The Dark of Summer

by Dean R. Koontz

  Thrust into action by the circumstances, with no time to think, Gwyn knew instinctively what she must do. She pulled open the rear door to the back lawn and, without stepping outside, she slammed it loudly. Then, moving quickly and noiselessly to the can cupboard, she opened that door, stepped into the tiny closet, and pulled the door almost shut again, leaving only a tiny crack through which she could watch the area of the kitchen by the back door.

  Almost at once, the swinging door pushed inward, and the specter glided across the kitchen floor to the back door, stood there peering out at the empty lawn.

  Gwyn held her breath, sure that the lovely demon would turn toward her, smiling, reveal that she had not been fooled at all.

  When a moment had passed, however, the ghost shouted, in a rather unghostly manner, “Ben!”

  He arrived in the kitchen a few seconds later, spattered with a dark liquid which, in the semi-darkness, was not easily identified as blood.

  “She's left the house,” the dead girl said.

  Gwyn watched from her hiding place in the can cupboard, in shock, as the dead man joined the specter at the back door and, leaning toward the glass, stared intently at the lawn.

  “Which way did she go?” Ben asked. He sounded exactly as he had sounded in life.

  “I don't know,” the dead girl told him. “By the time I got here, she was out of sight.”

  “You're sure she went out there?”

  “I heard the door slam.”

  He looked around the kitchen, but did not seem to see the cupboard as a hiding place. He said, “Damn!”

  “What do we do?”

  “Go after her, of course.”

  The dead girl was not at all happy about that prospect. She said, “Look, Ben, she's probably gone over the edge already, what with that routine on the stairs. She won't know whether the ghost is real or whether she's imagining everything, but in either case she won't hold onto her sanity. She's probably sitting out there babbling to herself under a tree. We can just wait until Barnaby comes home, go find her, have her examined and committed, and our job is done.”

  He thought about it a moment, then said, “No, that won't do.”

  “Why won't it?”

  He said, “We've got to be sure.”

  “I'm already sure.”

  Ben said, “But if she catches sight of me, all smeared up like this, after she's just seen me with a broken neck on the stairs, and if I start giving her that spiel about dying so she can be with us, she's bound to flip out. Then we'll both be sure the job's done right.”

  The dead girl said, “I don't like this whole job. I like it less and less every minute, and I wish we'd never taken it.”

  He put his arm around her and said, “There, there, love. You don't mean that.”

  “I do mean it.”

  “Just hang on a couple of more hours,” he said. “Then we're done, and we only have to sit around and wait for the money to pour in.”

  “If he pays us.”

  “He has to pay us.”

  “Not if he can find some way around it,” she said. “And what can we do if he refuses to pay — go to the Better Business Bureau?” She laughed somewhat bitterly.

  In the cupboard, Gwyn shook her head, as if she thought this was all another delusion and that she could rattle it out of the way. It remained, however, unfolding slowly, whether delusion or reality.

  Ben said, “Barnaby will pay. Look, he'll be grateful as hell to us when this is done; without you, he'd not have been able to pull it off. Hell, if he hadn't seen you, he wouldn't even have thought of the whole bit. Besides, he's as deep into this as we are. And, baby, what he's giving us is only a little dribble of the bucketful he'll get his hands on.”

  “I guess you're right.”

  He kissed her cheek. “I always am. Now come along, love, and let's see where the kid's gotten to.”

  She said, “What if she ran for help?”

  “The nearest help, by foot, is an hour away,” he said. “And I don't think she's got the strength or the sense of mind to make it. The best thing about the manor is its isolation.”

  “But just suppose she does make it,” the dead girl said.

  “Playing pessimist tonight, are you?” he asked. “Okay. Even if she reaches help somewhere, they'll need to settle her down before they can get the story out of her. Then, when she's told them about me — and about you — they'll most likely not believe a word of it. If they do, and if they come back here with her, we'll have you tucked away in the attic. I'll have got all the chicken blood cleaned up, and I'll simply explain that the kid has been having — unfortunate emotional problems.” He laughed, coldly. “We just can't lose. If we don't find her in an hour, we come back to the house and clean up and get ready for visitors. But my guess is that she's out there somewhere, completely cracked.”

  “I don't know,” the dead girl said. “I wouldn't have fallen for this. It makes me creepy to think she would swallow it so easily.”

  “She's been mentally ill before,” he said. “It was natural for her to think she was having a relapse.”

  “I guess…”

  “Come on,” he said, opening the kitchen door.

  Together, they went outside, closing the door after themselves.

  Slowly, cautiously, Gwyn pushed open the pantry door, waited in the shadows a moment longer to be certain that they were not going to return, then stepped out into the kitchen, crossed the room to the back door and looked outside. The pair of specters, who were not specters at all, stood on the lawn ten yards away from the house, still a frightening couple. They were calling her name in that same, eerie voice which she had thought, at one time, was so inhuman: “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn…” That unsettling vocal effect was merely a gimmick, a phony pitch that a professional actor might easily employ, though it sounded hollow and supernatural. They were surveying the woods where they thought she might have hidden, and gradually they became more comical and less terrifying, more human and less unnatural.

