Nevertheless, I was awash in guilt, drowning in cold currents, robbed of breath, and I stood gasping.
Nausea followed those currents, rippling like a fat slippery eel through my gut, swimming up my throat and almost surging into my mouth. I choked it down.
I needed to get out of here, yet I couldn’t move. I was half crushed under a weight of terror and guilt.
My right arm hung at my side, pulled as straight as a plumb line by the weight of the gun. The penlight, clutched in my left hand, stitched jagged patterns on the wall.
I could not think clearly. My thoughts rolled thickly, like tangled masses of seaweed in a sludge tide.
On the nearer nightstand, the telephone rang.
I kept my distance from it. I had the queer feeling that this caller was the deep-breather who had left the message on my answering machine, that he would try to steal some vital aspect of me with his bloodhound inhalations, as if my very soul could be vacuumed out of me and drawn away across the open telephone line. I didn’t want to hear his low, eerie, tuneless humming.
When at last the phone fell silent, my head had been somewhat cleared by the strident ringing. I clicked off the penlight, returned it to my pocket, raised the big pistol from my side—and realized that someone had switched on the light in the upstairs hall.
Because of the open window and the blood smeared on the frame, I had assumed I was alone in the house with Angela’s body. I was wrong. An intruder was still present—waiting between me and the stairs.
The killer couldn’t have slipped out of the master bath by way of the bedroom; a messy trail of blood would have marked his passage across the cream-colored carpet. Yet why would he have escaped from the upstairs only to return immediately through a ground-floor door or window?
If, after fleeing, he had changed his mind about leaving a potential witness and had decided to come back to get me, he wouldn’t have turned on the light to announce his presence. He would have preferred to take me by surprise.
Cautiously, squinting against the glare, I stepped into the hallway. It was deserted.
The three doors that had been closed when I had first come upstairs were now standing wide open. The rooms beyond them were forbiddingly bright.
14
Like blood out of a wound, silence welled from the bottom of the house into this upstairs hall. Then a sound rose, but it came from outside: the keening of the wind under the eaves.
A strange game seemed to be under way. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know the identity of my adversary. I was screwed.
Flicking a wall switch, I brought forth a soothing flow of shadows to the hall, which made the lights in the three open rooms seem brighter by comparison.
I wanted to run for the stairs. Get down, out, away. But I didn’t dare leave unexplored rooms at my back this time. I’d end up like Angela, throat slashed from behind.
My best chance of staying alive was to remain calm. Think. Approach each door with caution. Inch my way out of the house. Make sure my back was protected every step of the way.
I squinted less, listened more, heard nothing, and moved to the doorway opposite the master bedroom. I didn’t cross the threshold but remained in the shadows, using my left hand as a visor to shade my eyes from the harsh overhead light before me.
This might have been a son’s or daughter’s room if Angela had been able to have children. Instead, it contained a tool cabinet with many drawers, a bar stool with a back, and two high worktables placed to form an L. Here she spent time at her hobby: dollmaking.
A quick glance along the hallway. Still alone.
Keep moving. Don’t be an easy target.
I pushed the hobby-room door all the way open. No one was hiding behind it.
I stepped briefly into the brightly lighted room, staying sideways to the hall to cover both spaces.
Angela was a fine dollmaker, as proved by the thirty dolls on the shelves of an open display cabinet at the far end of the hobby room. Her creations were attired in richly imagined, painstakingly realized costumes that Angela herself had sewn: cowboy and cowgirl outfits, sailor suits, party dresses with petticoats…. The wonder of the dolls, however, was their faces. She sculpted each head with patience and real talent, and she fired it in a kiln in the garage. Some were matt-finish bisque. Others were glazed. All were hand-painted with such attention to detail that their faces looked real.
Over the years, Angela had sold some of her dolls and had given many away. These remaining were evidently her favorites, with which she had been most reluctant to part. Even under the circumstances, alert for the approach of a psychopath with a half-sharp knife, I saw that each face was unique—as though Angela wasn’t merely making dolls but was lovingly imagining the possible faces of the children whom she had never carried in her womb.
I switched off the ceiling fixture, leaving only a worktable lamp. In the sudden swelling of shadows, the dolls appeared to shift on the shelves, as if preparing to leap to the floor. Their painted eyes—some bright with points of reflected light and some with a fixed inky glare—seemed watchful and intent.
I had the heebie-jeebies. Big time.
The dolls were only dolls. They were no threat to me.
Back into the corridor, sweeping the Glock left, right, left again. No one.
Next along this side of the hall was a bathroom. Even with my eyes narrowed to slits to filter out the dazzle of porcelain and glass and mirrors and yellow ceramic tile, I could see into every corner. No one was waiting there.
As I reached inside to switch off the bathroom lights, a noise rose behind me. Back toward the master bedroom. A quick rapping like knuckles on wood. From the corner of my eye, I saw movement.
