He turned for the stairs, waving her away like a bad joke. “Go to bed before you become a battered child.”

  “Not so fast, you have a visitor. In the den.”

  At this hour? “Who?”

  An impish grin suddenly darkened Melissa’s face. “That girl you have a crush on. She’s been here almost two hours, said she’d wait. She seemed kind of uptight about something.”

  Kurt stood on the first step, puzzled. “It’s four in the morning. I wonder what she wants.”

  “You’re never going to find out unless you ask her, putz.”

  Kurt stepped for the door to the den, but Melissa grabbed his arm first, tugging him back. “Be careful,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Melissa lowered her voice to an exasperated whisper. “She might be one of the vampires, stupid.”

  “I’ll vampire you if you don’t get your butt in bed,” he had to restrain from shouting. “And I mean now.”

  In the den, dark yellow incandescence filled most of the room from a single shaded lamp in the corner. Uncle Roy’s Carpathian Elm grandfather clock ticked softly opposite. Vicky was sitting in the recliner beside the lamp, a book opened in her lap, and her head nodding forward. She was asleep.

  Kurt gently prodded her shoulder, certain he would see new bruises on her face, but when she opened her eyes and looked up, he found none.

  “Kurt,” she said. “I must’ve dozed off.” She winced and tried to blink the sleep from her eyes.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes…well, no. Something…”

  He took the book out of her lap and put it aside. “Lenny didn’t—”

  “No, no,” she said, now finally coming awake. “It’s not Lenny. I haven’t seen him in a day and a half, thank God.”

  “What then?”

  “I really shouldn’t even be bothering you about something dumb,” she said, and nervously pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Never mind about bothering me. What happened?”

  Vicky took a heavy breath, her eyes fixed bleakly on the window. “It must’ve happened last night… After I’d gone to bed, I heard noises in the backyard, so I got up and looked out—and I saw someone back there standing just in front of the trees. I was really scared at first, but whoever it was left a second later, and I figured it was just some kids or something.” She was tying her jacket cord into useless knots; she scarcely blinked. “Remember I told you Brutus died the other day? Well, I buried him in the backyard, about the same place I saw this person.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Kurt, somebody dug up my dog.”

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By 7:00 a.m. the sun radiated as a huge orb of molten light; it nudged its way into the sky, tinting the fringes of the horizon with what seemed like layers of orange and pink liquid. Glen downshifted a gear, then took the security truck up the narrow gravel lane toward the mansion. He could feel the gearbox straining against the deceptive incline. From the bottom, the hill didn’t seem very steep, but then it was a funny hill; it reminded him of a bald spot, a vast risen clearing in the center of Belleau Wood’s surrounding forest belt. Atop, the house sat sentinel-like in the new morning light, as if put there to watch over the property.

  Nearing the top, the hill’s cant leveled. Through the bug-spotted windshield, he watched the mansion grow to ominous size. It seemed to defy the morning’s calm, its front shadowed by the blaze of sun which crept up from behind. It wasn’t really a mansion—though townspeople often called it that—but an ugly oversized farmhouse with a bare wood wraparound porch, two protruding bay windows on the lower level that clashed achingly with its design, and a roof which seemed to slope unevenly. Dr. Willard’s restoration was no more impressive than a bad facelift; its oldness strained beneath new paint and trim. The house looked fake, atrophied. Glen decided that if he had Willard’s money, he’d have the whole thing knocked down and replaced with a real mansion.

  The road joined to a circular drive which fronted the house. Left of the circle was a separate four-car garage; Willard had had it built when he’d come to Belleau Wood, since the mansion originally had no garage of its own. Glen parked the truck in its space beside the garage and got out, suddenly realizing a joyous fatigue. Like a god, he gazed down at the reposing woodland—its beauty lay out before him, unflawed, the steady expanse of lush dark green and quiet which rolled all the way back to the ridgerise, where the old mining site was. The land must be worth millions. He turned then and approached the house.

