by John Saul
And maybe actually owning the house would give him the motivation that having nothing never had.
Marty pulled open the back doors of the truck, climbed in, and began handing boxes down to Myra, who passed them on to Angel. “Shall I start taking them in?” Angel asked as the pile on the lawn began to grow.
“Maybe we’d better all take them in,” Myra replied, glancing at the sky, which was rapidly clouding over.
“It’s not gonna rain,” Marty declared. “Let’s just keep going.”
The three of them unloaded the truck as fast as they could, and moved the furniture into the house so it wouldn’t get ruined if it rained. In less than an hour they’d hauled in the beds, and in another hour Marty had gotten them set up. The table was in the kitchen, and most of the rest of the furniture was in the living room.
They were only half done when there was a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder. A moment later the first drops of rain splattered onto the pile of packing boxes Marty had left on the lawn. “Goddammit, how come it always happens to me?” he complained, climbing out of the truck. He slammed the doors shut and picked up one of the boxes. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he called back as he headed for the front door. “You want everything to get wrecked before we get it inside?”
Another bolt of lightning slashed across the sky and the rain increased as both Angel and Myra snatched up boxes and ran for the house, ducking through the front door just as the thunderclap crashed over the house, rattling its windows. Setting her box down, Myra quickly crossed herself and uttered a silent prayer to St. Peter and St. Swithin that the violent storm that had blown up out of nowhere was nothing more than a freak weather system.
Angel’s clothes were soaked through and she was shivering with cold.
“Go up and put on something dry,” Myra told her.
“I don’t have anything,” Angel replied through chattering teeth.
“That box,” her mother told her, pointing to a stack in the corner of the living room. “The one next to the top that’s marked ‘A.R. Clothes.’ ‘A.R.’ stands for Angel’s room.”
A minute later Angel pushed her way into the little bedroom at the front of the house that had fascinated her from the first moment she set foot in it, using her hip to close the door behind her and lowering the box to the floor. She was just starting to pull its flaps open when she heard a noise.
A soft noise, barely audible. A moment later it came again, but this time she was listening for it, and she recognized it instantly.
A cat!
It mewed a third time, its voice muffled but insistent, as if it had been locked outside and now wanted to come back in.
Angel went to the window and looked out. The storm was still raging, the glass so streaked with rain that she could barely see. Despite the rain, she lifted the window, and peered outside.
Nothing.
In fact, the ledge was so narrow, she couldn’t see how even a cat could cling to it, and the only other place it could be was on the little roof that sheltered the front stoop. But even if there had been a cat on it, how could she have heard it through the window and the storm? She slid the window down again, and just as the sash dropped onto the sill, the sound came again. But this time it came from behind her.
Turning, she scanned the room, but saw nothing. Then, when the cat mewed yet again, this time accompanying its mewl with a scratching sound, she knew. She crossed the room and slowly pulled the closet door open. The gap was no more than three inches wide when the cat’s nose appeared, followed by its head and body. The moment it was out of the closet, it wound back and forth between Angel’s legs, rubbing first one side against her, then the other. Angel gazed down at it. “Where did you come from?”
The cat—pure black, except for a tiny white blaze in the exact center of its chest—looked up at her, then bounded up onto the bare mattress that Angel and her father had set up only an hour ago.
As it began licking itself, Angel pulled the closet door all the way open. Except for a single shelf and a bar for hanging clothes, it was empty. She searched the baseboard, looking for a hole the cat could have crept through, then searched the ceiling as well.
Nothing. Not even a hatch to get to the attic.
“How did you get in?” Angel asked, sitting on the bed next to the cat. The cat stopped grooming itself to creep onto her lap, its sinuous body shivering as Angel began to pet it. Rolling over to get its stomach scratched, it began licking Angel’s hand. Then it rolled over again, curled up, and began purring.
Though it wore no collar, it didn’t look like a stray to Angel. She could feel its muscles rippling beneath its skin, and the cat neither looked nor felt underfed. In fact, its coat was thick and clean, as if someone had been looking after it all its life. But how long had it been in the closet? If it had been more than a day or two, why didn’t it seem either hungry or thirsty?
Maybe she should change her clothes, she thought, and go down and see if she could find something for it to eat, and a bowl for it to drink out of. Easing the cat off her lap, Angel went back to the box she’d just opened when she first heard the cat, and burrowed through it. She found clean underwear, a pair of sweatpants, and a thick sweater, and stripped off her wet clothes. As she used a second pair of sweatpants to dry her skin, she heard the cat hissing. Turning, she saw that it was standing straight up, its back arched, staring at the bedroom door. As the cat hissed again, Angel heard the door open behind her. Whirling around and clutching the sweatpants over her naked torso, she saw her father standing in the doorway.
“Daddy!” she cried. “What are you doing in here? I’m not even dressed!” For a moment her father’s eyes remained fixed on her, and then he backed out and pulled the door closed.
“Sorry,” he called out. “I—I thought you were in the other room.”
