Jessup came up with the gun, and Morris went crashing backward over the chair, and Manny yelled with laughter and lunged after him, and Claire turned and ran full-tilt for the bedroom.
“Come out of there, honey,” Jessup called, and tapped on the bedroom door.
The last five minutes had been full of pointless frantic activity. She’d run in here and locked the door and pulled the dresser over in front of it to block it. And then there was the door to the bathroom—they could get into the bathroom from the kitchen, and then through this other door into here—and she jammed a chair-back under the door handle of that. And there was the glass door to the porch and the outside. And flanking it were windows.
Parker had been right. There was no way to lock yourself safely into this house. Too many doors, too many windows.
And now, too late, she realized she should have left the house at once, when she’d run in here. She should have kept on going, through the bedroom and out the door to the porch and across the yard and away from here.
There’d been a scream, just one, very hoarse, less than a minute after she’d come in here, while she was still barricading the first door, but there hadn’t been another sound since then. Where were they now, what were they doing?
It was too late to run now. She’d been mindless and frantic when she’d run into this room, and because of that she’d thrown away her chance, while they were both concerned with Morris.
But why hadn’t they come after her? She turned and stared hard at the windows, half-expecting to see Manny’s moon face grinning at her there, but the porch was empty.
Was there still time? Or were they playing cat and mouse with her, making believe they weren’t thinking about her, waiting for her to make the jump and try to get away? That would be like them, that would be their style. Let her think she still had a chance, and then do something really awful to her.
Once before, since the start of her involvement with Parker, people from his world had intruded into hers, bringing discomfort and danger with them, but that time the people involved had been rational and businesslike. They’d wanted Parker to do something, he hadn’t wanted to do it, they’d tried to use her for leverage against him. She had been afraid, but not the way she was afraid now, because that time she’d been dealing with sane human beings who wouldn’t do anything pointless. But Jessup and Manny weren’t sane, and they were barely human beings. It was as she’d thought before, like having a mountain lion loose in the house; no way to talk to him, no way to guess what he’ll do next, no way to reason with or about him at all.
She stood blinking and immobile in the middle of the bedroom, the two doors barricaded, the third door and the windows still unblocked, and for a minute she was incapable of any kind of movement at all. And then Jessup called, and tapped on the hall door, and she .took a fast aimless step to nowhere.
The porch door. Out, or block it? How barricade a glass door? How barricade the windows flanking it?
Jessup, sounding bored and irritable, called a second time, “Don’t make it tough on yourself, honey. Open the door and come out.”
What if she were to hide? What if she hid, and led them to believe she already bad escaped from the house?
But where? Where, in this small and simple bedroom? The closet, no good. Behind the drapes, no good. Under the bed, no good.
Under the bed.
The doorknob rattled. Jessup called, “I hate physical labor, bitch! You better open this door!”
Was it still there? She dropped to her knees and looked wildly under the bed, and the rifle was lying there where she’d left it, slender, long. She started to reach for it, and then suddenly became aware of the light in the room and the darkness outside, and how this room was now like a stage set. And was there an audience, outside the windows, in the darkness on the porch?
To have Jessup hammer and threaten at the hall door, and Manny waiting and grinning outside on the porch, hoping she would try to make a run for it—that was their style.
She left the rifle where it was, and got again to her feet. She moved awkwardly now, self-consciously, convinced that eyes were watching her.
The night-table lamp on her side of the bed was the only source of light. She moved to it, cumbersome, uneasy, blinking, and bent suddenly to switch it off. In the new darkness she dropped to the floor again, felt along the bed, reached her hand underneath and slapped at the floor till she felt the cold metal of the rifle barrel. And all the time wincing from the expected sound of breaking glass, sure that Manny would crash into the room now from the porch.
But nothing happened. She pulled the rifle out, sat up, and leaned her back against the side of the bed. She sat cross-legged, tailor fashion, with the rifle across her lap; the barricaded hall door was to her left, the vulnerable porch door to her right.
Nothing happened.
Was that voices, was that movement?
Jessup’s voice, low and threatening, sounded from against the blocked door: “Manny says you’ve turned out the light. You goin’ to bed now? But you got to finish your dinner.”
So she’d been right. Manny had been watching the porch door, that was the only way he could know the light had been turned off.
She thought of shouting to them that she was armed, that they should go away, but she was afraid that would simply make them meaner and more difficult to deal with. It was the mountain lion again; you can’t scare off a mountain lion by telling him you have a gun.
Jessup called, “Honey, you can come out now and cverything’ll be okay, no trouble at all. But you stay in there and you’ll be sorry.”
It was such a temptation to believe him. It would be so much easier that way, to hide the rifle again under the bed, pull the dresser away from the door, and just walk out there. If she could believe him.
She didn’t move.
Nothing happened then for a long while. She continued to sit there, straining to hear a sound that would tell her what they were doing, what they were planning to do.
Where was Parker? Five hours since he’d called.
Noises. Bumping and thumping in the living room, Manny and Jessup saying things to one another. She couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded as though they were doing some sort of work together and were giving one another instructions and comments.
Her eyes had grown more used to the darkness. It was an overcast night, with intermittent starshine; the rectangles of door and windows were paler blurs in the darkness, and at intervals she could make out the light-reflecting restless water of the lake.
The thumping noises were coming closer, moving now across the porch from the direction of the living-room door. Were they bringing something heavy to batter their way through this door? I can’t faint, she told herself, insisting on it because she was afraid she might faint; her arms were trembling, her stomach was light and queasy, and the blinking was back again, worse than ever.
What were they doing? Vaguely she saw movement outside, on the porch. They were out there, or one of them was out there.
Should she shoot at them through the glass? But they were so vaguely seen, and it was probably only one of them anyway, and the chances were she wouldn’t hit them at all, not under these conditions. And afterward they would know she had a gun.
Dragging sounds, rustling movements, half-seen busyness out there on the porch. And then nothing. There still seemed to be someone or something there, a vague shape bulky outside the glass door, but she couldn’t make out what it was.
Turn on the light? But that would illuminate her much more than it.
There were porch lights, two of them, operated by a pair of switches, one beside the door in here and one beside the door in the living room. Either switch operated both lights. She could crawl over to the door—standing up and walking was beyond her now—and reach up and turn on the porch lights, and then she would know what it was out there. But did she really want to know?