by Dean Koontz
"What time?" he asked.
"Eleven."
"At the slope?"
"Yes."
He stepped out of her way and smiled at her. "I'll be there just to prove that I don't always look on the gloomy side of things-and to show you I can get along with anyone, even Michael Harrison."
"Good!" Katherine said, smiling cheerily. The smile was utterly false. She wondered if he could see that, and she looked at him as she passed him on her way to the stairs. His eyes were black, hard and very intense, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
Upstairs, she locked her door.
It was twenty minutes of eight. More than three hours to wait until she could get out of Owlsden. She knew, now, that she would be greatly relieved to get out, even if Michael's "proof against Alex did not convince her. She had a premonition, however, that she would be thoroughly convinced...
CHAPTER 13
When Katherine had first entered the orphanage at the age of eight, she had had a run-in with Mrs. Coleridge on her third day there.
Mrs. Coleridge was a heavy set, severe woman who wore her hair drawn away from her face pinned in a bun on top of her head. Her eyebrows were thick, her lips thin and set. She never smiled at anyone, and she had a long list of dos and don'ts by which every child in the institution had to abide or suffer punishment. One of her rules was that every child should go through a period of mourning after they arrived, before actually entering into any of the activities of their new life. While Katherine had looked forward eagerly to a picnic scheduled for the third day of her stay, Mrs. Coleridge was shocked to find that she had any notion of enjoying herself so soon.
In her large, dimly lighted office on the ground floor of the main residence hall, Mrs. Coleridge took the young Katherine to task. "Your mother and father have only been gone a little more than a week," she said, looking meaningfully at the child.
Katherine said nothing.
"You know our rules here?"
"Some of them," Katherine said quietly.
"Maybe you know that we feel that two weeks of mourning are required before you can join right in with the other children."
Katherine had nothing to say.
"You'll go to chapel, of course, and to Sunday evening prayer, but as for a picnic.. ."
"I want to go too," Katherine said.
The woman looked at her, scowled. "I don't think that I have made myself perfectly clear, child."
"I'll sneak along, even if you won't let me go," Katherine said. She was growing bolder now, and she stood up in front of her chair, as if to confront the older woman. She was a small, delicate girl with a wistful look about her that 'made her seem somehow older than she was. She was so delicate, however, that she looked as if a strong wind might crush her.
"You'll do just what you're told to do," Mrs. Coleridge replied. She was more than ready to be the crushing wind in this case, for she actually enjoyed disciplining the children, enjoyed it more than anyone but Mrs. Coleridge herself could know. She stood up too, fingering the handle of the desk drawer where she kept the switch she used on unruly children.
"I'll go," Katherine insisted.
Screwing up her face, Mrs. Coleridge said, "Don't you have any respect for the dead, child? Don't you miss and love your parents?"
Tears had come into Katherine's eyes then, and she said, quietly, "I loved them a lot, a whole lot."
"Then-"
"I have to go on the picnic," Katherine cried. "You have to let me! If I'm not happy, I'll be sad. And when you're sad, awful things happen. If you're happy, if you stay happy, nothing can go wrong!"
Mrs. Coleridge took the switch from her drawer. "Don't yell at me, young lady."
"Daddy was always looking out for bad things, expecting bad things," she went on. "He said the flood would ruin the farm if it came, ruin everything for us. He was sad all the time. And then-then it came and was even worse than he expected."
Mrs. Coleridge tested the switch against her palm, and she said, "Be quiet, Katherine."
"No! You have to understand, Mrs. Coleridge! Don't be so sad, don't always think that bad things will happen, because-then they will!" It was not easy for a child, almost eight years old, to frame the essence of such a philosophy, and she was frustrated with herself for not being able to reach the older woman with the truth of what she thought.
"Come here," Mrs. Coleridge said, frowning. Her face was full of ugly lines when she frowned.
Katherine got her spanking shortly thereafter.
But the next day, she sneaked away on the picnic with the others. The house parents chaperoning the affair never reported her disobedience to Mrs. Coleridge, for they sympathized with her desperate search for happiness.
From that moment on, Katherine's life had been shaped by the principle of optimism.
Until Owlsden.
Owlsden had bled away her positive outlook over the period of only a few days until now, alone in her room, she could summon forth only one optimistic image: Michael Harrison. He represented hope to her -not only hope of getting away from this cold, dark house, but hope of returning to her former attitude of cheerfulness. Mike was always happy, it seemed, always full of hope for the best. Perhaps, with him, she could manage to regain her optimism and face life as she had always faced it before: with hope for the next day. With Michael, everything would return to normal again. She could still recall the warmth of his kiss...
As if she had been placed outside the normal stream of time, the minutes passed in agonizingly slow order, each one stretched into an hour.
She tried to read the book she had carried up from the library and could not get interested in it, tried to eat something and could not, tried to nap and could not keep her eyes closed. She kept wondering if someone had unlocked and opened her door while she was not looking, and she would open her eyes to survey the room and be certain of her solitude.
At a quarter past nine, only an hour and a half since she had spoken with Michael, the lights in her room shut off, plunging her into a deep and disquieting darkness.
