She swept away spiderwebs and desiccated insect prey in the back stairs, washed the spiraling treads with pungent ammonia water, and rid that space of mustiness and the faint odor of decay. No uncanny feelings overcame her, and it was hard to believe that she’d felt a superstitious dread of the stairs when she’d first descended them behind Paul and Toby.
From a few second-floor windows, she could see the graveyard on the knoll. It didn’t strike her as macabre any longer, because of what Paul had said about ranchers’ attachment to the land that had sustained their families for generations. In the dysfunctional family in which she’d been raised, and in Los Angeles, there had been so little tradition and such a weak sense of belonging anywhere or to anything that these ranchers’ love of home seemed touching—even spiritually uplifting—rather than morbid or strange.
Heather cleaned out the refrigerator too, and they filled it with healthy foods for quick breakfasts and lunches. The freezer compartment was already half filled with packaged dinners, but she delayed doing an inventory because more important tasks awaited her.
Four evenings in a row, too weary from their chores to cook, they drove into Eagle’s Roost to eat at the Main Street Diner, owned and operated by the steer that could drive a car and do math and dance. The food was first-rate country cooking.
The sixteen-mile journey was insignificant. In southern California, a trip had been measured not by distance but by the length of time needed to complete it, and even a quick jaunt to the market, in city traffic, had required half an hour. A sixteen-mile drive from one point in L.A. to another could take an hour, two hours, or eternity, depending on traffic and the violent tendencies of other motorists. Who knew? However, they could routinely drive to Eagle’s Roost in twenty or twenty-five minutes, which seemed like nothing. The perpetually uncrowded highways were exhilarating.
Friday night, as on every night since they’d arrived in Montana, Heather fell asleep without difficulty. For the first time, however, her sleep was troubled….
In her dream, she was in a cold place blacker than a moonless and overcast night, blacker than a windowless room. She was feeling her way forward, as if she had been stricken blind, curious but at first unafraid. She was actually smiling, because she was convinced that something wonderful awaited her in a warm, well-lighted place beyond the darkness. Treasure. Pleasure. Enlightenment, peace, joy, and transcendence waiting for her, if she could find her way. Sweet peace, freedom from fear, freedom forever, enlightenment, joy, pleasure more intense than any she had ever known, waiting, waiting. But she fumbled through the impenetrable darkness, feeling with hands extended in front of her, always moving in the wrong direction, turning this way and that, that way and this.
Curiosity became overpowering desire. She wanted whatever lay beyond the wall of night, wanted it as badly as she had ever wanted anything in her life, more than food or love or wealth or happiness, for it was all those things and more. Find the door, the door and the light beyond, the wonderful door, beautiful light, peace and joy, freedom and pleasure, release from sorrow, transformation, so close, achingly close, reach out, reach. Want became need, compulsion became obsession. She had to have whatever awaited her—joy, peace, freedom—so she ran into the cloying blackness, heedless of danger, plunged forward, frantic to find the way, the path, the truth, the door, joy forever, no more fear of death, no fear of anything, paradise, sought it with increasing desperation, but ran always away from it instead.
Now a voice called to her, strange and wordless, frightening but alluring, trying to show her the way, joy and peace and an end to all sadness. Just accept. Accept. It was reaching out for her, if only she would turn the right way, find it, touch it, embrace it.
She stopped running. Abruptly she realized that she didn’t have to seek the gift after all, for she was standing in its presence, in the house of joy, the palace of peace, the kingdom of enlightenment. All that she had to do was let it in, open a door within herself and let it in, let it in, open herself to inconceivable joy, paradise, paradise, paradise, surrender to pleasure and happiness. She wanted it, she really did oh-so-eagerly want it, because life was hard when it didn’t have to be.
But some stubborn part of her resisted the gift, some hateful and proud part of her complex self. She sensed the frustration of him who wished to give this gift, the Giver in the darkness, felt frustration and maybe anger, so she said, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Now the gift—joy, peace, love, pleasure—was thrust upon her with tremendous force, brutal and unrelenting pressure, until she felt she would be crushed by it. The darkness around her acquired weight, as if she lay trapped deep in a fathomless sea, though it was far heavier and thicker than water, surrounding her, smothering, crushing. Must submit, useless to resist, let it in, submission was peace, submission was joy, paradise, paradise. Refusal to submit would mean pain beyond anything she could imagine, despair and agony as only those in hell knew it, so she must submit, open the door within herself, let it in, accept, be at peace. Hammering on her soul, ramming and pounding, fierce and irresistible hammering, hammering: Let it in, let it in, in, in. LET…IT…IN.
Suddenly she found the secret door within herself, pathway to joy, gate to peace eternal. She seized the knob, twisted, heard the latch click, pulled inward, shaking with anticipation. Through the slowly widening crack: a glimpse of the Giver. Glistening and dark. Writhing and quick. Hiss of triumph. Coldness at the threshold. Slam the door, slam the door, slam the door, slamthedoor—
Heather exploded from sleep, cast back the covers, rolled out of bed onto her feet in one fluid and frantic movement. Her booming heart kept knocking the breath out of her as she tried to inhale.
