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.