyes appeared in the darkness there. They still moved too slowly to be dangerous.

But how long will that last? Rebecca wondered. Perhaps they’ll somehow become conditioned to the atmosphere in the cathedral. Perhaps they’ll gradually become bolder and begin to move faster. What then?

Pulling the kids with her, Rebecca began to back up the aisle, toward the altar. Father Walotsky came with them, the rosary beads clicking in his hands.