She crossed the room, Oliver’s flannels over one arm, and sat down on the bed to turn off the radio.
Snow and a cold wave . . .
Better call the oil company . . .
How odd about Maire . . .
She fell asleep. She slept uneasily, half-conscious at moments of lamplight on her eyelids, too bound by lassitude to stir. She dreamed that someone walked up to her, someone close and trusted, but when the hand came out to greet hers it was not a hand at all under the cuff but an enormous paw with a bite of claws just under the fur. When she snatched her hand away—appalled, knowing —the familiar voice stopped chatting and ripped upward in a howl.
Elizabeth awoke with a jerk of terror. She had pushed Oliver’s flannels violently away from her, but the scream still echoed on the air. . . .
This time, it was Maire.
“No,” said Elizabeth tensely to Noreen. “Let me . . .”
She dropped down on her knees before the living-room windows so that her face was level with Maire’s. She put her arms around the rigid body, hoping that the pound of her own heart would not communicate itself. “Show me where it is, darling, show me, and we’ll make it go away—”
Maire went tighter. She said in a muffled whisper, “Oun,” and plunged her face into Elizabeth’s throat, and Elizabeth, watching the darkness, turned all at once to ice.
There was a pair of eyes, looking in, watching. Yellowy and shining, like a monstrous cat’s, just above the ragged black tops of the clipped-down cedars under the windows. Elizabeth knelt there, frozen, her breath and her heartbeats afraid to move her own eyes from that blind and glittering stare.
It vanished suddenly. It was there, and then it was not. Elizabeth only half heard Noreen’s shaken release of breath behind her. She was watching incredulously as outside on the lawn a hand came up in salute, the blackness shifted, the porch light flickered on Steven Brent’s face.
He hadn’t been in the cedars—that was her changed perspective. He had halted on the path, probably struck by the tableau visible through the living-room windows, and the light had reflected on his glasses. . . .
Elizabeth rose, and gave Maire’s shoulders a reassuring pat; her legs felt weak. She smiled at Noreen in relief—did her own face look as bleached, as sucked-dry with fear?—and said, “It’s Mr. Brent.” It seemed a long moment before the girl managed an answering smile and a murmur as she took Maire’s hand. Then Elizabeth went to open the door.
“ ‘Oun?’ . . . Oh, of course, the night we were here and Maire —Good Lord.” Steven was concerned and apologetic, amused only when he found, five minutes later, that Maire would still come willingly to his knee. “What’s it all about?”
Elizabeth told him about the snarling cats on the lawn that afternoon, and her own translation of it. The sound, probably heard by Maire for the first time at night; one of the cats jumping up on a windowsill to glare into the lighted room—“Something like that, anyway,” said Elizabeth, and drew an enormous sighing breath, realizing the full measure of her relief.
Steven was watching her thoughtfully. He said, ignoring Maire’s cordial invitation to exhibit his stomach, “You know, I think this has done you more good than all the medicine and rest in the world. Take a look in the mirror—you’re a changed woman.”
He stood up. “As a matter of fact, that’s what I dropped by for —to see if you were well enough to start thinking about when we can expect the finished book.”
He talked about dates and publishing schedules, and Elizabeth, naming a month that would give her leeway, went with him to the door. “Tell Lucy that I called her when she was out, will you, and that I’ll probably see her tomorrow.”
“I will. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve shaken off Maire’s oun for good.” He was smiling, but his eyes were intent. “Let me know if there’s anything else, won’t you, Elizabeth?”
She should have been surprised at the message behind that, but she wasn’t. She had realized for some time that, of them all, Steven had caught an echo of the terror she lived with, without being aware of its cause. Her own instinctive ease with him had told her that. She said, matching his own lightness and the meaning behind it, “I might take you up on that some time.”
“Good, do,” said Steven, and was gone.
Elizabeth felt lighter than she had in weeks; it was as if Maire’s monster, in crashing down, had revealed a doorway to safety and reason. She had been convinced that the oun was a synonym for evil, she had started up in panic at a child’s aberration. That night on the stairs Maire had caught a glint from Lucy’s lorgnette, or Constance’s shell-rimmed glasses, or Steven’s, and that was all there was to that.
In the kitchen, Maire’s voice lifted in a peal of rage: “He ate it, he ATE it!” and there was a scuffle and a wail from Jeep. Elizabeth went in to find Noreen restoring order. Jeep wore a sated look in spite of his tears; he had managed to cram down most of two suppers while Noreen was stirring cocoa and Maire was in the living-room. Elizabeth gave Maire a slice of bread and jelly and Jeep a glance of straight-faced censure; it was difficult to restrain her own buoyancy.
The gilt clock said a few minutes after six, and she thought in a way she hadn’t thought in weeks: Oliver’s late. She would get out the ice for cocktails, and the anchovies and the imported crackers—it was, in a way obscure to everyone but herself, a night to celebrate. When Constance came in at the back door, returning from her usual before-dinner stroll, Elizabeth said at random, “Let’s go out tonight, shall we? Have a drink here,
