His hand came off the doorknob.
He blinked, took one swaying step, and opened his eyes to find himself on the third step up that narrow, shadowed stairwell.
Michael hesitated. His foot hovered, ready to descend, to retreat. But the laughter came again, from upstairs. In his mind he heard those words again. Come find me. Hadn't she seemed frightened then, when she spoke those words? Or, if not frightened, then at least very sad?
She had. He knew she had.
But now there was this sound, the giddy laughter of little girls.
The house was a mystery. One that made his skin crawl with doubt and reluctance. Michael just wanted to be gone, but that did not keep his foot from moving up instead of down. One step. Then another. Passing up through the inky blackness of the back stairs until he emerged in a long second-story corridor, lined with rooms. Every door hung open. The moonlight spilled like mist from those open doors, illuminating the hall.
It's a dream, he thought with a smile of disbelief. I've passed out somewhere. That's the only answer. I'm asleep.
But the texture of the costume was rough on his skin. The boots were too tight on his feet. And he could still taste the stout in his mouth.
Cinnamon. There was no breeze this time, but his nostrils were suddenly filled with the scent. Not just cinnamon, but sugar and baking apples. Apple pie, maybe. But layered with cinnamon.
A floorboard creaked behind him, down in the kitchen. Michael glanced down; in the narrow outline of the door at the bottom of the steps, something shifted. He was looking at it dead on, but it moved like the sort of phantom that usually appeared only in peripheral vision. So quickly that it was little more than an afterimage.
It left him only with the impression of silver, the color of moonlight on the surface of a lake at night. A ripple of silver. And a whisper. There had been a whisper, too. Not words. And not the wind. The whisper of something moving, pushing the air around it. Rustling down there in the kitchen, with not even a light sheen of dust to disturb as it passed.
Michael stared for several seconds down those stairs, trying to get another glimpse of whatever he had seen.
Another chorus of girlish laughter came to him from the back of the house. He looked down the hall.
Something flashed in the moonlight, ducking into one of the rooms back there. A little rush of air escaped his lips, and he stared again, narrowing his gaze, trying to make sense of what his eyes were showing him. A ripple of silver. An afterimage that stayed on his eyelids when he closed them, as though he had looked at the sun too long.
“That's enough,” he whispered, the words painfully simple.
He turned his back on the giggles and the shifting moonlight and started toward the front of the house. Far along the hall, he could see the balustrade at the top of the grand staircase. Michael began to move more quickly, his pulse racing. His own breathing was too loud in his ears. All he wanted was to get the hell out of there before he blacked out again, before his feet could take him in a direction no sober man would go.
Smells assaulted him now. Too many for him to separate them. It was as though he stumbled now through fairgrounds or a carnival, so overwhelming were the odors that filled the air. His stomach churned and bile burned up the back of his throat. His legs felt weak. A shudder went up his spine, and he knew if he turned and glanced back the way he had come he would see those silver ripples slipping from room to room, or gliding up the stairs in pursuit.
A soft chant began up ahead, coming from one of those side doors.
One, two, buckle your shoe.
Three, four, shut the door.
Five, six, pick up sticks.
Seven, eight, don't be late.
Nine, ten, do it again . . .
He stood frozen in the hall, listening, his heart pounding so hard in its bone cage that his chest hurt.
A little bit faster or your turn will end.
The laughter of small children seemed to fill the hall, streaming from every room. It was joined by a rhythmic shuffle, the backbeat of a jump rope. The sound of footsteps echoed off the walls. Michael shifted his gaze from left to right, certain he would see a little girl run into the hall, or do a ballerina pirouette.
The singsong chant faded. Once more he began to move, thinking only of leaving, of getting to the front stairs and the hell out of there. He reached an open door on the left. From within he heard a soft, lisping, baby-girl voice singing “I'm a Little Teapot.” Trembling, he paused an instant, then stepped over the threshold.
