by Archer Mayor
In the past, he had picked from a wide selection of targets, giving weight to the security systems opposing him, as well as to what he could learn of each home’s inhabitants. For example, the Jordans, being nouveau riche and Lloyd a stuffy know-it-all who bought extravagantly, tipped poorly (as Dan knew from personal experience), and he treated his wife dismissively; Merry Hodgkins, being smart and talented and self-made, if a little paranoid; and Gloria, with her love of travel, her generosity to others, and her simple old-fashioned grandeur. All of them and the others, too, had offered Dan the chance to stand covertly in their midst—a thief in the night—to eat their best food, enjoy their possessions, and absorb their contributions—good and bad—to human nature.
But never before had he been in his present position, having to act at his peril by entering a house a second time, with at least one of its residents both knowing of his existence and wishing him and Sally harm. For a man as committed to the shadows as Dan Kravitz, this was the equivalent of stepping out onto center stage buck naked on opening night.
All because, simply put, it had to be done.
And that wasn’t all—he had made a practice of dogged research in the past. Houses and house owners had been subjected to thorough scrutiny, his computer skills put to use, his background in electronics and security systems, his fondness for surveillance. He’d sometimes even gotten short-term jobs that put him close to the people whose privacy he planned to invade. That was one reason he’d worked at Bariloche—to study the Jordans.
But Paul Hauser? Dan had found no mention anywhere, and the more he’d searched, the more he’d felt the pressure of time. The words of the man he’d killed on the bridge—the first person he’d ever harmed in his life—burned like a fuse in his head. “It involves your daughter,” he’d said of the reason he’d been stalking Dan.
Whatever that was, whatever it meant, it told Dan that he didn’t have time to conduct his usual homework. He needed to take back control, and he needed to do it to save Sally from the evil he’d glimpsed in those albums.
This was now combat. He’d been driven to kill once, if admittedly in self-defense. Now he was ready to do it again, to protect the only human being he’d ever held dear.
But he needed to understand his enemy.
And therein lay his dilemma.
He studied the house as if for the first time, a confusing but appealing mixture of brick, clapboard, and Victorian flourishes, clearly remodeled over the centuries, and resulting in a maintenance nightmare and a visual treat. It utterly lacked any architect’s guidance and showed off instead the Yankee penchant for independence, accented with no small measure of humor.
Dan, however, was all business this time, paying no attention to the minutiae he favored and focusing instead on the threat level alone. He watched the windows and doors for light or movement, the bushes near the walls for shapes and shadows that didn’t fit. He tried with his will simply to sense the presence of another living soul.
But he picked up on nothing besides his own anxiety.
He’d been out here for an hour already, studying the building from every accessible angle. Considering a final approach, he decided against repeating his previous means of entry, or trusting what he knew of Gloria’s lack of interest in security. As before, he assumed all alarm systems to be on and all locks thrown, and even that, for once, someone might actually be watching.
Having thus weighed his new point of entry, he crossed the lawn at a silent run and quietly scaled a tree near the back wall. Once securely positioned on a sturdy branch fifteen feet off the ground—still a good ten feet from the second-floor window he’d selected—he removed a coil of rope from his close-fitting backpack, triggered the spring-loaded grappling hook on its end, and gracefully and successfully sent it looping over the top of a decorative piece of woodwork protruding from under the roof’s elaborate edge.
Once the rope was made taut and tested, Dan clipped it to his harness, alongside a second line attached to the tree trunk, and eased himself free of his branch, rappelling horizontally over to the window directly across from him. He arrived without a sound, high above the motion detectors designed to be monitoring the outside perimeter of the wall—that’s where he would have fallen prey had he simply used a ladder to reach the same window.
Comfortably tied off, dangling directly before the window, Dan removed several tools from his cargo-pants pockets and quickly extracted a single pane of glass. He reached inside, unlocked the window, and then replaced the pane, applying putty prestained to look old and weathered.
He repacked his tools, cleaned up his handiwork, placing the fragments of old glazing into a small plastic bag, and slipped inside the house. Leaning out the open window, he pulled on the accessory lines he’d laid out, above and across from him, and loosened his two primary ropes, reeling one in and catching the other as it fell toward him. By the end, he’d eliminated all but the tiniest signs of his ever having been there. The entire operation had taken fifteen minutes.
Only then did he shut and lock the window behind him and stand stock-still, listening, inside the house once more.
He knew the layout well by now. His mind, with its obsession for detail, retained memories of spatial relationships and lighting angles as he imagined cartographers’ did of cherished maps. A major factor in his choice of which window to assault had been based on his recall of the floor plan and even the actual window’s characteristics.
So now, he stood as still as a piece of furniture, in a small sitting room down the hall from Gloria’s bedroom, reacquainting himself with the heartbeat of the house.
But whether it was the truth or simply his own heightened anxiety, he didn’t like what he was sensing.
Something felt distinctly off-kilter, as if his every movement was being tracked.
