Matt’s simmering anger was about to boil over. What had Kelly been thinking about, blabbing to his folks that he’d been dropped from the football team? Couldn’t she keep her mouth shut, just for one night? Coming to the top of the stairs, he started down the hall toward his room. At least there he’d be by himself, away from everyone, at least for a little while. But as he came to the room next to his grandmother’s, he hesitated.
His grandmother was still downstairs, and he could barely hear his folks, who must have shut the door to the library, which meant that they didn’t want him to hear what they were talking about.
Which meant that he was alone upstairs.
He eyed the closed door to the room next to his grandmother’s, her warning echoing in his mind. “This is Cynthia’s room,” she’d said as he and his mother finished unpacking the boxes filled with his aunt’s things. “Nobody goes in it except me.” Her eyes, sunk so deep in her wrinkled face as to be almost invisible, had flicked from Matt to his mother, then come back to rest on him. “Nobody!” she’d repeated. He’d wondered why she thought he’d even want to go in there — there was nothing in the room but a bunch of old pictures stuck on the walls, a closet full of clothes that no one would want even if they weren’t so old they were starting to fall apart, and some ratty old furniture that Gram had insisted on using instead of the stuff he’d had to drag up to the attic. Why would anybody want to go in there?
But every day — and every night too — his grandmother spent hours in the room, talking as if someone were in there with her. But of course there wasn’t — Gram’s Alzheimer’s had just made her forget that his aunt was dead.
But what was it that made her go in there? Why didn’t she just sit in her own room and talk to Aunt Cynthia, if that’s what she wanted to do?
Matt went quickly back to the top of the staircase and peered down into the empty foyer. He still could barely hear his parents’ voices, muffled and indistinct, through the closed library door. And there was no sign at all of his grandmother.
His movements unconsciously furtive, he went back to the closed door and tested its knob.
Unlocked.
Slowly, praying that no squeaking hinge would give him away, he pushed the door open and slipped into the room.
He stood still, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, and took a deep breath to try to calm his now- pounding heart.
As his lungs filled with air, his nose was flooded with a scent that instantly transported him back to the house on Burlington Avenue.
But that was crazy! This room was much bigger than the one in the other house, and nothing like it at all except for all his aunt’s stuff.
Yet even as he told himself that it made no sense, the aroma washed over him and the walls seemed to close around him, just as the walls of his grandmother’s house had. In the gloom of the night, the terrors that used to come to him in his dreams surrounded him again, even though he was wide-awake.
Feeling as if he couldn’t breathe, he strode across the room to pull a window open and suck the cool evening air deep into his lungs.
A little better.
He took another breath, and the strange suffocating panic began to release its grip on him.
And then he felt something else.
Eyes.
Eyes watching him in the darkness.
Caught!
Someone had come upstairs and —
He spun around, his eyes searching.
Nothing! The door was still closed, the room still empty.
He started toward the door, and again was seized by the irrational feeling that unseen eyes were following his every move.
Once again he turned, and this time he saw it.
A pair of eyes pierced the darkness, seeming to hang suspended in the blackness, fixing on him with an intensity that made his skin crawl. As his heart raced, he fumbled for the light switch by the door, found it, and flipped the toggle. He blinked as light flooded from the chandelier in the center of the ceiling, and then he saw it.
The picture!
It was the picture of his aunt that hung over the fireplace. Now, in the bright light of the chandelier, the eyes lost the terrible intensity they had possessed in the darkness, and he found himself looking at nothing more than a carefully posed photograph of a beautiful girl who appeared to be no more than a year or two older than he was.
Nothing that bore any threat at all.
Then why had her eyes frightened him so much? Why had they seemed to glow in the dark almost as if they were lit from within?
His fingers trembling, he reached for the light switch, plunging the room back into darkness. As he waited for his eyes to readjust to the gloom, the strange suffocating claustrophobia closed around him again, but this time he fought it, his fingers clutching at the doorknob, tightening on it harder with every second that passed. Then, very slowly, Cynthia Moore’s eyes emerged out of the darkness, fixing on him.
No, he told himself. It’s not possible — it’s just some kind of trick of the light! But even as he tried to reassure himself, the eyes seemed to reach out to him, reach into him, peer into the depths of —
“No!”
The word exploded from him in a choked gasp of panic, cut off even before it was fully formed. Reflexively, his hand twisted the doorknob and he pulled the door open, spun out into the corridor, then jerked it closed behind him. He stayed there a moment, his heart pounding, his breath coming in panting gasps. As the panic slowly ebbed, as the terror drained away, he began to understand what must have happened.
Of course he’d been reminded of the house on Burlington Avenue: the odor in the room his grandmother had filled with all his aunt’s stuff smelled just like it. Until tonight he’d always thought the strange musky scent in his grandmother’s house was just the way that particular house smelled.
Now he knew it wasn’t that at all. It had been his aunt’s perfume, filling his grandmother’s house the way it now filled the room he’d just left.
And as for the eyes — the eyes that seemed to loom in the darkness as if lit from within — that was easy. It must have been a beam of moonlight straying in through the window, hitting the portrait at just the right angle. Putting the last of his fear aside, Matt went to his room, stripped off his tuxedo, and, even though it was barely ten o’clock, climbed into bed.
When he finally turned out the light an hour later, he fell asleep before noticing that the moon had not yet risen.
So it never occurred to him that it must have been something else that lit his aunt Cynthia’s eyes…
* * *
