operate the gun. She jacked a shell into the chamber. Holding the stock tucked tight under her right arm, barrel straight ahead, finger on the trigger, she used her left hand to turn the key. She yanked open the doors and jumped back.
No one was there.
She felt only the briefest sense of relief. The absence of an intruder left vastly more frightening possibilities.
Lila made it through that day and the next. She heard the table clenching. She saw the shoe and the jacket again, a little more showing each time, but when she'd go to investigate, it would disappear. And now she'd begun to hear things – movement in the other room, the scrape of a chair, the brush of cloth. Sometimes she thought she heard a pattering, like a four-legged thing running, the clack of claws on the floorboards. It never happened when Jack was in a room with her, only when he was at work or in another part of the house. She began making it through her days and nights hour by hour. Any distraction helped; it was a relief when the new cleaning woman started coming twice a week, because for the first couple of times Lila had to show her around – that killed off part of a day.
Thanksgiving came, and Janine and David, the two youngest Warren kids, returned home for the holiday; Ron and his girlfriend and Momma and Jack's parents all came over for the feast. Everyone commented on Lila's condition – 'Oh, honey, you've lost some weight! You takin'proper care of yourself?' 'Mom, you haven't been sick, have you?' but having people in the house seemed to banish much of the tension.
Once the holiday ended, things got rapidly worse. Lila saw her watcher several times – the shoe tips and the lapel of the jacket. She began to sense flutterings at the corner of her eye all the time. She heard the relentless screech of the table's claws, and a couple of times she saw other things quickly resume their former shapes as if trying to conceal dire transformations from her: the faces in the family portraits leaving a faint afterimage of snarling, ogling monstrosities, a throw rug that had been a gnarled, waited, lizardlike thing. She became afraid to leave the TV on because the sound might camouflage the subtle noise of something sneaking up on her. Mirrors became particularly intolerable, because whenever she saw herself in them she always got the sense that another image, something terrifying, had just vacated the glass. And then there was her own face.
When she asked Jack how he liked the place – was he comfortable here – he said a guy could sure get used to it. People came up to him at the office and complimented him on his new digs, he told her cheerfully. That was pretty fine.
So far, Lila told herself, nothing she'd experienced was all that bad, she was a Beauforte, she should show a little spine. But it was wearing on her – the constant tension, the sleepless nights. Plus she was living a double life, trying to lie to Jack and Ron and Momma and everybody about how great she was doing and all the while being gnawed hollow on the inside.
They decided to hold a big Christmas party, with all the kids, some of Jack's family, some friends. Seemed like a good idea: She'd keep busy with planning, sending invitations, making calls for catering and decorations, and so on. But it didn't help. By the first week of December she didn't think she could survive until Christmas, let alone be able to play hostess. Things came to a head the second week of December.
Middle of the night. Jack asleep in bed. Propped up on the pillows next to him, unable to find sleep, Lila had been reading until her eyes burned. Just after she turned out the light, she heard a brushing or slithering sound. She lifted her head to stare at the fireplace, its little black coal grate just a square of shadow in the semidark. As had become their habit, they'd left the lights on in the hall, so there was enough light to see what was happening.
A shadow began oozing out of the stove – many slender tendrils of shadow, actually, worming out through the holes in the grate, groping in the air and then braiding together into a thick snake of darkness. It came out like smoke but seemed to collect weight, growing as a long tube of shadow along the floor, writhing, arching, swelling thicker until it was as big around as a horse's belly. It looked like a water moccasin. Lila could hear the friction of its body on the floor, the rasp of scales. She couldn't breathe, couldn't even scream until its knotting coils had filled half the room.
Jack woke up groggy, groping for the bedside light. 'Lila? Peaches? What's goin' on?' he mumbled. Lila managed to find her lamp and snapped it on. When light filled the room, the snake didn't disappear instantly but rather took a second or two to fray into separate tentacles and suck back into the stove.
Lila was pointing at the fireplace, but there was nothing for Jack to see. Shaking with her own pulse, she could only tell him it was a bad dream. She'd had a bad dream. She was sorry she'd wakened him. Bad dream.
