This is not fan any longer. Not fun at all.
The mystery is too deep. And alarming.
It is as if this woman didn’t come to him out of that Honda but came through an invisible barrier between dimensions, out of some world beyond this one, from which she has been secretly watching him. The flavor is distinctly supernatural, the texture otherworldly, and now the laundry detergent smells like burning incense, and the cloying air seems thick with unseen presences.
Fearful and plagued by doubt, unaccustomed to both of those emotions, Mr. Vess steps into the laundry room, raising the Heckler & Koch P7. His finger wraps the trigger, already beginning to squeeze off a shot.
The cellar door stands open. The stairwell light is on.
The woman is not in sight.
He eases off the trigger without firing. On those infrequent occasions when he has guests to the house to dinner or for a business meeting, he always leaves a Doberman in the laundry room. The dog lies in here, silent and dozing. But if anyone other than Vess were to enter, the dog would bark and snarl and drive him backward.
When the master is away, Dobermans vigilantly patrol the entire property, and no one has a hope of getting into the house itself, let alone into the cellar.
Mr. Vess has never put a lock on the door to the cellar steps because he is concerned that it might accidentally trip, imprisoning him down there when he is at play and unawares. With a key-operated deadbolt, of course, this catastrophe could never happen. He himself is incapable of imagining how any such mechanism could malfunction and trap him; nevertheless, he’s too concerned about the prospect to take the risk.
Over the years, he has seen coincidence at work in the world, and people perishing because of it. One late-June afternoon near dusk, as Mr. Vess was driving to Reno, Nevada, on Interstate 80, a young blonde in a Mustang convertible had passed his motor home. She was wearing white shorts and a white blouse, and her long hair streamed red-gold in the twilight wind. Filled with an instant and powerful need to smash her beautiful face, he had pressed the motor home to its limits to keep her swifter Mustang in sight, but his quest had seemed doomed. As the highway rose into the Sierras, the speed of the motor home had fallen, and the Mustang had pulled away. Even if he had been able to draw close to the woman, the traffic had been too heavy—too many witnesses—for him to try anything as bold as forcing her off the highway. Then one of the tires on the Mustang had blown. Traveling at such high speed, she nearly spun out, nearly rolled, swerved from lane to lane, blue smoke pouring off the tires, but then she got control and pulled the car off the road onto the shoulder. Mr. Vess had stopped to assist her. She had been grateful for his offer of help, smiling and pleasantly shy, a nice girl with a one-inch gold cross on a chain around her neck, and later she had wept so bitterly and struggled so excitingly to resist surrendering her beauty, to turn her face away from his various sharp instruments, just a high-spirited young woman full of life and on the way to Reno until coincidence gave her to him.
And if a blown tire, why not a malfunctioning lock?
If coincidence can give, it can take.
Mr. Vess lives with intensity but not without caution.
Now this woman, calling for Ariel, has come into his life, like a blown tire, and suddenly he’s not sure if she is a gift to him or he to her.
Remembering her revolver and wishing for Dobermans, he glides across the laundry room to the cellar door.
The woman’s voice rises from the stairs below: “China Shepherd untouched and alive.”
The words are so strange—the meaning so mysterious—that they seem to be an incantation, encoded and cryptic.
Confirming that perception, the woman repeats herself, as though she is chanting: “China Shepherd untouched and alive.”
Though Vess is not usually superstitious, he experiences a heightened sense of the supernatural, beyond anything he’s felt thus far. His scalp prickles, and the flesh on the nape of his neck crawls, and his hand tightens on the pistol.