3
* * *
THAT NIGHT she woke in sudden panic and sat bolt upright in bed, staring unseeing into the dark, feeling the rapid thumping of her heart deep within her breast, for one scared second unable to believe what she had heard: that tremendous smashing of glass somewhere downstairs. For a moment she thought the room had changed, that she was dreaming it as she had that afternoon, but then she saw she was wrong. The house was silent now, ticking away in its usual nighttime quiet, with only the faintest hum from the air conditioner, a faint rattle of the air conditioner grille; but there could be no mistaking that violent outburst of sound she had heard from the floor below.
She turned, eyes adjusting to the dark, to see Michael up on one elbow.
“What was that?” he said.
“I don’t know.” She strained to hear the slightest unusual sound—a footstep, the groan of a stair, the creak of an opening door—but there was nothing. A faint movement at the window caught her eye, and she started, stared through the intervening dark, but it was only the curtain moving slightly in the current from the air conditioner. “Do you think someone’s breaking in?”
“This is the country, for God’s sake. We’re supposed to be safe from that here.”
He swung out of bed and fumbled on a chair for his pants. She started to protest but stifled it, thinking in the arrested surge of her mind about that farmhouse in Kansas, the Clutter family, those two killers prowling the darkened house in the eerie glow of flashlights, carrying a shotgun. In Cold Blood. She watched Michael’s vague form struggling into his pants, heard the jingling of his belt buckle in the dark.
He rummaged inside the closet near the door. “Isn’t there anything I could use for a weapon?”
She thought for a moment. “In the top left drawer of the dresser. My electric comb. You’ll have to wind up the cord.”
She got out of bed, wrapped herself in a robe, and tiptoed across to the dresser. Michael was hefting the comb by the handle.
“It’s not much,” he said, “but it’ll have to do.”
“Michael, be careful.”
She watched him dwindle to a shadowy figure down the dark hallway, then disappear down the stairs. Behind her, the air conditioner grille maintained its minuscule rattle. She shivered, hugging the robe to her; it was suddenly very scary to be alone. She crept to the top of the stairs and looked down.
In the dark, she could see nothing. She wanted to call out to Michael, but that seemed suddenly dangerous: it would warn whoever had broken the glass. Then the light in the dining room went on, and she saw Michael against the far wall, near the light switch, the comb at the ready.
The dining room looked normal. The oak table gleamed dully under the light. The mirror over the buffet was intact. She saw a shadowy movement in the black of the window glass and for an instant she started, but it was only Michael’s reflection as he turned, surveying the room. He went to the dining-room door and leaned around, then disappeared into the dark kitchen. She held her breath and listened. The silence seemed ominous. The kitchen light went on, but still he said nothing.
“Michael?” Her voice seemed unnaturally loud in the night’s quiet. “Michael, are you there?”
There was still nothing but that ominous silence.
“Michael?”
“Come down here and look at this,” he said.
Quickly she descended the stairs and went into the kitchen. He was standing with his hands on his hips, looking at the tall old cupboard in the corner.
“Oh, my poor cupboard.” She went down on her knees in front of it, careful to avoid the splinters of glass on the floor. The pane in the left door was completely smashed, only little jagged edges left around the frame. Thin, hairline cracks radiated away from a large, tear-shaped hole in the right pane.
“I don’t understand it,” Michael said. “It’s the only thing broken. The windows are all right. And I checked the door—it’s still locked.”
She picked up a large splinter of glass. It was streaked with the discolorations of age. “Do you think just because it was so old . . . ?”
“I don’t see how. Glass doesn’t break just because it’s old. Crack, maybe, if you put pressure on it. But this looks like something’s been thrown through it. Look, most of the glass is inside the cupboard. Behind the doors.”
“Michael, I’m scared.”
He pulled her up against him and put his arm around her. “There’s nothing to be scared of, kid. Things like this don’t just happen. There’s some explanation for it.”
“But you said yourself the door’s still locked, the windows aren’t broken. What could have caused it?”
