by Dean Koontz
Anna sat across the room, preparing next week's menu. She seemed almost unaffected by what had happened. Yet, now and again, Jenny caught the old woman staring into space, her attention diverted from steaks, vegetables and desserts. The incidents at the Brucker house had finally come between the cook and her profession, and that meant the situation had grown serious.
Jenny's eye fell on the red spines of the witchcraft books. She looked quickly away.
Could there really be a curse? And if there could be, she thought, is it possible that I am the one who is cursed? It seemed like everyone or everything she loved met with grief or death before long. First her parents. Then Grandmother Brighton, just as Jenny was growing old enough to truly appreciate the depths of that old woman. Then, when she was beginning to grow fond of Hollycross and of their daily rambles about the estate, the horse had died. And, again, the death had been a violent one. Perhaps Freya was not the possessed soul. Perhaps it was Jenny Brighton who drew disaster like a lightning rod.
These and other terrible thoughts fled across her mind. She knew they were doing her no good, but she could not ignore them.
At that moment, the door opened. Cora came in, closed it gently behind her. "Are you feeling better, Jenny?" she asked. She looked very haggard herself.
"A little," Jenny lied.
Cora sat on the foot of the bed, patted her niece's knee where it rested beneath the blanket. "We've gotten in touch with Dr. Malmont. He'll be along in about fifteen minutes now."
The woman sounded so achingly exhausted that Jenny felt a little guilty about adding to her aunt's concerns. She sat up a little straighter in the bed and brushed her dark hair back from her face. She tried a smile, then opted for a bland expression when she realized the smile must look very forced.
"You look tired," she told Cora. "You should have Dr. Malmont give you something."
"I'll be all right. But, I swear, if any more of those real estate brokers come around, I'm going to beat them off with a broom!" She wiped a hand across tired eyes, smiled. "I guess they're only trying to do their job. But we've told them again and again that we don't want to sell the estate. Can you picture all this lovely woodland built up with motels and gas stations to service that ugly superhighway of theirs? That picture, on top of our present troubles, is enough to make me sick!"
"What has Richard done about-about Hollycross?" Jenny asked.
"He called a veterinarian in town. They just got finished putting her in the vet's truck. Richard's acting quite mysterious about it, won't let anyone enter the stable, won't let Harold clean it out. In fact he gave Harold express orders to leave everything as it is."
That seemed odd. The sooner the blood was cleaned up and fresh straw put down, the sooner the stables would lose the aura of horror that it now held for all of them.
"We're having top halves put on the other three stall doors. Richard plans to chain lock them tonight and keep the keys in his room. He believes someone had to open the door for the-wolf, or whatever."
"Not if it was a-well that kind of a wolf," Jenny said. "Then no one would have had to open the door for it, would they?"
"But Richard doesn't believe in curses," Cora said.
Anna did not join in the conversation at all, but kept her head tilted, busily juggling the following week's menu again.
"But you still do," Jenny said.
"Yes. I believe."
Jenny couldn't say for certain what she herself believed. There were too many conflicting terrors loose in her mind to be able to pick one that was dominant.
"For one thing," Cora said, staring out the window at the noon sun, "we didn't hear anything last night. In all that terrible battle between Hollycross and the- the thing, we heard nothing. Hollycross seems not even to have whinnied. And if she tried to return the attack, there's no sign of it. Her hooves did not deal any damage out there."
Jenny had just long enough to contemplate the meaning of these details before Dr. Malmont arrived, huffing and puffing, cursing the number of steps from one floor of the Brucker mansion to another.
"People must have been healthier in the previous century," he said, his face scarlet as he dropped his bag on a chair beside Jenny's bed. "You'd have to have the constitution of an ox to go up and down those stairs every day of the week!"
He was such a comical character-perhaps intentionally-that he helped to take Jenny's mind off the dark and unexplainable affairs of the household. His tie was askew, his shirt collar slightly open.
She said, "Maybe people in the last century didn't ride everywhere in a car and didn't drink too many martinis or eat too many high calorie foods. Did they have potato chips back then, for instance?"
Malmont looked down at his bulging paunch, then up at Jenny with mock consternation on his face. "Young lady, are you inferring that I have not kept myself physically fit?"
"Oh, no!" Jenny said, exaggerating her response.
Malmont shrugged. "Well, perhaps I haven't followed my advice to the letter. But I make certain my patient's do!"
He took her temperature, blood pressure. He checked the size of her pupils, listened to her heart, took her pulse. He was swift and economical in his movements, handling the instruments of his profession as if they were somehow outgrowths of his own body.
"Perhaps a little shock," he said. "But you're fine. My recommendations are a big, hot meal for supper, a little earlier than is the Brucker norm. Have it in bed. Will that be too much of an inconvenience, Anna?"
The cook looked up, surprised that she had been addressed. "No trouble at all, doctor."
"Fine. Then, some light television or light reading. No melodrama. And early to bed after two of these." He took a small bottle of sleeping capsules from his case.
"Do I have to take pills?" Jenny asked.