He left the room, stopped in the hallway, and tried to peer into the surrounding darkness, wishing he’d invested in a pair of night-vision goggles.
Relying on his memory, he stole down the corridor, avoiding a side table here or a creaky floorboard there, headed for the master bedroom to confirm the homeowner’s whereabouts.
At Gloria’s slightly ajar door, outlined by the barest glimmer from a night-light at the rear of the room, he placed his hand on the knob and pushed, knowing the hinges to be well oiled and silent.
The scene was what he had expected. This time, he wasn’t startled to see the old lady propped up in bed, but he was tense nevertheless, more nervous about what he couldn’t see than about what was directly before him. He stepped free of the open doorway and placed his back against the wall.
He grimaced, fighting his growing unease. What the hell felt so wrong?
He studied Gloria carefully, or what little he could see of her. Her face was in shadow, her shape under the covers little more than a bulbous lump. A bit of cloth had fallen over the distant night-light and made of her a virtual apparition—the suggestion of a human being.
Chilled by the thought, Dan sidled across the rug, working his way around the foot of the large four-poster to get a better angle on his subject.
What he finally discerned was no face at all. The sleeping Gloria he was expecting had no eyes, no nose, no features at all. Planted atop the pillow, slightly turned away as if in slumber, was the blank orb of a volleyball topped with a wig.
Dan whirled around, convinced that someone had to be standing behind him, having lured him in with this subterfuge.
There was no one there, but he swore that there’d been a flicker of movement, framed in the now open doorway.
He dropped into a crouch behind the hulking bed, peering over its blankets at the door. A moment later, he glanced again at what he’d thought to be Gloria, concentrating on the ramifications of his situation.
One thing was safe to assume: He was now caught in this house like a rodent in a trap. He no longer needed to return to a cellar room for evidence of a monster on the loose. The monster was coming for him.
He considered his options. He was on the second floor of a house whose magisterial dimensions dictated a drop of fifteen feet or more to the ground below. Dan was light and athletic, but such a distance, onto invisible terrain possibly strewn with lethal debris, was too daunting.
That eliminated the easiest course of just leaping out the window.
But he had his ropes, and the leather gloves he’d used earlier. It would be a simple matter to rig a knot and rappel to safety, before Hauser had time to react.
Dan scuttled across to the nearest window, not taking his eyes off the door. He reached up and pushed against the lower half of the window. It was locked. He straightened and felt for the lock. It was nailed in place.
“Damn,” he murmured, and as quickly as he could, twisted around, shielded his eyes with his hands, and peered through the glass. As he’d expected by now, the shutters were closed.
He didn’t need to establish that they’d probably been screwed down as tightly as bulkhead doors.
He returned to the barricade of the large bed.
Dan was essentially a cat burglar, predisposed to stealth, silence, and deliberation. His opponent would think of him thus, and prepare himself accordingly. He’d shown that much by his construction of this trap—he’d known that Dan would initially check on Gloria’s whereabouts.
Salvation, therefore, possibly lay in violating that presumption—Dan might increase his chance of survival by turning on every light he could locate, and running like a maniac for the front door, leaving his nemesis flatfooted in surprise.
But did he dare? It was a long stretch to that door, and one of the few things he rarely cataloged in his memory was the location of light switches. Did he really want to base his entire strategy on correctly guessing which switch lay where? And what if Hauser had already seen to that, and killed most of those lights? He’d certainly been sharp enough to plant a dummy of Gloria in this bed and to seal the windows. He’d had to have anticipated moves that Dan might make if he returned for a second visit.
This man, as twisted as he seemed, clearly could think things through.
So what had he not foreseen?
Dan racked his brain, sensitive to the passing seconds, convinced that Hauser lay in wait, ready to execute the plan that would convince authorities that the now dead Tag Man had been caught and killed in defense of home and hearth. Wherever Gloria really was—and Dan was confident she’d been sent on some bogus journey in order to empty the house—she’d probably return and have only praise for the protector of her worldly goods.
Up, Dan suddenly thought. That would be something Hauser wouldn’t have considered—that Dan would head upstairs, even to the roof. In fact, the roof might be preferable. He tried to remember that topmost aspect of the house from his prior visit here. However, along with the location of light switches, it wasn’t something to which he gave much attention. Still, there had to have been something …
The top floor had the usual collection of small rooms, once reserved for the servants—garrets with dormer windows, and a shared bathroom at the end of the hall. Dan steered his memory back to an outside view of the house—and its flat-topped mansard roof.
He left his spot by the bed and moved quickly to the edge of the door frame, pausing to chart his route.
To his right was the main staircase leading down to the foyer, the living room, and the other formal spaces. Given what Hauser seemed to be planning, that was the direction where the danger would be greatest. Fortunately for Dan, to the left, directly above the kitchen, was a second, narrower staircase to the cramped and largely ignored third floor.
He took a deep breath. This was far from his operating norm, even when he was situated in a setting of his choosing. The irony would have been comical if he hadn’t been so scared.
