of here.
Without the cat, we had little chance of conducting a successful search
of Wyvern. We were hostage to his curiosity to whatever it was that
motivated him to turn his back to us on the newel post, sprint agilely
up the handrail, spring to the stairs, and disappear into the darkness
of the upper floor.
“What’s he doing? ” I asked Roosevelt.
“Wish I knew. It takes two to communicate, ” he murmured.
As before, Sasha took the point position as we ascended the stairs.
I brought up the rear. The carpeted treads creaked a little underfoot,
more than a little under Roosevelt’s feet, but the movie sound track
drifting up from the living room and studyand similar sounds coming from
upstairs effectively masked the noises we made.
At the top of the stairs, I turned and looked down. There weren’t any
dead people standing in the foyer, with their heads concealed under
black silk. Not even one. I had expected five.
Six doors led off the upstairs hall. Five were open, and pulsing light
came from three rooms. Competing sound tracks indicated that The Lion
King was not the universal choice of entertainment for these condemned.
Unwilling to pass an unexplored room and possibly leave an assailant
behind us, Sasha went to the first door, which was closed. I stood with
my back to the wall at the hinged edge of the door, and she put her back
to the wall on the other side. I reached across, gripped the knob, and
turned it. When I pushed the door open, Sasha went through fast and low,
the gun in her right hand, feeling for the light switch with her left.
A bathroom. Nobody there.
She backed into the hall, switching off the light but leaving the door
open.
Beside the bathroom was a linen closet.
Four rooms remained. Doors open. Light and voices and music coming from
three of them.
I emphatically am not a gun lover, having fired one for the first time
only a month previously. I still worry about shooting myself in the
foot, and would rather shoot myself in the foot than be forced ever
again to kill another human being. But now I was seized by a desire for
a gun that was probably only slightly down the scale of desperation from
the urgency with which a half-starved man craves food, because I
couldn’t bear to see Sasha taking all the risks.
At the next room, she cleared the doorway quickly. When there was not an
immediate outburst of gunfire, Bobby and I followed her inside, while
Roosevelt watched the hall from the threshold.
A bedside lamp glowed softly. On the television was a Nature Channel
documentary that might have been soothing, even elegiac, when it had
been turned on to provide a distraction for the doomed as they drank
their spiked fruit punch, but at the moment a fox was chewing the guts
out of a quail.
This was the master bedroom, with an attached bath, and though it was a
large chamber, with brighter colors than those downstairs, I felt
suffocated by the determined, slathered-on, high-Victorian cheerfulness.
The walls, the drapes, the spread, and the canopy on the four-poster bed
were all of the same fabric, a cream background heavily patterned with
roses and ribbons, explosions of pink, green, and yellow. The carpet
featured yellow chrysanthemums, pink roses, and blue ribbons, lots of
blue ribbons, so many blue ribbons that I couldn’t help but think of
veins and unraveling intestines. The painted and parcel-gilt furniture
was no less oppressive than the darker pieces downstairs, and the room
contained so many crystal paperweights, porcelains, small bronzes,
silver-framed photographs, and other bibelots that, if considered
ammunition, they could have been used to stone to death an entire mob of
malcontents.
On the bed, atop the gay spread and fully dressed, lay a man and a woman
with the de rigueur black silk face coverings, which now began to seem
neither cultish nor symbolic but quite Victorian and proper, draped
across the awful faces of the dead to spare the sensitivities of those
who might discover them. I was sure that these twoon their backs, side