Intensity

stairs, which lay to the right. His back was to her.

She froze. Half in the hallway. Half on the threshold to the master suite. If he turned, she would not be able to slip away before he glimpsed her from the corner of his eye-yet she was unable to move now while there was still a chance to avoid him. She was afraid that if she made any sound whatsoever, he would hear it and spin toward her. Even the microwhispers of carpet fibers compressing under her shoe, if she moved, seemed certain to draw his attention.

The visitor was doing something so bizarre that Chyna was as transfixed by his activity as by her fear. His hands were raised in front of him, stretched as high as he could reach, and his spread fingers languorously combed the air. He seemed to be in a trance, as though trying to seine psychic impressions from the ether.

He was a big man. Six feet two, maybe even taller. Muscular. Narrow waist, enormous shoulders. His denim jacket stretched tautly across his broad back.

His hair was thick and brown, neatly barbered against the nape of his bull neck, but Chyna could not see his face. She hoped never to see it.

His seining fingers, stained with blood, looked crushingly strong. He would be able to choke the life out of her with a single-hand grip.

'Come to me,' he murmured.

Even in a whisper, his rough voice had a timbre and a power that were magnetic.

'Come to me.'

He seemed to be speaking not to a vision that only he could see but to Chyna, as if his senses were so acute that he had been able to detect her merely from the movement of the air that she had displaced when she'd stepped soundlessly through the doorway.

Then she saw the spider. It dangled from the ceiling on a gossamer filament a foot above the killer's reaching hands.

'Please.'

As if responding to the man's supplications, the spider spun out its thread, descending.

The killer stopped reaching, turned his hand palm-up. 'Little one,' he breathed.

Fat and black, the obedient spider reeled itself down into the big open palm.

The killer brought his hand to his mouth and tipped his head back slightly. He either crushed the spider and ate it-or ate it alive.

He stood motionless, savoring.

Finally, without looking back, he went to the head of the stairs on the right, at the midpoint of the hallway, and descended spider-quick and almost spider-silent to the first floor.

Chyna shuddered, stunned to be alive.

2

The house held a drowning depth of stillness as a dam held water, with tremendous pent-up power and pressure on the breast.

When Chyna found the courage to move, she cautiously approached the head of the stairs. She feared that the visitor had not fully descended to the first floor, that he was toying with her, standing just out of sight, waiting, smiling. He would reach for her, palms up, and say, Come to me.

She held her breath, risked exposure, and looked down. The stairs curved through gradients of gloom to the foyer below. She could see just well enough to be sure that he wasn't there.

As far as Chyna could discern, no lamps were on downstairs. She wondered what he was doing in that darkness, guided only by the pale moon glow at the windows. Perhaps he was in a corner, crouched like a spider, sensitive to the faintest changes in the patterns of the air, dreaming of silent stalkings and the frenzied rending of prey.

She went quickly past the head of the stairs, into the last length of hallway, to the next open door and the second source of amber light, dreading what she might find. But she could cope with both the dread and the finding. It was always not knowing, turning away from truth, that caused night sweats and bad dreams.

This room was smaller than the master suite, with no sitting area. A corner desk. A double bed. One nightstand with a brass lamp, a dresser, a vanity with a padded bench.

On the wall above the bed was a poster-size portrait of Freud. Chyna loathed Freud. But Laura, dear of heart and idealistic, clung to a belief in many aspects of Freudian theory; she embraced the dream of a guiltless world, with everyone a victim of his troubled past and yearning for rehabilitation.

Laura was lying facedown on the bed, atop the sheets and the blankets. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her. A second pair of handcuffs secured her ankles. Linking both of those shiny steel restraints was a shackling chain.

She had been violated. The pants of her baggy blue pajamas had been cut off with a neatness worthy of a conscientious tailor; the blue panels of cloth had been smoothed across the blankets to both sides of her. The pajama shirt had been shoved up her back; now it was gathered in rumpled folds across her shoulders and the nape of her neck.

Chyna moved deeper into the room, her fear equaled now by a swelling sorrow that seemed to enlarge her heart yet leave it cold and empty. When she caught a faint odor of spilled semen, her fear and sorrow were matched by anger. As she stooped beside the bed, her hands curled into such hard fists that her fingernails pressed painfully into her palms.

Sweat-damp blond hair was pasted to the side of Laura's face. Her delicate features were salt-pale and clenched in anxiety, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

She was not dead. Not dead. It seemed impossible.

The girl-terror had reduced her to the condition of a girl-was murmuring so softly that the words couldn't be heard even from a distance of inches, yet so urgently that the meaning was harrowingly clear. It was a prayer, one that Chyna had recited on numerous nights long ago, in far places: a prayer for mercy, a plea to be delivered from this horror untouched and alive, dear God, please, untouched and alive.

On those other nights, Chyna had been spared both violation and death. Already, half of Laura's petition had gone unanswered.

Chyna's throat tightened with anguish, and she could barely speak: 'It's me.'

Laura's eyelids sprang open, and her blue eyes rolled like those of a terrified horse, wide with disbelief. 'All dead.'

'Ssshhh,' Chyna whispered.

'Blood. His hands.'

'Ssshhh. I'll get you out of here.'

'Stank like blood. Jack's dead. Nina. Everyone.'

Jack, her brother, whom Chyna had not met. Nina, her sister-in-law. Evidently the killer had been to the vineyard manager's bungalow before coming to the main house. Four dead. There was no help to be found anywhere on the sprawling property.

Chyna glanced worriedly at the open door, then quickly rose to test the handcuffs on Laura's wrists. Securely locked.

With fettered hands and fettered ankles linked by a chain, Laura was thoroughly hobbled. She wouldn't be able to stand, let alone walk.

Chyna wasn't strong enough to carry her.

She saw her reflection in the vanity mirror across the room, and she realized with a shock how nakedly her terror was revealed in her wrenched face.

Trying to look more composed for Laura's sake, Chyna stopped beside the bed again and murmured almost as softly as her friend had been praying: 'Is there a gun?'

'What?'

'A gun in the house?'