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And her dark gaze tightened sharply in the violet light.

CHAPTER SIX
     
     
     
    We swung around the corner of Haswell Avenue, then sped down it till the right house came in sight. The front door was flung wide open. Ritchie’s car was stopped out front, slewed across the sidewalk with its driver’s door pushed open too. And I could make out Cassie’s Harley. No surprises there.
    I didn’t bother parking. Simply stopped dead in the middle of the street. And the second that I got out, I heard shots and yelling. So I started running, Saul hard on my heels.
    I noticed, as I drew closer, that there were two people crying out. One of them was a man, bellowing with pain. But the other voice was Cassie’s, and she wasn’t hurting. She was cursing up a blue streak, and she only usually does that when she finds herself right up to her neck in trouble.
    We went down through the house until we arrived at the source. Going in, I found myself confronted by a sight that turned me halfway into lead.
    The light in here was such a deep mauve that it lent shades of black to everything it touched. Like trying to see through impenetrably dark glasses. But my eyes adjusted enough to make out Ritchie Vallencourt, on his back down on the floor. He was writhing furiously and yelling. A creature had grabbed hold of him by one of his ankles. It looked like it had emerged from a wide hole that had opened in the wall beneath the washbasin.
    And the first word that came into my head was ‘spider.’ But it wasn’t really that. It had at least twenty legs. Was the same color as the light surrounding us, which made it difficult to see. And had a massive, bulbous thorax, slightly more than two feet across.
    Its mandibles were clenched around the lower part of Ritchie’s leg. And it was dragging him insistently in the direction of the gap. It looked awful strong for something of that size. And determined – Ritchie kept on slamming at it with his free heel, and he couldn’t knock it off.
    Cass was standing over the thing, pumping 8mm rounds into its body. But it didn’t even feel them. Not at first, anyway.
    She emptied her entire clip into the creature. And its outline wobbled sharply and broke up. The thing collapsed into a slimy mound of purple glop, which spread across the tiles for a few seconds before vanishing. At which point, I thought she’d saved Vallencourt’s young hide.
    But then another of the things – exactly like the first – came scuttling out, grabbed him by the leg again, and the whole awful scene was being re-enacted before I could get my head around it.
    This was like one of those dreams that keep on going around in a broad circle, with the same details perpetually repeated. And I couldn’t think now to react to that, so I simply pulled my own gun out.
    Saul was firing too, now. Shots were raining down upon these spider types as thick and fast as hail. But every time one of them faltered and broke up, another creature would come running out, and pick up where the last one had left off.
    “What are these?” Cass was howling.
    But that wasn’t the right question. The correct one was, ‘how many of them are there?’
    An endless number, apparently. But the same wasn’t true of our supply of ammunition.
    One of Cassie’s Glocks let out a ching as its extended clip ran dry. And Saul stared down at his own piece and cursed. I’d only had five in mine in the first place, it being a revolver. But I had more ammunition in my pockets, and had been placing my shots carefully, aiming for what I thought might be the spiders’ vital areas.
    So far, I’d been wrong.
    Cassie pulled a knife out and then went down on one knee, stabbing at the newest creature. I was afraid at first that it would turn on her, and there’d be two people we’d have to save. But it didn’t take the slightest notice of her. Just kept dragging Vallencourt in the direction of that big damned hole.
    And her blade had absolutely no effect. It went in