might not have had the courage to reach into that coiled blackness to
feel for it.
She missed it on the first and second tries, dared not look away from
the darkness before her, felt blindly where she recalled having seen
it, almost shouted at Toby to wake up and run, at last found the
switch–thank God-clicked it. Light. The deserted landing. Nothing
there. Of course. What else?
Empty steps curving down and out of sight. A stair tread creaked
below. Oh, Jesus. She stepped onto the landing. She wasn’t wearing
slippers. The wood was cool and rough under her bare feet. Another
creak, softer than before.
Settling noises. Maybe. She moved off the landing, keeping her left
hand against the concave curve of the outer wall to steady herself.
Each step that she descended brought a new step into view ahead of
her.
At the first glimpse of anyone, she would turn and run back up the
stairs, into Toby’s room, throw the door shut, snap the dead bolt in
place. The lock couldn’t be opened from the stairwell, only from
inside the house, so they would be safe. From below came a furtive
click, a faint thud–as of a door being pulled shut as quietly as
possible.
Suddenly she was less disturbed by the prospect of confrontation than
by the possibility that the episode would end inconclusively. Needing
to know, one way or the other, Heather shook off timidity. She ran
down the stairs, making more than enough noise to reveal her presence,
along the convex curve of the inner wall, around, around, into the
vestibule at the bottom. Deserted. She tried the door to the
kitchen.
It was locked and required a key to be opened from this side. She had
no key. Presumably, an intruder would not have one, either.
The other door led to the back porch. On this side, the dead bolt
operated with a thumb-turn. It was locked. She disengaged it, pulled
open the door, stepped onto the porch. Deserted. And as far as she
could see, no one was sprinting away across the backyard. Besides,
although an intruder would not have needed a key to exit by that door,
he would have needed one to lock it behind him, for it operated only
with a key from the outside.
Somewhere an owl issued a mournful interrogative. Windless, cold, and
humid, the night air seemed not like that of the outdoors but like the
dank and ever so slightly fetid atmosphere of a cellar. She was
alone.
But she didn’t feel alone.
She felt . . . watched. . “For God’s sake, Heth,” she said, “what the
hell’s the matter with you?” She retreated into the vestibule and
locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn,
wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural
noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost.
The rotten smell lingered. Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had
not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or
another small animal might be dead and decomposing inside the wall. As
she turned toward the stairs, she stepped in something. She lifted her
left foot and studied the floor. A clod of dry earth about as large as
a plum had partially crumbled under her bare heel. Climbing to the
second floor, she noticed dry crumbs of earth scattered on a few of the
treads, which she’d failed to notice in her swift descent. The dirt
hadn’t been there when she finished cleaning the stairwell on
Wednesday. She wanted to believe it was proof the intruder existed.
More likely, Toby had tracked a little mud in from the backyard. He
was usually a considerate kid, and he was neat by nature, but he was,
after all, only eight years old.
Heather returned to Toby’s room, locked the door, and snapped off the
stairwell light. Her son was sound asleep. Feeling no less foolish
than confused, she went down the front stairs, directly to the
kitchen.
If the repulsive smell was a sign of the intruder’s recent presence,
and if the slightest trace of that stink hung in the kitchen, it would