Second Child

  As Blackie finished the Milk Bone, licking the last crumbs from the closely-cropped lawn, she slipped the belt around his neck.

  “That’s right,” she crooned softly. “That’s such a good dog.”

  The belt was all the way around Blackie’s neck now, and finally Teri released her grip on his collar to take the other end of the belt.

  Blackie looked up expectantly, hoping for another treat.

  And Teri, with a sudden jerk, pulled the terry-cloth belt tight around his neck.

  The big dog’s eyes jerked wide open as his breath was suddenly cut off. He tried to twist free from the noose, but Teri stood straight up, lifting the Labrador half off the ground, his forequarters suspended helplessly from the knotted belt. His legs lashed out, kicking wildly as he searched for something to brace himself against, and then his lips curled back as he bared his fangs. His hind legs, still touching the ground, clawed helplessly at the lawn as he tried to free himself from his tormentor, but as Teri began jerking on the belt, yanking it first one way and then the other, he lost what little traction he had.

  The struggle went on, eerily silent in the darkness of the foggy night, and for a moment Teri thought she might lose her grip on the belt.

  But then, with a sharp snap, the battle came to an abrupt end.

  Blackie’s body, sixty pounds of violently thrashing bone and muscle, suddenly went limp as his neck broke, severing his spinal cord.

  Teri held on to the belt for a few more seconds, until she was certain the dog was dead. Then, half carrying Blackie’s corpse and half dragging it, she went back into the house and started up the servants’ stairs.

  At first Melissa didn’t know what the sounds were; didn’t even know when she’d first become aware of them. She was sitting alone in the featureless white room, a room that sometimes seemed so immense she could barely see the walls that surrounded her. But at other times those same walls seemed to press in on her with a terrifying closeness that made her feel as if she were suffocating.

  She didn’t know why she was in the white room or how long she’d been there.

  But she knew it was some kind of punishment, some kind of penance she was required to suffer for some crime she couldn’t even remember having committed.

  But the room had been silent, so silent that the only sound she’d been able to hear at all was the quiet rasping of her own breath and the rhythmic beating of her own heart.

  It seemed as though she’d been sitting in the silence forever, but at some point the sounds had begun.

  She knew what they were now.

  They were footsteps.

  They had an ominous sound to them, and Melissa knew that whoever was approaching the room was coming for her.

  The footsteps would not pass her by and fade away again. Instead they would stop, and then she would have to wait.

  Wait for the door to open.

  The hollow thumping grew louder, and suddenly the walls began to close in, moving toward her, threatening to crush her. She looked around, searching for a door or a window, but there was nothing.

  And even if there were a way to escape the room, all that waited beyond was the terrifying being whose ominous tread came ever closer. The walls pressed in yet closer, and suddenly Melissa lashed out at them, shoving back at them with all the strength she could muster.

  She jerked awake, and for a moment didn’t know where she was. Then, as the remnants of the dream slipped away from her consciousness, the room began to take shape around her.

  Her room.

  She was home, and in bed, and …

  Tied up.

  Her heart sank. Had her mother come back tonight, after she’d gone to sleep, and put the restraints on?

  The familiar panic she always felt at the sight of the hateful straps boiled up inside her, and in her mind she started to call out for D’Arcy. But even as she summoned her friend, her muscles automatically contracted against the bonds.

  And her legs moved.

  She wasn’t strapped down at all.

  Instead, she was tangled up in her sheet, one of her arms pinned to her side. She rolled over, squirming, and the sheet released its hold on her. Working her arm loose, she began tugging the folds of material away from her body, and finally kicked the sheet away entirely. She sat up, reaching for the sheet to straighten it out.

  And heard the footsteps again.

  Clear and distinct, they echoed in the silence of the night.

  Melissa froze, listening.

  The footsteps came again, and for a moment Melissa was certain that it was her mother after all. She must have cried out as she woke up from the dream, and wakened her mother.

  There was a thump, and then the footsteps sounded once more.

  But not from outside her room, not from beyond the door to the hallway.

  From above.

  From the attic.

  Melissa’s breath caught and she unconsciously held it, waiting for the sound to come again.

  It came. Once, twice, three times. Then silence.

  A moment later it happened again. Three distinct steps, and then silence.

  D’Arcy.

  Melissa released her breath as the name came once more into her mind. But it couldn’t be D’Arcy—D’Arcy wasn’t real. She’d made D’Arcy up herself.

  Or had she?

  The footsteps echoed from the ceiling once more, and at last Melissa got up and put on her robe, then found her flashlight in the second drawer of her desk. She opened her door a crack and peered out into the hallway.

  All along its empty length closed doors seemed to gaze blankly at each other. Pulling the robe close around her and tying its belt, Melissa crept out into the hall, leaving her door open.

  She moved slowly toward the far end of the corridor, coming at last to the door behind which lay the stairs to the attic. She hesitated.

  What if her mother woke up and heard the footsteps, too?

  What if her mother found her in the attic in the middle of the night?

  But it wouldn’t be like the other times. This time she was awake and knew what she was doing.

  At last she turned the knob and pulled the door open. The stairs, the familiar flight she’d been up and down hundreds and hundreds of times, now appeared steeper.