A dream. Only a dream. But no dream in her experience had ever been so intense.
Maybe the thing beyond the door had followed her out of sleep into the real world.
Crazy thought. Couldn’t shake it.
Wheezing thinly, she fumbled with the nightstand lamp, found the switch. The light revealed no nightmare creatures. Just Jack. Asleep on his stomach, head turned away from her, snoring softly.
She managed to draw a breath, though her heart continued to pound. She was damp with sweat and couldn’t stop shivering.
Jesus.
Not wanting to wake Jack, Heather switched off the lamp—and twitched as darkness fell around her.
She sat on the edge of the bed, intending to perch there until her heart stopped racing and the shakes passed, then pull a robe over her pajamas and go downstairs to read until morning. According to the luminous green numbers on the digital alarm clock, it was 3:09 A.M., but she was not going to be able to get back to sleep. No way. She might be unable to sleep even tomorrow night.
She remembered the glistening, writhing, half-seen presence on the threshold and the bitter cold that flowed from it. The touch of it was still within her, a lingering chill. Disgusting. She felt contaminated, dirty inside, where she could never wash the corruption away. Deciding that she needed a hot shower, she got up from the bed.
Disgust swiftly ripened into nausea.
In the dark bathroom she was racked by dry heaves that left a bitter taste. After turning on the light only long enough to find the bottle of mouthwash, she rinsed away the bitterness. In the dark again, she repeatedly bathed her face in handfuls of cold water.
She sat on the edge of the tub. She dried her face on a towel. As she waited for calm to return, she tried to figure out why a mere dream could have had such a powerful effect on her, but there was no understanding it.
In a few minutes, when she’d regained her composure, she quietly returned to the bedroom. Jack was still snoring softly.
Her robe was draped over the back of a Queen Anne armchair. She picked it up, slipped out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her. In the hall, she pulled on the robe and belted it.
Although she’d intended to go downstairs, brew a pot of coffee, and read, she turned instead toward Toby’s room at the end of t
he hall. Try as she might, Heather was unable to extinguish completely the fear from the nightmare, and her simmering anxiety began to focus on her son.
Toby’s door was ajar, and his room was not entirely dark. Since moving to the ranch, he had chosen to sleep with a night-light again, although he had given up that security a year ago. Heather and Jack were surprised but not particularly concerned by the boy’s loss of confidence. They assumed, once he adjusted to his surroundings, he would again prefer darkness to the red glow of the low-wattage bulb that was plugged into a wall socket near the floor.
Toby was tucked under his covers, only his head exposed on the pillow. His breathing was so shallow that to hear it, Heather had to bend close to him.
Nothing in the room was other than it ought to have been, but she hesitated to leave. Mild apprehension continued to tug at her.
Finally, as Heather reluctantly retreated to the open hall door, she heard a soft scrape that halted her. She turned to the bed, where Toby had not awakened, had not moved.
Even as she glanced at her son, however, she realized that the noise had come from the back stairs. It had been the sly, stealthy scrape of something hard, perhaps a boot heel, dragged across a wooden step—recognizable because of the air space under each stair tread, which lent the sound a distinctive hollow quality.
She was instantly afflicted by the same distress that she’d not felt while cleaning the stairs but that had plagued her on Monday when she’d followed Paul Youngblood and Toby down that curving well. The sweaty paranoid conviction that somebody—something?—was waiting around the next turn. Or descending behind them. An enemy possessed by a singular rage and capable of extreme violence.
She stared at the closed door at the head of those stairs. It was painted white, but it reflected the red glow of the night-light and seemed almost to shimmer like a portal of fire.
She waited for another sound.
Toby sighed in his sleep. Just a sigh. Nothing more.
Silence again.
Heather supposed she could have been wrong, could have heard an innocent sound from outside—perhaps a night bird settling onto the roof with a rustle of feathers and a scratching of claws against shingles—and could have mistakenly transposed the noise to the stairwell. She was jumpy because of the nightmare. Her perceptions might not be entirely trustworthy. She certainly wanted to believe she had been wrong.
Creak-creak.
No mistaking it this time. The new sound was quieter than the first, but it definitely came from behind the door at the head of the back stairs. She remembered how some of the wooden treads creaked when she had first descended to the ground floor during the tour on Monday and how they groaned and complained when she had been cleaning them on Wednesday.
She wanted to snatch Toby from the bed, take him out of the room, go quickly down the hall to the master bedroom, and wake Jack. However, she had never run from anything in her life. During the crises of the past eight months, she’d developed considerably more inner strength and self-confidence than ever before. Although the skin on the back of her neck tingled as if acrawl with hairy spiders, she actually blushed at the mental image of herself fleeing like the frail-hearted damsel of a bad gothic-romance novel, spooked out of her wits by nothing more menacing than a strange sound.
Instead, she went to the stairwell door. The dead-bolt lock was securely engaged.
She put her left ear to the crack between door and jamb. The faintest draft of cold air seeped through from the far side, but no sound came with it.