Still clutching the sweatpants against her body, Angel went to the door and locked it. But even knowing it was locked, she couldn’t get the image of her father out of her mind, of him looking at her before he left the room. There had been something strange in his expression, something she’d never seen before as he gazed at her.
Gazed at her nakedness, with a look in his eyes—
But that was crazy! He was her father! He’d never looked at her like that before. He wouldn’t!
She was wrong. She had to be!
Suddenly, the room was filled with a blinding light, and Angel whirled around as an explosion of thunder shook the house. Angel shrank back against the closed door as the storm howled outside. Another bolt of lightning flashed, and the house trembled again as the second thunderclap struck. As it died away, Angel remembered the cat.
It was no longer there.
“Kitty?” she called, as she pulled on her dry clothes and scanned the corners of the room.
Nothing.
Crouching down, Angel peered under the bed.
Nothing.
The closet?
The door was still ajar, and Angel pulled it wide.
No sign of the cat at all.
Angel searched the room again, then gave up. However the cat had gotten in, it must have gotten out the same way. “Houdini,” she said softly, as rain slashed against the window. “If you ever show up again, that’s going to be your name.” With one last glance around the room, she went back downstairs.
Her mother was unpacking boxes in the kitchen, a kettle of water was coming to a boil on the stove, and there were three mugs on the table, along with a box of hot chocolate mix.
“I thought a cup of cocoa might do us all some good,” Myra said, offering Angel a wan smile that didn’t quite cover the nervousness the storm was causing her. She glanced out the window. “They certainly didn’t say anything like this was going to happen on the weather reports.” Another bolt of lightning struck, and Myra winced as the thunderclap immediately followed. “Go tell your father his hot chocolate will be ready in another couple of minutes.”
The memory of what had
happened upstairs flooded back to Angel, and she hesitated. Should she tell her mother? But what had happened, really? Her father thought she was in the other room, that’s all.
And nothing had happened.
So there was nothing to tell her mother.
Nothing at all.
Chapter 11
HE SOUND WAS SO LOW THAT AT FIRST ANGEL WASN’T sure she heard it at all. She was sitting in her bedroom in the new house, looking out the window. Across the road she saw a tree, a huge maple, whose limbs seemed to be reaching toward the house—toward Angel herself. At first the branches appeared friendly, as if they wanted to cradle her, and she felt an urge to go out into the night and climb the tree, disappearing into its foliage—able to see out, but knowing that no one could see in. But then the branches took on a threatening look, as if the giant maple wanted to reach across the road and through the window and pluck her from the safety of her room. Though she told herself that it was only a tree—that it couldn’t hurt her—she’d still been unable to tear her eyes away from it.
Until the sound came.
Its first faint whisper wasn’t enough to penetrate Angel’s consciousness. The sound grew, though, almost imperceptibly, so that when she finally became conscious of it, it didn’t seem out of place.
Rather, it seemed just one more of the sounds that filled the night—the chirping and whirring noises of insects, the soft croaking of frogs, and the muted hooting of owls. Yet as the sound crept out of the background and grew, it began to take on form as well.
By the time Angel recognized it as being apart from the rest of the sounds of the night, she also realized what it sounded like.
A girl.
A girl her age.
A girl crying.
Her attention torn from the tree beyond the window, Angel turned, half expecting to see the crying girl behind her. But except for herself, the room was empty.
Herself and the shadows, deep and dark, that filled the corners, for there was barely a moon tonight, and even its faint light kept fading as clouds scudded across it.
Yet she could still hear the crying, and she no longer felt alone in the room.
She squinted, straining her eyes to see where the girl might be hidden.
The crying grew louder, and finally Angel left the window and moved into the center of the room. At first the crying seemed to be coming from everywhere, echoing off the walls and ceiling and even the bare floor. It grew louder, until Angel was certain her mother or father would wake up and hear it.
Then she realized that it wasn’t coming from inside the room at all.
It was coming from the closet.
The crying became harsher, as if the girl was in some kind of pain.
A ray of light, barely visible, crept from under the closet door, then brightened, turning from a faint orange to a brighter yellow. Angel stared at the light, and it began pulsating, mesmerizing her.
Meanwhile, the sound grew, until Angel could feel it as well as hear it.
Yet somehow she didn’t feel frightened.
Instead, she felt herself being drawn toward the closet door.
Slowly, she moved toward it, her eyes fixed on the yellow light pulsing from the gap beneath the closet door, her ears filled with the now-howling sound of the girl’s cries.
She reached for the door. Heat seemed to radiate from it, yet still Angel felt no fear.
Her fingers tightened on the knob, and she turned it and pulled the door open.
To her amazement, the closet was filled with flames, and in the midst of the flames stood a figure, its back to her. As Angel stood rooted to the spot, the figure turned.
The face of the girl was gone, its flesh burned away. But the empty sockets where the girl’s eyes had been stared straight at Angel.
The girl raised her right arm and reached toward Angel in eerie imitation of the branches of the tree she’d been staring at moments earlier.
