had thrown her into the woods, where the canopy of leaves and branches broke the rainfall. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and her heart banged. Behind her, the trees groaned. She turned toward Main House and took a step. Wasn't Main House off to her right, not her left? She took a step in what seemed the wrong direction as soon as she had taken it. An enormous branch cracked away above her and crashed to the ground ten feet in front of her. Deeper in the woods, another limb broke off and tumbled to earth.When she looked back she saw that she had managed to get only a little way beyond the cottage.
Dim light flickered in the doorway; a second later, the silhouette of a large male body filled the opening. Reflected yellow light glinted off a flat blade. She backed into a tree and yelped. The man jumped off the porch and vanished into the darkness. Nora plunged into the woods in what she hoped was the direction of Main House.
She stumbled over fallen branches and walked into invisible trees. Waist-high boulders jumped up at her; streaming deadfalls towered over her, branches smacked her forehead and thumped her ribs. She moved with her hands in front of her face; now and then, she set a foot on empty air and went skidding downhill until she could grasp a branch. She fell over rocks, over roots. The weapon in her pocket bruised her thigh, and the rocks and branches she struck in her falls bruised everything else. She had no idea how far she had gone, nor in what direction. The worst thing she knew was that Dick Dart, who should have been but was not dead, followed close behind, tracking her by sound.
She knew this because she could hear him, too. A minute or two after she had run from the sight of him leaping off the porch, she had heard him curse when a branch struck him. When she had taken a tumble over a boulder and landed in a thicket, she had heard the harsh bow-wow-wow of his laughter, faintly but distinctly, coming it seemed from all about her. He had not seen her, but out of the thousands of noises surrounding him, he had heard the sounds of her fall and struggle with the thicket and understood what they meant. He could probably hear her boots slogging through the mush. She ran with upraised arms, hearing behind her the phantom sound of Dart picking his way through the woods.
A few minutes later this ghostly sound still came to her through a renewal of the waterfall's booming; Nora pushed her way past nearly invisible obstacles and came to the reason for the noise. On the other side of a veil of trees, a curtain of water crashed down onto a black river. She had come to another path, which made it certain that she had run in the wrong direction: paths led to cottages, and there were no cottages in a direct line from Pepper Pot to Main House, Dart's ghost steps advanced steadily toward her.
Nora came up to the trees bordering the path, bent her head, and moved out into the deluge. Fighting for balance, she trudged forward, the boots sticking, slipping. At length the tide began to solidify underneath her feet, and she peered ahead at another wall of trees. The barrage diminished to heavy rainfall.
Nora looked back and thought she saw a pale form flickering through the woods on the other side of the path. She dodged into a gathering of oaks and began to work down a slight grade. The ground softened, then dropped away, and her feet went into a sliding skid. Instinctively, she crouched forward to keep her center of gravity in place and slipped down past the oak trees, skimming around rocks, tilting from side to side to stay upright. She stayed on her feet until a low branch struck her right ankle and sent her tumbling into a tree trunk. Sparks flared in front of her eyes, and her body slipped into a slow downhill cruise. When she came to rest, Marian's hat was gone, her head was pounding, and the lower half of her right leg seemed to be underwater. Her leg came out of the water when she crawled to her knees.
She was on open ground, and the storm had begun to slacken. At some point during the trip downhill, the wind had lessened. Dizzy and exhausted, she raised her right leg to pour water out of the boot. Her muscles ached and her head throbbed. The sky had grown lighter. More quickly than it had come, the storm was ending.
Before her a five-foot sheet of water moved swiftly from right to left. Rain dimpled and pocked the surface of the water. A river? Nora wondered how far she had come. Then she realized that fattened with rainwater and overflowing its banks, this was the little stream running through the estate. Behind her, some enormous object creaked, sighed, and surrendered to gravity. Dart was gaining on her. She had to hide from him until she could get to Main House.
Why didn't he just bleed to death like normal people?