“Maybe atmospheric conditions. You know those windshields you see sometimes? Shattered so fine they’re almost white? I think that’s what does that.”
Jennie felt goose bumps rippling her arms. The clock above the stove said 2:13. The silence of the house seemed unnatural, not an absence of sound but like a hushed waiting for something about to happen. In the brilliant black of the window panes she saw her own face reflected back at her, ethereal and strange, like a disembodied other self hovering just outside. She remembered the dream that afternoon—the voices downstairs calling out another woman’s name—and the thought of someone, some presence, here in the room with them made her shiver.
“Well, what the hell,” Michael said. “Better clean it up.”
Together they swept up the glass, and while Michael carried it out to the trash barrel beside the garage, she stood in the kitchen door, looking out into the night. The flagstones of the patio were ghostly pale in the moonlight. A faint wind rustled through the trees looming up huge and black at the edge of the yard. In the unfamiliar guise of night, everything seemed alien and ominous, as if the house had a secret life of its own, into which she intruded only at her own peril.
4
* * *
JENNIE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY, waiting for fresh coffee to perk in the kitchen behind her, her long dress brilliantly white in the late morning sun. The table was set up in the shade of the tree on the far side of the patio. It was nearly noon; they had just finished Sunday brunch. Across the table Beverly was leaning back in her chair, talking to Michael. Beside her, plump and scowling through the smoke of his cigar, Don had the entire Sunday Times on his lap, reading the headlines on the top page. Jennie was very happy. Everything was right: the cool white of the tablecloth in the deep shade, the colorful array of napkins and cups and bowls, the rustle of the trees in the quiet of the morning. When the coffee was ready, she carried it across the patio to the table.
“More coffee, Don?”
“I always accept more coffee from a lovely lady. Have I told you how beautiful you look this morning? That’s a ravishing dress.”
Jennie blushed. “It goes well with the house, don’t you think? A nineteenth-century dress for a nineteenth-century house.”
“I love this house,” Beverly said. “That view of the lake is gorgeous. Wouldn’t you like a house like this, Don?”
“I wouldn’t live in this house. It’s haunted.”
“Don’t laugh,” Michael said. “I think it is.”
“You never found out what broke that glass?”
“Some kind of atmospheric change is all I can think of. With glass that old, who knows?”
“Maybe you have a poltergeist,” Beverly said.
“A what?”
“A poltergeist. A spirit that haunts houses. Knocks things off shelves and pounds on the walls and things. There’ve been some well-documented accounts.”
“I hope we haven’t got one,” Jennie said, setting the coffee pot on the table and returning to her chair. “We left the city to find peace and quiet.”
“Or maybe it’s somebody trying to get through from a parallel world,” Beverly said. “There’s a theory, you know, that beyond some sort of cosmic barrier there’s another world just like this one—same landscape, same environment, everything. Certain things are
supposed to be different, but basically it’s just the same.”
“I didn’t know you were a science-fiction buff,” Michael said.
“Oh, this isn’t science fiction. Science fiction writers have been speculating about a parallel universe for ages, but this is something different. I just read about it recently. It has something to do with karma and reincarnation and all that.”
“Spare me,” Don said. “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s this whole occult explosion. Reincarnation, meditation, exorcism—the whole country’s gone nuts.”
“I think the idea of a parallel world is fascinating,” Jennie said. “What does it have to do with reincarnation?”
“It’s supposedly where you go when you die,” Beverly said. “Actually, according to the theory, there’s a whole series of parallel worlds. Each one is a higher level of existence, and the higher the level of existence the more changed that world is from this. According to the theory, if you die naturally, of old age, it means you’ve worked out your karma and you pass on to a higher level of existence. But if you die young you pass on to a parallel world like this one, so you can work out the karma for this incarnation. But the point is that it’s almost exactly like this world, with the same geography and everything.”
Don made a face. “You’ve been a magazine editor too long. Reading every crackpot idea published in the last ten years would scramble anybody’s brains.”