A child's bedroom. Pale and bleached of life, washed in moonlight. No sign of any occupant at all, and now the voice he had heard was hushed, distant, as though it came from a closet, or from outside the window.
“. . . Here is my handle, here is my spout . . .”
Spiders of dread crept all over his body. He flinched, staring at that empty room. As he turned to withdraw, he noticed the scrawl. Graffiti snaked all over one wall of that bedroom, but these were no filthy limericks or spray-painted gang tags. Miss Friel Cuts the Cheese, announced one. Nikki and Danielle were here. Ruthie Loves Adam. Lizzie & Jason, TLA.
TLA. Michael hadn't seen those three letters put together since grade school, but their meaning was fresh in his mind. True Love, Always. The sort of notion kids believed in, before they began to understand just how many obstacles there were to get in the way. TLA seemed so damned simple then. But True Love, Always could be hard work. Even when you got lucky, like he had, finding Jillian. Even then, it was work.
Jillian. He could imagine her face in front of him, her grin, the way she always seemed to have one lock of hair hanging in front of her eyes. Oh, Jesus, honey, I just want out of here.
A door slammed. Michael spun, heart pounding, and let out a long, shuddering sigh when he saw that it was not the door to this room. He staggered into the hallway.
A trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck.
Michael broke into a run for the end of the hall, for the top of that grand staircase. There were higher floors, more stairs that went up and up, to the very top . . . to that one window at the peak of the house where he had seen a light on. He didn't care about those stairs. He only wanted the ones that went down.
His boots thumped the floor as he ran, stumbling toward the stairs, building momentum.
Giggles erupted from the rooms he passed, but now he did not want to look inside them. Still, he could not avoid the images his peripheral vision sent to him.
A swing set, chains creaking as they swayed in some unseen breeze.
More graffiti . . . in every room. Names in chalk and crayon and marker, and maybe in other substances he did not want to think about. Heather. Sarajane. Michael picked up speed. The hallway seemed impossibly long. Barbie. Alisa. His arms were pumping, legs flying under him. The stairs were getting closer, at last. Tracy. Erica. Scooter.
Scooter.
He tried to stop short, twisting himself around to get a better look inside a room on his right, a little study with a desk and bookshelves and children's names finger-painted in watercolor on the side of the desk. But he was running too fast. Michael tripped over his own legs and for a moment he was airborne. Then he hit the wood floor and slid. The fabric of his costume jacket tore.
He lay panting, eyes closed tightly, wishing it would all go away. Someone had given him something bad, and here he was running around some stranger's house like a lunatic. Scooter's house.
His eyes opened. The temptation to go back to that small study, to look at her name painted on the side of the desk, was strong. But he was through with succumbing to curiosity. It could wait until morning, until he was sober. Or straight. Until he got his head on right.
Michael pushed himself to his knees and glanced along the hall toward the top of the stairs. The whole corridor was dappled with splashes of moonlight and shadows, but there were other things there as well. Things that were neither light nor darkness. Silver things that shimmered like heat off the summer pav
ement, that only really seemed solid if his eyes were half closed.
They were between Michael and the stairs.
Without ever seeming to move, they came nearer. It was as though they blinked out of one spot and appeared in another, flickering from one gloomy place to another, becoming visible not in the patches of shadow or the shafts of moonlight, but only ever in those slashes of nighttime twilight where shadow and light met.
Michael froze, staring. His stomach lurched again and he gasped for breath. He shook his head and started to back away, moving down the hall. But images flickered in his mind, silver ripples he had seen down in the kitchen, and back along that hallway. He did not have to turn around to know that they were behind him as well.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see the open door of that little study, Scooter scrawled in lime green finger paint on the desk. Erica had used yellow, Tracy a metallic gold. Another picture flashed through Michael's mind . . . of his own finger, dipped in bright blue paint, tracing a capital M onto the wood. . . . His every muscle fought the urge to go in there.
But the ripples flickered nearer still.