She strode forward into the quickly moving water, and slick stones met the soles of the boots. The rain dwindled to a pattering of drops. Wind ruffled the surface of the water and flattened the coat against her body. Overhead, a solid mass of great woolen clouds glided along. With a shock, she realized that it was now a little past nine on an August night. Above the storm, the sun had only recently gone down. She climbed over the opposite bank of the stream and waded through the overflow into the fresh woods to conceal herself.
She heard laughter in the pattering rain and the hissing leaves.
Through the massed trunks Nora saw what looked like gray fog. She moved forward, and the fog became an overgrown meadow where grasses bent before the cool wind. On the other side of the meadow, high-pitched voices swooped and skirled, climbing through chromatic intervals, introducing dissonances, ascending into resolution, shattering apart, uniting into harmony again, dividing and joining in an endless song without pauses or repeats.
Singing?
For a second larger without than within, like the massy vault, Nora dropped through time and awakened to unearthly music in a bedroom on Crooked Mile Road in Westerholm, Connecticut, scrambling for a long-vanished pistol. Then she realized where she was. Instead of going south, she had run almost directly west. The meadow in front of her was the Mist Field, and the voices came from Monty Chandler's Song Pillars. Unable to hide, she pulled the gun from her pocket and whirled around to look for Dart. She ranged in front of the woods, jerking the gun back and forth. Dart did not show himself. She moved right, then left, then right again, waiting for him.
Then she understood what he had done. Dick Dart had half-followed, half-chased her across the stream and toward the Mist Field. He wanted her to cower in a hidey-hole and wait for him to move past. In the meantime, he was on his way to Main House.
'Oh, my God,' Nora said. She began to run along the edge of the meadow toward a point in the woods where she could wade back across the stream, cut past Honey House, and approach Main House from the west lawn. She stopped to pull off the clumsy boots. Bare-legged, the ground squashing beneath her feet, she started running again.
A pale figure emerged from the woods at the far corner of the Mist Field. Nora froze. The revolver wanted to slip out of her muddy hand. Maybe it was empty, maybe not. If not, maybe it would fire, maybe not. The figure moved toward her. She raised the gun, and the man before her called out her name and became a drenched Jeffrey Deodato.
Nora let her arm fall. Jeffrey had lost his Eton cap. Covered with muddy streaks and smears, his raincoat clung to him like a wet rag. Other streaks adhered to his face. Because he was Jeffrey, his bearing suggested that he had deliberately camouflaged himself. He got close enough for her to see the expression in his eyes. Clearly she looked a good deal worse than he did.
'You came after all,' she said.
'It seemed like a good idea.' He looked down at the gun. 'Thanks for not shooting. Where's Dart?'
Apparently Jeffrey had learned a good deal since their telephone conversation. 'I killed him,' she said. 'But it didn't work.' She lifted the revolver and looked at it. 'I don't think there are any bullets left in this thing, anyhow.'
Jeffrey delicately took the gun from her. 'So you got away from him.'
'It started out that way. But I think after a while he was chasing me away. He wanted me out of his hair so he could enjoy himself with the women at Main House. Then he could come back and have all the fun of hunting me down. We can't stand around and talk, Jeffrey, we have to get moving.'
He snapped open the cylinder. 'You have one bullet left, but it's not in a very safe place, unless you want to shoot yourself in the leg.' He moved the cylinder, clicked it back into place, and handed her the revolver, grip first. 'Let's get out of here and find a phone.'
Frantic with impatience, Nora rammed the revolver back into her pocket. 'The phones don't work.' She looked around wildly. 'We have to get to Main House.' Jeffrey was still examining her. The spectacle she presented obviously did not inspire much confidence in her ability to deal with Dick Dart. Nora glanced down at the ruined coat and her streaky legs. She looked like an urchin pulled from a swamp.
'Main House?' Jeffrey asked.
She grabbed the sleeve of his coat and pulled him back toward the woods. 'If we don't, he'll murder
