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.
Jesus.
It was a prayer, not a curse. Or maybe both.
Holding the Glock in a two-hand grip again, I aimed toward where I thought the big armoire stood. Then I reconsidered and swung the muzzle three inches to the left. Only to swing it immediately back to the right.
I was disoriented in the absolute blackness. Although I was certain that I would hit the armoire, I couldn’t be sure that I would put the round straight through the center of the space above the two drawers. The first shot had to count, because the muzzle flash would give away my position.
I couldn’t risk pumping out rounds indiscriminately. Although a spray of bullets would probably waste the bastard, whoever he might be, there was a chance that I would only wound him—and a smaller but still very real chance that I would merely piss him off.
When the pistol magazine was empty—then what?
Then what?
I sidled to the hallway, risking an encounter there, but it didn’t happen. As I crossed the threshold, I pulled the guest-room door shut behind me, putting it between me and whoever had come out of the armoire—assuming I hadn’t imagined the creaking of the piano hinges.
The ground-floor lights were evidently on their own circuit. A glow rose through the stairwell at the end of the black hall.
Instead of waiting to see who, if anyone, would burst out of the guest room, I ran to the stairs.
I heard a door open behind me.
Gasping, descending two stairs at a time, I was almost to the landing when my head in miniature sailed past. It shattered against the wall in front of me.
Startled, I brought an arm up to shield my eyes. China shrapnel tattooed my face and chest.
My right heel landed on the bullnose edge of a step and skidded off. I nearly fell, pitched forward, slammed into the landing wall, but kept my balance.
On the landing, crunching shards of my glazed face underfoot, I whipped around to confront my assailant.
The decapitated body of the doll, appropriately attired in basic black, hurtled down. I ducked, and it passed over my head, thumping against the wall behind me.
When I looked up and covered the dark top of the stairs with the gun, there was no one to shoot—as if the doll had torn off its own head to throw at me and then had hurled itself into the stairwell.
The downstairs lights went out.
Through the forbidding blackness came the smell of something burning.
15
Groping in the impenetrable gloom, I finally found the handrail. I clutched at the smooth wood with one sweaty hand and started down the lower flight of stairs toward the foyer.
This darkness had a strange sinuosity, seemed to coil and writhe around me as I descended through it. Then I realized that it was the air, not the darkness, that I was feeling: serpentine currents of hot air swarming up the stairwell.
An instant later, tendrils and then tentacles and then a great pulsing mass of foul-smelling smoke poured into the stairwell from below, invisible but palpable, enveloping me as some giant sea anemone might envelop a diver. Coughing, choking, struggling to breathe, I reversed directions, hoping to escape through a second-floor window, although not through the master bathroom where Angela waited.
I returned to the landing and clambered up three or four steps of the second flight before halting. Through smoke-stung eyes flooded with tears—and through the pall of smoke itself—I saw a throbbing light above.
Fire.
Two fires had been set, one above and one below. Those unseen psychotic children were busy in their mad play, and there seemed to be so many of them. I was reminded of the veritable platoon of searchers that appeared to spring from the ground outside the mortuary, as though Sandy Kirk possessed the power to summon the dead from their graves.
Downward, once more and quickly, I plunged toward the only hope of nourishing air. I would find it, if anywhere, at the lowest point of the structure, because smoke and fumes rise while the blaze sucks in cooler air at its base in order to feed itself.
Each inhalation caused a spasm of coughing, increased my feeling of suffocation, and fed my panic, so I held my breath until I reached the foyer. There, I dropped to my knees, stretched out on the floor, and discovered that I could breathe. The air was hot and smelled sour, but all things being relative, I was more thrilled by it than I had ever been by the crisp air coming off the washboard of the Pacific.
I didn’t lie there and surrender to an orgy of respiration. I hesitated just long enough to draw several deep breaths to clear my soiled lungs, and to work up enough saliva to spit some of the soot out of my mouth.
Then I raised my head to test the air and to learn how deep the precious safe zone might be. Not deep. Four to six inches. Nevertheless, this shallow pool ought to be enough to sustain me while I found my way out of the house.
Wherever the carpet was afire, of course, there would be no safe-air zone whatsoever.
The lights were still out, the smoke was blindingly thick, and I squirmed on my stomach, frantically heading toward where I believed I would find the front door, the nearest exit. The first thing I encountered in the murk was a sofa, judging by the feel of it, which meant that I had passed through the archway and into the living room, at least ninety degrees off the course I imagined I’d been following.
Now luminous orange pulses passed through the comparatively clear air near the floor, underlighting the curdled masses of smoke as if they were thunderheads looming over a plain. From my eye-to-the-carpet perspective, the beige nylon fibers stretched away like a vast flat field of dry grass, fitfully brightened by an electrical storm. This narrow, life-sustaining realm under the smoke seemed to be an alternate world into which I had fallen after stepping through a door between dimensions.