As she listened, she suspected that the intruder was on the upper landing of the stairwell, inches from her, with only the door between them. She could easily imagine him there, a dark and strange figure, his head against the door just as hers was, his ear pressed to the crack, listening for a sound from her.
Nonsense. The scraping and creaking had been nothing more than settling noises. Even old houses continued to settle under the unending press of gravity. That damned dream had really spooked her.
Toby muttered wordlessly in his sleep. She turned her head to look at him. He didn’t move, and after a few seconds his murmuring subsided.
Heather backed up one step and considered the door for a moment. She didn’t want to endanger Toby, but she was beginning to feel more ridiculous than afraid. Just a door. Just a staircase at the back of the house. Just an ordinary night, a dream, a bad case of jumpy nerves.
She put one hand on the knob, the other on the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock. The brass hardware was cool under her fingers.
She remembered the urgent need that had possessed her in the dream: Let it in, let it in, let it in.
That had been a dream. This was reality. People who couldn’t tell them apart were housed in rooms with padded walls, tended by nurses with fixed smiles and soft voices.
Let it in.
She disengaged the lock, turned the knob, hesitated.
Let it in.
Exasperated with herself, she yanked open the door.
She’d forgotten the stairwell lights would be off. That narrow shaft was windowless; no ambient light leached into it from outside. The red radiance in the bedroom was too weak to cross the threshold. She stood face-to-face with perfect darkness, unable to tell if anything loomed on the upper steps or even on the landing immediately before her. Out of the gloom wafted the repulsive odor that she’d eradicated two days before with hard work and ammonia water, not strong but not as faint as before, either: the vile aroma of rotting meat.
Maybe she had only dreamed that she’d awakened but was still in the grip of the nightmare.
Her heart slammed against her breastbone, her breath caught in her throat, and she groped for the light switch, which was on her side of the door, If it had been on the other side, she might not have had the courage to reach into that coiled blackness to feel for it. She missed it on the first and second tries, dared not look away from the darkness before her, felt blindly where she recalled having seen it, almost shouted at Toby to wake up and run, at last found the switch—thank God—clicked it.
Light. The deserted landing. Nothing there. Of course. What else? Empty steps curving down and out of sight.
A stair tread creaked below.
Oh, Jesus.
She stepped onto the landing. She wasn’t wearing slippers. The wood was cool and rough under her bare feet.
Another creak, softer than before.
Settling noises. Maybe.
She moved off the landing, keeping her left hand against the concave curve of the outer wall to steady herself. Each step that she descended brought a new step into view ahead of her.
At the first glimpse of anyone, she would turn and run back up the stairs, into Toby’s room, throw the door shut, snap the dead bolt in place. The lock couldn’t be opened from the stairwell, only from inside the house, so they would be safe.
From below came a furtive click, a faint thud—as of a door being pulled shut as quietly as possible.
Suddenly she was less disturbed by the prospect of confrontation than by the possibility that the episode would end inconclusively. Needing to know, one way or the other, Heather shook off timidity. She ran down the stairs, making more than enough noise to reveal her presence, along the convex curve of the inner wall, around, around, into the vestibule at the bottom.
Deserted.
She tried the door to the kitchen. It was locked and required a key to be opened from this side. She had no key. Presumably, an intruder would not have one, either.
The other door led to the back porch. On this side, the dead bolt operated with a thumb-turn. It was locked. She disengaged it, pulled open the door, stepped onto the porch.
Deserted. And as far as she could see, no one was sprinting away across the backyard.
Besides, although an intruder would not have needed a key to exit by that door, he would have needed one to lock it behind him, for it operated only with a key from the outside.
Somewhere an owl issued a mou
rnful interrogative. Windless, cold, and humid, the night air seemed not like that of the outdoors but like the dank and ever so slightly fetid atmosphere of a cellar.
She was alone. But she didn’t feel alone. She felt…watched.
“For God’s sake, Heth,” she said, “what the hell’s the matter with you?”
She retreated into the vestibule and locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn, wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost.
The rotten smell lingered.
Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or another small animal might be dead and decomposing inside the wall.
As she turned toward the stairs, she stepped in something. She lifted her left foot and studied the floor. A clod of dry earth about as large as a plum had partially crumbled under her bare heel.
Climbing to the second floor, she noticed dry crumbs of earth scattered on a few of the treads, which she’d failed to notice in her swift descent. The dirt hadn’t been there when she finished cleaning the stairwell on Wednesday. She wanted to believe it was proof the intruder existed. More likely, Toby had tracked a little mud in from the backyard. He was usually a considerate kid, and he was neat by nature, but he was, after all, only eight years old.
Heather returned to Toby’s room, locked the door, and snapped off the stairwell light.
Her son was sound asleep.
Feeling no less foolish than confused, she went down the front stairs, directly to the kitchen. If the repulsive smell was a sign of the intruder’s recent presence, and if the slightest trace of that stink hung in the kitchen, it would mean he had a key with which he’d entered from the back stairs. In that case she intended to wake Jack and insist they search the house top to bottom—with loaded guns.