by Lionel Fenn
He knelt to look under the table and saw only more pieces of more dishes he could ill afford to replace even if they had been less than a dollar apiece. It was, he thought as he straightened, a crime for which someone is going to pay.
The refrigerator coughed on, and he spun around, barely able to check his swing before the bat dented the top.
"Take it easy," he told himself, patting the appliance to make amends for his mistake. "Take it easy."
The vase he placed on the table as he walked over to the back door and checked the lock, rattled the knob, peered around the white curtains that covered the panes. The backyard was still dark, the houses behind unseen.
He examined the high window beside it and discovered the lock still in place; he checked for telltale signs of little people or expert illegal contortionists in the cupboards over and under the counters; and, as long as he was at it, he checked the oven and the refrigerator and thanked the ceiling for the fact that the house had no cellar.
He closed the pantry door because the golden glow was making him nervous. It had occurred to him fleetingly that he might go in there and check the meadow as well, for a clue to whatever was happening here tonight. That was discarded. Coward or not, he would just as soon not know.
And when he was positive he was alone, he tapped the bat thoughtfully against his left palm. This, he reminded himself, was not the only room in the house. And in the time it had taken him to get down here, whoever it was might have even fled out the front door, giggling to his friends about the fool he had made of the sucker who lived alone in the house and never came out except at night, to mow the lawn.
And maybe not.
The meadow aside, the idea of calling the police and letting them do all the work was becoming increasingly seductive, even if they would eventually question his sobriety and his pantry decor. Unfortunately, there was no phone extension in the kitchen, and once again he couldn't count on his neighbors for help.
"Gideon," he muttered, "you'll never get some sleep if you don't get your ass in gear."
Thus inspired, he moved cautiously down the hall toward the living room, aware that he had not put on slippers and that the floor where it wasn't covered by throw rugs was skin-tighteningly cold, the constant jumping of his nerves promising to make his calves cramp.
He slowed even further, his breathing more a faint hissing, and dropped into a slight crouch and raised the bat for a quick and devastating strike to his opponent's kneecaps when he reached the foyer and looked to his right.
The lights were out, but the waning moon was still bright enough to cover the few pieces of furniture in shimmering silvered grey, to put unpleasantly shifting shadows in the mouth of the fireplace, and to show him that unless the intruder was substantially smaller than the average midget, there was no one here, either.
He double-checked the dining room, just to be sure they weren't hiding under the table or in the china closet, and tried the front door, which was still locked from the inside.
He frowned and scratched the side of his neck.
A board creaked overhead.
It was entirely possible, he thought as he stared glumly at the ceiling, that his night visitor—who seemed now to be less dangerous than intriguing—had hidden in the living room until he had gone into the kitchen, then left the living room to run furtively upstairs into either of the bedrooms or into the bathroom as soon as his back was turned. Unless he or she or they found the stairs to the attic and went up there instead, though it was little more than a crawlspace and held nothing of interest to even the most myopic of thieves.
In that case, his search was not yet finished.
In that case, he ought to stop trying to be a hero and call the goddamned police and be done with it.
Another board creaked.
Remember, Gideon, he told himself, the meadow and the bottle; that kind of publicity you do not need when you're trying to make a comeback.
Of course, it could be just the house.
For as long as he had known it, it had talked to itself at night, groaning and settling and releasing its warmth, shifting and shrinking and snapping as it contracted with the night's chill; the floorboards made noises all the time, even under the carpets, not to mention the walls and a couple of the ceilings, especially when a good wind was blowing and the eaves found their voice.
The fireplace and its flue were a veritable orchestra of whistles and moans, and when the furnace turned on, the ducts added a basso blowing that even reached into the closets.
A board cracked.
On the other hand, he thought, I could just be stalling because I'm in a bathrobe and bare feet and carrying a baseball bat for protection against god knows what that's creeping around my house.
There was nothing else to do, again, and he headed for the staircase, moved up as quietly as he could, and when he reached the second floor decided that boldness was the best way to keep the intruder off guard.
He stepped into the spare bedroom and switched on the light, looked under the bed, the dresser, and in the tiny closet—they were empty; he stepped into the bathroom and switched on the light, threw back the shower curtain, checked under the sink, and shook his head when he found himself staring at the toilet's water-tank lid; he hesitated before stepping into his own bedroom and switching on the light—it was getting personal now, and he was beginning to feel like ten kinds of a fool.
But when he did, it was empty.
The door to the attic was closed, and locked.
"Gideon," he said, "you have earned a rest. Put the stupid bat away and forget this ever happened."
Something moved downstairs.
With a revelatory snap of his fingers, he realized he must be drunk. Not nearly four sheets to the wind, not by a long shot, but at the very least struggling with a good-sized pillowcase. Four good, healthy swallows in his tired and forlorn condition could very well have caused an interruption of rational thought, a short-circuiting of reality perception, and a muzziness that began to make him feel as if he were wading through wet cotton. That would do it, no question about it, and the only logical solution would be to get back into bed, sleep, and sort it all out in the morning, when he wasn't jumping at every shadow that moved in every corner.