  At the front door, his hand locked in midair. That doorknocker always rasped his eye, like junk on the road. It was a small oval of old dull brass which took the shape of a face. But the face was bereft of features, save for two wide, empty eyes. There was no mouth, no nose, no jawline really—just the eyes, like a work of sculpture abandoned by its creator. The knocker was one of many things that made him feel wrong about the house. He wondered why Willard would adorn his front door with something so tasteless.

  And he wondered, seriously now, when Willard would catch on.

  He rapped three times with the knocker’s brass ring. It made a weak, tinny sound; he doubted that anyone had even heard it. From the jackplate beside the door, a tiny red light blinked at him three times per second. He glanced at it distrustfully; the new Arrowhead alarm system made him feel obsolete, a walking half-measure. Was Willard getting ready to lay him off? As he raised his fist again to knock, a voice came out of the intercom.

  “Glen, is that you?”

  It was Mrs. Willard; at least someone was up. Aside, the red light continued to blip insolently. He pressed the talk button and said, “Yeah. I’ve come to pick up my paycheck.”

  “Wait till I turn off the system, then come on in.”

  Rigmarole, he thought. So far there’d already been several false alarms, and the system was only days old. At least my contacts don’t rust. The old light slowed to one blip per second. He unlocked the door with his own key and went in.

  It was dark enough inside to have been nighttime, and the lack of daylight only made the cramped interior seem more cramped. Past the foyer, the hall followed down like a tunnel. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Willard or his wife to acknowledge him. It was stuffy where he stood; violating odors of tobacco and old wood exuded from the walls. The paneling looked like sheets of paraffin in the hall’s dimness. He strained his vision to examine the foyer paintings but made out only dark blotches and streaks.

  “Be down in a sec,” Mrs. Willard’s voice called from upstairs. The darkness soaked it up. “I’m just getting out of the shower.”

  Her voice startled him and made his heart pick up. He wondered where Willard was, expecting to catch a glimpse of him crossing the landing. Perhaps he was standing down the hall, hidden by grainy dark, face set in an unseen scowl of hate. But that was silly—he and Willard were friends, and that fact made him feel gritty with guilt. With friends like me, he thought, who needs…

  He wandered dreamily down the hall and back, calling his own bluff. Come, young man, step into my parlor. Next, obliviously, he found himself standing in the middle of the darkened study.

  It was a small, oblong room, walled around by bookshelves all different heights and styles. More evidence of Willard’s decorative ineptitude—some of the shelves were obviously high-priced antiques, while others looked like the do-it-yourself kind they sold in Dart Drug. Carpet tiles vapidly covered the floor in what seemed the worst possible choice of colors—green and brown. Sunlight strained through heavy drapes; he flicked on a lamp and slid his finger through a layer of dust on the shade. The room felt unbalanced, desk and chairs and bar table all in the wrong places. He went to the shelves nearest the light: mostly medical texts arranged in no particular order, alphabetically or otherwise. Fine gray lines of dust had settled vertically between some of the spines, and crammed at the end were several faded manila folders. Glen took the liberty of sliding one out. He leafed through it, dust pouring off the edges like sand. The folder held medical papers, which he stared at through a vertigo of incomprehension. One of the titles read:

  Proposed Mechanisms Detailing Dopaminergic Inhibition of Prolactin-Releasing Hormone (PRH) Production in Cultured Rat Hypothalamic Neurons

  And another:

  Purified Nerve-Growth-Factor Effect on Membrane-Receptor Aggregation in in vitro Chick Neuroblasts Pretreated with Triiodothyronine (T3)

  The titles warped his vision; he couldn’t even pronounce the words. What is this shit? he thought. The last title came from the American Journal of Neuropharmacology. It read:

  Role of Vasoactive-Intestinal-Peptide (VIP) Andrenergic Release of Norepinephrine by Cat Dorsal-Root-Ganglia (DRG) Cells

  Now it made sense. The byline was: S. Howard, Andrew M. Freeman, and Nancy King.

  King was Nancy Willard’s maiden name. These must be research papers she’d done while working at N.I.H. before she got married. Must’ve been a lot of fun, he thought. Jesus. He jammed the folder back into its slot.

