It took a moment to shake off the shock. She wanted to run and call the police but was afraid to turn away from the intruder. Instead, she shouted out, "I see you! I see you there! You come out of there right now!"
Whoever it was didn't move. Just continued to hold there, breathing.
"I have a gun!" she lied. "You come out or I'll shoot you, so help me God!"
Standing in the big room at the top of the stairs now, Lila pulled out of the narrative to look wide-eyed from Cree's face to Jack's and back.
"And I would have!"
"Why didn't you? Couldn't you have gotten Jack's shotgun?" Cree asked. She sighted down the hallway, lined by many doorways.
Lila shook her head. "Oh, I did. But not at that point. It's so hard to explain what goes through your head at a time like that! See, I… I saw somebody standing there. But then part of me was looking for a, I don't know, a normal explanation? I'm sorry, Jackie, for a minute I thought maybe it was you, home early and pulling some stupid prank. Or Ron. Or somebody else who maybe had some reason for being there, I don't know, a, a handyman Jack had asked to come in. Or then I thought, No, Lila, it's your nerves again, just like the first time. The security system was working when I came home – how could anyone have gotten in? I just didn't want to do anything stupid! I didn't want to call attention. You see?"
So she began to walk toward the doorway. When she was fifteen feet away, the lapel disappeared, slipping backward into the room. What she thought she was going to do, where she got the courage, Lila didn't know, but she kept on going until she stood in that doorway and looked inside. It was the room that had been her bedroom when she was a child, now set up as a guest bedroom.
There was nobody in there. The windows were closed and locked, and there was no other way out. She could see the empty floor under the bed. The only place someone could hide was the huge armoire that served as the room's closet. The doors were shut, but there was a key in the lock and she quickly turned it and yanked it out. Good, solid, old-time craftsmanship, heavy doors with strong lock and hinges. If someone was in there, he was stuck now.
She debated calling the police but then got afraid of making a fuss, of what people would think if they came with flashing lights and sirens and found nothing. Jackie would for sure hear about it, he'd tell Ron and Momma. So instead she went quickly across the hall, got the shotgun, and came back.
Jack had taught her how to load it, she'd even shot clay pigeons with him once in a while, she knew how to operate the gun. She jacked a shell into the chamber. Holding the stock tucked tight under her right arm, barrel straight ahead, finger on the trigger, she used her left hand to turn the key. She yanked open the doors and jumped back.
No one was there.
She felt only the briefest sense of relief. The absence of an intruder left vastly more frightening possibilities.
Lila made it through that day and the next. She heard the table clenching. She saw the shoe and the jacket again, a little more showing each time, but when she'd go to investigate, it would disappear. And now she'd begun to hear things – movement in the other room, the scrape of a chair, the brush of cloth. Sometimes she thought she heard a pattering, like a four-legged thing running, the clack of claws on the floorboards. It never happened when Jack was in a room with her, only when he was at work or in another part of the house. She began making it through her days and nights hour by hour. Any distraction helped; it was a relief when the new cleaning woman started coming twice a week, because for the first couple of times Lila had to show her around – that killed off part of a day.
Thanksgiving came, and Janine and David, the two youngest Warren kids, returned home for the holiday; Ron and his girlfriend and Momma and Jack's parents all came over for the feast. Everyone commented on Lila's condition – "Oh, honey, you've lost some weight! You takin'proper care of yourself?" "Mom, you haven't been sick, have you?" but having people in the house seemed to banish much of the tension.
Once the holiday ended, things got rapidly worse. Lila saw her watcher several times – the shoe tips and the lapel of the jacket. She began to sense flutterings at the corner of her eye all the time. She heard the relentless screech of the table's claws, and a couple of times she saw other things quickly resume their former shapes as if trying to conceal dire transformations from her: the faces in the family portraits leaving a faint afterimage of snarling, ogling monstrosities, a throw rug that had been a gnarled, waited, lizardlike thing. She became afraid to leave the TV on because the sound might camouflage the subtle noise of something sneaking up on her. Mirrors became particularly intolerable, because whenever she saw herself in them she always got the sense that another image, something terrifying, had just vacated the glass. And then there was her own face.
When she asked Jack how he liked the place – was he comfortable here – he said a guy could sure get used to it. People came up to him at the office and complimented him on his new digs, he told her cheerfully. That was pretty fine.
So far, Lila told herself, nothing she'd experienced was all that bad, she was a Beauforte, she should show a little spine. But it was wearing on her – the constant tension, the sleepless nights. Plus she was living a double life, trying to lie to Jack and Ron and Momma and everybody about how great she was doing and all the while being gnawed hollow on the inside.
They decided to hold a big Christmas party, with all the kids, some of Jack's family, some friends. Seemed like a good idea: She'd keep busy with planning, sending invitations, making calls for catering and decorations, and so on. But it didn't help. By the first week of December she didn't think she could survive until Christmas, let alone be able to play hostess. Things came to a head the second week of December.
Middle of the night. Jack asleep in bed. Propped up on the pillows next to him, unable to find sleep, Lila had been reading until her eyes burned. Just after she turned out the light, she heard a brushing or slithering sound. She lifted her head to stare at the fireplace, its little black coal grate just a square of shadow in the semidark. As had become their habit, they'd left the lights on in the hall, so there was enough light to see what was happening.
A shadow began oozing out of the stove – many slender tendrils of shadow, actually, worming out through the holes in the grate, groping in the air and then braiding together into a thick snake of darkness. It came out like smoke but seemed to collect weight, growing as a long tube of shadow along the floor, writhing, arching, swelling thicker until it was as big around as a horse's belly. It looked like a water moccasin. Lila could hear the friction of its body on the floor, the rasp of scales. She couldn't breathe, couldn't even scream until its knotting coils had filled half the room.
Jack woke up groggy, groping for the bedside light. "Lila? Peaches? What's goin' on?" he mumbled. Lila managed to find her lamp and snapped it on. When light filled the room, the snake didn't disappear instantly but rather took a second or two to fray into separate tentacles and suck back into the stove.
Lila was pointing at the fireplace, but there was nothing for Jack to see. Shaking with her own pulse, she could only tell him it was a bad dream. She'd had a bad dream. She was sorry she'd wakened him. Bad dream.
She had always hated snakes. The visitation had given her a shock, and the next day she felt sick, almost too weak to get out of bed. The housekeeper came for half the day, so that one wasn't so bad. But the next day Jack had to leave on a business trip, a realty seminar put on by the national affiliate company in Dallas. Jack couldn't skip it – he was supposed to make a presentation.
Lila was left alone at the house for two days and nights.