It wouldn't be the first time he had done something stupid after drinking; it would be the first time he was glad of it, though.
Someone, or something, knocked the vase off the kitchen table.
"Well, Jesus," he said angrily, and took the steps down two at a time, ran down the hall, and barely stopped himself in time from slicing his bare feet open on the pieces of vase that lay jagged on the floor.
"You know," a voice said behind him, "this isn't getting us anywhere."
Gideon shrieked.
CHAPTER THREE
Nimbly treading a fine line between bolting for the back door and skipping over the shards of crockery and pottery on the floor, Gideon stumbled backward until a chair caught him behind his calves. He sat heavily. The baseball bat dropped unnoticed from his hand, and most notions of imprecations were driven away by the sight of the woman standing in the hall shadows.
When his lungs started working again and his heart slowed down, he swallowed and said, "I haven't got anything. You're wasting your time."
She said nothing.
He peered at her and didn't see a gun. "You can look around," he told her, "but like I said, you're wasting your time. The most valuable thing I have is this bat, believe me."
"I don't want anything, nothing that belongs to you, that is," she said.
"Thank god."
"If you choose, go ahead."
Her voice was pleasant and soft, but oddly strained. Though she remained in the hall, he could see she was wearing some sort of plain long white dress with something gold tied around her waist. He could not see her feet, nor could he see more than a suggestion of her face. It was disconcertingly like talking to a decapitated mannequin.
He waited.
"Well?" he said.
The ghost-like figure stepped forward into the light, and he couldn't for the life of him understand why she would want to hide a face like that. Her eyes were wide and violet, her eyebrows dark to match the dark of her hair; her cheeks were full and flushed, her mouth naturally red, the whole destined to plunge every cosmetics firm in the country into a depression.
And she was bleeding.
At first he had thought it was some sort of decoration, there under her arm, just to the side of her left breast. Then he realized the decoration was moist, red, and spreading. He looked up and saw a faint glaze spreading over her eyes.
"Damn," he said, and jumped to his feet.
She took a hasty step backward.
"But you're hurt!"
She looked at her wound as if seeing it for the first time and nodded. "Yes, I suppose I am."
"But how?"
Her answer was a slight swaying that alarmed him, though she showed no evidence of the pain she must have been feeling.
Again avoiding the cutting edges on the floor, he took her hand and, slapping on lights along the way, guided her to the upstairs bathroom. She did not protest, and by the time he had lifted her easily to the counter beside the basin, she was leaning heavily against him. The pain was there now, and it made her look far too old for her years.
"Look," he said, fumbling open the medicine chest and staring inside, "I'm no doctor, but I know a little about cuts and things because I was always getting cut and things." He grabbed out tape, ointment, gauze, bandages, scissors, tweezers, and his straight razor. He looked at the blood on her dress and held his breath for a moment. "I think you'd better get to a hospital. I don't have a car, but I can call a cab. Really, I—"
"Do what you can," she said flatly. "Please."
"All right. But I'm afraid I'm not..."
The cloth, of some shimmering material far softer and less slippery than the silk it resembled, would not part when he tried to cut it away from the wound. He cursed, blushed, then saw the line of lacing down her spine.
"We're going to have to..."
"Whatever you must," she said.
Gently he pushed her hair over one shoulder and undid the lace's knot at the top of the dress. When the material parted sufficiently, he eased it down over her shoulder until her arm was free. She held the dress to her chest with her right hand and lifted the arm.
"God almighty," he whispered.
It was more than a scratch. It was a four-inch slash that ran across the ridge of one rib. He looked at her in near panic, and she smiled back encouragement.
"It's crazy."
"It hurts."
He filled the basin with cold water, soaked a towel, and used it to staunch the bleeding. When the wound was as clear as he could get it, he realized it wasn't as deep as he had thought; it was, however, unpleasant enough to make his stomach queasy.
"I think you'll need stitches."
"Just do what you can."
"Sure."
After a deep breath he blew out in a rush, he drenched several lengths of gauze with antiseptic and placed them over the cut. She didn't wince, hiss, or try to slap his hand away. Quickly and awkwardly, then, he taped the gauze in place, washed as much of the blood away as he could from around the wound, and stood back, his hands trembling as he tried to dry them on his jeans. His breathing was shallow, and there was cold perspiration on his face he patted off with a towel, and perspiration on hers he washed with a face cloth.
"You're still going to need a doctor."
She examined the repairs by lifting her arm high over her head, her other hand prodding at the tape and thick gauze mound. Accordingly, her dress dropped away from her chest.
"Oh my," he said, and being no fool took a careful look before turning away modestly.
"It will do," she decided, and slipped her arm back into its sleeve, slid off the counter, and turned for him to relace the back.
He did, albeit reluctantly, aware that she was watching him closely in the mirror.
"Gideon," he said, fumbling with the laces. "Gideon Sunday."
"Glorian," she told him with an amused smile.
"Pretty name."
"Yes."
