Nothing but time moved in the hall.
I was as still as ashes in an urn, but life continued within me: My heart raced as it had never raced before, no longer merely revving nicely, but spinning with panic in its squirrel cage of ribs.
Once more I looked at the offering of eyes that filled those small china hands — bloodshot brown eyes, milky and moist, startling and startled in their lidless nakedness. I knew that one of the last things ever seen through them was a white van pulling to a stop in response to an upturned thumb. And then a man with a shaven head and one pearl earring.
Yet I was sure that I wasn’t dealing with that same bald man here, now, in Angela’s house. This game- playing wasn’t his style, this taunting, this hide-and-seek. Quick, vicious, violent action was more to his taste.
Instead, I felt as though I had stumbled into a sanitarium for sociopathic youth, where psychotic children had savagely overthrown their keepers and, giddy with freedom, were now at play. I could almost hear their hidden laughter in other rooms: macabre silvery giggles stifled behind small cold hands.
I refused to open the armoire.
I had come up here to help Angela, but there was no helping her now or ever. All I wanted was to get downstairs, outside, onto my bicycle, and away.
As I started toward the door, the lights went out. Someone had thrown a breaker in a junction box.
This darkness was so bottomless that it didn’t welcome even me. The windows were heavily draped, and the milk-pitcher moon couldn’t find gaps through which to pour itself. All was blackness on blackness.
Blindly, I rushed toward the door. Then I angled to one side of it when I was overcome by the conviction that someone was in the hall and that I would encounter the thrust of a sharp blade at the threshold.
I stood with my back to the bedroom wall, listening. I held my breath but was unable to quiet my heart, which clattered like horses’ hooves on cobblestones, a runaway parade of horses, and I felt betrayed by my own body.
Nevertheless, over the thundering stampede of my heart, I heard the creak of the piano hinges. The armoire doors were coming open.
It was a prayer, not a curse. Or maybe both.
Holding the Glock in a two-hand grip again, I aimed toward where I thought the big armoire stood. Then I reconsidered and swung the muzzle three inches to the left. Only to swing it immediately back to the right.
I was disoriented in the absolute blackness. Although I was certain that I would hit the armoire, I couldn’t be sure that I would put the round straight through the center of the space above the two drawers. The first shot had to count, because the muzzle flash would give away my position.
I couldn’t risk pumping out rounds indiscriminately. Although a spray of bullets would probably waste the bastard, whoever he might be, there was a chance that I would only wound him — and a smaller but still very real chance that I would merely piss him off.
When the pistol magazine was empty — then what?
I sidled to the hallway, risking an encounter there, but it didn’t happen. As I crossed the threshold, I pulled the guest-room door shut behind me, putting it between me and whoever had come out of the armoire — assuming I hadn’t imagined the creaking of the piano hinges.
The ground-floor lights were evidently on their own circuit. A glow rose through the stairwell at the end of the black hall.
Instead of waiting to see who, if anyone, would burst out of the guest room, I ran to the stairs.
I heard a door open behind me.
Gasping, descending two stairs at a time, I was almost to the landing when my head in miniature sailed past. It shattered against the wall in front of me.
Startled, I brought an arm up to shield my eyes. China shrapnel tattooed my face and chest.
My right heel landed on the bullnose edge of a step and skidded off. I nearly fell, pitched forward, slammed into the landing wall, but kept my balance.
On the landing, crunching shards of my glazed face underfoot, I whipped around to confront my assailant.
The decapitated body of the doll, appropriately attired in basic black, hurtled down. I ducked, and it passed over my head, thumping against the wall behind me.
When I looked up and covered the dark top of the stairs with the gun, there was no one to shoot — as if the doll had torn off its own head to throw at me and then had hurled itself into the stairwell.
The downstairs lights went out.
Through the forbidding blackness came the smell of something burning.
15
Groping in the impenetrable gloom, I finally found the handrail. I clutched at the smooth wood with one sweaty hand and started down the lower flight of stairs toward the foyer.
This darkness had a strange sinuosity, seemed to coil and writhe around me as I descended through it. Then I realized that it was the air, not the darkness, that I was feeling: serpentine currents of hot air swarming up the stairwell.
An instant later, tendrils and then tentacles and then a great pulsing mass of foul-smelling smoke poured into the stairwell from below, invisible but palpable, enveloping me as some giant sea anemone might envelop a diver. Coughing, choking, struggling to breathe, I reversed directions, hoping to escape through a second-floor window, although not through the master bathroom where Angela waited.
I returned to the landing and clambered up three or four steps of the second flight before halting. Through smoke-stung eyes flooded with tears — and through the pall of smoke itself — I saw a throbbing light above.
Fire.
Two fires had been set, one above and one below. Those unseen psychotic children were busy in their mad play, and there seemed to be so
Downward, once more and quickly, I plunged toward the only hope of nourishing air. I would find it, if anywhere, at the lowest point of the structure, because smoke and fumes rise while the blaze sucks in cooler air at its base in order to feed itself.
Each inhalation caused a spasm of coughing, increased my feeling of suffocation, and fed my panic, so I held my breath until I reached the foyer. There, I dropped to my knees, stretched out on the floor, and discovered that I could breathe. The air was hot and smelled sour, but all things being relative, I was more thrilled by it than I had ever been by the crisp air coming off the washboard of the Pacific.
I didn’t lie there and surrender to an orgy of respiration. I hesitated just long enough to draw several deep breaths to clear my soiled lungs, and to work up enough saliva to spit some of the soot out of my mouth.
Then I raised my head to test the air and to learn how deep the precious safe zone might be. Not deep. Four to six inches. Nevertheless, this shallow pool ought to be enough to sustain me while I found my way out of the house.
Wherever the carpet was afire, of course, there would be no safe-air zone whatsoever.
The lights were still out, the smoke was blindingly thick, and I squirmed on my stomach, frantically heading toward where I believed I would find the front door, the nearest exit. The first thing I encountered in the murk was a sofa, judging by the feel of it, which meant that I had passed through the archway and into the living room, at least ninety degrees off the course I imagined I’d been following.
Now luminous orange pulses passed through the comparatively clear air near the floor, underlighting the curdled masses of smoke as if they were thunderheads looming over a plain. From my eye-to-the-carpet perspective, the beige nylon fibers stretched away like a vast flat field of dry grass, fitfully brightened by an electrical storm. This narrow, life-sustaining realm under the smoke seemed to be an alternate world into which I
