She was afraid of falling.
Of dying.
Tony?
She ran toward the only place that might offer protection: the doors in the ground.
Lightning flickered, and thunder followed it.
Frye wasn’t screaming behind her any more. She heard a deep, animal growl of pleasure.
Very close.
Now she was screaming.
She reached the doors in the hillside and saw that they were latched together at both the top and bottom. She reached and threw back the top bolt, then stooped and disengaged the one on the bottom, expecting a blade to be slammed down between her shoulders. The blow never came. She pulled open the doors, and there was inky blackness beyond.
She turned.
Rain stung her face.
Frye had stopped. He was standing just six feet away.
She waited in the open doors with darkness at her back, and she wondered what was behind her other than a flight of steps.
“Bitch,” Frye said.
But now there was more fear than fury in his face.
“Put the knife down,” she said, not knowing if he would obey, doubting it, but having nothing to lose. “Obey your mother, Bruno. Put the knife down.”
He took a step toward her.
Hilary stood her ground. Her heart was exploding.
Frye moved closer.
Shaking, she backed down the first step that lay beyond the doors.
Just as Tony reached the head of the stairs, supporting himself with one hand against the wall, he heard a noise behind him. He looked back.
Joshua had crawled out of the bedroom. He was splashed with blood, and his face was nearly as white as his hair. His eyes seemed out of focus.
“How bad?” Tony asked.
Joshua licked his pale lips. “I’ll live,” he said in a strange, hissing, croaking voice. “Hilary. For God’s sake … Hilary!”
Tony pushed away from the wall and careened down the stairs. He weaved back down the hall toward the kitchen, for he could hear Frye shouting out on the rear lawn.
In the kitchen, Tony pulled open one drawer, then another, looking for a weapon.
“Come on, dammit! Shit!”
The third drawer held knives. He chose the largest one. It was spotted with rust but still wickedly sharp.
His left arm was killing him. He wanted to cradle it in his right arm, but he needed that hand to fight Frye.
Gritting his teeth, steeling himself against the pain of his wounds, lurching like a drunkard, he went out to the porch. He saw Frye at once. The man was standing in front of two open doors. Two doors in the ground.
Hilary was nowhere in sight.
Hilary backed off the sixth step. That was the last one. Bruno Frye stood at the head of the stairs, looking down, afraid to come any farther. He was alternately calling her a bitch and whimpering as if he were a child. He was clearly torn between two needs: the need to kill her, and the need to get away from that hated place.
Whispers.
Suddenly she heard the whispers, and her flesh seemed to turn to ice in that instant. It was a wordless hissing, a soft sound, but growing louder by the second.
And then she felt something crawling up her leg.
She cried out and moved up one step, closer to Frye. She reached down, brushed at her leg, and knocked something away.
Shuddering, she switched on the flashlight, turned, and shone the beam into the subterranean room behind her.
Roaches. Hundreds upon hundreds of huge roaches were swarming in the room–on the floor, on the walls, on the low ceiling. They were not just ordinary roaches, but enormous things, over two inches long, an inch wide, with busy legs and especially long feelers that quivered anxiously. Their shiny green-brown carapaces appeared to be sticky and wet, like blobs of dark mucus.
The whispering was the sound of their ceaseless movement, long legs and trembling antennae brushing other long legs and antennae, constantly crawling and creeping and scurrying this way and that.
Hilary screamed. She wanted to climb the steps and get out of there, but Frye was above, waiting.
The roaches shied away from her flashlight. They were evidently subterranean insects that survived only in the dark, and she prayed that her flashlight batteries would not go dead.