"You're too old to be stubborn," he said, writing the directions on the white packet.
"I don't want to sleep," she said. "I'll have all sorts of terrible nightmares. I know I will!"
"Not with these," Malmont said. "They put you so far under that you wouldn't wake up for the end of the world."
She didn't argue any further. As long as she didn't dream, she preferred sleep to being awake. Awake, she had too much time to think...
When Malmont left, Cora went with him.
That afternoon, Jenny and Anna played 500 rummy, at Anna's insistence, to help to pass the time. The old woman was clever enough to build a rivalry between them for the best of three games. Jenny saw what she was doing, how she was trying to divert her young charge's mind from uglier things, but she didn't mind. If Anna could divert her, that was fine. Heaven knew, she didn't want to continually think of Hollycross, her parents, her grandmother, and of things that howled and crept about after dark.
She was left alone while Anna went to prepare an early supper, but she filled the two hours with an old comedy that was playing on the late afternoon movie. She supposed it was a senseless and time-wasting film, but it distracted her.
Anna brought a tray around six, lavishly set with a number of dishes and two thick slices of a cream-filled chocolate cake for dessert. Watching news, she ate everything that had been put before her. She had not thought she could take a bite, but it seemed that her fear and the day's excitement had taken more out of her than she had thought.
It was shortly before seven o'clock when she heard Richard and Cora arguing. She used her remote control to turn down the volume on the television set, listened closely. She could not make out many individual words, but she could gather the general drift of the fight. Richard was pressing, harder than ever, for a psychiatrist for Freya. Cora was resisting.
Twice, she could make out loud, undisciplined cursing, and she felt herself grow hot with anger that Richard should subject his mother to such things.
In a short while, the shouted conversation stopped with the abruptness of a slammed door.
Then a door really did slam somewhere in the house.
Feet pattered hurr
iedly across an uncarpeted floor.
Distantly, she could hear Cora crying.
What on earth was happening in this house?
She started to climb out of bed and then thought better of that idea. She could not do anything to help. She might only walk in on something which was none of her business. Instead of moving from the comfort of the warm bed, she snuggled even deeper into the heavy covers that were draped across her.
She turned the television back up and tried to get interested in whatever was on. In twenty minutes, she had flipped to all the channels on the cable and was still unsatisfied. It was growing more and more difficult to shut out of her mind all the strange events that transpired in this house and on the grounds surrounding it.
The red bindings on the bookshelf caught her eye. She stared at them for a long while, then finally got out of bed and took the witchcraft volumes down from the shelf. Back in bed, she opened them, skimmed through them, and finally began reading in earnest.
There was only one way to abolish fear-and that was through knowledge. It was difficult to be frightened of anything that you understood. She checked the subject index of the volumes and began absorbing everything they had to say about curses and werewolves.
At eight-thirty, Harold came to collect her tray and to ask if she would be wanting anything to snack on later. The commotion downstairs seemed not to have interested or bothered him in the least. He was the same dignified old man as he had been before.
Twice, she gave him openings to talk about the ruckus between Cora and Richard.
Twice, he pretended not to catch what she was hinting at, as if the argument had been of little note, even though the volume of it had suggested some degree of bitterness.
At last, she realized that the only way to find out what she wanted was to bluntly ask him.
"The fight," she said. "What were they arguing about?"
"Fight?" Harold asked, raising snowy eyebrows.
"I heard parts of it," Jenny told him.
"Oh," Harold said, "you mean the discussion between Mrs. Brucker and young Richard?"
He was too much the gentleman to admit that his employers had been engaged in the next thing to a donnybrook.
"That's it," Jenny agreed, smiling to herself.
"It was over Miss Freya," Harold said.
He picked up her tray, looked about for a misplaced glass or napkin, found nothing.
"And?" Jenny asked.
"Mrs. Brucker has agreed to allow a psychiatrist to come live here in the mansion and treat the child. Richard has been busy, since, arranging that with Dr. Malmont."
She sensed that the old man did not want to speak about things of this nature, that he considered it some minor betrayal of confidence, even though Cora and Richard's argument had been so loud. When he ascertained that she was not wanting anything, he departed with the dinner tray.
For a time, Jenny lay there wondering about the wisdom of subjecting a child so young to the grueling experience of psychotherapy. She tended to side with Cora. Love alone might do the job, with much less of a drain on the little girl than cold, professional treatment might be.
She told herself there was nothing she could do about it.
She returned to the books she had been reading. These disturbed her more than they helped. If she had been pre-disposed to laugh off the idea of werewolves and the supernatural, the book gave her material for second thoughts. It was unsettling to discover that the Church in Europe did not laugh off such suggestions, but that it actually contained rituals for the exorcism of such evil spirits. Modern day Rumanians, Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs-all these believed, to one degree or another, in such unlikely things as men who walked as wolves at night, in vampires and ghouls. Indeed, she discovered that many Rumanians slept with dried garlic leaves nailed above each window and door of their houses, to ward off things with fangs that sought victims after the sun had set.