  Then he noticed the door in the darkest corner.

  It caught his attention only because it added to the room’s imbalance. He supposed it was a closet, but why would there be a closet in here? He opened the door to face a rectangle of absolute darkness, which seemed long yet somehow devoid of depth. Warm air rushed his face, and a faintly unsettling redolence, like tar.

  “Don’t go in there.”

  Glen whirled at the sound of Nancy Willard’s command. Her voice rang with a thin underpinning of panic. She was standing just inside the study doorway, cloaked in a robe of dark gold terry. Her hair glistened slickly from the shower, and she had combed it out in straight, shiny lines. Her looks had always deceived him; she was plain and bookwormish, yet he found something opaquely sensuous about that, more so now without her glasses. The lamplight drew a line on her, shadowing one half of her body and bringing out the other half to a fresh, wet crispness. Droplets of water clung to her neck and bare calves, as though she’d dried herself in haste.

  “Sorry,” he said, and closed the door. “Just curious. Seemed odd to have a closet in a study.”

  Her eyes widened, concentrating speculatively on his face as she spoke. “It’s not a closet; it’s the stairwell to the cellar. I keep telling Charles to nail it shut, since we never use it. One of these days someone’ll go down there and wind up with a cracked skull.”

  He couldn’t stand it when she made him guess. She was doing it on purpose, he knew she was. Her sadistic streak ran deep. He went closer to her, and elevated himself an inch off his heels to look past her shoulder into the hall.

  She smiled and handed him an envelope. “Here’s your paycheck.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Willard,” he said, projecting his voice. He tilted his head to get a better look behind her. “Hope I didn’t disturb you, coming so early.”

  “Cut,” she said, and laughed. “We can stop with the ‘Mrs. Willard’ for now. I get such a kick out of watching you peek around to see if it’s safe.”

  Glen released a hard, allaying breath. He noticed now that her eyes were fixed on his crotch, and that her robe had come unsashed. It seemed her breasts were keeping the robe open, luring his gaze to her exposed flesh. She wore her nakedness obscenely and without a thought. One foot parted; he thought again of that sadistic streak.

  They embraced immediately. Kissing, he reached into the gap of the robe, sliding his hand to her shoulder blades, then slowly down the length of her back. His palms pressed against her rump, squeezing their hips together. Her head lolled back at a soft angle; he tracked a damp, warm line along her throat in kisses.

  “Charles went to the library in Bethesda,” she said. She closed her eyes. Around his waist her arms tightened, drawing slack. “He won’t be home for hours.”

  “Good,” he managed to say, and his kisses went back to her mouth, long, hot, penetrating kisses. He breathed in the soapy fragrance of her hair; it roused him, made him feel light in the head. His hands continued feeling her beneath the robe.

  “I thought about you…” he whispered, “…all night. I couldn’t wait to see you, couldn’t stop thinking about how much I love you.”

  “Show me,” she said back. “Show me how much.”

  “I’ll show you. I’ll…” His hands were already out from behind her, his fingers delicately touching her breasts. Then he watched her eyes and touched her lower.

  She gave a little hiss, his touch sending up a spike of pleasure. Her words grew heavy with heat and love. “Not here, darling. Oh. We have lots of time. We can go upstairs.”

  “Here,” he said. He could feel a warm current moving in his gut, and he could feel her heat. Urgency pulled them slowly and carefully to the floor like a sudden swell of gravity. Now she lay before him on her back, soft and spraddled and legs trustingly open. Shadows emphasized her shape; her skin shone darkly in the downreaching light. Their eyes locked—he was looking at her. Searching. Kneeling up between her white, open legs. He loved her so much, another man’s wife. Her abdomen seemed to be quivering, her flesh tense in wait, and he was kissing circles lightly around her navel, while his hands smoothed over her breasts and down to her warm, bare hips. She breathed jaggedly through her teeth, as if exerted. His kisses roamed harder, lower, more direct. So close now, he began kissing the inside of her thighs, inching up, and was at last working on the vital spot. Her mouth opened. Her eyes reduced to slits. She stared off into dim space, sighing her bliss.