Fighting his previous urge to run at full tilt, Dan slipped out into the hallway, his shoulder blades against the wall, and strained to pick up on Hauser’s presence. Of course, that worked all too well—the menace of the man enveloped him like a fog.
Hoping to quell his rising panic, Dan slid down the hall, toward the back of the house, convinced that at every step, his stalker would suddenly appear from behind some door or passageway. The trade-off of his having chosen a moonless night to break in was that he’d rarely been in such blacked-out surroundings.
Paul Hauser could have been standing right behind him, and he would have been none the wiser.
On the other hand, he rationalized, unless Hauser had the same night-piercing goggles Dan had been wishing for earlier, he was at the same disadvantage as Dan.
Dan reached the end of the hall and was confronted by a closet before him and a door to either side, one leading to the kitchen below, the other upstairs. He groped for and took hold of a small side table decorated with a flower arrangement he remembered from before, and gently dragged it across the rug to where it blocked the entrance to downstairs. It wouldn’t prohibit that door from being opened, but it would create a hell of a noise were that to happen.
He then cautiously opened the door opposite.
Just then a faint noise rose up behind him like a chill—the muted brushing of a foot against the carpet.
He dropped to one knee and swung around, staring wide-eyed into the gloom with his hands out before him. His fingertips grazed a man’s pant leg just as he felt the breeze of something heavy barely miss the top of his head.
Without thought, he launched himself forward like a linebacker, using his legs for explosive propulsion, and caught his opponent by the waist. There was a thudding outburst of air, a strong smell of human being in Dan’s nostrils, followed by a tangle of arms and legs and fists as they both went sprawling to the floor.
Instantly, Dan knew he was up against a far bigger man than he, so he pursued his momentary advantage by pummeling the face beneath him, leaping to his feet, and reaching back to the small, vase-equipped table to bring the whole of it crashing down on the body still struggling before him.
Without pause or thought, he followed that by bolting for his original escape route. He yanked the door wide and half stepped, half fell onto the rough wooden stairs heading up, reaching out to steady himself and catching his hand on what seemed to be an interior dead bolt. Seizing this opportunity, he slammed the door behind him, and just as he heard the scrabbling of hands on the other side, he snapped the dead bolt closed.
He quickly explored both sides of the door frame, found a switch, and flooded the tight passageway with light.
He bounded up the stairs, pursued by the repeated pounding of fists against the door.
At the top of the stairs was a long, unadorned corridor with doors on both sides, each leading, as he knew, to an assortment of small bedrooms, storage areas, and a bathroom at the end. Every other room had a garret window overlooking the lawn far below, but Dan recalled their all being small and placed high on the wall—enough to supply air and light, but hardly ideal as a means of escape.
Hitting another light switch on the way, he continued jogging down the hall until he reached a trapdoor mounted in the ceiling.
As in a countdown to a launching, he heard Hauser battering the downstairs door with something far more solid and destructive than his fists or shoulder. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
Dan checked the nearest room, found a half-broken chair parked against the wall, and pulled it under the trapdoor. He clambered up, wobbling atop its frail, spindly legs, and studied the overhead opening from close-up. It was larger and heavier than he’d expected, equipped with rugged hinges and a latch.
Fumbling nervously, aware of wood splintering below, Dan undid the latch and pushed with all his might against the square panel.
At the precise moment that the trapdoor yielded to his efforts, the chair collapsed beneath him, accompanied by a resounding crash at the foot of the stairs.
Hauser was heading his way.
Dan caught hold of the opening’s edge, chin-lifted himself to where he could push the unhooked
door with his head, and with some effort scrambled up and over the lip of the opening, surprised to find himself not in an attic but on the roof of the house itself. Just as he slammed the door back down, he saw his pursuer coming into view.
Unslinging his backpack and opening it as he ran, Dan crossed the flat roof to where it met the mansard slope downward and peered over the edge. Hopelessly far below, he saw the crown of a tree and only blackness beneath.
Dan glanced about for an anchor, found a nearby chimney, knotted a quick loop in one of his ropes, secured a carabiner to the harness around his waist, and—just as the roof-access panel flew back on its hinges and revealed a vertical shaft of light—Dan twisted around, took two steps backward, and dropped off the edge of the roof into the void.
Hauser was faster than he’d hoped. As Dan reached the gutter marking the boundary between the mansard slope and the sheer drop beneath it, he placed both his feet against the wall and pushed out, in order to effect a rapid descent by letting the rope fly almost unimpeded through his “beener.”
Instead, the rope simply vanished, sliced through at its anchor point.
For a split second, Dan felt suspended in midair, before the tree’s uppermost branches began tearing at his body in freefall.
He reached out with both hands in desperation, caught several violent blows in his back and across his forearms, before finally grabbing hold of a branch thick enough to break his fall. Not slowly enough, being whipped across the face and body as he went, Dan tumbled from level to level within the tree’s embrace before finally cascading out the bottom and landing in a heap on the cool grass.
Momentarily, he lay stunned on his back, wondering what might appear out of the night sky above him like a truck and crush him flat.