If such beliefs survived so strongly, even into this industrial age, who was to say they were any less true than the beliefs of, say, the Christian church?
She read until very late, and she closed the drapes that hung aside the windows, so that the darkness could not watch her through the thin glass.
The legends of those European countries-and not, incidentally, the stories that originated in them as late as the middle 1960s-were so fascinating that she read on until she fell asleep over the books.
She slept fitfully. Many times, she half rose from bed, her heart beating furiously, only to drop quickly into troubled slumber again. She whimpered unintelligibly to no one and often kicked out at the covers that seemed to hold her down like heavy wings.
In the morning, she felt more on edge than ever before, as if she were standing before a monumentally huge jack-in-the-box, waiting tensely for the unexpected moment when it would leap out on a heavy spring, leering at her...
* * *
6
By the following morning, after she had showered and dressed and lightly perfumed herself, Jenny knew that she wanted to leave the Brucker estate, wanted it more than anything she had ever wanted before. If the unexpected were to be sprung upon her, there was no more likely place for it than this curse-ridden house. The dream-voices of her dead family seemed to return to her, even when she was awake, urging her to flee.
She had come here, in the first place, in hopes that she could be with people whom she loved and who would return her love and make her feel a part of their lives. All those whose affections had sustained her in the past-all those were dead. Only Cora and Richard remained as links to the brighter parts of life, to love and understanding and gentleness. But now they had problems of their own: Freya's illness, the bickering between mother and son, Richard's increasing impoliteness, the heckling of the real estate speculators who made Cora so nervous-and the unremitting air of the unknown which hung over the house and those within it. There was no time for the simple pleasures of life. It was, suddenly, as if she were a boarder in a house of strangers.
The frustrated longing for stability and routine and love which had possessed her ever since Grandmother Brighton's death could not be resolved here. There was no stability in a place of werewolves and curses. Routine was shattered by howls in the night, by badly mutilated horses, by children in unexplained comas. And the air contained an evil expectancy that stifled love. All Jenny could gain here was sorrow and a sharper edge to her fear.
But how could she ever explain all of this to Cora?
She did not want to hurt her aunt's feelings or add to the older woman's current list of miseries. Though she might not like being here, Cora might actually need her. She remembered the several times Cora had come to her room to talk about things, as if confiding, just a little, in the niece. Perhaps, unknowingly, she offered Cora the woman's only emotional outlet at the moment.
Yet she wanted out.
Desperately.
She thought around all sides of her problem as she descended the wide main staircase Saturday morning. She was not dressed for riding, since she did not want to go near the stables, at least until the memory of Hollycross' corpse was not so sharp in her mind. She still wore her bedroom slippers which made little or no noise on the steps.
Perhaps that was why Richard did not hear her and look up, even though she had not been consciously trying to sneak up on him. He spoke urgently, his voice a stage whisper, into the black receiver of the main hall telephone on its stand by the foot of the last flight of steps.
"What should we do with her?" Richard asked the unknown party on the other end of the line.
For some reason, Jenny stopped at the last landing on the length of stairs, her hand on the polished wood bannister, waiting. Ordinarily, she would never have considered eavesdropping on someone's private conversation. Yet, these were strange times. His whispered voice had an odd excitement to it. And there was something about the way he had spoken that question which made Jenny's blood run colder...
He listened for a time, intense
, breathing heavily.
Then he said, "I don't know if we can get away with it without arousing some suspicions."
He was quiet again.
Get away with what? Jenny wondered. What sort of conversation had she stumbled into? Whatever it was, it made her more wary than ever. The voices of the dead began urging her to flee, their pleading more urgent now.
"Yes, I agree. The drug itself won't be a clue; too many people could get hold of it to make it unique. The killer would find himself pretty much untraceable."
More silence.
Imperceptibly, at the mention of a killer, Jenny shifted her weight nervously. A board creaked under her, the noise piercing the unnatural morning silence of the house as thoroughly as the explosion of a stick of dynamite might have done.
He was too engrossed in his conversation to hear. He did not look up or appear startled.
She waited, afraid now to retreat-aware that she could not possibly go ahead and let him know that she had been listening.
Please, please, don't let him see me, she begged- not quite certain toward whom she was directing this short and anxious prayer.
"Let me think about it," Richard said. "Since you'll not be available until day after tomorrow, there's no rush."
He listened, nodded,
"Goodbye," he said.
He hung up, careful to cradle the phone as quietly as possible, then walked back the corridor and entered the distant kitchen through the swinging white door there. The squeak of that door's hinges echoed in the still hall for long seconds before complete silence returned.
Only then did Jenny allow herself to go down to breakfast.
Richard was having a cup of coffee at the long, gleaming kitchen worktable where Anna made most of her culinary masterpieces. Neither the cook nor her husband were about. Cora had probably not gotten to sleep until late and was still in her room. The twins would be out playing somewhere on the large estate grounds.
She and Richard were alone.
"Good morning," she said. She tried to sound bright and cheerful, but she was afraid that her uneasiness showed through.