She had always hated snakes. The visitation had given her a shock, and the next day she felt sick, almost too weak to get out of bed. The housekeeper came for half the day, so that one wasn't so bad. But the next day Jack had to leave on a business trip, a realty seminar put on by the national affiliate company in Dallas. Jack couldn't skip it – he was supposed to make a presentation.
Lila was left alone at the house for two days and nights.
'Do I really have to do this?' Lila moaned.
'Only if you want to,' Cree said. 'It will certainly help me, and I think it would help you, too. But it's up to you. Always.'
They had come to the bedroom she and Jack shared, a big room that was now about half furnished. A huge antique canopy bed dominated the wall opposite the fireplace, and two large mirrored armoires stood against the other walls. A pair of French doors opened onto a small balcony that hung among the branches of a magnolia tree. Through the dark green, waxy foliage, Cree could make out the backyard, bounded on the far side by a hedgelike thicket, the iron fence, and then the wall of the next house. Cree noticed that the mirrors on both armoires' doors were broken, big spiderweb cracks from some heavy impact, and in combination with the broken mirror downstairs it struck her as a significant detail. But it wasn't the right moment to ask Lila about it.
Lila was shivering. She reached shakily for one bedpost and sat down on the edge of the mattress.
Jack moved to her side, looking chastened. 'I didn't know,' he mumbled miserably. 'I didn't really… get it. How bad it was. Or I wouldn't have gone.'
Lila stared at the coal stove as if she could still see the shadow snake emerging. The separate muscles of her face ticced, one above her eyebrow, another that tugged the corner of her lip.
'I don't have what it takes for the blow-by-blow. I can't give you all the buildup. I can't tell every detail. I can't.' Looking up at Jack, Lila took his hand and massaged it lovingly as if, Cree was surprised to see, she were suddenly worried about him. But when she went on, it was in that flat, almost mechanical voice, reciting it to get it over with: 'That night I saw a wolf in the house. A black wolf. Yellow-green eyes. He just rounded the corner at a run and came bounding down the hallway. I barely had time to jump back in here and slam the door. I could hear him snuffling all along the crack and at the keyhole. I could see the shadows of his paws and muzzle under the door. And then I could hear him saying my name, this raspy, whispery voice, God help me I could hear the sound of those… long wolf lips kind of fluttering as he called my name over and over, and I thought, Oh, God, just let me be dead! Don't make me listen to this!' Lila's desperation had crescendoed again, and she struggled to find the impassivity that would let her go on. 'And of course I knew there aren't wolves in New Orleans, and wolves can't talk. Which meant I was crazy. So I stood in here for a long time. After a while I didn't hear him. So when I got my courage up, I went out again. I was going to leave the house, go sleep at a hotel. But down at the corner, where I'd seen the shoe, there was the edge of someone's clothes again! That awful raggedy jacket. I'd been seeing a little more of him each time, and this time I could see part of his face above the clothes, the side of his cheek, with hair, a beard or something. And I was going to come back in here and get the gun and shoot him, I didn't care if it was a hallucination or whatever, I didn't care if I was going to wreck up the house. But then the face turned, and I realized that what I could see wasn't right, it was sort of… square, shiny but hairy. Not human. More like a bristly snout. And that's what it was. He stepped out, and he had a pig's head. It was a boar-headed man. I peed myself. He had a wet snout and bristles going down into his shirt and these little tiny bright eyes. And he came straight for me. And I ran down the hall, I was going to go for the back stairs. But he came after me so fast, I knew he was going to catch me. So I turned into my old bedroom. I tried to shut the door on him, but he pushed it aside so hard it knocked me down. And – '
Lila stopped, panting shallowly. She sat curled slightly forward, hands tight over her stomach, knees pushed together hard. A defensive posture held so hard the whole bed vibrated with her tension.
The sudden silence startled Cree. Jack's face had flushed red and his eyes bulged as if there was a huge pressure inside him.
Cree gave it a full minute, but Lila didn't move. 'And -?' Cree prompted gently.
