They were all silent.
The only sound was the faraway gurgle and sizzle of rain.
‘So we have a few hours,’ Boothe said at last, and he sounded like a different man from the one who had welcomed Dan into the library a short while ago, a much weaker and less impressive man. ‘Just a few hours …’
But they didn’t even have that much time. As Palmer Boothe’s voice faded into a silence composed of terror and self-pity, the air temperature in the library dropped twenty degrees from one second to the next.
Laura hadn’t been able to keep Melanie alert.
‘No!’ Uhlander gasped.
Books exploded off one of the highest library shelves and rained over Boothe and Uhlander.
The two men cried out and threw their arms over their heads.
A heavy chair rose off the floor, eight feet into the air, hung there, spinning around and around, then was thrown all the way across the library, where it struck the French windows. The brittle sounds of breaking glass and splintering mullions was followed by the crash of the chair rebounding from the window frame and falling to the floor.
Melanie was there. The etheric half of her. The astral body or psychogeist.
Dan thought of trying to speak to her and reason with her now, before she killed again, but he knew there was no hope of getting through to her, no more hope than her mother had had in hypnotic-therapy sessions. He could not save Boothe and Uhlander, and he really had no desire to save them. The only life he might be able to save now was Melanie’s, for he had thought of something — a plan, a trick — that might stop her from turning her psychic power upon herself in a suicidal response to her self-loathing and horror. It was a shaky plan. Not much chance that he could make it work. But in order even to try, he had to be with the girl’s body, with her physical self, when her astral body returned. Which meant he had to get back to Westwood, to the theater, before she was finished in Bel Air, and he didn’t have time to waste in a fruitless attempt to dissuade her from destroying Boothe and Uhlander.
Unseen hands swept another shelf clean of books, and the volumes crashed to the floor, all across the room.
Boothe was screaming.
The bar exploded as if a bomb had gone off in it, and the air reeked of whiskey.
Uhlander was begging for mercy.
Dan saw the Tiffany lamp rising into the air, floating up like a balloon on its cord. Before the lamp had risen to the length of that tether, Dan recovered his wits, regained his sense of urgency. He ran the last few steps to the end of the room. As he pulled open the door, the light went out behind him, and the library was plunged into darkness.
He pulled the door shut as he stepped out of the room. He raced back through the house, retracing the route along which the butler had brought him earlier.
In a room with peach-colored walls and an elaborately molded white ceiling, he encountered that servant rushing the opposite direction in response to the hideous screaming in the library.
Dan said, ‘Call the police!’ He was sure that Melanie wouldn’t harm anyone other than those who had been in the gray room or those closely associated with the conspiracy against her. Nevertheless, as the butler stopped in confusion, Dan said, ‘Don’t go in the library. Call the police. For God’s sake, don’t go in there yourself’.
* * *
The dark theater no longer seemed like a sanctuary to Laura. She was claustrophobic. The rows of seats were confining. The darkness threatened her. Why in the name of God had they taken refuge in a place of darkness. It probably thrived on darkness.
What would happen if the air grew cold again and the thing returned.
And it would return.
She was sure of that.
Soon.
* * *
The enormous iron gates began to swing slowly open when Dan had descended half the long driveway.
Ordinarily, the butler probably called ahead to the gatehouse, and the guard opened the gates even as the guest was pulling his car out of the parking circle in front of the house. But at the moment, the butler was calling 911, scared witless by the bloodcurdling screams and battle sounds coming from the library, so the guard had activated the gate controls only when he’d seen the headlights knifing down toward him through the early darkness and rain.