switch. The light revealed no nightmare creatures. Just Jack. Asleep
on his stomach, head turned away from her, snoring softly. She managed
to draw a breath, though her heart continued to pound. She was damp
with sweat and couldn’t stop shivering.
Jesus. Not wanting to wake Jack, Heather switched off the lamp–and
twitched as darkness fell around her. She sat on the edge of the bed,
intending to perch there until her heart stopped racing and the shakes
passed, then pull a robe over her pajamas and go downstairs to read
until morning. According to the luminous green numbers on the digital
alarm clock, it was 3:09 A.M but she was not going to be able to get
back to sleep. No way. She might be unable to sleep even tomorrow
night. She remembered the glistening, writhing, half-seen presence on
the threshold and the bitter cold that flowed from it. The touch of it
was still within her, a lingering chill. Disgusting. She felt
contaminated, dirty inside, where she could never wash the corruption
away.
Deciding that she needed a hot shower, she got up from the bed.
Disgust swiftly ripened into nausea. In the dark bathroom she was
racked by dry heaves at left a bitter taste. After turning on the
light only enough to find the bottle of mouthwash, she rinsed away the
bitterness. In the dark again, she repeatedly bathed her face in
handfuls of cold water. She sat on the edge of the tub. She dried her
face on a towel. As she waited for calm to return, she tried to figure
out why a mere dream could have had such a powerful effect on her, but
there was no understanding.
In a few minutes, when she’d regained her composure, she quietly
returned to the bedroom. Jack was still snoring softly. Her robe was
draped over the back of a Queen Anne chair. She picked it up, slipped
out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her.
In the hall, she pulled on the robe and belted it. Although she’d
intended to go downstairs, brew a pot of coffee, and read, she turned
instead toward Toby’s room at the end of the hall. Try as she might,
Heather was unable to extinguish completely the fear from the
nightmare, and her simmering anxiety began to focus on her son.
Toby’s door was ajar, and his room was not entirely – dark Since moving
to the ranch, he had chosen to sleep with a night-light again, although
he had given up that security a year ago. Heather and Jack were
surprised but not particularly concerned by the boy’s loss of
confidence. They assumed, once he adjusted to his surroundings he
would again prefer darkness to the red glow of the low-wattage bulb
that was plugged into a wall socket near the floor.
Toby was tucked under his covers, only his head exposed on the
pillow.
His breathing was so shallow that to hear it, Heather had to bend close
to him.
Nothing in the room was other than it ought to have been, but she
hesitated to leave. Mild apprehension continued to tug at her.
Finally, as Heather reluctantly retreated to the open hall door, she
heard a soft scrape that halted her. She turned to the bed, where Toby
had not awakened, had not moved.
Even as she glanced at her son, however, she realized that the noise
had come from the back stairs. It had been the sly, stealthy scrape of
something hard, perhaps a boot heel, dragged across a wooden
step-recognizable because of the air space under each stair tread,
which lent the sound a distinctive hollow quality.
She was instantly afflicted by the same distress that she’d not felt
while cleaning the stairs but that had plagued her on Monday when she’d
followed Paul Youngblood and Toby down that curving well. The sweaty
paranoid conviction that somebody– something?–was waiting around the
next turn. Or descending behind them. An enemy possessed by a
singular rage and capable of extreme violence.
She stared at the closed door at the head of those stairs. It was
painted white, but it reflected the red glow of the night-light and