Halfway down the second flight of stairs she stopped. There was a curious tingle in the darkened hallway. A chill of night air: and more. She waited, shadow-thin, on the stairs, until her eyes accustomed themselves to the dark. Perhaps she should just go back upstairs, lock her bedroom door behind her, and find a few pills to while away the hours until the sun came up. It would be so much easier than living as she was, with every nerve electric. Along the hall toward the kitchen she caught a movement. A black bulk was framed against the doorway, and then gone.
It’s just the dark, she told herself, playing tricks. She smoothed her hand over the wall, feeling the design of the wallpaper ripple under her fingertips until she found the light switch. She flipped it on. The corridor was empty. The stairway at her back was empty. The landing was empty. She muttered “Stupid” to herself, and padded down the last three stairs and along the corridor to the kitchen.
Before she got there, her suspicions about the chill were confirmed. The back door was in direct line with the kitchen door, and both were open. It was odd, almost shocking in fact, to see the house, which was usually hermetically sealed, exposed to the night. The open door was like a wound in its flank.
She stepped through from the carpeted hallway onto the cool linoleum of the kitchen and was halfway to closing the door when she caught the glass glinting on the floor. The door had not been left open accidentally; somebody had forced his way in. A smell-sandalwood-was pricking her nostrils. It was sickly; but what it covered was sicklier still.
She had to inform Marty; that was the first priority. No need to go back upstairs. There was a phone on the kitchen wall.
Her mind divided. Part of her coolly assessed the problem and its solutions: where the phone was, what she must say to Marty when he answered it. Another part, the part that embraced H, that was always frightened, dissolved in panic. There’s somebody close (sandalwood), it said, somebody lethal in the dark, rotting in the dark.
The cooler self kept control. She walked-glad now to be barefoot because she made scarcely a sound-across to the phone. She picked up the receiver and dialed nineteen, the number of Marty’s bedroom. It rang once, then again. She willed him to wake quickly. Her reserves of control were, she knew, strictly limited.
“Come on, come on . . .” she breathed.
Then there was a sound behind her; heavy feet crunched the glass into smaller pieces. She turned to see who it was, and there was a nightmare standing in the doorway with a knife in his hand and a dogskin slung over one shoulder. The phone slipped from her fingers, and the part of her that had advised panic all along took the reins.
Told you so, it shouted. Told you so!
A phone rang in Marty’s dreams. He dreamed he woke, put it to his ear, and spoke to death on the other end of the line. But the ringing went on even though he’d picked the phone up and he surfaced from sleep to find the receiver in his hand and no one on the line.
He put it back in its cradle. Had it rung at all? He thought not. Still, the dream wasn’t worth going back to: his conversation with death had been gobbledygook. Swinging his legs out of bed he pulled on his jeans and was at the door, bleary-eyed, when from downstairs there came the crash of breaking glass.
The butcher had lurched toward her-throwing off the dog’s skin to make an embrace easier. She ducked him once; twice. He was ponderous, but she knew if he once got his hands on her, that was the end. He was between her and the exit into the house now; she was obliged to maneuver her way toward the back door.
“I wouldn’t go out there-” he advised, his voice, like his smell, mixing sweetness and rot. “It’s not safe.”
His warning was the best recommendation she’d heard. She slipped around the kitchen table and out through the open door, trying to skip across the glass shards. She contrived to pull the door closed behind her-more glass fell and shattered-and then she was away from the house. Behind her, she heard the door pulled open so roughly it might have been wrenched off its hinges. Now she heard the dog-killer’s footsteps-thunder in the ground-coming after her.