Had he been drawn back there tonight? Could it have been Patrick she’d heard, keening his grief alone in the confines of this cold stone structure? Kara hurried forward and a moment later stood before the wooden door that was the mausoleum’s entrance, its great panels appearing even larger than the doors of the house itself.
A heavy lock hung from a hasp, and even without touching it, Kara knew it was firmly latched.
As she stood on the crypt’s cold stone steps, the night sounds deepened and once more seemed to circle closer. She stepped away from the mausoleum, but even when she stood in the middle of the path that led back to the great open lawn, the first tendrils of claustrophobia began to crawl around her.
She turned back to gaze at the mausoleum, and a vision of Steve’s ashes — still on the dining room table in her deserted house — rose before her eyes.
She shuddered again.
She turned around, intending to start back toward the house, but a small building off to the left caught her eye.
A building that appeared in the darkness to be an almost exact miniature of the enormous main house that stood at the top of the gently sloping lawn.
As she gazed at it, Kara realized what it was.
A children’s playhouse.
The playhouse where Chrissie and Jenna would have played when they were little girls.
Perhaps even where Patrick and Claire had played when they were children, too.
Kara stepped off the path and started across the grass, which was glistening with dew in the moonlight. Though the dampness quickly found its way inside her loafers, she barely noticed the chill in her feet.
She drew closer.
The playhouse had been boarded up, its door and windows covered with heavy plywood.
Of course. After the tragedy, Patrick would have been no more able to bear the sight of the playhouse than he could his daughters’ rooms.
Kara gazed at the building for a while, shivering at the memories that must lurk in its closed-off corners. A wind came up then, flapping the robe that was all that covered her bare legs and jerking her out of her reverie. Turning away from the playhouse as she’d turned away from the mausoleum a few minutes earlier, she resolutely headed back toward the house.
But just as she was mounting the steps to the terrace and the conservatory beyond, she heard it.
Muffled, but distinct.
A shout!
The shout of a woman!
Kara whirled, goose bumps rising on her arms, and then her grandmother’s voice echoed in her head:
Nothing.
Nothing but the waves and the wind, whispering in the darkness. Quickly, she hurried up the steps, crossed the terrace, and turned the handle on the door, but before she could push it open, it was pulled from within.
Neville Cavanaugh stood in the partially open doorway, fully dressed, gazing down at her, his eyes cold and suspicious. Flustered, she blurted out the truth before she even thought about it: “I heard noises.” His expression didn’t change, though he opened the door wider and stepped back so she could come in. “Like singing,” she went on. “I thought it was… Oh, God, it sounds so silly now, but—” She faltered, but Neville only raised his eyebrows and waited. “I thought someone was singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ ” she finally managed. “And someone was yelling.”
The man’s expression seemed to darken. “From where?”
“Down by the… by the mausoleum, I think.”
After a moment, he closed and secured the door behind them. “Shore birds,” he said. “They make all manner of queer sounds in the night. And there are peacocks on the next property. Sometimes it sounds like babies crying, sometimes like—” He hesitated, then his lips curved into what Kara assumed was his idea of a smile. “Sometimes I don’t know what they sound like. And there are stories…” This time his voice faded away, and Kara thought he would go on, but instead he only shrugged. “Birds and animals make strange noises in the night. After a while you stop hearing them at all.”
Birds! All it had been was birds. Kara felt utterly foolish, and hoped the dimness in the conservatory hid the burning flush in her face.
“Will you be needing anything?” Neville asked her.
Kara shook her head, left the conservatory, and hurried up the stairs. Back in the guest room, she closed the door behind her, twisted the key in the lock, slipped off her wet shoes, then slid under the covers of the bed, her robe still wrapped tightly around her. As she lay in the darkness, the servant’s words came back to her.
But if he hadn’t heard them at all, what was he doing, wide-awake, fully dressed, prowling the house in the middle of the night?
Lindsay felt herself fading away, drowning in something she no longer understood. Everything around her had turned surreal — the candles all had halos, grotesque shadows whispered to her in unintelligible words from the dark corners of the ceiling, and sounds reverberated in her head until they were rendered meaningless.
Nothing was real.
All she wanted to do was slip into that blissful unconsciousness where there was no pain, no fear, no terror, where nightmares were something from which she would awaken, and when she awoke, her mother and father would be there to hold her and kiss away her tears.
As the sirens of unconsciousness crooned their song, she began to let herself slip away, singing with them for a while. But whatever words she was singing became as meaningless as the whisperings of the shadows that lurked in the corners. She heard someone yell, but, too tired, too depleted, too exhausted even to respond, she couldn’t even raise her head from where it hung on her chest.
Like Shannon’s had…
Then the dreams started — the bad dreams — and even though she knew she was still awake, she couldn’t move or talk or fend off the red-eyed monsters that were growling at her from the dark.
She twisted against her bonds and tried to rise up through the layers of sleep, to fight the dreams that weren’t dreams at all, but her strength was finally gone.
Now the fear itself began to consume her, the fear she’d been fending off since the moment the nightmare had begun. Was it the red-eyed monster that was stalking her? Was there nothing there at all except fear itself? But if that was all there was, why wouldn’t it go away? She wanted it to go away — she was so tired of being afraid, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She wanted to face things, to ignore the fear, but she didn’t know how to do that anymore.
The world was made of fear.
Thick, impenetrable, suffocating fear.
Fear that was killing her.
She had to get away from it, had to escape from it…
She began closing herself down, drawing back, away from the fear, away from her body, away from everything.
And slowly, as she pulled away from the fear, things changed. Somehow she had escaped her own body, and now she was looking down, gazing down from somewhere high above. Far below, she watched as the black-clothed beast that had imprisoned and tormented her sliced away the gray tape that held her hands and ankles to the chair.
She watched as he lifted her body and lay it with an odd gentleness on the table.
With an almost idle curiosity, she watched him part her legs.
And then, in an instant, the odd sense of detachment ended and she was back in her body, and she knew exactly what was happening, and the terror that had threatened to utterly destroy her moments before flashed into fury, a fury that jerked her out of the lassitude that had held her paralyzed, a fury that filled her with a keen, razor- edged consciousness and a sudden influx of strength.