I spun toward the sound, bringing up the Glock in a two-hand grip again, as if I knew what the hell I was doing, imitating Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Eastwood and Cage from a hundred jump-run-shoot-chase movies, as if I actually believed that they knew what the hell they were doing. I expected to see a hulking figure, demented eyes, an upraised arm, an arcing knife, but I was still alone in the hallway.
The movement I’d seen was the master-bedroom door being pushed shut from the inside. In the diminishing wedge of light between the moving door and the jamb, a twisted shadow loomed, writhed, shrank. The door fell shut with a solid sound like the closing of a bank vault.
That room had been deserted when I left it, and no one had come past me since I’d stepped into the hallway. Only the murderer could be in there—and only if he’d returned through the bathroom window from a porch roof where he’d been when I’d discovered Angela’s body.
If the killer was already in the master bedroom again, however, he couldn’t also have slipped behind me, moments earlier, to turn on the second-floor lights. So there were two intruders. I was caught between them.
Go forward or back? Lousy choice. Deep shit either way, and me without rubber boots.
They would expect me to run for the stairs. But it was safer to do the unexpected, so without hesitation I rushed to the master-bedroom door. I didn’t bother with the knob, kicked hard, sprung the latch, and pushed inside with the Glock in front of me, ready to squeeze off four or five shots at anything that moved.
I was alone.
The nightstand lamp was still lit.
No bloody footprints stained the carpet, so no one could have reentered the splattered bathroom from outside and then returned here by that route to close the hall door.
I checked the bathroom anyway. I left the penlight in my pocket this time, relying on an influx of faint light from the bedroom lamp, because I didn’t need—or want—to see all the vivid details again. The casement window remained open. The smell was as repulsive as it had been two minutes ago. The shape slumped against the toilet was Angela. Although she was mercifully veiled in gloom, I could see her mouth gaping as though in amazement, her wide eyes unblinking.
I turned away and glanced nervously at the open door to the hall. No one ha
d followed me in here.
Baffled, I retreated to the middle of the bedroom.
The draft from the bathroom window was not strong enough to have blown the bedroom door shut. Besides, no draft had cast the twisted shadow that I had glimpsed.
Although the space under the bed might have been large enough to hide a man, he would have been uncomfortably compressed between the floor and the box springs, with frame slats banding his back. Anyway, no one could have squirmed into that hiding place before I’d kicked my way into the room.
I could see through the open door to the walk-in closet, which obviously did not harbor an intruder. I took a closer look anyway. The penlight revealed an attic access in the closet ceiling. Even if a fold-down ladder was fitted to the back of that trap door, no one could have been spider-quick enough to climb into the attic and pull the ladder after himself in the two or three seconds that I had taken to burst in from the hallway.
Two draped windows flanked the bed. Both proved to be locked from the inside.
He hadn’t gone out that way, but maybe I could. I wanted to avoid returning to the hall.
Keeping the bedroom door in view, I tried to open a window. It was painted shut. These were French windows with thick mullions, so I couldn’t just break a pane and climb out.
My back was to the bathroom. Suddenly I felt as though spiders were twitching through the hollows of my spine. In my mind’s eye, I saw Angela behind me, not lying by the toilet any longer but risen, red and dripping, eyes as bright and flat as silver coins. I expected to hear the wound bubbling in her throat as she tried to speak.
When I turned, tingling with dread, she was not behind me, but the hot breath of relief that erupted from me proved how seriously I’d been gripped by this fantastic expectation.
I was still gripped by it: I expected to hear her thrash to her feet in the bathroom. Already, my anguish over her death had been supplanted by fear for my own life. Angela was no longer a person to me. She was a thing, death itself, a monster, a fist-in-the-face reminder that we all perish and rot and turn to dust. I’m ashamed to say that I hated her a little because I’d felt obliged to come upstairs to help her, hated her for having put me in this vise, hated myself for hating her, my loving nurse, hated her for making me hate myself.
Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind.
My hands were clammy. The butt of the pistol was slick with cold perspiration.
I stopped chasing ghosts and reluctantly returned to the upstairs hallway. A doll was waiting for me.
This was one of the largest from Angela’s hobby-room shelves, nearly two feet high. It sat on the floor, legs splayed, facing me in the light that came through the open door from the only room that I hadn’t yet explored, the one opposite the hall bath. Its arms were outstretched, and something hung across both its hands.
This was not good.
I know not good when I see it, and this was fully, totally, radically not good.
In the movies, a development like the appearance of this doll was inevitably followed by the dramatic entrance of a really big guy with a bad attitude. A really big guy wearing a cool hockey mask. Or a hood. He’d be carrying an even cooler chain saw or a compressed-air nail gun or, in an unplugged mood, an ax big enough to decapitate a T-Rex.
I glanced into the hobby room, which was still half illuminated by the worktable lamp. No intruder lurked there.
Move. To the hall bathroom. It was still deserted. I needed to use the facilities. Not a convenient time. Move.
Now to the doll, which was dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. The object in its hands was a navy-blue cap with two words embroidered in ruby-red thread above the bill: Mystery Train.
For a moment I thought it was a cap like mine. Then I saw that it was my own, which I’d left downstairs on the kitchen table.
