“I only wish I could,” Jack said.
The small monster twisted, flopped, wriggled, did its best to slither out of Jack's hands. The feel of it revolted him, but he gripped it even tighter than before, harder, dug his fingers into the cold oily flesh.
“Rebecca, what about your hand?”
“Just a nip,” she said.
“Penny?”
“I… I'm okay.”
“Then the three of you get out of here. Go to the avenue.”
“What about you?” Rebecca asked.
“I'll hold onto this thing, give you a head start.” The lizard thrashed. “Then I'll throw it as far as I can before I follow you.”
“We can't leave you alone,” Penny said desperately.
“Only for a minute or two,” Jack said. “I'll catch up. I can run faster than the three of you. I'll catch up easy. Now go on. Get out of here before another one of these damned things charges out from somewhere. Go!”
They ran, the kids ahead of Rebecca, kicking up plumes of snow as they went.
The lizard-thing hissed at Jack.
He looked into those eyes of fire.
Inside the lizard's malformed skull, flames writhed, fluttered, flickered, but never wavered, burned bright and intense, all shades of white and silver, but somehow it didn't seem like a hot fire; it looked cool, instead.
Jack wondered what would happen if he poked a finger through one of those hollow sockets, into the fire beyond. Would he actually find fire in there? Or was it an illusion? If there really was fire in the skull, would he burn himself? Or would he discover that the flames were as lacking in heat as they appeared to be?
White flames. Sputtering.
Cold flames. Hissing.
The lizard's two mouths chewed at the night air.
Jack wanted to see more deeply into that strange fire.
He held the creature closer to his face.
He stared into the empty sockets.
Whirling flames.
Leaping flames.
He had the feeling there was something beyond the fire, something amazing and important, something awesome that he could almost glimpse between those scintillating, tightly contained pyrotechnics.
He brought the lizard even closer.
Now his face was only inches from its muzzle.
He could feel the light of its eyes washing over him.
It was a bitterly cold light.
Incandescent.
Fascinating.
He peered intently into the skull fire.
The flames almost parted, almost permitted him to see what lay beyond them.
He squinted, trying harder to see.
He wanted to understand the great mystery.
The mystery beyond the fiery veil.
Wanted, needed, had to understand it.
White flames.
Flames of snow, of ice.
Flames that held a shattering secret.
Flames that beckoned…
Beckoned…
He almost didn't hear the car door opening behind him. The “eyes” of the lizard-thing had seized him and half mesmerized him. His awareness of the snowswept street around him had grown fuzzy. In a few more seconds, he would have been lost. But they misjudged; they opened the car door one moment too soon, and he heard it. He turned, threw the lizard-thing as far as he could into the stormy darkness.
He didn't wait to see where it fell, didn't look to see what was coming out of the unmarked sedan.
He just ran.
Ahead of him, Rebecca and the kids had reached the avenue. They turned left at the corner, moving out of sight.
Jack pounded through the snow, which was almost over the tops of his boots in some places, and his heart triphammered, and his breath spurted from him in white clouds, and he slipped, almost fell, regained his balance, ran, ran, and it seemed to him that he wasn't running along a real street, that this was only a street in a dream, a nightmare place from which there was no escape.
X
In the elevator, on the way up to the fourteenth floor, where Anson and Francine Dorset had an apartment, Faye said, “Not a word about voodoo or any of that nonsense. You hear me? They'll think you're crazy.”
Keith said, “Well, I don't know about voodoo. But I sure as hell saw something strange.”
“Don't you dare go raving about it to Anson and Francine. He's your business partner, for heaven's sake. You've got to go on working with the man. That's going to be hard to do if he thinks you're some sort of superstitious nut. A broker's got to have an image of stability. A banker's image. Bankers and brokers. People want to see stable, conservative men at a brokerage firm before they trust it with their investments. You can't afford the damage to your reputation. Besides, they were only rats.”
“They weren't rats,” he said. “I saw—”
“Nothing but rats.”
“I know what I saw.”
“Rats,” she insisted. “But we're not going to tell Anson and Francine we have rats. What would they think of us? I won't have them knowing we live in a building with rats. Why, Francine already looks down on me, she looks down on everyone; she thinks she's such a blueblood, that family she comes from. I won't give her the slightest advantage. I swear I won't. Not a word about rats. What we'll tell them is that there's a gas leak. They can't see our building from their apartment and they won't be going out on a night like this, so we'll tell them we've been evacuated because of a gas leak.”
“Faye—”
“And tomorrow morning,” she said determinedly, “I'll start looking for a new place for us.”
“But—”
“I won't live in a building with rats. I simply won't do it, and you can't expect me to. You should want out of there yourself, just as fast as it can be arranged.”
“But they weren't—”
“We'll sell the apartment. And maybe it's even time we got out of this damned dirty city altogether. I've been half wanting to get out for years. You know that. Maybe it's time we start looking for a place in Connecticut. I know you won't be happy about commuting, but the train isn't so bad, and think of all the advantages. Fresh air. A bigger place for the same money. Our own pool. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe Penny and Davey could come and stay with us for the entire summer. They shouldn't spend their entire childhood in the city. It isn't healthy. Yes, definitely, I'll start looking into it tomorrow.”
“Faye, for one thing, everything'll be shut up tight on account of the blizzard—”
“That won't stop me. You'll see. First thing tomorrow.”
The elevator doors opened.
In the fourteenth-floor corridor, Keith said, “Aren't you worried about Penny and Davey? I mean, we left them—”
“They'll be fine,” she said, and she even seemed to believe it. “It was only rats. You don't think rats are going to follow them out of the building? They're in no danger from a few rats. What I'm most worried about is that father of theirs, telling them it's voodoo, scaring them like that, stuffing their heads full of such nonsense. What's gotten into that man? Maybe he does have a psychotic killer to track down, but voodoo has nothing to do with it. He doesn't sound rational. Honestly, I just can't understand him; no matter how hard I try, I just can't.”
They had reached the door to the Dorset apartment. Keith rang the bell.
Faye said, “Remember, not a word!”
Anson Dorset must have been waiting with his hand on the doorknob ever since they phoned up from downstairs, for he opened up at once, just as Faye issued that warning to Keith. He said, “Not a word about what?”
“Rats,” Keith said. “All of a sudden, it seems as if our building is infested with rats.”