seemed almost to shimmer like a portal of fire. She waited for another
sound. Toby sighed in his sleep.
Just a sigh. Nothing more. Silence again. Heather supposed she could
have been wrong, could have heard an innocent sound from
outside–perhaps a night bird settling onto the roof with a rustle of
feathers and a scratching of claws against shingles–and could have
mistakenly transposed the noise to the stairwell. She was jumpy
because of the nightmare.
Her perceptions might not be entirely trustworthy. She certainly
wanted to believe she had been wrong. Creak-creak. No mistaking it
this time. The new sound was quieter than the first, but it definitely
came from behind the door at the head of the back stairs. She
remembered how some of the wooden treads creaked when she had first
descended to the ground floor during the tour on Monday and how they
groaned and complained when she had been cleaning them on Wednesday.
She wanted to snatch Toby from the bed, take him out of the room, go
quickly down the hall to the master bedroom, and wake Jack. However,
she had never run from anything in her life. During the crises of the
past eight months, she’d developed considerably more inner strength and
self-confidence than ever before. Although the skin on the back of her
neck tingled as if alive with crawling hairy spiders, she actually blushed at
the mental image of herself fleeing like the frail-hearted damsel of a
bad gothic-romance novel, spooked out of her wits by nothing more
menacing than a strange sound.
Instead, she went to the stairwell door. The dead-bolt lock was
securely engaged. She put her left ear to the crack between door and
jamb. The faintest draft of cold air seeped through from the far side,
but no sound came with it.
As she listened, she suspected that the intruder was on the upper
landing of the stairwell, inches from her with only the door between
them. She could easily imagine him there, a dark and strange figure,
his head against the door just as hers was, his ear pressed to the
crack, listening for a sound from her.
Nonsense. The scraping and creaking had been nothing more than
settling noises.
Even old houses continued to settle under the unending press of
gravity. That damned dream had really spooked her.
Toby muttered wordlessly in his sleep. She turned her head to look at
him. He didn’t move, and after a few seconds his murmuring subsided.
Heather backed up one step and considered the door for a moment. She
didn’t want to endanger Toby, but she was beginning to feel more
ridiculous than afraid. Just a door. Just a staircase at the back of
the house. Just an ordinary night, a dream, a bad case of jumpy
nerves. She put one hand on the knob, the other on the thumb-turn of
the dead-bolt lock. The brass hardware was cool under her fingers.
She remembered the urgent need that had possessed her in the dream: Let
it in, let it in, let it in. That had been a dream. This was
reality.
People who couldn’t tell them apart were housed in rooms with padded
walls, tended by nurses with fixed smiles and soft voices. Let it
in.
She disengaged the lock, turned the knob, hesitated. Let it in.
Exasperated with herself, she yanked open the door. She’d forgotten
the stairwell lights would be off. That narrow shaft was windowless,
no ambient light leached into it from outside. The red radiance in the
bedroom was too weak to cross the threshold.
She stood face-to-face with perfect darkness, unable to tell if
anything loomed on the upper steps or even on the landing immediately
before her. Out of the gloom wafted the repulsive odor that she’d
eradicated two days before with hard work and ammonia water, not strong
but not as faint as before, either: the vile aroma of rotting meat.
Maybe she had only dreamed that she’d awakened but was still in the
grip of the nightmare. Her heart slammed against her breastbone, her
breath caught in her throat, and she groped for the light switch, which
was on her side of the door. If it had been on the other side, she