Winter Moon

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

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