the photograph, the feeling of being under observation grew so acute
that she abruptly wheeled around and looked back across the living room.
She was alone.
She stepped quickly to the archway and through it into the front hall.
Deserted.
A dark mahogany staircase led up to the second floor. The dust on the
newel post and bannister was undisturbed: no palm marks, no
fingerprints.
Looking up the first flight, she said, “Hello?” Her voice sounded
queerly flat in the empty house.
No one responded to her.
Hesitantly, she started to climb the stairs.
“Who’s there?” she called.
Only silence answered her.
Frowning, she stopped on the third step. She glanced down into the
front hall, then up toward the landing again.
The silence was too deep, unnatural. Even a deserted house had some
noise in it, occasional creaks and ticks and pops from old wood swelling
or contracting, a rattle from a loose windowpane tapped by a finger of
wind.
But the Ironheart house was so hushed, Holly might have thought that
she’d gone deaf, except that she could hear the sounds she made herself
She climbed two more steps. Stopped again.
She still felt she was under observation. It was as if the old house
itself watched her with malevolent interest, alive and sentient,
possessed of a thousand eyes hidden in the wood moldings and in the
pattern of the wallpaper.
Dust motes drifted in the rays of the landing light above.
Twilight pressed its purple face to the windows.
Standing just four steps below the landing, partly under the second
flight that led into the unseen upstairs hallway, she became convinced
that something was waiting for her on the second floor. It was not
necessarily The Enemy up there, not even anything alive and hostile-but
something horrible, the discovery of which would shatter her.
Her heart was hammering. When she swallowed, she found a lump in her
throat. She drew breath with a startling, ragged sound.
The feeling of being watched and of trembling on the brink of a
monstrous revelation became so overpowering that she turned and hurried
down the steps. She did not flee pell-mell out of the house; she
retraced her path and turned off all the lights as she went; but she did
not dally, either.
Outside, the sky was purple-black where it met the mountains in the
east, purplish-red where it touched the mountains in the west, and
saphire-blue between. The golden fields and hills had changed to pale
gray, fading to charcoal, as if a fire had swept them while she was in
the house.
As she crossed the yard and moved past the barn, the conviction that she
was under observation only grew more intense. She glanced
apprehensively at the open black square of the hay loft, the windows on
either side of the big red double doors. It was a gut-clenching
sensation of such primitive power that it transcended mere instinct.
She felt as if she were a guinea pig in a laboratory experiment, with
wires hooked into her brain, while scientists sent pulses of current
directly into the raw cerebral tissues that controlled the fear reflex
and generated paranoid delusions. She had never experienced anything
like it, knew that she was teetering on the thin edge of panic, and
struggled to get a grip on herself By the time she reached the graveled
drive that curved around the pond, she was running. She held the
extinguished flashlight like a club, prepared to swing it hard at
anything that darted toward her.
The bells rang. Even above her frantic breathing, she heard the pure,
silvery trilling of clappers rapidly striking the inner curves of
perfectly tuned bells.
For an instant she was amazed that the phenomenon was audible out side
the windmill and at a distance, as the building was halfway around the
pond from her. Then something flickered in her peripheral vision even
before the first spell of ringing ended, and she looked away from the
mill, toward the water.
Pulses of blood-red light, originating at the center of the pond, spread
outward toward the banks in tight concentric circles, like the measured
ripples that radiated from the point at which a dropped stone struck