Leaning back in his comfortable leather office chair, rocking gently, holding a compact cassette recorder in his right hand and dictating a letter to his editor in New York, Martin Stillwater suddenly realized he was repeating the same two words in a dreamy whisper.
Frowning, Marty clicked off the recorder.
His train of thought had clattered down a siding and chugged to a stop. He could not recall what he had been about to say.
Needed what?
The big house was not merely quiet but eerily still. Paige had taken the kids to lunch and a Saturday matinee movie.
But this childless silence was more than just a condition. It had substance. The air felt heavy with it.
He put one hand to the nape of his neck. His palm was cool and moist. He shivered.
Outside, the autumn day was as hushed as the house, as if all of southern California had been vacated. At the only window of his second-floor study, the wide louvers of the plantation shutters were ajar. Sunlight slanted between angled slats, imprinting the sofa and carpet with narrow red-gold stripes as lustrous as fox fur; the nearest luminous ribbon wrapped one corner of the U-shaped desk.
Instinct told him that something important had happened only a moment ago, just out of his sight, perceived subliminally.
He swiveled his chair and surveyed the room behind him. Other than the fasciae of coppery sunshine interleaved with louver shadows, the only light came from a small desk lamp with a stained-glass shade. Even in that gloom, however, he could see he was alone with his books, research files, and computer.
Perhaps the silence seemed unnaturally deep only because the house had been filled with noise and bustle since Wednesday, when the schools had closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. He missed the kids. He should have gone to the movie with them.
The words had been spoken with peculiar tension—and longing.
Now an ominous feeling overcame him, a keen sense of impending danger. It was the premonitory dread which characters sometimes felt in his novels, and which he always struggled to describe without resorting to cliches.
He had not actually experienced anything like it in years, not since Charlotte had been seriously ill when she was four and the doctor had prepared them for the possibility of cancer. All day in the hospital, as his little girl had been wheeled from one lab to another for tests, all that sleepless night, and during the long days that followed before the physicians ventured a diagnosis, Marty felt haunted by a malevolent spirit whose presence thickened the air, making it difficult to breathe, to move, to hope. As it turned out, his daughter had been threatened neither by supernatural malevolence nor malignancy. The problem was a treatable blood disorder. Within three months Charlotte recovered.
But he remembered that oppressive dread too well.
He was in its icy grip again, though for no discernible reason. Charlotte and Emily were healthy, well-adjusted kids. He and Paige were happy together—absurdly happy, considering how many thirty-something couples of their acquaintance were divorced, separated, or cheating on each other. Financially, they were more secure than they had ever expected to be.
Nevertheless, Marty
He put down the tape recorder, went to the window, and opened the shutters all the way. A leafless sycamore cast stark, elongated shadows across the small side yard. Beyond those gnarled branches, the pale- yellow stucco walls of the house next door appeared to have soaked up the sunshine; gold and russet reflections painted the windows; the place was silent, seemingly serene.
To the right, he could see a section of the street. The houses on the other side of the block were also Mediterranean in style, stucco with clay-tile roofs, gilded by late-afternoon sun, filigreed by overhanging queen-palm fronds. Quiet, well landscaped, planned to the square inch, their neighborhood—and indeed the entire town of Mission Viejo—seemed to be a haven from the chaos that ruled so much of the rest of the world these days.
He closed the shutters, entirely blocking the sun. Apparently the only danger was in his mind, a figment of the same active imagination that had made him, at last, a reasonably successful mystery novelist.
Yet his heart was beating faster than ever.
Marty walked out of his office into the second-floor hall, as far as the head of the stairs. He stood as still as the newel post on which he rested one hand.
He wasn’t certain what he expected to hear. The soft creak of a door, stealthy footsteps? The furtive rustles and clicks and muffled thumps of an intruder slowly making his way through the house?
Gradually, as he heard nothing suspicious and as his racing heart grew calmer, his sense of impending disaster faded. Anxiety became mere uneasiness.
“Who’s there?” he asked, just to break the silence.
The sound of his voice, full of puzzlement, dispelled the portentous mood. Now the hush was only that of an empty house, devoid of menace.
He returned to his office at the end of the hall and settled in the leather chair behind his desk. With the shutters tightly closed and no lamps on except the one with the stained-glass shade, the corners of the room seemed to recede farther than the dimensions of the walls allowed, as if it were a place in a dream.
Because the motif of the lamp shade was fruit, the protective glass on the desk top reflected luminous ovals and circles of cherry-red, plum-purple, grape-green, lemon-yellow, and berry-blue. In its polished metal and Plexiglas surfaces, the cassette recorder, which lay on the glass, also reflected the bright mosaic, glimmering as if encrusted with jewels. When he reached for the recorder, Marty saw that his hand appeared to be sheathed in the pebbly, iridescent rainbow skin of an exotic lizard.
He hesitated, studying the faux scales on the back of his hand and the phantom jewels on the recorder. Real life was as layered with illusion as any piece of fiction.
He picked up the recorder and pressed the rewind button for a second or two, seeking the last few words of the unfinished letter to his editor. The thin, high-speed whistle-shriek of his voice in reverse issued like an alien language from the small, tinny speaker.
When he thumbed the play button, he found that he had not reversed far enough:
Frowning, he switched the machine to rewind, taking the tape back twice as far as before.
But still:
Rewind. Two seconds. Five. Ten. Stop. Play.
After two more attempts, he found the letter:
The dictation stopped. Silence unreeled from the tape—and the sound of his breathing.
By the time the two-word chant finally began to issue from the speaker, Marty had leaned forward tensely on the edge of the chair, frowning at the recorder in his hand.
He checked his watch. Not quite six minutes past four o’clock.
Initially the dreamy murmur was the same as when he’d first come to his senses and heard soft chanting like the responses to an interminable, unimaginative religious litany. After about half a minute, however, his voice on the tape changed, became sharp with urgency, swelled with anguish, then with anger.
Frustration seethed through those two words.
The Marty Stillwater on the tape—who might as well have been a total stranger to the listening Marty Stillwater—sounded in acute emotional pain for want of something that he could neither describe nor imagine.
Mesmerized, he scowled at the notched white spools of the cassette player turning relentlessly behind the plastic view window.
