He heard enough nothing to suggest that he might be adrift in the vacuum of deep space, and as he began to wonder if he had gone deaf, he decided that Kenny must be no less patient than he was full-on psychotic.
Although Dylan wanted to do this about as much as he wanted to wrestle a crocodile, he edged into the open doorway, reached around the casing into the room, and felt the wall for the light switch. He assumed that Kenny stood poised to respond to such a maneuver, and his expectations of having his hand pinned to the wall with a knife were so high that he was not far short of astonished when he still had all his fingers after flipping the switch.
Grandma’s room didn’t have a ceiling fixture, but one of two night-stand lamps came on: a ginger jar painted with tulips, crowned by a pleated yellow shade in the shape of a coolie hat. Soft light and soft shadows shared the space.
Two other doors served the room. Both were closed. One most likely led to a closet. A bathroom might lie behind the other.
The drapes at the three windows were neither long enough nor full enough to conceal anyone.
A freestanding, full-length, oval-shaped mirror occupied one corner. No one lurked behind it, but Dylan’s reflection occupied its face, looking less frightened than he felt, bigger than he thought of himself.
The queen-size bed was positioned so that Kenny might be hiding on the far side, lying on the floor, but no other furniture offered concealment.
Of more immediate concern was the figure on the bed. A thin chenille spread, a blanket, and a top sheet were tossed in disarray, but someone appeared to be lying under them, concealed head to foot.
As in countless prison-escape movies, this might actually have been pillows arranged to mimic the human form, except that the bedclothes trembled slightly.
By opening the door and switching on the light, Dylan already had announced his presence. Cautiously approaching the bed, he said, ‘Kenny?’
Under the tumbled bedding, the ill-defined figure stopped shaking. For a moment it froze and lay as still as any cadaver beneath a morgue sheet.
Dylan gripped the baseball bat with both hands, ready to swing for the fences. ‘Kenny?’
The hidden form began to twitch, as though with uncontainable excitement, with nervous energy.
The door that might lead to a closet: still closed. The door that might lead to a bathroom: still closed.
Dylan glanced over his shoulder, toward the hall door.
Nothing.
He grappled for the name that the shackled boy mentioned, the name of the threatened girl from down the street, and then he had it: ‘Becky?’
The mysterious figure twitched, twitched, so alive beneath the covers, but it did not reply.
Although he dared not club what he could not see, Dylan was loath to put his hand to the bedclothes to toss them aside, for the same reason that he would have been reluctant to pull back the tarp on a woodpile if he suspected that a rattlesnake coiled among the cords.
He also wasn’t eager to use the fat end of the baseball bat to lift the bedclothes out of the way. While entangled with the covers, the bat would be an ineffective weapon, and although this maneuver would leave Dylan vulnerable for only the briefest moment, a moment would be all that Kenny needed if he shot off the bed and out from under the rising covers, armed with a specialty knife well designed for evisceration.
Soft light, soft shadows.
House hushed.
The shape, twitching.
17
Jilly in the downstairs hall, archway to archway, past three lightless rooms, listened at each threshold, detected nothing, and moved onward to the foyer, past the lamp table, to the foot of the stairs.
Starting to climb, she heard a metallic plink behind her, and halted on the second step. Plink was followed by tat-a-tat and by a quick strumming – zzziiinnnggg – and then by utter stillness.
The noises had seemed to come from the first room inside the front door, directly opposite the foyer. Probably the living room.
When you were trying to avoid a run-in with a young man whose own grandmother’s best assessment of him boiled down to crazy-drugs-knives, you didn’t want to hear peculiar metallic sounds coming out of a dark room at your back. The subsequent silence did not have – could never possibly have – the innocent quality of the silence that had preceded plink.