  As she stood there, Gwyn began to piece together tiny bits of data, previously unremarkable events which now linked into one chain of cause and effect and produced a bracelet of deception…

  How unnatural it had been, after all these years, for Uncle Will to write the sort of letter that he had, how pat and perfect and too like a wish or a dream.

  And, too, how odd that she had suffered no illusions of ghosts until she was securely in the manor house, under the watchful eyes of — she now realized — complete strangers…

  She realized other things as well: The interest which Elaine and Will had shown in hearing of her previous illness was not innocent, but the interest of a pair of vultures listening to their wounded victim tell them how and when it would die and be available for a feast; Fritz and Grace's air of not belonging in the jobs they held — they too must be in on this scheme; the careful admonitions not to go near Jack Younger, not because he would harm her, but because he might convince her of a bit of the truth which would help her to discover the ruse they planned; the sleeping tablets, not meant to help her get better, but to weaken her, to let her slide back into the patterns of her old illness where she would be an easier target for the horrors they had planned to show her tonight; Jack Younger's assurance that her uncle was a bigot, so far as social stations went, though she had thought he had outgrown that pettiness; all the talk at the beginning of her stay in the manor, about the view from her bedroom windows, so silly at the time, but effectively reminding her of Ginny and priming her for the first visit of the ghost; the broom marks which she had seen and which her uncle professed not to be able to pick out… The list went on and on, so that Gwyn wondered, now, how she could ever have overlooked so many things, how she could have let them almost get away with this. She had been near to madness, after all.

  However, even now, so soon after the revelation of the hoax, she could understand, just a little, why she had been ripe for this kind of thing. She had wanted to have a fa
mily again, wanted that so desperately, that she had been not only capable of overlooking flaws in Will and Elaine, but had been eager to see only the good in them. She had not wanted to do anything to shatter the hope they had given her, and as a result, she had played right into their hands.

  There were various bits and pieces of the hoax which she had not yet found satisfactory explanations for: how the blonde girl could look so very much like her, and like Ginny, her exact double, in fact; how she could have known about the Teckert boy, whom Gwyn had forgotten about a long time ago… But, in the end, these were nothing more than technicalities, and they did not change the basic explanation of why she had fallen so completely and so quickly for their deception: she wanted a family; she needed to be loved.

  Out on the lawn, still calling her name to the night in those cold and unnatural voices, Ben Groves and the unnamed girl moved out of Gwyn's line of sight as they continued with their fruitless search. There was no kid sitting beneath a tree and babbling…

  Gwyn turned away from the window.

  She was not particularly angry with anyone, not with Will or Elaine or Ben or this unknown woman, not even as — moment by moment — she realized more fully just what they had been trying to do to her, how little they had cared about her, how utterly ruthless they had been. Instead of anger, she felt a deep, welling sorrow. She was depressed beyond measure by what had happened. Her love had been met by deception, her trust twisted and used against her. Because she had passed through so much of life without loved ones, she had passed through life alone — and, alone, she had never had the opportunity to learn, first-hand, how duplicitous human nature was, how often people used false affection to hide an inner hate. Now, having learned this lesson in one sudden sortie, she was literally stunned.

  “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn. “ hollow and strange, but no longer frightening.

  She shook herself out of her negative reverie, aware that she had no time to waste with her sorrow, and she tried to decide what she must do next. Because her own belief in the hoax was, after all she had heard, still rather shaky, she felt that she must do some detective work, snoop around and find out as much as she could, to fortify her belief. Besides, though she knew, almost for certain, what hoax had been played and why, she had no proof of it to take to the authorities. Indeed, if she went to them with what she had now, they would humor her and, as her uncle evidently wished, eventually decide that she was quite incompetent.

  She wondered why Uncle Will, a millionaire in his own right, would go to such lengths to get his hands on her fortune. Was it sheer malice, grown from dissatisfaction with his dead sister's husband's successes? Or had his own fortune, somehow, been dissipated, until he had nothing left of the Barnaby estate? Was his hoax, his ruthlessness, based on a desperate need rather than on jealousy and hatred?

  No matter. She would find that out eventually, when all of the details were brought into the light. Right now, the most important thing was to take advantage of her solitary inhabitance of the manor, to do some unauthorized prying.

  Where should she look first?

  It was unlikely that anything having to do with the hoax would be left out in the open, or concealed in a room to which she would have unquestioned access. Therefore, the library and the study were out. Her own room, the kitchen, the dining room, just about every place.. Except Elaine and Will's bedroom — and Ben Groves' room. She already knew who her aunt and uncle were and, to a lesser degree, what they were. However, she now realized, Groves was a complete stranger; and it was Groves who seemed to be close to the blonde who had taken the part of the dead girl.