The sounds had all but died in the house, but now they returned. The laughter was a madhouse cacophony, a schoolyard full of songs and giggles and jeers. And the scents, that carnival of smells . . . popcorn and cinnamon and baking pie, rosemary and roasting turkey, spring rain and flowers, smoke from a wood stove. Somewhere in the house he could hear calliope music . . . maybe from a carousel, but he thought he recognized the tinny buzz of this particular tune. It was the ice-cream man. The one from his street. His high-school English teacher, Mr. Murphy, owned the truck and spent his summers making the rounds. There had been a faded caricature of a clown on the side of the truck, its hair the same bright rainbow of colors as Michael's favorite sno-cone. The clown had scared him, despite the fact that the paint that gave it life was dim and chipped, as though time had taken steel wool to the image.
That was it. The calliope music of Mr. Murphy's ice-cream truck. He could almost taste that sno-cone. Almost see that clown, with its squat, ugly body and bulbous nose, and that leering grin that said, Come on, kiddies, I'm your friend. Just mind the teeth, and you'll be all right . . .
He bolted, surging up from the floor. Feet still numb, he stumbled into the doorframe, slamming his shoulder hard enough to send spikes of pain through him. The room was empty. At least, for a moment it was. Then, once more, figures shifted in his peripheral vision. But these were not silver ripples, moonlight wraiths . . . these were glimpses of phantom children. There were pale girls skipping rope. A sullen dark-skinned girl in a corner. Another pair playing rock-paper-scissors.
No way out.
One final glimpse showed him an ocean of silver gathering outside in the hall.
He scrambled up onto the desk and hurled his body at the window, pulling his limbs close in hopes that he could shield himself from the glass as it shattered. Then he was falling, limbs flailing, glass shards glittering in the moonlight as they cascaded down around him.
The ragged grass seemed to rush up toward him.
The impact knocked the air out of him.
Darkness closed in, the shadows swallowing the moonlight.
His mouth was still filled with the rich, earthy flavor of stout.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tap, tap!
The first bit of awareness that slipped into Jillian Dansky's mind on that Sunday morning was the prickle of gooseflesh along her arms. She shivered from the cold, and drew her legs up beneath her, pulling into a fetal ball, yet there was no warmth to be had. Her nipples were painfully erect from the chill. She had neither sheet nor blanket to huddle beneath.
Tap, tap, tap!
As she slowly emerged from sleep, she became cognizant of the light beyond her eyelids. Simultaneously, she woke to the bone-deep aches that wracked her body. Her neck was stiff, and a line of dull pain ran up the back of her skull and panned out across the top of her head, settling into her forehead and temples. A tickle in her stomach was almost nausea, but not quite. More a whispered hello, putting her on notice that if she tried anything more ambitious than opening her eyes it might turn into full-on puking.
Jillian shivered again and let a tiny moan escape her lips. It was a sound born not of pain, but of regret. All she wanted, body and soul, was to stay precisely where she was. But she knew that the cold would never be abated if she did not move.
Tap, tap!
Eyes still closed, she frowned. What was that noise? She had heard it before, but had not registered it. It sounded like glass, like something rapping against—
“Rise and shine!” called an impatient voice. A man's voice. And it was not Michael's.
The pieces of this strange puzzle were all there, but her brain was slow in putting them together. Then, in an instant, the connection was made. The stiffness. The feel of the seat beneath her, and at her back. The cold. And that tapping . . . tapping on the window of the car.
Jillian opened her eyes. Late October sunshine made her squint, but she could see the blue uniform clearly enough. She was lying on the backseat of the car, peering up at a gruffly handsome young police officer who stared in through the glass at her with a disdain in his eyes that she had never felt directed at her before, and hoped never to feel again. An autumn leaf struck the window, blew across the glass in front of his face, then disappeared. Their eyes had made a connection, and that leaf had severed it.
“Oh, Christ. Michael!” she cried, sitting up too quickly, heedless of her hangover headache.
