He lay gasping and wheezing on the top of the tank. If they rose and struck this high again, they'd have him. He was too tired and shaky to move for a moment. "They're soaked," he gasped. "All we've got to do is light them."

Cordie sat cross-legged, watching the things circle under the lawn. "Great," she said. "Y'all got a match?"

Kevin slapped his pockets for his father's gold lighter. He sagged, still clinging to the filler cap. "It's in my gym bag," he said, pointing to the small canvas satchel he'd carefully set on top of the gas pump ten feet away.

Harlen's flashlight beam joined Dale's.

Almost forty feet above them, perched on the railing of the third-floor level, Lawrence sat in a wooden chair that had two of its legs dangling over the long drop. Dale's brother looked tied into the chair, but the "ropes" appeared to be thick strands of the fleshlike material that hung like torn tendons everywhere. A strand of the material ran around Lawrence's mouth and disappeared behind his head.

Another strand, a thicker strand, formed a noose around his neck and ran up into the belfry . . . into the pulsing red egg-sac there.

The chair teetered on the overgrown railing. An adult figure was standing there, white arms holding the chair in place but none too steadily.

"Put your weapons down," ordered Dr. Roon, his voice as imperative as a whiplash. "Now."

"You'll kill us," Dale said through lips gone numb. He forced himself to lower the flashlight beam to Dr. Roon. There were other man-sized shadows moving in the cloakroom and dripping first-grade room behind the principal.

Dr. Roon smiled again. "Perhaps. But if you do not put the weapons down now, we will hang him this second. The Master would welcome another offering."

Dale glanced up. The third-floor landing seemed miles away. Lawrence was wiggling as if trying to free himself, his eyes wide. In the red-and-green glow from the belfry, Dale could see his brother's cowboy pajama tops. He wanted to shout at him not to move.

"Don't do it," whispered Harlen, leveling the .38 at Roon's long face. "Kill the motherfucker."

Dale's heart was pounding so loudly in his ears that he barely heard his friend. "He'll kill him, Jim. He really will."

"He'll kill us," hissed Harlen. "No!"

But Dale had already laid the Savage on the floor.

Roon stepped closer, almost within arm's length. "Your weapon," he said to Harlen. "Now."

Harlen paused, cursed, glanced upward, and laid his pistol on the sticky floor.

"The toys," said Roon, gesturing impatiently toward the squirt guns in their belts.

Dale started to lower the plastic weapon, turned the muzzle upward at the last second, and squeezed a long burst of holy . water directly into Dr. Roon's face.

The ex-principal shook his head slowly, removed a handkerchief from his suitcoat's breast pocket, mopped his face, and calmly removed his glasses to wipe them. "You silly, silly boy. Just because the Master spent a thousand years in the center of such belief and still reacts to old habits, not all of us grew up in the land of Popery." He set his glasses back in place. "After all, you don't believe in this miraculously altered water, now do you?" He smiled and, without warning, slapped Dale viciously across the face. A ring on the principal's hand ripped a furrow from Dale's cheek to jaw.

Harlen shouted something and lunged for his pistol, but the man in the black suit was quicker, cuffing the boy on the side of the head with such force that the sound echoed up the open stairwell. Roon bent and picked up the pistol as Harlen fell to his knees.

Dale wiped blood from his cheek and saw the Soldier gliding through the dark beneath the stained-glass window. Something else, something taller and blacker, was moving on the library mezzanine above. Thunder was just audible through the thick walls and boarded-up windows.

Dr. Roon set his large hand on Dale's face, fingers and thumb digging deep into the boy's cheeks just below the eyes. "Set the radio toy down . . . slowly . . . that's good." He moved his grip to the back of Dale's neck and catapulted him forward, over the shotgun, squirt gun, and walkie-talkie lying in the thick syrup that had been a floor. Roon dragged Harlen with them and smashed the squirt gun as he passed, kicking the radio back toward the basement.

Stumbling to keep up, Roon's hands like vises on their necks, Dale and Harlen were shoved and pushed up the stairs to the second floor.

FORTY

"I'll never get to it in time," Kevin shouted over the sound of the storm. It was only fifteen feet from the back of the truck to the gas pump and gym bag, but the lampreys were circling closer with each pass. He had seen how fast they could move.

Cordie's pale face was illuminated with every flash of lightning. She was smiling, her small mouth pursed. "Unless you got a whatchamacallit," she said. "A distraction."

Before Kevin could say anything, she had slid down the far side of the tank and jumped to the gravel drive, running downhill toward the street for all she was worth.

The lampreys swung left and accelerated after her like sharks sensing blood in the water.

Kevin slid down the tank and leapt off the left rear fender, grabbing the satchel and heading back toward the truck just as the hose started sucking air in the empty underground tank. Instead of clambering onto the back of the truck, Kevin swept around in a circle, picked up the walkie-talkie, and jumped for the cab.

Downhill, Cordie had reached the asphalt of Depot Street two yards ahead of the first lamprey. It drove deep as she staggered into the center of the street and stopped, jumping up and down and waving her arms at Kevin. He couldn't hear her shouts for the thunder.

Smart, he thought, but at that second one of the lamprey-things broke surface on the far side of the street and used its momentum to slide across the asphalt surface like a trained porpoise sliding out of a pool onto wet cement.

Cordie threw herself aside, the mouth missing her by inches, and went down hard, kicking and scraping her heels to crawl away from the writhing thing. At least twenty feet of the lamprey's body was out of its hole now.

Kevin pawed through the gym bag, removing the lighter he'd told her about and the truck keys he hadn't. The engine started on the first try. Kevin had a fleeting thought of all the gasoline he'd been spraying around, of the eleven or twelve hundred gallons sloshing in the uncapped tank behind him and the stuff still dribbling from the hose . . . thinking of the ignition spark he was putting into the middle of this vaporous mixture. To hell with it, he thought, feeling the adrenaline .filling his body like some wild elixir, if it goes I won't know about it.

Cordie was pulling herself backward by her elbows and heels on dark pavement, kicking at the thrashing thing that still twisted to find her, its mouth expanding to twice the size of the body.

Kevin slammed the truck in gear and roared down the gravel drive, rolling right over the body of the thing, feeling the vibration coming up through the truck frame as if he had hit a massive telephone cable or something. Then he was out the door and pulling Cordie in while the lamprey began to unwind back into its hole like a hose on a tension reel, spraying fluid as it backed off the pavement.

Kevin stood in the open doorway, lighter in his hand, watching the thing slide past four feet away but knowing that the lighter flame would never last long enough in the wind to ignite the lamprey.

Cordie tore a three-foot swatch of her dress off and handed it to Kevin.

He crouched, wadding the old fabric into a ball, using the truck door as a windbreak. The dress had been half-soaked in gasoline itself and flared on the second strike of the lighter.