  “Gwyn… Gwyn…”

  He had said they could afford to spend an hour out there, looking for her. That left fifty minutes for Gwyn to go through Groves' room. She headed for the main staircase, her heart beating rapidly, but the last of the self-doubts gone.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The door to Ben Groves' room was not locked, and there was really no good reason why it should have been, since none of the conspirators in this hoax had any idea that she would be clear-headed enough to tumble onto their secret. She pushed the door open and went inside without turning on any lights.

  In the darkness, she crossed to the room's only window and looked out onto the front lawn, where she could hear the “ghosts” calling her name, still: “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn…” In the dim light of the stars and the moon fragment, she saw that they were down by the edge of the woods, their backs to the house, scanning the trees, hoping to scare her out of them. If they intended to inspect the entire perimeter of the forest, they would be down there a long while yet.

  Gwyn found the drawcord for the flimsy set of under-drapes, drew those shut, located the second cord and pulled the heavy, velvet main drapes into place. These were backed by a thick, rubberized material that was sure to keep any light from passing through. She inspected the edges of the window and the place where the velvet panels met in the middle of the glass, and she satisfied herself that there was no crack that would betray her to the people on the lawn.

  She turned on the lamp by the bed and began her search.

  Feeling like a shameless busybody or like a sneak thief, but not about to call it quits already, she opened all of his bureau drawers and went through his clothes, piece by piece. She even unfolded his shirts to see if he had hidden anything inside of them, papers or photographs, anything at all. She did not know what she might find, and, in the end, she found nothing at all.

  Next, she went through the six drawers in the high-boy, through his collection of soaps and colognes, through the jewelry box, gloves, socks, beach towels, sweaters — and through a collection of souvenirs of Europe, and an inordinately large number of mementoes of Great Britain. She examined each of these but found nothing worthwhile in them, nothing that seemed to be applicable to her present problem.

  She looked behind the bureau and behind the high-boy, finding nothing but dust.

  She looked under the bed.

  Nothing.

  She lifted the edge of the mattress.

  Again: nothing.

  In the single closet, she took out four suitcases and opened those, found each of them empty.

  She removed his suits from the hangers in the closet, and she went through the pockets of each of them.

  She found nothing.

  However, as she lifted the last suit off the closet rack, she saw the flight of stairs, leading up into pitch darkness, and she knew, without understanding how, that they led to what she wanted.

  Quickly, she returned to the lamp by the bed, turned it off, went to the window and parted the heavy drapes, to see where Ben Groves and the girl were now. Unfortunately, they were no longer in sight, a development which she should have expected but which nonetheless made her heart race and her hands shake against the soft velvet. Though they had given up on the woods, they might not have given up on the search itself. She hoped that was the case. Most likely, they had decided she wasn't in the trees and had gone down to the beach to look for her; she would have to pray that that was the case.

  She drew the drapes shut again, left the room and went out into the upstairs hall. There, she stopped with her back against the wall, very still, and listened for voices and for the stealthy tread of feet on loose floorboards.

  The house was quiet.

  She was pretty sure that she was still alone.

  Moving quickly again, she went to the back stairs and down to the kitchen, where she got a flashlight from the utility drawer near the oven. She paused for an instant by the back door, to see if Groves and the girl had returned to the rear lawn; they had not. Then, she went back upstairs again, without turning the flashlight on, having gotten quite adept at finding her way in the dark.

  Back in Groves' room, after checking the drapes for cracks again, she switched on the flashlight and went to the closet, ducked inside and went up the stairs to the attic.

  She estimated that she had better than twenty minutes, perhap
s as much as half an hour, before Groves and the girl would come back to the house. She planned to make good use of each of those twenty minutes, and she had a premonition that she wouldn't need any longer to get to the bottom of the last few mysteries that surrounded this hoax.

  Groves and his wife stood on the night beach, squinting both north and south along the silvered sand, she in a white dress of many layers that was not unlike a funeral shroud, and he spattered with chicken blood that had begun to dry and get sticky.

  “I simply can't understand where she's gotten to,” he said, more to himself than to Penny.

  She said, “Let's go back.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ben, if she'd gone crazy, we'd find her wandering around in a daze. She wouldn't be crafty enough to go to ground as she has.”

  “Don't be too sure about that,” he said. “The mad can be terribly clever at times.”

  “But its all begun to fall apart on us,” she said, miserably.

  “Shut up, Penny.”

  “But it has.”

  He grabbed her and shook her, violently, as if he could rip her loose of her growing anxiety, then let her go so suddenly that she almost fell. He said, “Come to your senses, for God's sake! We haven't lost her. It isn't that bad. She wasn't on the lawn, and she wasn't in the woods, so she must be down here on the beach. It's as simple as that.”

  “Unless we've overlooked her,” Penny said, sullen.

  “I don't think we have.”

  “But I do think we have.”

  He said, “Love, you've got to admit that the beach would be the most likely place for her to come to, more so than the woods. After all, the beach has certain, ah, associations for her.”