He drove down the hill and away, reminding himself that although she retained possession of the house he had one strong advantage over the niece, because she was obviously unaware that she and the child were not alone in the house. When he had gone about a mile he passed a small abandoned church, and did not even turn his head.
The couch was extremely comfortable. After a little while Amanda sat up and appropriated Rosie’s wool blanket; after a further interval, when pages of her book began to flip over as her eyelids dropped, she reached up behind her, discarded one of the propping cushions, turned off the lamp, and stretched out full length.
This was the kind of drowsiness that had an eggshell fragility at its onset; to break it now might be to invite hours of wakefulness later. The soft light from the hall did not penetrate here. Apple would come, presently, and Amanda could not fail to hear her, and then she would get up and wash her face and brush her teeth and crawl into the other guest room bed.
A feather of sound that would have been buried in the night’s earlier wind brushed against the light beginning of sleep. It had a guarded quality which inanimate materials could not achieve, suggesting a muffled nudge, and it had not come from the deep interior of the house where Rosie slept. It had come from somewhere much closer than that.
Amanda sat up with instinctive caution, eyes roaming the darkness which was not quite absolute, and dropped instantly, soundlessly back, because she had seen what must have sent that crippling roar of blood to Mrs. Balsam’s brain.
Chapter 7
A human shape was growing impossibly up out of the floor to the side of the kitchen, moving black against almost-black stillness.
Amanda, her own heartbeats tumbling, pressed herself tightly into the couch, as immobilized and nearly as will-less as a rabbit at the stooping approach of a hawk. It seemed to her that her presence was stamped all over the dark, and that at any moment, at the end of a mincing prowl down the step and across the room, a pair of hands would come thrusting over the back of the couch.
The pulse of blood in her ears at this incarnation of all the unrecognized fears of childhood had made her briefly deaf. Gradually, she became aware of an infinitely careful progress which was not so much sound as the flawing of silence, and then a tiny, trembly vibration.
A gulp of light registered faintly on the living room ceiling. The shape risen From the floor—a man, said Amanda’s bared senses—had opened the refrigerator door.
Infinitesimal click as glass touched glass, tremor of metal as something was slid across a shelf: Amanda realized that in the guest room she would have heard none of this; she would have been peacefully asleep.
And she should not have thought that, because as if she had sent some desperate mental signal a breathy little voice called anxiously, “Manda?”
Dear God. Rosie stirring, turning, discovering that the broad friendly shaft of light over the end of her strange bed was gone, coming now in all innocence to betray Amanda. Would she venture into alien darkness on her tottery little legs? Amanda clenched her hands helplessly—and Rosie had advanced along the hall.
“Manda?” Subdued, but growing frightened.
The dim light vanished as the refrigerator door was pressed rubberily shut. This time the almost soundless progress was swift, and it was unmistakably flight. The muffled nudge that had halted Amanda’s slide into sleep was repeated, this time with finality.
Silence, broken by Rosie’s first forlorn sob. Amanda eased herself off the couch, whispering, “Here I am, Rosie,” even before she tiptoed across the rug and into the dimming wash of gold at the doorway. She picked up the child, blessing the quality of voice which would have led the man to believe that it was addressing someone a safe distance away, and went swiftly into the guest room.
Her heart had steadied somewhat, because that monstrous black shape—for the moment at least—had been as frightened of discovery as she, but her hands shook badly over the dressing of Rosie; had her tiny clothes really contained all these buttonholes before? She thought disconnectedly that if she were required to sign her name right now she couldn’t, with any kind of legibility.
In fact, she was having trouble with simple shoelaces. “We’re going to my house just as soon as I get dressed, Rosie. Come on. . . .”
She couldn’t drive in these ill-fitting slippers, and she had probably used up less than a minute and a half with all her fumbling. Going fast and very quietly into her aunt’s bedroom, she flung off the robe and got into her suit, misbuttoning the jacket, and put on her shoes. It came as a scald to realize that her coat and handbag were still in the living room along with Rosie’s blanket, so that she had to go back into that violated darkness— and that the telephone was ringing like an alarm bell.
Amanda stood paralyzed. Answer it and breathe an urgent message, at the same time publishing to the undoubtedly listening man the fact that there was someone awake and knowledgeable here? How far would she get before he exploded out of hiding at her?
“The telefoam,” whispered Rosie in reproach, and Amanda whispered back, “But we won’t answer it.”
This drew the wonderful, abashed, nobody-knows-but-us smile; still, it seemed a nerve-fraying eternity before the ringing stopped. He would be convinced now, wouldn’t he, that that very small and distant voice had retired into sleep again?
Which would of course, realized Amanda, thunderstruck, embolden him to re-emerge from what could only be the cellar and continue his interrupted exploration of the refrigerator. Cellar. That was what Mrs. Balsam had been straining to say, that was the warning in her mutely burning stare at Amanda’s announced intention of coming here tonight, that was behind all her terror.
