add to his knowledge of the Pendleton.
Now, although he had watched the legions of the storm marching out of the lowlands and up the long north slope of Shadow Hill, Silas startled back one step when the first wet volley snapped against the French panes, as if the rain, mistaken for mere weather, were instead a malevolent assault aimed specifically at him. The city blurred, the day seemed to darken, and the silvering effect of the living-room lamplight made an inadequate mirror of the window. In the wet glass, his face was transparent and lacking sufficient detail, as if it were not in fact his reflection but instead must be the face of another, the pale countenance of something less than fully human, a visitor from an occult realm temporarily connected to this world by the power of the storm.
Spikes of lightning split the darkening day, and Silas turned away from the window as thunder jackhammered the sky. He went to the kitchen, where the under-cabinet fluorescents brightened the golden-granite countertops and where all other lights were off. His files about the Pendleton littered the dinette table: newspaper articles, Xeroxes of public records, transcripts of interviews with people who claimed to have some experience of the building prior to 1974, and photocopies of the eleven scraps that remained of a handwritten journal that Andrew North Pendleton had destroyed immediately before killing himself.
Each surviving piece of Pendleton’s writing was an incomplete fragment, each singed brown around the edges because he burned the journal in his bedroom fireplace prior to biting a shotgun barrel and receiving a mortal meal of buckshot. Each of the eleven scraps of prose was intriguing, suggesting that Andrew Pendleton endured an experience so extraordinary as to be otherworldly. Or perhaps in the final stages of his madness, he was tormented by a dementia in which he mistook nightmares and hallucinations for memories of real events.
Of the eleven surviving scraps, Silas most often returned to a cryptic, disturbing fragment about Pendleton’s daughter, Sophia, who was seven years old when she disappeared. The words and all their possible meanings so haunted him that he’d committed them to memory: …
Andrew Pendleton’s loss of his family was not the only tragedy in the history of the great house. The second owner, Gifford Ostock, who was the sole heir to considerable wealth made in coal mining and in railroad coal-car manufacturing, lived well and fully in Belle Vista from 1905 until 1935. One night in December of ’35, the butler, Nolan Tolliver, slaughtered the Ostock family and all the live-in staff before killing himself. Tolliver left an incoherent handwritten note claiming to have murdered them in order to “save the world from eternal darkness,” and though he took responsibility for all sixteen killings, eight of the dead were never found. To this day it was not known why or how Tolliver disposed of half his victims, or why he did not likewise dispose of the other eight.
Bailey Hawks had not reported the encounter in the lap pool to building security. Out of consideration for the privacy of residents, no camera was mounted in that room; therefore, no proof existed that the bizarre incident had occurred.
Five residents of the Pendleton were among his clients: the Cupp sisters, Edna and Martha, in 3-A; Rawley and June Tullis in 2-D; and Gary Dai in 3-B. People with substantial investment portfolios were not likely to continue to entrust their assets to a man who began to rant about a supernatural experience, regardless of how solid his performance had been in the past.
Bailey spent most of the morning and early afternoon in his study, where he tracked the prices of stocks, bonds, and commodities on three dedicated computers while conducting research and analysis on a fourth. Only one of his two full-time employees, Jerry Allwine, worked here with him, and although Jerry was out with the flu, the day was not hectic. There wasn’t much movement in either equities or commodities, and when the major exchanges closed, at 2:00 his time, it proved to be a treading-water day.
Normally, Bailey possessed a sharp focus and singular powers of concentration, which served him as well on financial battlefields as in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As he worked that Thursday, however, his mind repeatedly drifted to the memory of the mysterious figure in the pool, and the sense of peril that he had felt back in the moment rose anew and lingered, though not as acute as it had been during the encounter.
Computers off, working by the light of a single lamp, he was still at his desk past three o’clock when shatters of rain against the north-facing windows drew his attention. For the first time he realized how dark the day had grown. Dusk had crept in two hours ahead of schedule. The lowering clouds were as plush and gray as the coats of the Cupp sisters’ cats, seeming not only to belly over the city but also to curl around it as if settling in for a long dreamy evening.
Serial lightning flashed, flashed, flashed. The bright flares caused geometric shadows of the French-window muntins and stiles to flutter through the dimly lighted room and briefly print themselves upon the walls.
The quick-following crash of thunder, loud enough to suggest Armageddon, did not bring Bailey up from his chair. But as his desk lamp dimmed, he bolted to his feet during the subsequent barrage of lightning because this time, among the flung grids of window-frame shadows, another shadow moved. Sinuous and fleet. It raced across the room not as if it might be a silhouette of something inanimate projected and set in motion by the storm light, but instead as if it must be an intruder revealed.
Man-tall when it leaped, the featureless dark figure seemed more pantherlike as the leap became a lower lope. Having spun in his chair even as he sprang up from it, Bailey turned to follow the specter, if that’s what it was. The thing eluded the eye, swift and quicksilvery, its motion smooth and continuous while the lightning- inspired shadows of the window frames flickered and twitched in the stroboscopic pulses of the storm.
The black form didn’t print itself upon the wall, along with the window grids, but seemed to pass
After he stood staring for a moment at the Pendleton-related files on the kitchen table, Silas went to the coffeemaker. He filled a white ceramic mug and took down a bottle of brandy from a cupboard shelf and spiked the coffee. The clock showed 3:07 P.M., and though Silas never took a drink earlier than dinnertime, if at all, he felt the need to be fortified for a meeting at five o’clock.