Between glances at the head of the stairs and at the open door to the only room that I hadn’t searched, expecting trouble from one source or the other, I plucked the cap from the small china hands. I pulled it on my head.
In the right light and circumstances, any doll can have an eerie or evil aspect. This was different, because not a single feature in this bisque face struck me as malevolent, yet the skin on the back of my neck creped like Halloween-party bunting.
What spooked me was not any strangeness about the doll but an uncanny familiarity: It had my face. It had been modeled after me.
I was simultaneously touched and creeped out. Angela had cared for me enough to sculpt my features meticulously, to memorialize me lovingly in one of her creations and keep it upon her shelves of favorites. Yet unexpectedly coming upon such an image of oneself wakes primitive fears—as if I might touch this fetish and instantly find my mind and soul trapped within it, while some malignant spirit, previously immobilized in the doll, came forth to establish itself in my flesh. Gleeful at its release, it would lurch into the night to crack virgins’ skulls and eat the hearts of babies in my name.
In ordinary times—if such times exist—I am entertained by an unusually vivid imagination. Bobby Halloway calls it, with some mockery, “the three-hundred-ring circus of your mind.” This is no doubt a quality I inherited from my mother and father, who were intelligent enough to know that little could be known, inquisitive enough never to stop learning, and perceptive enough to understand that all things and all events contain infinite possibilities. When I was a child, they read to me the verses of A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter but also, certain that I was precocious, Donald Justice and Wallace Stevens. Thereafter, my imagination has always churned with images from lines of verse: from Timothy Tim’s ten pink toes to fireflies twitching in the blood. In extraordinary times—such as this night of stolen cadavers—I am too imaginative for my own good, and in the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, all the tigers wait to kill their trainers and all the clowns hide butcher knives and evil hearts under their baggy clothes.
Move.
One more room. Check it out, protect my back, then straight down the stairs.
Superstitiously avoiding contact with the doppelgänger doll, stepping wide of it, I went to the open door of the room opposite the hall bath. A guest bedroom, simply furnished.
Tucking my capped head down and squinting against the glare from the ceiling fixture, I saw no intruder. The bed had side rails and a footboard behind which the spread was tucked, so the space under it was revealed.
Instead of a closet, there were a long walnut bureau with banks of drawers and a massive armoire with a pair of side-by-side drawers below and two tall doors above. The space behind the armoire doors was large enough to conceal a grown man with or without a chain saw.
Another doll awaited me. This one was sitting in the center of the bed, arms outstretched like the arms of the Christopher Snow doll behind me, but in the shrouding brightness, I couldn’t tell what it held in its pink hands.
I switched off the ceiling light. One nightstand lamp remained lit to guide me.
I backed into the guest room, prepared to respond with gunfire to anyone who appeared in the hall.
The armoire hulked at the edge of my vision. If the doors began to swing open, I wouldn’t even need the laser sighting to chop holes in them with a few 9-millimeter rounds.
I bumped into the bed and turned from both the hall door and the armoire long enough to check out the doll. In each upturned hand was an eye. Not a hand-painted eye. Not a glass-button eye taken from the dollmaker’s supply cabinet. A human eye.
The armoire doors hung unmoving on piano hinges.
Nothing but time moved in the hall.
I was as still as ashes in an urn, but life continued within me: My heart raced as it had never raced before, no longer merely revving nicely, but spinning with panic in its squirrel cage of ribs.
Once more I looked at the offering of eyes that filled those small china hands—bloodshot brown eyes, milky and moist, startling and startled in their
lidless nakedness. I knew that one of the last things ever seen through them was a white van pulling to a stop in response to an upturned thumb. And then a man with a shaven head and one pearl earring.
Yet I was sure that I wasn’t dealing with that same bald man here, now, in Angela’s house. This game-playing wasn’t his style, this taunting, this hide-and-seek. Quick, vicious, violent action was more to his taste.
Instead, I felt as though I had stumbled into a sanitarium for sociopathic youth, where psychotic children had savagely overthrown their keepers and, giddy with freedom, were now at play. I could almost hear their hidden laughter in other rooms: macabre silvery giggles stifled behind small cold hands.
I refused to open the armoire.
I had come up here to help Angela, but there was no helping her now or ever. All I wanted was to get downstairs, outside, onto my bicycle, and away.
As I started toward the door, the lights went out. Someone had thrown a breaker in a junction box.
This darkness was so bottomless that it didn’t welcome even me. The windows were heavily draped, and the milk-pitcher moon couldn’t find gaps through which to pour itself. All was blackness on blackness.
Blindly, I rushed toward the door. Then I angled to one side of it when I was overcome by the conviction that someone was in the hall and that I would encounter the thrust of a sharp blade at the threshold.
I stood with my back to the bedroom wall, listening. I held my breath but was unable to quiet my heart, which clattered like horses’ hooves on cobblestones, a runaway parade of horses, and I felt betrayed by my own body.
Nevertheless, over the thundering stampede of my heart, I heard the creak of the piano hinges. The armoire doors were coming open.