She rolled out of bed and slipped into her shoes, felt her way to the door. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, though there was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen.
At the door, she listened carefully.
For a moment, there was only silence. Then, Lydia called out to someone-and was answered by Mason Keene.
"-all over the house," he finished saying.
Katherine opened her door and found the second floor corridor in complete darkness.
"Lydia?" she called.
"Here," the older woman said. She sounded as if she were only a few yards farther along the hallway. From the quaver in her voice, it appeared she was more than a little on edge. She sounded, too, as if she expected someone to leap at her from the unrelieved darkness in the almost windowless corridor.
"What's happened?" Katherine asked. She kept her back to the door of her room, her hand against the doorjamb to keep her position in mind.
"I think, perhaps, that a fuse has blown," Mason Keene said, drawing closer to her, though still invisible.
She wished that she could see him. She did not like the idea that his eyes might have adjusted to the dimness more readily than hers and that he had an advantage, for she had now come to fear nearly everyone in Owlsden, even the reticent Keene couple.
"Or else the power lines are down," Lydia said.
"Heaven forbid," Keene said, almost at Katherine's side now.
"Has that happened before?" Katherine asked, squinting in the direction that Keene seemed to be coming from.
"Now and again, during the most rugged storms," Lydia said. "And this one seems to be a beauty, doesn't it? Listen to that wind."
Katherine realized how loud the wind was, even within the thick walls of the mansion. For a time, she had lost the sound of it, had let it become a gentle background roar of which she was unaware.
"Well," Lydia said, "we'd best break out
the supplies of candles and get used to living primitively for a while."
"I've found a closet," Mason Keene said a moment later, pulling open a poorly oiled door close at Katherine's left hand. "I'll have some light for us in a moment."
"Poor light, but something anyway," Lydia said. She sounded as if she would dearly welcome even the meagerest relief from this Stygian dark. What, exactly, was she afraid of? Alex?
"It's not the lack of light, but the lack of heat that we'll soon begin to notice," Keene said. "The furnace starts up electrically, you see. So we'll have to build fires in the fireplaces downstairs and keep to as few rooms as possible."
"How long will it take them to fix the lines?" Katherine asked.
Lydia sighed. "They can't start until the snow stops and the roads are at least partially cleared. We're going to have to rough it for a couple of days."
"Isn't so bad, once the big fireplaces are in use," Keene said. "And we have plenty of firewood to see us through. Yuri always made sure to keep a stock..." His voice ran out like an old-fashioned phonograph when he realized that Yuri was no longer among the living.
As they waited in silence and darkness for Mason Keene to strike a match over a candle wick, Katherine thought that the entire thing was more sinister than either Lydia or the servant realized. Just possibly, someone had deliberately stopped the power flow into Owlsden. Just possibly, someone wanted a dark house in which to operate. And, just possibly, she was not slated to finish out the night here, let alone a couple of cold days ahead...
A match lighted.
Orange flame cast light upwards over Mason Keene's features, twisting them into a parody of a human face. When he turned to them and smiled, the smile more resembled a leer than anything more reassuring. That was only the fault of the distorting flame, of course.
He touched the match to a candle wick and enlarged the circle of blessed light to include both of the women.
In a moment, they each had a candle, looking strangely like the celebrants in some religious rite.
"Let's go find Alex," Lydia said. "He'll know what to do about this."
Unless, Katherine thought, he's the one who already did it...
CHAPTER 14
"There we go!" Alex said, stepping back from the mammoth fireplace in the library.
Blue flames leapt up from the pile of twigs and danced across the bark of the larger logs, their strange color attributable to the chemical starter that Alex had used.
Katherine thought of the eerie blue flames that had soared out of the bonfire down by the woods when the Satanists had been engaged in their devil's dance...
"Heat!" Lydia said, rubbing her hands together. "You know, despite its elaborate design, Owlsden holds heat no better than a cardboard box-maybe worse. The furnace went off no more than half an hour ago, and already the place is freezing!"
"Imagine what it was like in the early days, before they even had an electric furnace," Alex said.
"Father was slightly crazy," Lydia said, shaking her head and laughing. The laughter seemed genuine, as if the adversity and the feeling of camaraderie that it generated had perked her considerably.
Everyone was in the room, except for Mason Keene who had found a flashlight and gone into the basement to check the fusebox. Now, he returned and said, "Power lines are down, unfortunately. All the fuses seem in order."
"I was afraid of that," Lydia said.
After a long moment of silence when everyone watched the bright flames beyond the hearthstones, Katherine said, "Is it really windy enough to bring the lines down?"
"More than enough," Alex said. "Why do you ask?"
She shifted uncomfortably on the small sofa on which she sat and looked at him, trying to read the expression in his dark eyes. Then she said, "It occurred to me that someone might have cut the lines."
"On purpose?" Lydia asked.
"Yes."
"But whatever for?"
She shrugged. "Why would they want to use your drawing room to hold a Satanic ceremony? Why would they kill Yuri to keep him from identifying them? Nothing else these people have done makes a whole lot of sense."
