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 himand 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 stair-well 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.
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 stair-well.
An instant later, tendrils and then tentacles and then a great pulsing