  She tasted sharp and lovely. Glen felt her body under him squirm. Though the room was deadened with silence, he could hear her sounds as though they had been excessively amplified. He could hear her lungs working, her heart, her pulse. He could hear the tiny whimpers that came with every breath she let out. He could hear her lips part, her hands in his hair, and the wet sounds of her throat as she swallowed. But he was so lost in his love for her that he didn’t hear the strange, faint shuffling from the cellar.

  ««—»»

  The voice rocketed through his sleep.

  “Kurt! Kurt! There’s something awful in the backyard! Kurt! Wake up, wake up!”

  Small hands attached to his shoulders and shook him around, roughly, violently, lifting his head off the bed, shaking shaking shaking.

  “Oh, wake up, you poop!”

  Kurt thought he was being shocked out of a coma. His eyes peeled open, and they took a long time focusing on Melissa’s terrified face, which seemed to hover over him like a demon spirit. She continued shaking him, continued shouting in his ear.

  His eyes bored into her. “Damn it, Melissa. If you weren’t a girl, I’d punch the stuffing out of you. Now just what the f— What are you doing waking me up at—” a hard glance to the clock—“at eight-thirty in the morning when you know I didn’t get to bed till after four?”

  She spoke, panting, as some sheer terror made gibberish of her words. “I went outside to put water in the birdbath out back, you know where the birdbath is—something between the trees like guts or hair or something in a pile. Kurt, you’ve got to do something, it’s awful—”

  He tried to be mad at her, but found he couldn’t. She was a menace, yes, a gadfly, a prank, and pain in the ass, but still, she was only a little girl. “If this is another one of your jokes—”

  “It’s not, Kurt. I swear, it’s not,” she assured him, rhythmically shaking her head. “I wouldn’t kid about something like this.”

  Like the time she’d said she’d heard someone in the attic. Kurt had grabbed his revolver and pulled down the attic stairs. A bucket containing cold three-day-old barbecue sauce had tipped over on his head. “Go downstairs and make me coffee,” he told her. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Melissa’s face was stark. She nodded and dashed out of the room. Kurt couldn’t remember ever seeing her this unstrung.

  He pulled on old clothes, every movement of his body sluggish from being cheated out of sufficient sleep. When he went down the steps, his feet thumped like blocks of concrete. Instinct made him fumble in his top pocket for a cigarette; he groaned audibly when he found none. The sunlight in the kitchen seemed like an energy field designed to repel. Melissa had her back to him; she was staring intently out the sliding-glass door into the backyard, her fingertips pressed against the glass. She wore red sneakers, striped socks, a bright yellow T-shirt, and brand-new denim overalls. Looks like a children’s wear mannequin, he thought. The pack of cigarettes in her back pocket was shamefully obvious. He stiffened, sneaked up on her then, and had slipped the cigarettes out just as she began to spin around.

  “Thief!” she shouted, grabbing. “Gimme ’em back!”

  eld Not a chance,” he replied. He held the pack up, just out of her reach. “I told you the other day, you’re forbidden to smoke. Period. I’m only doing this for your own good. You’ll thank me ten years from now.”

  “Sit on it,” she said. “Homo.”

  Kurt lit a cigarette immediately, savoring the first-puff rush. “Ah, see, it all works for the best, since I just happen to be all out of cigarettes. Ironic that you should buy my brand.”

  Melissa grinned now, triumphantly. “They ought to be your brand. I took ’em out of your car.”

  “You little klepto,” he said when he realized it was true. “If you were my kid, I’d paddle your backside.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not your kid, and instead of worrying about my backside, what are you going to do about that thing in the backyard?”

  The quick switch to seriousness in her expression jogged his memory. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot the reason you so rudely got me out of bed. So what’s so terrible in the backyard?”

  “I can’t tell what it is, just that it’s dead. It’s…it’s big and it’s gross.”

  Occupational conditioning forced him to muse the very worst possibility. “Melissa, let’s be serious for just one minute. This thing in the backyard—it’s not a, uh, you know… It’s not a human being, is it?”