there was no understanding.
In a few minutes, when she'd regained her composure, she quietly
returned to the bedroom. Jack was still snoring softly. Her robe was
draped over the back of a Queen Anne chair. She picked it up, slipped
out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her.
In the hall, she pulled on the robe and belted it. Although she'd
intended to go downstairs, brew a pot of coffee, and read, she turned
instead toward Toby's room at the end of the hall. Try as she might,
Heather was unable to extinguish completely the fear from the
nightmare, and her simmering anxiety began to focus on her son.
Toby's door was ajar, and his room was not entirely - dark Since moving
to the ranch, he had chosen to sleep with a night-light again, although
he had given up that security a year ago. Heather and Jack were
surprised but not particularly concerned by the boy's loss of
confidence. They assumed, once he adjusted to his surroundings he
would again prefer darkness to the red glow of the low-wattage bulb
that was plugged into a wall socket near the floor.
Toby was tucked under his covers, only his head exposed on the
pillow.
His breathing was so shallow that to hear it, Heather had to bend close
to him.
Nothing in the room was other than it ought to have been, but she
hesitated to leave. Mild apprehension continued to tug at her.
Finally, as Heather reluctantly retreated to the open hall door, she
heard a soft scrape that halted her. She turned to the bed, where Toby
had not awakened, had not moved.
Even as she glanced at her son, however, she realized that the noise
had come from the back stairs. It had been the sly, stealthy scrape of
something hard, perhaps a boot heel, dragged across a wooden
step-recognizable because of the air space under each stair tread,
which lent the sound a distinctive hollow quality.
She was instantly afflicted by the same distress that she'd not felt
while cleaning the stairs but that had plagued her on Monday when she'd
followed Paul Youngblood and Toby down that curving well. The sweaty
paranoid conviction that somebody-- something?--was waiting around the
next turn. Or descending behind them. An enemy possessed by a
singular rage and capable of extreme violence.
She stared at the closed door at the head of those stairs. It was
painted white, but it reflected the red glow of the night-light and
seemed almost to shimmer like a portal of fire. She waited for another
sound. Toby sighed in his sleep.
Just a sigh. Nothing more. Silence again. Heather supposed she could
have been wrong, could have heard an innocent sound from
outside--perhaps a night bird settling onto the roof with a rustle of
feathers and a scratching of claws against shingles--and could have
mistakenly transposed the noise to the stairwell. She was jumpy
because of the nightmare.
Her perceptions might not be entirely trustworthy. She certainly
wanted to believe she had been wrong. Creak-creak. No mistaking it
