Penny was watching her father over Davey's shoulder. She smiled and winked.
Jack winked back at her.
Ten-twenty.
With every minute that passed uneventfully, Jack felt safer.
Not safe. Just safer.
Penny gave him a very abbreviated account of her encounters with the goblins.
When the girl finished, Rebecca looked at Jack and said, “He's been keeping a watch on them. So he'd always know exactly where to find them when the time came.”
To Penny, Jack said, “My God, baby, why didn't you wake me last night when the thing was in your room?”
“I didn't really see it—”
“But you heard it.”
“That's all.”
“And the baseball bat—”
“Anyway,” Penny said with a sudden odd shyness, unable to meet his eyes, “I was afraid you'd think I'd gone… crazy… again.”
“Huh? Again?” Jack blinked at her. “What on earth do you mean — again?”
“Well… you know… like after Mama died, the way I was then… when I had my… trouble.”
“But you weren't crazy,” Jack said. “You just needed a little counseling; that's all, honey.”
“That's what you called him,” the girl said, barely audible. “A counselor.”
“Yeah. Dr. Hannaby.”
“Aunt Faye, Uncle Keith, everyone called him a counselor. Or sometimes a doctor.”
“That's what he was. He was there to counsel you, to show you how to deal with your grief over your mom's death.”
The girl shook her head: no. “One day, when I was in his office, waiting for him… and he didn't come in to start the session right away… I started to read the college degrees on his wall.”
“And?”
With evident embarrassment, Penny said, “I found out he was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists treat crazy people. That's when I knew I was a little bit… crazy.”
Surprised and dismayed that such a misconception could have gone uncorrected for so long, Jack said, “No, no, no. Sweetheart, you've got it all wrong.”
Rebecca said, “Penny, for the most-part, psychiatrists treat ordinary people with ordinary problems. Problems that we all have 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 on the door and the horde in the foyer beyond. Rebecca and Penny stared at that Hellborn pack without speaking, both of them driven beyond the need — and perhaps beyond the ability — to scream. Davey was the only one who cried out. He clutched at Jack's arm.
“They must be inside the building by now,” Rebecca said. “In the walls.”
They all looked toward the hallway's heating vents.
“How do we get out?” Penny asked.
How, indeed?
For a moment no one spoke.
In the foyer other creatures had joined the worm-thing on the glass of the inner door.
“Is there a rear entrance?” Rebecca wondered.
“Probably,” Jack said. “But if there is, then these things will be waiting there, too.”
Another pause.
The silence was oppressive and terrifying — like the unspent energy in the raised blade of a cocked guillotine.
“Then we're trapped,” Penny said.
Jack felt his own heart beating. It shook him.
Think.