Seize the Night

nervously as he replaced the silk.

And after we left the study, Sasha hesitated and then returned to the open door to check the room once more. She no longer gripped the.38 in both hands but nonetheless held it at the ready, as though she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that even a glassful of the Jonestown punch, their version of a Heaven’s Gate cocktail, was not poisonous enough to put down the creature in the Morris chair.

Also on the ground floor were a sewing room and a laundry room, but both were deserted.

In the hallway, Roosevelt whispered Mungojerrie’s name, because we had yet to see the cat since we’d entered the house.

A soft answering meow followed by two more, audible above the competing sound tracks of the Disney movie, drew us forward along the hall.

Mungojerrie was sitting on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. In the gloom, his radiant green eyes fixed on Roosevelt, then shifted to Sasha when she quietly but urgently suggested that we get the hell out of here.

Without the cat, we had little chance of conducting a successful search of Wyvern. We were hostage to his curiosity — or to whatever it was that motivated him to turn his back to us on the newel post, sprint agilely up the handrail, spring to the stairs, and disappear into the darkness of the upper floor.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Roosevelt.

“Wish I knew. It takes two to communicate,” he murmured.

22

As before, Sasha took the point position as we ascended the stairs. I brought up the rear. The carpeted treads creaked a little underfoot, more than a little under Roosevelt’s feet, but the movie sound track drifting up from the living room and study — and similar sounds coming from upstairs — effectively masked the noises we made.

At the top of the stairs, I turned and looked down. There weren’t any dead people standing in the foyer, with their heads concealed under black silk. Not even one. I had expected five.

Six doors led off the upstairs hall. Five were open, and pulsing light came from three rooms. Competing sound tracks indicated that The Lion King was not the universal choice of entertainment for these condemned.

Unwilling to pass an unexplored room and possibly leave an assailant behind us, Sasha went to the first door, which was closed. I stood with my back to the wall at the hinged edge of the door, and she put her back to the wall on the other side. I reached across, gripped the knob, and turned it. When I pushed the door open, Sasha went through fast and low, the gun in her right hand, feeling for the light switch with her left.

A bathroom. Nobody there.

She backed into the hall, switching off the light but leaving the door open.

Beside the bathroom was a linen closet.

Four rooms remained. Doors open. Light and voices and music coming from three of them.

I emphatically am not a gun lover, having fired one for the first time only a month previously. I still worry about shooting myself in the foot, and would rather shoot myself in the foot than be forced ever again to kill another human being. But now I was seized by a desire for a gun that was probably only slightly down the scale of desperation from the urgency with which a half-starved man craves food, because I couldn’t bear to see Sasha taking all the risks.

At the next room, she cleared the doorway quickly. When there was not an immediate outburst of gunfire, Bobby and I followed her inside, while Roosevelt watched the hall from the threshold.

A bedside lamp glowed softly. On the television was a Nature Channel documentary that might have been soothing, even elegiac, when it had been turned on to provide a distraction for the doomed as they drank their spiked fruit punch; but at the moment a fox was chewing the guts out of a quail.

This was the master bedroom, with an attached bath, and though it was a large chamber, with brighter colors than those downstairs, I felt suffocated by the determined, slathered-on, high-Victorian cheerfulness. The walls, the drapes, the spread, and the canopy on the four-poster bed were all of the same fabric: a cream background heavily patterned with roses and ribbons, explosions of pink, green, and yellow. The carpet featured yellow chrysanthemums, pink roses, and blue ribbons, lots of blue ribbons, so many blue ribbons that I couldn’t help but think of veins and unraveling intestines. The painted and parcel-gilt furniture was no less oppressive than the darker pieces downstairs, and the room contained so many crystal paperweights, porcelains, small bronzes, silver- framed photographs, and other bibelots that, if considered ammunition, they could have been used to stone to death an entire mob of malcontents.

On the bed, atop the gay spread and fully dressed, lay a man and a woman with the de rigueur black silk face coverings, which now began to seem neither cultish nor symbolic but quite Victorian and proper, draped across the awful faces of the dead to spare the sensitivities of those who might discover them. I was sure that these two — on their backs, side by side, holding hands — were Roger and Marie Stanwyk, and when Bobby and Sasha pulled aside the veils, I was proved correct.

For some reason, I surveyed the ceiling, half expecting to see five-inch-long, fat cocoons spun in the corners. None hung over us, of course. I was getting my waking nightmares confused.

Struggling to resist a potentially crippling claustrophobia, I left the room ahead of Bobby and Sasha, joining Roosevelt in the hallway, where I was pleased — though surprised — to find there were still no walking dead people with black silk hoods covering their cold white faces.

The next bedroom was no less gonzo Victorian than the rest of the house, but the two bodies — in the carved mahogany half-tester bed with white muslin and lace hangings — were in a more modern pose than Roger and Marie, lying on their sides, face-to-face, embracing during their last moments on this earth. We studied their alabaster profiles, but none of us recognized them, and Bobby and I replaced the silks.

There was a television set in this room, too. The Stanwyks, for all their love of distant and more genteel times, were typical TV-crazed Americans, for which they were certainly dumber than they otherwise would have been, as it is well known and probably proven that for every television set in a house, each member of the family suffers a loss of five IQ points. The embracing couple on the bed had chosen to expire to a thousandth rerun of an ancient Star Trek episode. At the moment, Captain Kirk was solemnly expounding upon his belief that compassion and tolerance were as important to the evolution and survival of an intelligent species as were eyesight and opposable thumbs, so I had to resist the urge to switch the damn TV to the Nature Channel, where the fox was eating the guts of a quail.

I didn’t want to judge these poor people, because I couldn’t know the angst and physical suffering that had brought them to this end point; but if I were becoming and so distraught as to believe that suicide was the only answer, I would want to expire not while watching the products of Empire Disney, not to an earnest documentary about the beauty of nature’s bloodlust, not to the adventures of the starship Enterprise, but to the eternal music of Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps Brahms, Mozart; or the rock of Chris Isaak would do, and do handsomely.

As you may perceive from my baroque ranting, by the time I returned to the upstairs hall, with the body count currently at nine, my claustrophobia was getting rapidly worse, my imagination was in full-on hyperdrive, my longing for a handgun had intensified until it was almost a sexual need, and my testicles had retracted into my groin.

I knew that we weren’t all going to get out of this house alive.

Christopher Snow knows things.

I knew.

I knew.

The next room was dark, and a quick check revealed that it was used to store excess Victorian furniture and art objects. In two or three seconds of light, I saw paintings, chairs and more chairs, a column-front cellarette, terra-cotta figures, urns, a Chippendale-style satinwood desk, a breakfront — as if the Stanwyks’ ultimate intention had been to wedge every room of the house so full that no human being could fit inside, until the density and weight