  Steeper, and darker, rising upward into what seemed nothing more than a black void.

  She switched on the flashlight, but its beam barely penetrated the darkness.

  And yet, despite the darkness, the ominous shadows above seemed to be reaching out to her, beckoning her. Taking a deep breath, Melissa started up the stairs.

  She came to the top and stepped through the second door, into the attic itself. She paused, listening, but the seconds ticked by and she heard nothing.

  She reached for the light switch, and the single bare bulb that was the attic’s only light came on.

  Suddenly Melissa stood in the center of a pool of light, and the darkness in the far reaches of the attic grew even deeper. Then, as if from far away, she heard a faint sound, almost like a soft chuckle of laughter.

  A twinge of panic grasped at her. Could there really be someone up here?

  And then she understood.

  Teri.

  It had to be Teri, playing a trick on her.

  The fear drained away from her and she giggled out loud, but cut the laughter short as it echoed loudly around her. “Teri?” she whispered as loudly as she dared. “Come on, I know it’s you.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then the strange chuckle came again. Melissa listened, trying to determine from which direction it came.

  “Teri? Where are you?”

  She began playing the light around the attic, certain that at any moment she would catch her half sister in its beam.

  A moment later, as she aimed it toward the far end of the musty chamber, the end above her own room, a figure loomed up in the darkness.

  A figure clad in white, its face veiled.

  A
nd next to it, suspended from the rafters by a white rope, was Blackie’s corpse.

  Even from there she could see the dog’s grotesquely twisted head and bulging eyes, see its swollen tongue hanging over its sagging jaw.

  And around the dog’s neck she saw something else, something that made her blood run cold.

  It was a string of pearls.

  The pearls her father had given her for Christmas last year.

  She stood spellbound, her eyes fixed on the softly glistening beads as her mind tried to accept what it meant.

  She began moving forward, her vision narrowing until the string of pearls blotted out all else around it. She reached out, her fingers touching the pearls, and then clutched at them, pulling them over the dog’s head.

  A split second later a scream erupted from her throat, shattering the silence in the attic. Panic welled up inside her, overwhelming her, and she bolted toward the door, leaving the light on as she pounded down the stairs. She reached the second-floor hall, turned the corner and hurled herself through the door of the master suite. An instant later a light came on and her mother sat up in bed, staring at her in bewilderment.

  “Melissa? What on earth?”

  “It’s Blackie,” Melissa wailed. “I saw him, Mama. I saw him!”

  The last vestiges of sleep dropping away from her, Phyllis reached for her robe. “What on earth are you talking about, Melissa? If you’ve brought that dog into the house—”

  “But I didn’t,” Melissa cried. She was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks as she instinctively ran to her mother.

  But instead of taking her into an embrace, Phyllis grasped Melissa’s arms and sat her firmly on the edge of the bed. “Melissa, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Now stop crying and tell me what’s wrong!”

  With an effort of pure will, Melissa caught the sob that was rising in her throat. “U-Upstairs,” she stammered. “He’s upstairs. He—He’s dead, Mama.”

  Phyllis stared at her daughter, exasperated. “Melissa, I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Blackie,” Melissa wailed. “I keep telling you, Mama. He’s up in the attic. He—He’s dead!”

  Slowly, the story coming out in fragments, Melissa tried to tell her mother what had happened, but even as she repeated what she had seen, she could tell her mother didn’t believe her. Finally, when Melissa was done, Phyllis shook her head. “Melissa, you know how I feel about the things you make up.”

  “But I’m not making it up, Mama,” Melissa pleaded, offering her mother the string of pearls. “I found these up there.”

  Phyllis eyed the necklace. “Your pearls, Melissa? Why would they have been in the attic?”

  “Th-They were around Blackie’s neck,” Melissa stammered, her voice quavering as her sobs threatened to overwhelm her. “If you don’t believe me, go up and look!”

  Phyllis abruptly stood up. “I will,” she said, taking Melissa’s hand and pulling her off the bed. “We’ll both go. And,” she added, her voice ominous, “I hope for your sake you haven’t made all this up.”

  Phyllis marched her daughter out of the bedroom and down the hall. They came to the turn at the main stairs, and Melissa stopped abruptly as she saw Teri, clad in her pajamas and bathrobe, standing at her door.

  “Melissa?” Teri asked, cocking her head as a worried frown creased her brows. “What’s wrong? I thought I heard someone scream a few minutes ago.”

  Melissa wiped at the tears that still flooded her eyes, and nodded.

  “I-It’s Blackie—” she began, but her mother didn’t let her finish.

  “She seems to think she saw that stupid dog up there, along with some kind of ghost. It’s nonsense, of course, but she insists I go see.”

  Teri’s eyes widened. “Can I go, too?” she asked.

  Phyllis hesitated, then smiled grimly. “Why not?”

  A few seconds later, with Teri right behind her, Phyllis mounted the stairs to the attic. Melissa, still too terrified by what she’d seen to go back up to the shadowy chamber beneath the roof, hovered in the hall on the second floor. A few seconds later, though, Melissa heard her mother’s voice speaking to Teri. “Well, there’s the ghost, anyway!” Her voice rose as she called down the stairs. “Melissa, come up here.” Melissa hesitated, and Phyllis spoke again, her voice sharp. “Did you hear me? I told you to come up here!”