Patricia Keene made a moaning noise low in her throat and cuddled closer to her husband. He cradled her awkwardly, but he really looked as if he would have preferred to have the roles reversed and let her comfort him.
"It bears some thought," Alex said, watching her intently.
"Not from me," Lydia said. "I don't want to dwell on anything that gruesome."
They sat for a long time in silence, while Alex nursed the fire and built it to a peak that was easily maintained by the regular feeding of dry logs into the yellow-orange mouth.
"Mason and I can get a fire started in the dining room and kitchen hearths," he said. "Pity we can't go into the drawing room and use that one as well. Even so, we ought to have the bottom floor fairly warm in a few hours."
Katherine looked at her watch and saw the time was ten minutes after ten o'clock. She said, "I think I'll go up to my room and get into some warmer clothes. I feel pretty chill right now."
Alex turned away from the fireplace and picked up the flashlight that Mason Keene had been using earlier. He approached her, smiling, and said, "I'll help you find your way upstairs, Katherine."
"That's not necessary."
"But I don't mind. I don't want you tripping and falling. If anyone hurt himself here, we'd be hard-pressed to get him medical help."
"I'll take a candle," she said. "I'll be just fine." She hoped she didn't sound as desperate as she felt. The last thing she wanted was to be alone with Alex Boland, in a darkened house, for even a brief moment.
"Don't be stubborn," he said, taking her elbow in a gentlemanly manner. "It will only take a minute to-"
"I insist," Katherine said, pulling her arm away from him. "You and Mason have to see to the other fires. That's the most important thing right now, isn't it?"
He didn't say anything but looked down at her wrist -at her watch. Had he seen her glancing at the time a moment ago? And what could he make of that, even if he had seen it?
"Okay," he said at last.
"Be back in a minute," Katherine told Lydia.
She picked up one of the candles in a brass holder with a wax-catch that flared out around its hilt, and she left the room. She walked sedately toward the stairs but, once on them, took the risers two at a time.
Strange shadows played on the walls around her, loomed in front and shrank into blackness behind.
At the top of the staircase, she turned around and held the candle out before her, barely lighting the last flight of steps. If anyone had followed her, he was now waiting beyond the turn at the landing, on the flight below this last one, where she could not see him. She turned and started down the hall toward her room, the candlelight carrying only six or seven feet in front of her.
She was halfway down the hall when she heard something close at hand: a floorboard squeaking as someone stepped on it without being aware that it was loose beneath the carpet. She stopped, stood very still and slowly turned in every direction, looking for movement, a glimpse of light.
She could not see anyone.
"Anybody there?"
When she got no answer, she went on.
She closed and bolted the door to her room and lighted the ornamental candles on her hutch and triple dresser. Satisfied that there was no one in the room, closets and attached bath, she began to change clothes.
Her watch told the time: 10:22, little more than half an hour until she must meet Michael Harrison at the top of the ski run. If she had previously had any doubts about sneaking away from Owlsden during the night, they had been destroyed by this sudden deprivation of light and by Alex's increasingly suspicious behavior-Where had he been all day, until after darkness had fallen, in town arranging something with his friends? And why his insistence to accompany her to the second floor, to get her alone long enough to...?
She zipped up her ski jacket and pulled the tobog
gan cap down over her ears. She was ready to go.
Picking up the candle in the brass holder, she blew out those that burned on the hutch and the dresser, and she went to the door. As she slid the iron bolt out of place, she heard someone on the other side of the door-taken quite by surprise as he had been listening at the keyhole-scurrying quickly down the long corridor. When she swung her door open and stepped into the hall, she heard another door swing shut farther along toward the head of the stairs. Though the sound had carried well in the still house, it was not possible to figure out which door it had been.
The stairs seemed an eternity away, but she struck out for them just the same, flinching uncontrollably as she passed each room and expected to be accosted by someone hiding in one of them.
She was halfway along the corridor when, not so very far behind her, a door squeaked open and someone stepped into the hall, hot on her trail again.
She turned swiftly and held the candle high and forward, but she was too far away to illuminate anything. For a moment, she considered taking several quick steps back the way she had come, thereby surprising and trapping the stalker in the open where she could learn his identity. The only thing that held her back was the certain knowledge that she would not like what happened after she had pulled off this little coup...
Turning again, she walked toward the steps more quickly than before, went down them two at a time with the inescapable feeling that someone was only inches behind her.
Near the bottom of the steps, she reluctantly blew out her candle so that none of the household would see her leaving.
Moving cautiously along the main hall, aware that she faced danger in front as well as behind now, she passed the library where the two women waited. She felt certain that the stalker was still behind her, watching and waiting for the proper moment to make his move. She passed the dining room where she could hear Mason Keene speaking to someone else. She assumed he must be talking to Alex and that surprised her. She had assumed that it was Alex behind her, waiting to trip her up.
Of course, Alex did not have to be the only one of the cultists in Owlsden, did he? He might easily have stationed one of his friends upstairs in the event that she tried to slip away from them.