His hand brushed over the drying blood, and he grimaced and pulled away as soon as he was finished. She thanked him with a nod and walked out of the room, forcing him to follow as she returned to the kitchen and headed for the pantry.
"Hey, wait a minute! What about the doctor? I can have a cab here before—"
She turned. "What are you talking about? Aren't you coming with me?"
He blinked. He looked at the bat on the floor, the glow in the doorway, and decided that this woman, whoever she was, could not possibly be part of whatever his sour-minded destiny had in store for him. She was, alas, nothing more than a puzzling but nevertheless evident part of the nightmare he was having, or the DTs he was suffering, or the letdown he was feeling from finding no one in the house.
He leaned against the jamb and folded his arms over his chest. "I don't think so."
She seemed suddenly bewildered. "What?"
"I said, I don't think so."
"But don't you want to help me?"
"With what?"
She gestured vaguely toward the pantry. "With that. You know, the meadow."
He frowned and looked at her slightly sideways for a new and perhaps more illuminating perspective. Then he smiled. He grinned. And he laughed once and loudly.
"I get it!" he exclaimed happily. "By god, I get it!"
Clearly impatient, and more bewildered than ever, Glorian looked anxiously into the pantry, then back at him. "What do you get?"
"This," he said, relief and a twinge of fear battling to keep his voice unnaturally high. He coughed and cleared his throat. "This is one of those Connecticut Yankee things, you know what I mean? You get hit on the head, you wake up in a different time and have all sorts of fantastic adventures, bring modern technology to a medieval country, and then, just as you fall in love with the heroine and you're going to live happily ever after, you're sent back to where you came from. Or you wake up. Or you come out of the anesthetic because you've been having a terribly serious operation that means life or death to you, and you work out all your fantasies and wishes while you're under, thus saving yourself in more ways than one.
"Boy, am I stupid. I should have known."
Glorian stared at him. "You mean... are you trying to tell me you don't think I'm real?"
"Of course you're real," he said earnestly, failing miserably to keep a quivering smile from his lips. "But you're not real here"—he rapped a knuckle against the wall lightly—"you're real in here"—and he tapped a finger to his temple. "It's a hell of a difference."
"You shit," she said.
The smile wavered.
She strode across the room and stood in front of him, glaring until he wondered if perhaps he had made a slight error in perception.
Then she punched him.
His head rebounded off the wall and she punched him again, catching his chin just right. His hand came up to stop her, but he missed her wrist and took the blow instead. His knees buckled and he had to press his palms against the wall to keep from sliding to the floor. Getting tackled was one thing; getting slugged by a woman in a bloodstained dress was something else again—a clear symptom that he had misjudged not only the strength in her slender arms, but also the depths to which his self-pity would sink in order to teach him some small measure of humility and gracious behavior.
When his eyes cleared she was at the pantry door again, hands on her hips. "I am Glorian," she said angrily, "and I don't like being pushed around and laughed at."
Gingerly examining the condition of his face with one finger, he managed an apologetic wince; in all his years as a football player he had never once met a cheerleader who could slug like that.
"Now if you're coming, come! If you're not, go back to bed."<
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His tongue found a loose tooth; when he swallowed he could taste a hint of blood. Wonderful, he thought sourly; and tomorrow someone will call to give me an interview and he'll ask me where I got the bruises on my jaw and I'll have to tell him I got them from a woman who lives in my pantry. Wonderful.
Glorian gave him a look of supreme disgust, whirled around, and stalked into the pantry. He would have followed, but there was still a stubborn part of his mind that refused to believe he wouldn't wake up in the morning with a clear face and a hangover. After all, that's what happened, in a way, to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole and ended up not playing with a full deck of cards. The whole thing was standard Freudian problem-solving and escapism, and while it might have been nice to escape, he still had enough pride left, not to mention his sister's legacy, to carry on a while longer before he gave in to—
Glorian screamed.
"Christ," he said wonderingly, "she's still here."
He moved into the kitchen with every intention of finding out what was wrong this time when Glorian, still screaming, raced out of the pantry, shoved him aside, and charged down the hall toward the staircase.
"Hey!" he shouted.
"Run!" she ordered.
"What?" he said.
And froze when he heard something he knew had to be large and ugly topple the pantry shelves. Jars shattered, cans cracked and thudded, and that same large ugly thing let loose with a bellow that made him think of an oversized lion that had just discovered its prey.
Glorian, from the relative safety of the second floor, screamed at him again, but Gideon didn't move.
He had been afraid before on many occasions, and he was afraid now as he saw the gold glow in the doorway blotted out; but he was also getting a little annoyed at the way his house was being used as a traffic lane for fantasies. In fact, as he reached out and picked up the bat, he was beginning to lose his temper, which, as his sister had often despairingly told him, was the one thing about him that made him somewhat undesirable company for those who triggered it.
The wall shook and the refrigerator gurgled off.
Using one foot as a brush, he pushed aside the pieces of broken crockery he could see and eased his way toward the door, keeping the table between him and whatever was trying to bull its way through.