  Melissa crept up the stairs, already certain that something had happened, that whatever she’d seen, her mother and Teri had not.

  “Look,” her mother said as she reached the top of the stairs. “Is that what you saw?”

  Melissa’s eyes followed her mother’s pointing finger, and she felt an icy finger of apprehension as she saw the old dressmaker’s mannequin.

  The mannequin she and Teri had seen only a few days earlier.

  The mannequin that still wore an old white ball gown.

  The mannequin that, only a few minutes ago, must have looked like a ghostly figure looming in the shadows. Her chest tightening, Melissa’s eyes searched the attic for any trace of Blackie.

  “Look around carefully,” she heard her mother’s voice instructing her. “Where, exactly, did you see the dog?”

  A lump rose in Melissa’s throat, and she tried to swallow it. “O-Over there,” she breathed. “Right by the mannequin.”

  Grasping her daughter by the hand, Phyllis threaded her way across the cluttered floor until they stood only a foot from the mannequin. “Well?” she demanded. “Do you see him?”

  Melissa shook her head.

  “But you said he was right here.”

  Melissa nodded.

  “And now he’s not.” When Melissa made no answer, Phyllis jerked at her arm. “He’s not here, is he?”

  “N-No, Mother.”

  “And there’s no ghost wearing a veil, is there?” Phyllis demanded.

  “N-No.”

  “Then what happened?” Phyllis asked, her voice taking on a patronizing tone, as if she were talking to a five-year-old.

  “I—I don’t know,” Melissa whispered, her eyes darting around the attic, searching for something, anything, that might prove what she’d seen.

  “Well, then, since you don’t seem to know what happened,” Phyllis went on, starting back toward the stairs, “why don’t I tell you. You had a bad dream, that’s all.”

  “But it wasn’t a dream,” Melissa insisted, her eyes instinctively going to Teri for support. “I heard footsteps up here and came to see what they were. I—I thought it was you. I thought you were playing a trick on me.”

  Teri shrugged, shaking her head. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I was asleep. I only woke up when you screamed.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing,” Phyllis declared. “You’ve been up here—you’ve seen that there’s nothing here. If you were up here before and really saw what you say you saw, then you must have been walking in your sleep again.”

  The words battered at Melissa’s mind. Was it possible her mother was right? Could she have been sleepwalking again, and only dreamed the sounds she’d heard and the things she’d seen?

  It didn’t seem possible.

  She stared once more at the pearls still clutched in her hand. “But I found these—” she began.

  Her mother cut her off. “You brought those in hoping to convince me you were telling the truth. But it won’t work. You’re going back to bed, and this time you’ll stay there.”

  Melissa felt a chill as she heard the words, for she was certain she knew exactly what her mother was talking about. And when they got back to the second floor, her mother’s next words confirmed her fears.

  “Why don’t you go on down to the kitchen, Teri?” she suggested. “Put on some milk for cocoa, and I’ll be down in a minute.” She paused, her eyes fixing on her daughter. “As soon as I get Melissa settled into her bed,” she finished. But instead of going with Melissa to the room at the end of the hall, she sent he
r daughter ahead.

  When she came into Melissa’s room a minute or so later, the girl flinched as she saw the straps in her mother’s hands.

  “I don’t like these any more than you do,” Phyllis said as she began fastening the leather cuffs around Melissa’s arms and legs. “But I just don’t know what else to do. You can’t just wander around the house at night, can you?”

  Melissa made no answer, for the moment she had seen the dreaded straps in her mother’s hands, she had called out to D’Arcy to come and help her.

  And D’Arcy had responded, sending Melissa instantly to sleep while she herself stayed awake to endure the terror of the bondage.

  Half an hour later Teri came back upstairs with Phyllis, kissed her stepmother good night, and returned to her room. She waited until she heard the door to the master suite close, then crossed to the bathroom door, unlocked it, and moved through the bathroom itself to Melissa’s door. She paused, listening, and heard nothing.

  Finally, she opened the door and slipped through it into the darkness of Melissa’s room. Her bare feet padding silently across the floor, she went to the bed and looked down into her half sister’s face.

  Melissa lay on her back, her eyes open, staring, at the ceiling.

  “Melissa?” Teri whispered. “Are you awake?”

  There was no answer.

  Teri smiled in the darkness, her lips curving upward in an expression of hard cruelty. “They’re going to think you’re crazy,” she whispered. “They’re all going to think you’re crazy, and they’re going to lock you up.”

  Laughing silently to herself, she returned to her room and quickly drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  Teri awoke a second or two before the alarm on her nightstand went off, her hand clamping over the little clock before its soft buzzing reached full volume. She peered at the clock’s dimly glowing hands; it was four-thirty, and outside her window the sky was still black. She lay in bed for a few minutes, listening to the night sounds, but there was nothing out of the ordinary; only the chirping of crickets and frogs against the backdrop of gentle surf lapping at the beach.