The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

Four candles in red-glass cups brighten the table. But for what comes next, Amity wants more light. Earlier she gathered four more candles for this moment. With a butane match, she sets the wicks afire.

Crispin opened the box of cards earlier. Now he shuffles three times, hesitates, then shuffles thrice again.

Amity wants him to deal, and yet she doesn’t. She reaches toward him with one hand, as if to stop him, but then crosses her arms on her chest once more and hugs herself.

With no false drama, dealing them quickly, Crispin turns up four sixes. They are clean cards when they leave his hand, but as he turns them over, they are dirty, creased, and moldy.

The time has come for him to return to Theron Hall.

18

Having dealt the four sixes on Sunday evening, he must wait until the first employees arrive on Monday to avoid triggering the perimeter alarm. Following a route described by Amity, boy and dog slip out of the department store without being seen by any of the early-arriving guards and maintenance people.

They have no reason to wait for nightfall before approaching Theron Hall. There is no safety in darkness and perhaps more risk.

The first snow of the season fell Saturday night through Sunday morning. Already another storm has moved in. As Crispin and Harley set out for Shadow Hill, Shadow Street, and the house at the crest, new snow begins to sift down upon the old.

Winter transforms the city, white petals floating through an almost windless day, and everywhere the mantles and plowed mounds of the weekend storm remain largely pristine, not yet badly soiled by a workday. How easy it might be to think that with the casting down of this crystal manna, the great metropolis has been sanctified, that it is as innocent as these bridal veils make it seem. Easy for others, perhaps, but not for Crispin.

They approach the grand house from the back street, which is too wide and — when the pavement is visible — too ornately cobbled to be called a mere alley.

A stately carriage house, which serves as a garage, stands at the rear of the property. The pathway that leads from garage to house hasn’t been shoveled, and no footprints disturb the coverlet of snow.

According to what Amity overheard when she served Clarette and friends tea in Eleanor’s a couple of weeks earlier, the family — if such a word applies — and most of the staff are by now in Brazil.

The few who remain have evidently kept busy inside rather than venture into the cold.

Crossing the exposed ground between garage and house, Crispin searches the three floors of windows. No pale face appears at any pane.

A part of him believes that the power that has saved him often in the past few years, the power that wants him to return to Theron Hall to conclude unfinished business, has armored him against harm and will lead him to the third floor and safely away again without a violent encounter. But another part of him, a less wishful Crispin and one who knows that journeying through the fields of evil is the price we pay for free will, expects the worst.

If they know that he stole one of the spare house keys on that September night, they might have changed the lock. Or they might leave it unchanged in anticipation of his return.

Of the three back doors, he chooses the one that opens into the mud room behind the kitchen. The key works. He eases the door open.

The space is dark but for the snow light that presses coldly through two small windows.

He stands listening to a house so silent that perhaps everyone went to Rio, leaving only ghosts behind.

Because he doesn’t want to take off his backpack to use a chair, Crispin leans against the cabinetry to use the mud room’s small whisk broom to brush the caked snow from his shoes and from the legs of his jeans.

The dog shakes his thick coat, flinging off melted snow and bits of icy slush. That noisy moment of grooming doesn’t raise an alarm, which must mean that no one on the skeleton staff is nearby.

Aware that they will for a while leave wet footprints, Crispin is nevertheless disposed to move at once rather than dry his shoes and the dog’s paws with rags.

The kitchen is as shadowy and deserted as the mud room. The only sound is the hum of the refrigerators.

If three or even four of the staff have stayed behind to keep the house clean and functional, they are spread over such a vastness of rooms that he is unlikely to come face-to-face with one of them. He must also remember that, whatever else they may be, they are not demons. They are still human beings, as vulnerable as he is, as prone to error.

The boy decides to let the dog lead, and Harley takes him to the south stairs. Within the open tube of stone, the bronze railing and the spiral treads wind upward like the twisted spine of some bizarre Jurassic beast.

At the top, he leans over the railing and looks down, to be sure that no one is ascending quietly behind them. At the bottom of the stairwell, a full moon shines, as though Crispin is gazing up through a roofless tower instead of down. He assumes that whether this is a trick of light or something more, it is in either case a sign, and not a bad one, because the moon has always been to him the lamp of wisdom, a symbol of the right way to see the world.

They walk the third-floor hall and arrive at the miniature room without incident.

When Crispin switches on the overhead lights, the chandeliers and lamps within the scale model brighten as well.

Harley has never been here before. Although he’s an unusual mutt and perhaps something more than a canine, he behaves as any dog might in a new place: He puts his nose to the floor, sniffing this way and that around the solid pedestal that supports the huge scale model.

Crispin begins with the drawing room where, on the afternoon of the feast of the archangels, the two mouse-size cats perched on the window seat and peered at him through the French panes.

At once a white feline form enters the miniature room from the hallway, races to the window seat, springs up, and blinks its little green eyes. When Crispin touches one fingertip to the window, the cat rubs its face against the inside of the pane, as though yearning for contact with him.

The boy has had more than three long years to think about this extraordinary reproduction of Theron Hall, and he is not surprised that only a single cat greets him this time. Three cats for three children. With Mirabell dead, two cats appeared to Crispin on the afternoon before Harley was chained to that altar. Now, of Clarette’s three little bastards, only one remains, therefore one cat.

As the cats were somehow reduced to three inches and imprisoned in the miniature Theron Hall, so the three children were in their own way imprisoned in the real house. The cats were avatars of Mirabell, Harley, and Crispin; and if the cats ever escaped, the children would cast off their spells and break free, too.

Now that Mirabell and Harley are dead, two cats are gone. An avatar is an embodiment of a principle. If the principle — in this case a child — ceases to exist, the avatar might cease to exist, too, if you think of the child as just an animal, a meat machine.

Every child, every human being, however, is more than just a physical presence, which Giles Gregorio and his freak-show family well know. These apostles of the dark side want not only the blood of the innocent — a perversion of “Do this in remembrance of me”—but also their souls.

When a child is murdered in a ritual act, the soul will not be condemned forever. No action of an innocent could earn damnation.

Crispin is certain, therefore, that in the way that matters most, Mirabell and Harley are still alive, their spirits imprisoned in the scale model of Theron Hall.

He has survived so that he might free them.

Years of brooding on the subject leads him to the conclusion that the souls herein don’t have the same freedom of movement within the miniature structure that the avatar cats enjoyed. If they are captive, they will be in the room that the Gregorios regard as the most important — the altar room behind the steel-slab door.