“Well, maybe it’s somebody trying to contact you from out of the past.” Beverly winked at Jennie and turned solemnly to Don. “There’s another theory, you know, that the past, present and future exist simultaneously, and if you only knew how, you could move from one to the other.”
“Enough of your theories,” Don said. He extracted the sports section from the paper. “Does anybody want to read any of this? Mike, you want the business section?”
“Give me the travel section. I don’t think about Wall Street on Sundays.”
“Back to the real world,” Beverly said. “How is Wall Street these days?”
“The same,” Michael said. “The Street never changes.”
“Never changes?”
“What goes up changes. The Street never changes.”
Don shuffled the remaining sections in his lap. “Jennie? Arts and Leisure? Book Review?”
“Nothing, Don, thanks.” She drank her coffee, watching the others read. She felt wonderfully peaceful, with only the occasional chink of a spoon against a cup, the rustle of a page being turned, the scrape of a shoe on the stone of the patio as someone moved in a chair. Bees hummed lazily through the flowers in the big circular flower bed in the driveway. A car drove slowly by, only its top visible above the hedge at the other end of the yard, where the road passed the front of the house. Michael caught her eye and winked, and she felt a quick smile leap to her face. He could be a love sometimes when she least expected it.
After the coffee was finished and the Times disposed of, they went for a walk out along the driveway and down the road toward the lake. Michael and Jennie walked arm-in-arm, with Don and Beverly just ahead. The only sound was the faint scuff of their heels against the pavement. Down below the hill, the lake lay flat and blue and wide, the town intermittently visible through the trees on the other side. One small white sailboat skimmed in slow and dreamy silence across its surface. Jennie watched a white-clad figure duck as the boom came around and the boat slowly tacked off on a new slant across the water. She felt positively radiant in her new dress, and she gave a little exuberant hop and skip to get into step with Michael. This was how she had wanted life in the country to be. A quiet brunch on the patio, a few friends visiting from the city, a leisurely stroll in the afternoon.
“This is a very quiet road,” Don said. “How come there’s no traffic?”
“It’s a kind of side road,” Michael said. “Years ago there was a bridge down at the lower end of the lake, and this was the main road into town. When they took the bridge out, they closed this road off. It ends in a turn-around now, at the bottom of the hill.”
Beverly pointed ahead, fifty yards beyond the house, to where another road cut off from the pavement curving to descend the hill. “Where does that go?”
“That’s Summer House Road,” Michael said. “There’s a summer house or two in the woods there above the lake. It connects to the main road a couple of miles farther on.”
They were passing in front of the house, where the flagstone steps led up through a break in the hedge to the yard, when Jennie suddenly stopped. “My hat. I forgot my hat.”
“You don’t need a hat,” Michael said.
“It’s my wide-brimmed white hat. I got it especially to wear with the dress.”
“The lady wants her hat, Michael,” Beverly said. “Run back and get it, Jennie. We’ll wait for you.”
“No, you go on ahead,” Jennie said, starting up the steps. “I’ll meet you down at the lake.”
Back in the upstairs bedroom, she donned the hat and looked at herself in the mirror. It was the perfect touch. The dim light of the room made her reflection look like one of those old, brown-tinted daguerreotypes. Happily, she hurried out and down the flagstone steps to the road again.
The others were already out of sight around the turn, descending the hill toward the lake. She could hear their voices drifting back up to her.
“I can’t get over how Jennie looks,” Don was saying. “Life in the country is really doing wonders for her.”
“And that dress,” Beverly said. “She looks absolutely adorable in it. Like something out of a movie.”
“I like dresses like that,” Don said. “That’s what they wore back when men were men and women were women.”
“Hear, hear,” Michael said. “Vive la différence.”
“Did you see her blush when you complimented her on it?” Beverly said. “I’ve never seen Jennie blush before.”
“I haven’t seen any woman blush in years,” Don said. “It’s refreshing.”
