Only the night.
The chrome handle on the refrigerator was dulled by filth, and he did
not touch it. He opened the door by gripping the edge. The food and
beverages inside seemed untouched, everything just as he'd left it.
The doors of both double ovens were hanging open. He closed them
without touching the handles, which were also smeared in places with
unidentifiable crud.
Caught on a sharp edge of the oven door was a torn scrap of fabric,
half an inch wide and less than an inch long. It was pale blue, with a
fragmentary curve of darker blue that might have been a portion of a
repeating pattern against the lighter background.
Eduardo stared at the fragment of cloth for a personal eternity. Time
seemed to-stop, and the universe hung as still as the pendulum of a
broken grandfather clock-- until icy spicules of profound fear formed
in his blood and made him shudder so violently that his teeth actually
chattered. The graveyard ... He whipped around again, toward one
window, the other, but nothing was there.
Only the night. The night. The blind, featureless, uncaring face of
the night.
He searched the upstairs. Telltale chunks, crumbs, and smears of
earth--once moist, now dry--could be found in most rooms. Another
leaf. Two more dead beetles as dry as ancient papyrus. A pebble the
size of a cherry pit, smooth and gray.
He realized that some of the switch plates and light switches were
soiled.
Thereafter, he flicked the lights on with his sleeve-covered arm or the
shotgun barrel.
When he had examined every chamber, probed to the back of every closet,
inspected behind and under every piece of furniture where a hollow
space might conceivably offer concealment even to something as large as
a seven- or eight-year-old child, and when he was satisfied that
nothing was hiding on the second floor, he returned to the end of the
upstairs hall and pulled on the dangling release cord that lowered the
attic trapdoor.
He pulled down the folding ladder fixed to the back of the trap.
The attic lights could be turned on from the hall, so he didn't have to
ascend into darkness. He searched every shadowed niche in the deep and
dusty eaves, where snowflake moths hung in webs like laces of ice and
feeding spiders loomed as cold and black as winter shadows.
Downstairs in the kitchen again, he slid aside the brass bolt on the
cellar door. It worked only from the kitchen. Nothing could have gone
down there and relocked from the far side.
On the other hand, the front and back doors of the house had been
bolted when he'd driven into town. No one could have gotten inside--or
locked up again upon leaving--without a key, and he had the only keys
in existence. Yet the damned bolts were engaged when he'd come home,
his search had revealed no broken or unlatched window, yet an intruder
definitely had come and gone.
He went into the cellar and searched the two large, windowless rooms.
They were cool, slightly musty, and deserted.