With a hiss she pressed the heel of her right hand against her temple and squinted against the pain. All of this was foreign to her. Jillian had been drunk enough to have a hangover perhaps three times in her life, and never one as bad as this. Certainly never one with which she had awoken in the backseat of a car. Her own or anyone else's.
The cop was tapping on the window again, motioning for her to get out of the car. Didn't the guy know she had the mother of all headaches? Her Elizabethan gown was stiff and unyielding, wrinkled and pleated in places where no pleats ought to be. She squinted her eyes even more tightly and then forced herself to open them again, to swing her legs beneath her and sit up all the way in the backseat so that she could lean forward and look into the front, where Michael lay huddled much the way she had been only moments before. Even the rapping of the policeman's nightstick on the window had not roused him.
“Ma'am?” the cop called, his voice muffled by the glass. “Please step out of the car. Now.”
This last was said calmly, but with such an air of command that it could not be debated. There was a second police officer, she noticed at last. He was on the other side of the car, the passenger's side, and he was trying to get a look at Michael in his torn, wrinkled D'Artagnan costume, a grave expression on his face. For the first time, Jillian wondered why her husband wasn't waking up.
“Oh, no,” she said, in a tiny little voice that did not sound like her, even to her own ears. She reached into the front seat and grabbed his shoulder, shaking him with all the strength her hangover would allow. “Michael! Michael, wake up!”
“Ma'am!” the cop shouted.
Jillian had been numbed by sleep and her hangover, but with this snap from the policeman, her heart leaped into a sprint. Her face felt flushed and she raised both hands to signify that she was surrendering to his demand. As she moved toward the door, Michael began to stir in the front seat. She felt a mixture of relief and fury. He was alive, that was good. But what the hell were they doing there on the side of the road in the first place?
Michael, what the fuck have you done? she thought as she unlocked her door and eased it open.
The wind rushed in, whipping a cascade of chestnut hair across her face. She ran her fingers through it, pushing it away from her eyes, and hated how it felt, unwashed. Michael had begun to sit up in the front seat. There was a dark bruise on his face, covering most of his left cheek. She had no idea where he'
d come by it, or the tear in his costume. But now wasn't the time to ask.
She had heard the hum of engines as she was waking up, but only now that she was out of the car could she see other vehicles passing by. Even now a gold minivan that looked vaguely familiar passed, and she prayed no one would go by who might recognize her, standing there in her costume. What would she say, then? Just thinking about it made her headache worsen.
“Ma'am?” the policeman said, and his voice was stern. “I don't suppose you've got some ID in that outfit?”
Jillian's cheeks blossomed with the heat of embarrassment. She looked down again at the wreck of her beautiful costume. A stray thought danced through her mind; she wondered what had become of the traditional half-mask she'd worn in front of her face for most of the night. At some point, she recalled having handed it to Michael, but somehow she doubted she would find it again.
“No, I . . .” She met the policeman's gaze, and stiffened. Her first impression had been correct. He was handsome, a broad-shouldered mid-twenties guy with a square jaw darkened by permanent five o'clock shadow, and the kind of eyes that could melt a girl's heart. But what had brought her up short was the look in those eyes.
He was pitying her.
It made her feel small. The tickle in her stomach wasn't quite so ticklish anymore. She felt sick, but not so much that she would actually be sick.
“I'm sorry. I don't. My purse is in the car”—I think—“I can get it.” She ducked back into the car before he could argue with her. Her headache sang a funeral dirge, and her stomach churned as she bent over.
Michael was wide awake now. Or, at least, he seemed to be. There was something unspoken in his eyes. He looked almost stoned, but Michael had smoked pot exactly once in his life, so that was out of the question.
“Jillian? Jilly, what—”
The cop on the other side of the car wasn't as polite or as patient as the one Jillian had come to think of as her policeman. Michael's policeman slapped his open palm down on the roof of the car, making them both jump, then bent to glare in the window.
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