Just before the fingers touched her face, Angel stepped back and slammed the closet door.
And as the door slammed shut, she jerked awake, sitting bolt upright in her bed.
Her heart was pounding and she was covered with a sheen of sweat that felt hot but quickly turned cold and clammy. She was gasping for breath and her lungs hurt.
Hurt almost as if they’d been burned.
Angel sat perfectly still, waiting for the terror of the nightmare to pass, but even as her breathing returned to normal and her heartbeat calmed, the image of the girl, her flesh burned away by the raging flames, remained vivid in her mind. Finally, when even the sweat that covered her skin had dried, she lay back down and pulled the covers up until they were snug around her throat.
A nightmare, she told herself. That’s all it was.
She turned over, wrapped her arms around the pillow, and closed her eyes. But the vision still hung in the darkness, and a moment later she rolled over again, this time opening her eyes to look at the dimly glowing hands of the alarm clock that sat on the scarred table next to the bed.
Just a little after midnight.
Though she felt so tired from unpacking boxes all day that her whole body ached, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she banished the terrible image of her dream from her mind.
Throwing back the covers, she got up, pulling the blanket off the bed and wrapping it around her shoulders. She moved toward the closet, intending to open the door to prove to herself that nothing was inside except the clothes she’d hung there herself. Yet when she reached out to turn the knob, her hand hovered in the air a few inches from it, and she found herself unable to close her fingers on the brass.
She went to the window then and gazed out at the huge maple across the street, and slowly the vision of the horror inside the closet began to fade as the memory of the tree’s branches reaching out to her rose in her mind once more.
But in the dream, the tree had been covered with the bright green foliage of summer, and now, as she gazed out into the autumn night, she could see that its leaves had shriveled and fallen, until now its branches were almost bare.
It didn’t look at all as it had in the dream.
Turning away from the window, Angel gazed again at the closed door of the closet. There’s nothing in it, she told herself. Nothing but my clothes and a bunch of other junk. Yet even as she steeled herself and started toward the closet again, her heart began to race, and a clammy sheen of cold sweat once more broke out on her body. But she didn’t stop. She forced herself to keep going until she once more stood before the door.
This time she closed her fingers on the cold brass, she turned the knob, and pulled the door open.
Just as she had told herself, there was nothing inside the closet except the clothes she’d hung up this afternoon.
On the floor were her three pairs of shoes.
On the shelves were some boxes filled with stuff she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away.
And nothing else, except for a strange odor.
The odor of something burning . . .
“Angel?” Myra Sullivan said as her daughter came into the kitchen the next morning. “Are you all right?”
“I guess I didn’t sleep very well,” Angel replied, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I had a bad dream—”
“Well, that’s hardly a good sign, is it? You should have had wonderful dreams on your first night in our new house. What was it?”
As Angel tried to recall and relate the strange dream she’d had, Myra found the box she’d packed especially for this morning—buried, of course, under half a dozen other boxes, all of them heavier than the one she was after—opened it, and began taking out cereal bowls, glasses, and plates. “Rinse these for me while we talk,” she told Angel, stacking them on the counter next to the sink. “Everything gets so dirty when you pack it up.”
Angel ran the hot water and began rinsing and drying the dishes and silverware as she began once more to reconstruct the strange dream she’d ha
d the night before, but already some of the details were starting to slip away.
“But the weirdest thing was that when I finally woke up, the whole thing still seemed so real that I got up and looked in the closet.”
Her mother smiled thinly. “Just like when you were little, remember? You always made me open the closet door in your room to prove that there were no monsters inside.” She looked up from the oatmeal she was stirring. “And you didn’t find anything, did you?” she asked, her voice taking on an edge. “It was just a nightmare then, and it was just a nightmare last night. You didn’t actually hear anything, or see anything, did you?” Angel shook her head. Yet the look on her face told Myra there was something her daughter hadn’t yet told her. “What is it?” she pressed. “There’s something you’re holding back.”
“I—I don’t know,” Angel stammered. “It’s just—well, it sounds sort of crazy. . . .”
Myra stopped stirring the oatmeal. “I think I can be the judge of that. Why don’t you just tell me what you think happened, and maybe I can figure it out.”
Angel hesitated, and then blurted it out: “I smelled smoke.”
Myra frowned. “Smoke? You mean like wood smoke?”
Again Angel hesitated. “Well, sort of, but not really—I mean, it sort of smelled like burning wood, but there was something else too.”
“Something else?” Myra prodded when Angel fell silent. “Am I supposed to figure it out myself, or are you going to tell me?”
“Well, it was weird,” Angel said. “Remember when you burned yourself with the iron?”
Myra winced at the memory, and her eyes went to the scar that still showed clearly on the back of her left hand. It had happened five years ago, when she’d been talking to Angel while pressing Father Raphaello’s vestments and accidentally placed the scorching steam iron on her own hand.
“It smelled like that,” Angel said. “And like the time I scorched my hair trying to blow out the candles on my birthday cake.”