Listening, Jennie felt another blush creep up over her face, the hot blood tingling on the surface of her skin. Then another blush seemed to follow it, a hot wave rising up over her and not stopping, flooding into her head, beating in her ears, making her dizzy. She felt a sudden tense wire of pain thread its way from the back of her neck up into her temple. She stopped, her legs going weak and her head faint. Through a kind of haze, she saw the cutoff to Summer House Road shimmer and waver ahead of her. Dimly, she heard Beverly say, “I think we’d better wait for her.”
And then everything went black.
• • •
She was standing on a narrow dirt road. Deep brushy thickets rose above her head along the ditches on either side. The clear air was rich with the smell of earth and vegetation. Ahead, where the thickets flanked an abrupt downward curve, a rabbit emerged onto the road and paused on its haunches, then proceeded in leisurely hops into the brush on the other side.
Then, behind her, coming toward her, she heard an unfamiliar sound: clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop. She turned. It was a horse-drawn buggy, coming along the road toward her, sprays of dust flying up from the buggy wheels. In the open cockpit of the buggy sat a dark-haired young man, in a white shirt and a dark, open vest, a thick dark moustache looping across his face. At the sight of him, she felt a strange, painful yearning rise in her breast, something as strong as love swell in her throat. Then, as the buggy came closer, close enough for her to see his brilliant blue eyes, she realized he had seen her. He stared at her, strangely, and she felt a stitch of fear jerk through her. Abruptly, he stood up in the buggy and lashed the horse directly toward her. Panic flooded into her, and she turned to run. A rut in the road clutched at her heel, and she staggered, caught herself and ran on, suddenly terrified, the clop-clop-clop of the horse looming ominously up behind her. Running, she turned and saw him lashing the horse after her, his eyes fixed wide and strange on hers, and she felt the panic seize at her throat and staggered off the
road and plunged into the brush, floundering through thick branches that caught at her, tripped her, caused her to fall.
As the brush closed behind her, she heard his shout—eerie, desperate: “Pamela!”
• • •
Voices seemed to come from a great distance—approaching and receding, looming and fading like waves. She was floating, revolving on a giant horizontal wheel in slow and sweeping revolutions, around and around and around. The turning was making her sick. A hot flush swept through her, then a cold one, bringing beads of sweat to her brow. Someone was slapping her face—softly, gently. She jerked her head to escape the slaps and opened her eyes. Through a blur, she saw Michael’s face hovering over her, anxious and concerned.
“Jennie?” he said. “Jennie, are you all right?”
Don and Beverly loomed over his shoulder, seeming to waver and recede through her dizziness. The nausea swept over her and then subsided again. She felt grass under her hands and turned to see that she was lying on the brow of the hill, several yards across the road from the house. And then, abruptly, she remembered and it all came back, vivid and real: the narrow dirt road, the oncoming horse, the man in the buggy shouting after her as she ran. She wrenched free of Michael’s grasp and struggled to sit up.
“Whoa,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“What . . . what happened?”
“You must have fainted. We waited for you, and when you didn’t come, we came back and found you lying here. What were you doing way over here?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . fainted.”
“I still think we should call a doctor,” Beverly said. “She’s awfully pale.”
“I’m all right.” She struggled unsteadily to her feet, swaying, feeling faint again.
Michael caught her. “Well, I know one thing. We’re going to take you back and put you to bed.”
She remembered the upstairs bedroom—that terrible pain in her head, the furniture she did not recognize, the noise and shouts from downstairs. Pamela. The same name the man had shouted at her from the buggy, whipping the horse after her along the road. Still dizzy, she clung to Don and Michael as they guided her across the road, their voices again murmuring as if from a great distance, the flagstone steps seeming to swim toward her, reality receding again before the memory of that ancient pendulum clock tock-tock-tocking on the unfamiliar dresser, those frightening hoofbeats looming up behind her, her own awful realization that there was beginning to happen to her something she could not understand, something terrifying and strange.
Second Sight Page 3